 All right, hello everybody. We're just coming up on the seven o'clock hour and we're gonna get started on time. What a privilege and what an honor to be starting tonight's webinar, tonight's presentation because tonight we have a lot to celebrate on behalf of a broad and diverse democracy movement. The American democracy movement is alive and well and you're gonna get a window into it tonight. What I'd like to kick off with is just a little reminder here that this year and just this year alone, this movement had already tallied up a dozen victories in cities and states across the country, giving voters more power, giving us more representation, putting the control of government back in the hands of voters. We have eight new victories just as of election and we are still counting. Speaking of victories, tonight we are going to be joined by some of the folks who led our movement to some of these victories. We've got Lisa, John, Joe and Robbie and what I'm gonna do is skip the introductions for now, do a brief intro about our movement, about our work together while you all introduce yourselves and say where you're from. And then in a few minutes we're gonna bring on my colleague, Jenny who will do a proper introduction. But what I wanna do, even though it's so awkward over Zoom is just start with a round of applause for our panelists and their victories and everybody out there who voted to make democracy work and continue and make it stronger and safer. So cheers to you all with just so much appreciation for everything you have done. So as I said, we are here to talk about the American democracy movement. And that is so important, this idea of a movement for democracy of something that is bigger than any one organization, any one person, any one campaign. It is about the American people building into our culture as a country, the idea that we care about, we care about our government and our democracy and what it stands for and what it does for us and what it does for our future. And that is what we're fighting for and that's what we're building is this big broad movement where the government is actually of, by and for the people. But in order to get there, we need to get past something. We need to get past what is currently a very broken system. Now we've made a lot of progress in this last year in these last 10 years and especially in this last week. But we need to continue that progress and we need to amplify it because ultimately there are some structural issues with our democracy that are standing in the way of progress and standing in the way of regular Americans, regular people, regular voters, getting the outcomes that we want from our own government. And those things are things we all talk about. It's things like getting rid of gerrymandering, so that we can have competitive elections where your vote actually counts a lot, outcomes aren't predetermined. Things like reducing extremism through policy so that we elect representatives who represent a broad swath of the electorate who we can all feel proud of and getting rid of pay to play corruption that has become so normalized in our political system where laws are written for the highest bidder rather than what's best for the most amount of people. And in order to get these things, we know this, we have to pass laws, laws like rank choice voting, laws like independent commissions, open primaries, campaign finance and ethics reform, laws that tackle these structural problems within our democracy. And very often when we have these conversations that sounds out of reach because the federal government is so broken. And so this idea of actually winning seems out of reach. But what's so cool is that tonight you're gonna hear from people that are part of a strategy that has been used throughout American history to create really big effective change when the odds seemed insurmountable. And I'm gonna show you just a couple brief examples of that to remind you how this all fits in, not just for the people of each city and each state that you're gonna hear from but for all of us across America. So this map right here, the white squares represent the states that gave women the right to vote before it was federal policy. And if you look at the chart here from 1890 all the way to 1920, you'll see that over time those states stacked up towards the right. Well, the same thing happened on interracial marriage. You see from 1787, all the way to 1967, states passed laws building momentum, giving people their rights in states before it became federal. And then much more recently, we all saw what happened with marriage equality from 2004 to 2016, states passing laws to make marriage equality legalized and eventually it led to federal reform. And that's what our movement is doing. We as a coordinated effort across multiple issues across multiple organizations and groups are all working in concert to build a stronger America, one city, one state at a time until that day when we can ultimately get the massive federal reforms that we all desire. So in the past decade or so, since 2015, this is the map we've been able to build together. You see, it's as I've said, it's ethics, voter registration, vote by mail, anti gerrymandering, money in politics, ranked choice voting, it all adds up to democracy. And just in this last cycle, in the 2022 cycle, these were the cities and states that we were watching closely. And to be clear, there are others that are not represented on this map that also led to victory. But what's so amazing, not just about the vote that we just saw in which most election deniers did not win office. Thank you to everybody who voted Democrat and Republican to save democracy. That's what this is all about. But also nearly every campaign that we worked on together, one, I'm gonna go back to that previous map so you can see it. Here's where we were targeting and here's where the victories were. It is almost across the board and we are still waiting for a few more victories to come in. I see some folks from Seattle on the call. It's great to have you here and we're all pulling for you. The votes are coming. And I just wanna say waiting for votes to be counted is a good thing. It means it's being done carefully. It means there is integrity, signature matching, validation are all really good things and we should be proud of that. So that's where we are today. Let's talk really briefly about what's next. Simply, it comes down to this. We've had a tremendous year, a dozen victories. But what would it look like to accelerate and multiply that? What if we had more campaign leaders in more places across the country who were more qualified to win more campaigns? Then our movement would get to that end goal of federal reform even faster. And so in the coming years, what represent us is gonna be focused on is inspiring, educating, training and empowering folks across the country who want to get involved and lead campaigns like the ones that you're gonna hear about tonight. And if you're not gonna lead it, you can also get trained to be a helpful participant in that campaign to help drive it to victory. We can all play a role in this. Now there's one other piece of the future that I wanna talk about before we go to the panel. And that is the upcoming Supreme Court case, more V Harper. And I missed the opportunity to make a pun between more, more, more and more V Harper. But here we are. They're considering something called the Independent State Legislature Theory. This is a dangerous case that could have a lot of impact on our statewide victories. What the Supreme Court could end up doing is taking a literal reading of the Constitution, which says that state legislator is just the members of the state legislature rather than the broader definition, which includes Supreme Courts, state Supreme Courts, governors and the legislature itself. And the reason this is such a problem is we've seen so much backbone from state courts in standing against gerrymandering in recent years. We need to do everything we can to show the court that the American people have a strong understanding of the power of our states to set laws around elections and we need to protect it. Please get involved with this at any level that you can. Represent us is gonna be working with other groups to have a big event at the Supreme Court coming up in a few weeks. We need as many people there as possible to make a really strong statement that we have to protect our ability to pass laws for democracy in the states. All right. The last thing I'm gonna ask of you is to go here. Represent.us slash impact. I'm gonna pause for a second so you don't feel like you're gonna miss anything. You've got plenty of time. I know you're on a device. Open up a new tab. Go to represent.us slash impact and on that you will find ways that you can volunteer, you can donate, you can get involved. We have a phone bank coming up in just a few days that you can be a part of. So please get involved. And with that, speaking of getting involved, it is my very great pleasure to introduce you to my colleague, Jenny, who is gonna join us in just a moment here to talk to you a little bit about the impact that we have as a movement and then introduce our panelists. Hey, everyone, I am so honored to moderate this 2022 election recap. And before we get into the discussion, I just first have to thank all of the volunteers, donors and organizers who made the victory map that we saw earlier a reality. So I just wanna run through a few exciting updates of what we accomplished together. So together we made roughly one million phone calls and texts this cycle. We organized 21 actions in support of these campaigns across the country. More than 4,500 of you donated your dollars to fight corruption. In Maine alone, we had over 15,000 conversations to educate voters about ranked choice voting. And in Fort Collins, Colorado, we worked with the Fort Collins team on the ground to have almost 9,000 text conversations, which is more than the wind margin, 125% of the wind margin. In Evanston, we texted almost 40% of the voters on this issue, which is huge. And I share all of this to say that the victories that we had in this cycle are the product of many hands. So I just wanted to do, I know Josh already had us applaud, but let's do it again. I just wanna give a short round of applause for all of you who volunteered your time, your money, your energy to pull off these wins. So just quick round of applause, thank you. And now we're going to hear from the leaders of the successful pro-democracy ballot initiatives on how their campaigns put power, the power of government back into the hands of the people. So I wanna introduce our fearless campaign leaders and we'll start with Elisa Kaplan. Elisa Kaplan is the Executive Director of Reform for Illinois. Elisa joined Reform for Illinois in 2018, drawn to the organization's commitment to an inclusive democracy and against systemic corruption. And as Executive Director, she leads RFI's policy development, advocacy and educational initiatives. Thank you so much for being with us, Elisa. Next, we have John Brodegem, Legal Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor of the League of Women Voters Maine. He supported questions three and four on the Portland Maine municipal ballot and John is a former state legislator and a current attorney and consultant with a practice in public policy, election law and legislative advocacy. He has successfully litigated several cases relating to public funding of main elections. So thank you, John, for being with us. Next, we have Joe Bresny, Campaign Manager of Yes on Three, Nevada. Joe has been engaged in Nevada politics for more than 20 years, beginning his career serving as Executive Director of the Nevada Republican Party. And since 2010, he's focused on nonpartisan politics, managing independent expenditure and ballot measure campaigns. Thank you so much for being with us, Joe. And finally, Robbie Moorland of Better Ballot Fort Collins and RCB for Fort Collins. Robbie has a strong interest in election and campaign finance reform and as co-founder of Represent Fort Collins, she has been active in advocating for election law reform since 2017. So we are going to talk to these panelists. We're gonna start with some guiding questions. And as we talk, if you have questions for one of our panelists, please go ahead and put it in either the Q&A, which you can find at the bottom of your screen. It's like two little speech bubbles or you can throw it in the chat on the side and our chat facilitator, Jasmine, will help us see it in the Q&A. So just repeat, if you have a question, post it in the Q&A or in the chat on the side of your Zoom window and we're gonna get into it. So I wanna start by asking all of our panelists the same question. And that is, we would love to hear from each of you about what the goal of your campaign was is and why it got started. And I wanna start here with Joe. Two years after the pandemic starts, I still have to pause for a second and unmute myself, but at least I didn't talk for 30 seconds first. Nevada's been kind of circling the drain as far as hyper partisanship and bitterness goes. For about 15 of the 20 years I've been here. Politics has never been a game of softball, but our state legislature is now so dysfunctional. We had a Senate and Assembly and the governor's office, all of the same party and the leaders of the same party don't speak to each other. They literally can't get along. And so we've gotten so dysfunctional here that everyone, everyone across the board has agreed that we've reached a tipping point and a breaking point. And that our proposal, which is open primaries, we're closed primary state, and then top five ranked choice voting is a solution that will help bring the temperature down on partisanship and reduce the negative campaigning. And then the biggest thing that we've seen happen here that's disheartening that led us to this is we've got one party that is meddling in the other party's primaries and making sure that the least qualified person possible makes it out of the primary. And so the party that isn't doing that has decided they're going to do that as well. And so what we're looking at in the future is if both of them succeed, we get to pick between two bad choices. And so that's not really leaving the rest of us in a good place. And so it's been surprising to watch groups from all across the spectrum. The casino industry is really hesitant to get on board with anything unless it's a sure thing, the house always wins. They've been deeply invested and deeply involved. The unions have been involved, realtors have been involved, chambers of commerce have been involved. And so we're seeing support amongst pockets of the political spectrum that don't even get along with each other, but they all agree that things have gotten so bad that we have to come together as Nevadans and make a change. And so that was the problem that led us to this solution. And then we were lucky enough to qualify the measure and have it passed this year. We're not done yet. That'll come later in the program, but that will, that will, we were lucky to qualify them and have it win the first time. That was a problem that led us to this. Thank you so much, Joe. And I'm sure a lot of us can relate to that experience of feeling like our state politics are reaching a breaking point. So I'm going to pass it now on to Robbie to talk to us a little bit about how your campaign got started and what your goals are. Hi there. First of all, I want to say a shout out to our volunteers that are on this call. I saw a couple of them pop up in the chat. So thank you all for all the work you did to get this thing going through four columns. I really, really appreciated all your help. Ranked Choice Voting was on our ballot in 2011 in Fort Collins and it lost 40% to 60%. And then a few years went by, 2017 comes around and we started to represent Fort Collins chapter just focusing on campaign finance reforms in Fort Collins. But at that time when Ranked Choice Voting was on the radar, we didn't have a favorable council. And so in 2021, in April at our last municipal election, we finally had a favorable council to get it referred to the ballot. And so within 24 hours of that election, we started Ranked Choice Voting for Fort Collins and we worked for 18 months to educate the public on Ranked Choice Voting. And then so here we are 18 months later, we had a successful campaign. We ran one with 58%. And now we're returning to our roots. We're back to being a represent Fort Collins chapter with some other campaign finance goals ahead of us. Incredible, thank you so much, Robbie. And I'm gonna pass it on now to John from Maine. Thank you. And let me just say first, we appreciate the partnership with Repa so many issues here. It's really great to be part of such an important movement. We had two goals in Portland. First, we have had Ranked Choice Voting for over a decade, but we wanted to make sure our multi-winner races were conducted using proportional Ranked Choice Voting. And we needed to do this by mending the local charter. And second, we've had clean elections in the state of Maine since 2000. But during the past two decades, Portland municipal races have gotten way more expensive and increasing amounts of outside money have been coming in. And it's just been harder and harder for everyday people to run for office in the city. So folks in Portland decided to push for clean elections and municipal races. In 2019, we gathered 8,000 signatures in 90 days to force a vote on this. And even though the city certified our petition, the city attorney refused to place it on the ballot and we had to sue them. And we've actually been in court ever since then. But meanwhile, in 2020, the voters of Portland chose to form a charter commission. And we pushed that charter commission to put clean elections on the ballot and also to advance a PRCV proposal. And we pushed them to go even farther and ban corporate contributions and foreign spending and ballot question raises. So we always knew that we had the people of Portland 100% behind us. And it was a city government that we had to defeat. And these were sitting public officials who themselves really couldn't imagine that the people would make good choices. But the clean elections measure got more votes than any of the other 12 questions on the ballot last week and PRCV wasn't far behind. And so now we have in Portland PRCV for multi-winner elections. And starting in 2023, we will have full public funding for candidate races. And we have a city government now that has a little more respect for the voters as a result of this. And so how did all this get started? I mean, it's simple. Some everyday people who cared about democracy and believed that the status quo wasn't good enough and they came together and they really threw themselves into making things better in their city. And they took things into their own hands and now they have two victories to show for it. Thank you, John. It's so rare to have a panel of people who are all coming off of victories. And so I love hearing in both your stories how you've built capacity over time and how coming off of losses and coming off of wins, you're really building your capacity and power in your communities. That's really, really beautiful to hear about. So I want to pass it on to Elisa to share the goal of your campaign and how it got started. Well, so first of all, I just want to thank Representus for all of their support. We had a great set of partners and Representus's support was really instrumental to getting us to 82% of the votes in favor of ranked choice voting for city elections in Evanston, Illinois. My organization much like Representus is concerned with policies that will help make our government more accountable and more responsible, more responsive. We got interested in ranked choice voting several years ago as a way to increase political competition in Illinois and a way to shake up the political balance. As many of you probably know, we have a really entrenched political establishment, a political machine in Illinois. And that means that the voters don't always feel heard. The establishment isn't always responsive to the voters' wishes. And the government isn't always held accountable. So that's how we got interested in ranked choice voting. And we decided to go with Evanston because it had a number of advantages for us. Sometimes it's great to start at the state level, but we felt this would be a good way to get our foot in the door. I live in Evanston, so it was a natural fit. We knew that we had some potential champions in the city government and that it was a potentially receptive community. So we just got started and started talking to people and we're really happy with the way it turned out. Well, congratulations to all of you. And I'm wondering if I can stay with you, Elisa. And at the beginning of this conversation, Josh discussed how our political system is broken on a foundational level. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how your victory is helping to fix that broken system. Well, Illinois has some of the lowest trust in state government in the country. The last few times it's been polled, we've come down dead last in trust in state government. So I hear Joe on dysfunction in Nevada government. We are very familiar with political dysfunction here in Illinois, although probably have a slightly different flavor. And I think people are so frustrated in Illinois and everywhere right now, people are so frustrated, they feel disaffected, they feel like they're not being heard by the system. And so for us, something like rank choice voting that can really show people that their voices matter and give them a more powerful voice in the outcome of elections, give them more choices, open up competition to candidates that might be a little less traditional but might reflect the values and goals of the community better and deal with some of the polarization, which we experienced in different ways in Illinois, but we very much have even a place like Evanston. Evanston is politically quite homogeneous. It's a very politically liberal community, but we still managed to have quite a bit of infighting, divisive politics, nasty campaigns. And I think that fosters a feeling about your democracy that is not healthy. And so this way of showing that people's voice matter and engaging them in a different way and helping to hold your government more accountable, those are things that we see as really beneficial for not just our community here in Evanston, but ideally on the state and national level. Absolutely. I'll be really interested to see if that polling changes in Illinois around trust and government as rank choice voting grows across the state. Yeah, we can use all the help we can get. I know that Joe and Robbie have also been working on rank choice voting. And so I'm curious if we can turn to you, John, to speak a little bit about how you see the wider range of policies you've been working on, helping to fix the broken system that you're experiencing in Maine. So I wanna see, John, are you willing to speak to that? It's just, oh, I'm sorry, yes. Thank you, appreciate that. I thought you were going with the other John, sorry. So everybody here knows that rank choice voting promises to return elections back to the people and moving forward with proportional rank choice voting in Portland was very promising. But we think with a few election cycles, this will allow voters to feel more empowered that candidates will respond positively. The city government will be more responsive and representative of the constituents. Same thing with clean elections and the corporate contribution ban, being able to run without special interest money will open the door to a more diverse and more representative slated candidates each cycle. And we hope this will reduce cynicism and energized civic participation. You know, I would say it's worth taking a moment to focus on the intangible benefits also, we just had a robot and the routine questions on the ballot, including R2. We think that is very healthy for democracy. It reminds everyone, the city government, the candidates, the incumbents, the voters, who is supposed to be in the driver's seat and that democracy is not a spectator sport that the people can and do make good choices and that there's nothing to fear from thoughtful, respectful democracy. We did get some pushback from people who didn't think that these kinds of questions should go out to the voters. And I think we squelched that pretty effectively. And I think the results resonated with a lot of people in the city of Portland and we're pretty pleased with that. So I know that many of the folks who are joining us today, I heard a few folks calling out that there are volunteers who are on the call. So happy that y'all are here. But many others are really interested in hearing about your path to victory and any advice that you might have for folks who are interested in starting a campaign like yours in their own communities. And so I wanted to turn this one to Robbie to see if you have any advice that you would like to share with folks on this call about starting their own campaign. For me, the first thing we did when we started this rank choice voting effort was to just talk to all the campaign managers in town and see if we could get their advice and support because we had never done this before. This was just people, you know, on the outskirts we'd never ran a campaign but we had talked to city council a lot. We knew city council, but we hadn't run a campaign. So getting advice from represent us, getting advice from fair vote from other partners around the country who wanted this same kind of reform and talking to our experienced people in town and then slowly building a team of people who just really wanted to see this happen. That combination just was super powerful and helpful. You can't do this on your own. Absolutely. I'm curious, you know, many of you are coming from a city organizing level and I'm curious if Joe, there's anything that you would add to that working at the state level on a campaign like this? Yeah, I mean, you can't discount the real campaign the grassroots organizers, the folks who believe in this passionately and can get that message out one-on-one particularly with something like ranked choice voting. We had almost, most of our television spots were 15s. You can't explain ranked choice voting in 15 seconds. You can't do it. But our volunteers talked to 27,000 voters in person and had 10, 15, 20 minute conversations with them explaining it to them. We had ranked choice voting pizza parties where you picked your pizza toppings. We had ranked choice voting beer tastings at Micro Breweries where you picked your favorite beer. Our student coalition, I'm assuming all of them are over 21. I wasn't in attendance, but on 420 they ranked strains for ranked choice marijuana. So we've been trying to make this as easy to understand but with a statewide ballot initiative where you're taking on both parties and the long knives are gonna come out for you from both sides. Now we also had to run an air cover campaign where we went to the major industries in the state, the gaming industry, the mining industry, the real tours, the chambers of commerce and at least make sure we could get them to do no harm and not come in against us in a significant manner. And then with trying to qualify and pass a ballot measure that isn't as easy as I managed the marijuana campaign in 2016. So I referenced that now and then. Back then it was the war on drugs has failed. You can say that in seven seconds. Like you can say that in seven seconds and over 70% of the people that hear it are gonna nod and go, yeah, he's got a point. Ranked choice voting is hard. It's hard to explain, but actually ranked choice voting is not hard to do. It is hard to campaign and explain something that was not taught to people in their high school government class. And so we needed air cover for that. We needed a strong television campaign to kind of back up what we were doing on the ground. And so that's the one thing I would say is if you're gonna do something statewide you've got to scale up both with having the resources. We ended up spending $20 million here this year. So you have to have the resources in place for a budget for paid media, but you can't win this on the air alone. If you don't have, I mean, we've got, I've got Sondra Cosgrove here who's a history professor who's been working on this for six years. I've got Doug Goodman who started a group called Nevadans for election reform. He's been working on this for six years. I think Steve in Carson City, who's on right now is with the rep us chapter there. Rep us and the other nonprofits were really helpful doing text programs, phone calling programs. And it took everything. I mean, we won by four points. It was pretty close. And so it took everything. So that's the only thing I would say with a statewide is that it is difficult to do that without that air cover and without getting larger groups to come in and invest in something to get you over the finish line. Absolutely. Yeah, shout out to Steve. I'm curious if Elisa or John would wanna add anything to this in terms of lessons that you learned from this campaign work that you would wanna share as someone who's trying to start a new campaign. Yeah, I love this question and I have some thoughts on this. First of all, start as soon as you can. We've been working on clean elections here in Maine since 1995. It took this long to get it in our largest city. So just get started, call some friends, hold a kitchen table meeting, just start. Second, go as broad as you can, as diverse as you can. Small businesses, neighborhood groups, faith organizations, civic groups, invite them all to the table. Third, listen. Listen, listen, listen and listen some more. Hear the voice of the people you're trying to do this work for and internalize that voice. It's more important than polling or headlines or op-eds or listening to people like me, frankly. Next, I would say expect blockages. You're gonna get bumps in the road. If it came easy, obviously it would have been done already and the opposition just confirms that you're onto something good. And then finally, I would say take care of yourselves and each other. Campaigns are hard and make it part of your work to celebrate every milestone and every small success individually and collectively. You need all kinds of strength for this work and we can find that strength in each other along the way. So those are the things that I took away from this campaign. I really appreciate that and especially that last point that it's gonna take all of us. So go stay in it for the long run. Alisa, would you wanna bring us home with any other reflections on this point? John covered a lot of it, a lot of the important points I think. I think for us picking the right target there was important. Look at what you have resource-wise, who you have on the ground, what kind of community you're looking at and just try to match what you are able to do and what is feasible with what you're trying to do. So that doesn't mean that you shouldn't stretch. If you think that you can marshal the energy and the resources for a long shot campaign then by all means go for it. But in our case, for example, we had to decide do we wanna pour all of our resources into a statement or do we wanna start somewhere that we think might be winnable and expand out from there? And I think we made the right call and not to mention the fact that when you start out with a smaller community you're still bringing a huge benefit to that community. For us, I think the fact that I was on the ground in Evanston made a big difference and we had other volunteers who were on the ground. So if you are working in other communities really make those grassroots connections and try to make sure that you have them if possible for the reasons that Joe brought up that you need to have those longer conversations because and we found this over and over again ranked choice voting is not that easy to explain. So to have those extended conversations bring it in as diverse cross-section of the community as you can into your conversations and then just to echo, just to amplify John's point a little be prepared for setbacks. So we came into this knowing this was a relatively friendly community but I've been living here long enough to know that nothing is open and shut, nothing is easy. And that's just gonna be in just about any political campaign. And we definitely had, we started out with a relatively friendly city council and then all of a sudden, boom, somebody decided they were opposed and it got pretty nasty there for a little while. So you just be mentally prepared for those things, budget for them if you can. Assume everything is gonna take five times longer than you thought because people take a long time to get back to you and everything does take a really long time. Those are the key things and have great partners because if you can manage it, because that's huge to have partners like represent us that can bring that expertise and resources from the national level and have those grassroots partners to show you what's going on on the ground. Oh yeah, go ahead, Robbie. I'd just like to say along those lines, Elisa, that we could not have done this either without the strong support of the local League of Women voters. So I'd like to thank them so much if any of them are on this call besides John. They know the community, they know how to educate, they're willing to educate, they bring so many resources to the game. If you're trying to get this started in your community, that should be your first contact. We had League of Women voters support as well. So big fan. Yeah, I love this point about building your partnerships, making sure that you're not going it alone on the front end of your campaigns. And so I'm wondering if, I know that we have some questions. I've been seeing them popping up in the chat as we've been talking. And so I were about to turn to a more open Q&A. But before we do, I wanted to just close out round with our panelists on what's coming next for your campaign, if there's any next steps, any next campaigns, any implementation work that you want to share with the crew tonight. And so maybe we can start with John and then we'll work our way around. Yeah, I'll date myself here a little bit, but we passed clean elections in statewide level in 1996 and we're still defending it in the legislature. We're still making sure it has full funding. So when you win at the ballot box, your work is not over. It's an important milestone, but you still have to implement. You may have regulations to write. You may have to educate the public. You may have to educate candidates, stakeholders. And so you have to be there to nurture your success and bring it along. So that's what we'll be doing in Portland to implement clean elections and the rank choice voting. And then also in November 2023, we have a statewide ballot question to ban foreign contributions from state ballot question campaigns and also to urge our congressional delegation to take a stand against Citizens United. And that's a super exciting effort. And we were just gonna go right into that campaign as soon as we can. We submitted 80,000 signatures for that and we're waiting approval to get on the ballot there. So we're moving forward with some new things that we've been working on last week and busy. Busy. Well, it's concerned it's not gonna be here until 2025. And so we've got time to educate the public and work with our CV for Colorado in they're really concerned about making sure that the rollouts in Boulder and Broomfield and Fort Collins are all done really smoothly. But besides that, locally, we as a represent Fort Collins chapter are working on getting a candidate blue book. Now that people are gonna be running elections with ranked choice voting here, the people are gonna wanna know what the candidates are and who they are. So we need a candidate blue book and we're gonna work on that. And we also are working on public financing of elections for our municipal elections. I just love that transition from winning this victory to like actually giving voters more information about what and who they're voting for. That's an awesome pivot. Really appreciate you highlighting that. So I'm gonna move on now to Joe and then we'll close up, Belisa. We are only halfway done. And Nevada, I mean, it's actually really good that it's not super easy to change the constitution. And our election laws are in the constitution. So to change the election laws, we have to change the constitution. And so the way to do that is you have to get a certain number of signatures, which we got. And then you have to win at the ballot box twice in a row. And so we won in 22 and we will have to win again in 24. So I'm letting my staff breathe and sleep this week and next week and just not be too crazy busy. But we've already got our next staff meeting for Tuesday the 29th. We're gonna be back at it. And we're gonna start up, our goal is to start the countdown on every Tuesday. We're gonna have an event. Either a ranked choice pizza party. And it's where we pick, someone asked a question about that. So we'll pick five pizzas and we have people come in and try them. And then they use an app, RCV123, and they rank their favorite. And then we announce the winner at the end. And same thing with beer flights. We'll go in and we'll have the beer flight set up with the pub and they'll pull it. So we're gonna be starting those, right, Jen? Everybody wants to vote on pizza and beer flights. So that's been a, we're gonna start those grassroots things right away. And I know it sounds gimmicky, but where that's been valuable is when people say, oh, this is confusing. And people are like, no, it's not. I ranked pizza choices by that or I ranked beer flights by that. And then the other grassroots activity that was surprisingly successful for us that we're gonna continue is speaking to high school senior government classes. And only about a third of those kids are gonna be eligible to vote before election day or were. But what we found is that they explain it to their parents when they go home and their parents are like, this sounds confusing. I don't like this. The kids are like, oh, I had this guy come in and he was super excited. And he was talking about how this works and it's instant runoffs and it guarantees the majority. And if you do it that way and you have a top five that reduces negative campaigning and a lot of parents are just stoked to see their kid excited about something in government. And we got a lot of feedback that people learned about this from their kids. So we've got to win again in 2024. We're starting up the grassroots portion right now. I firmly believe that our opponents and it's both sides coming at us. I firmly believe our opponents are gonna come out as twice as hard in 24 as they did in 22. And I firmly believe that we will win this race in 2023. And with all of the air cover that we will muster in 2024, we will maintain that win. But if we don't convince tens of thousands of people one-on-one in the next 12 months, how our CV works that it'll lower the temperature and politics that'll reduce hyper partisanship that it'll allow you to vote for who you want to vote for instead of picking between the lesser of two evils. I mean, we have a gimmicky vote here in Nevada. I voted for none of the above in two of the five statewide races because I know the people running and I could not in good conscience vote for either of them. And so getting rid of that and making it so that you can vote for someone and make a vote for a system that encourages collaboration instead of division. We have to do that in the next 12 months or we're gonna get creamed in 24. And so that's our march, that's what's coming next is we've got a long grassroots slog in 2023 where we're going to use every method imaginable to roll out a heavy grassroots effort and just do person-to-person canvassing and campaigning. And then in 24, we'll bring the air cover campaign back in and be back up on the air. And hopefully we will get a victory four. And the good news is once it's in our constitution it can only be taken out the same way. And so you would have to qualify a measure to get rid of this and have the people vote to get rid of it twice in a row. And so unlike what we're seeing in Alaska with a statutory initiative where you can tweak it at the legislature this would be something where the people would be more in control. So that's our next two years. I love that Joe and I love that this gives Nevada voters several cycles to experience RCB before there would be a chance to even attack it. So that's good. Alisa, I'm gonna let you close us out with next steps for your campaign. Well, our RCB will also go into effect for our municipal elections in 2025. So we have some time to educate people to work with Cook County which is the election authority that runs our local elections to get this implemented. At the same time, there are initiatives in a number of other places both within the county and elsewhere in Illinois that we hope to stay in touch with. We have terrific partners at Fairvote Illinois who were really helpful. They were our reformed for Illinois partners on this. And so we hope to continue working with them on all of this. We're also looking at Chicago. We're in the midst of a mayoral campaign and we have, I don't know, nine candidates already or something like that. And our last mayoral election, both of the front runners who moved to the runoff had less than 20% of the vote each. So this is a really great opportunity, this mayoral election to start socializing the idea of RCB with Chicago. And so I'm working with an alderman there who was interested in starting to hold hearings and starting to talk to people on the city council about this. And then clean elections, apart from RCB, clean elections is always a huge goal for us. We're starting to feel like outliers over here in Chicago as far as some of the big cities not having a clean elections program. And we really desperately need it. Pay to play both illegal and legal in Illinois and Chicago and surrounding communities is a huge problem. Corruption, again, both illegal and legal is obviously a huge problem in Illinois, probably one of the things we're most famous for, unfortunately. So those are some of the goals for the next, next six months, next couple of years. Yeah, it's amazing to hear how even on the heels of victory we've got our work cut out for us to educate, implement, to make sure that these policies are working for the people. And so we've got a handful of questions that have come in. Many of them are specifics about some of the things you've mentioned. And so I wanna name, if you have additional questions, drop them in the Q&A now. We're gonna get to as many as we can. And if we don't get to them on this call, we will do our best to follow up with a response on as many of these questions as possible. But I wanna pull up a first question, which was specifically, specifically for you, Elisa, from Catherine who was phone banking for the Evanston referendum. And there was really high awareness among the voters who they were calling. There were lots of news articles, community forums available online and a front page article in the Chicago Tribune the day before the election. Can you talk about how your coalition developed this public awareness and media coverage so that others can pick up some best practices? Yeah, so first of all, Catherine, thank you so much for phone banking. The phone banking effort was huge and we know it was crucial to our success. So thank you for doing that and to everybody who helped us through represent us. Yeah, partly it was, we had the contacts and we just use them in the media. I called just about every reporter I knew who I thought might be interested in doing a story. And many of them got back to me and coverage begets more coverage and so on and so forth. So we put, having those contacts helps if you have that relationship, that's terrific. If you can find somebody who has those relationships, those existing relationships, that's great. But I also wouldn't be afraid of cold calling reporters or emailing them. Reporters are looking for stories too. They're looking for content. They're looking for things to write about and it doesn't hurt to send them an email and say, hey, we're pushing for this and what do you think about doing a story? And you will get responses because it is a story. Your community trying to make a big change in the way people vote, that's a big story. So I would just be bold and get as many things out there as you can. Yeah, hold forums, see who your champions are. In our case, the mayor was supportive. So that was very helpful. And just get the word out there as much as you can. But I'm really glad you had that experience because that means that what we were doing was working and we really did work hard at it. So. Thanks, Lisa. And this may be a question that others would want to answer as well. I'm seeing a handful of questions all kind of focused on like many folks talked about opposition. What are some of the attacks that you all had to push back against? But I'm curious if there's anything else that other panelists want to add around how you got your message out, how you combated either misinformation or attacks on your policies and any best practices that you'd recommend? I see John, it's off. I would just say one quick thing about ranked trace voting is one of the things that was most helpful in getting people to understand it was to show them an actual ballot and just show them what it looks like. And as soon as you can get a specimen ballot or if you can make up a specimen ballot, the visualization of that makes it click for a lot of people right away. So while you're doing your beer tastings and everything, having that visual can be super helpful. Robbie, I think I also saw you take yourself off me, did you want to add? Definitely showing people what a ballot looks like was super, super helpful because then they just see how easy it is. And we did that all the time at the farmer's market. We would say, this is what a ballot looks like, you get to pick one. And here's a ranked trace voting, you get to rank them. And they'd go, ah, yes, I get it. But where we had a lot of impact, I think was just getting into Reddit. And we went on the Fort Collins subreddit and just answered questions, put out informational stuff, pointed people to articles and just engaged with people. I mean, just talking back and forth and answering questions as often as we could in that environment was super helpful to just kind of mix it up with them where they could ask anything anonymously and we would just answer those questions. So making yourself available in any of those, whatever's popular in your town, maybe it's Facebook page in your town, but here it's Reddit, it seemed to work for us. Wonderful. So I am wondering, there's a lot of really specific questions about the various policies. And what I saw that came up quite a bit earlier, John, when you were speaking about proportional RCV versus RCV was, what's the difference? And I'm wondering if you wanna share a little bit about. Well, we're still working on our 10 second explanation, but I would just say that proportional ranked choice voting comes into play when you have a kind of election where there are multiple winners. It's not for a single winner election. It's where you have city council or something where the top three out of six candidates get elected to the city council. And it's just a way to make sure that those three spots are allocated in a way that proportionally represents the population instead of each one of them going to some majority faction and kind of leaving the minority completely out of the room. That's the best way I can explain it. Thank you. So I think we're getting close on time here. We've got about one minute left. And so I just wanted to hold this last minute for any last words that any of the panelists wanna share with us. And if you're looking for last words, any recommendations you have for the average person on how they can take action to help fight for a stronger democracy and less corruption in our government? I see you off mute, Joe. So I'm gonna throw it to you close as half. I'll pipe in. I think the answer, I mean, I about fell over when we had 700 plus reservations for this. And I think the answer is in the people who logged on and are watching, we can't do this without you. Like I saw Ben from Rep Us in the chat talked about some of the folks I didn't get a chance to thank like Kimmy and Cesar. And then there's dozens of people behind them. This takes a team. It's not easy to explain. It takes a while to explain it to people. It doesn't compress into five seconds. But what we're trying to do here may just save our democracy. It may just save America. And so getting people to learn about this and own it and then get involved with the team. It's something where one thing I've said to my troops overall is they're in the business of collecting raindrops. We're building a flood, but we have to build a flood one raindrop at a time. And so we need you to be raindrop collectors and raindrop harvesters. And we need some of you to get super excited and to be people who collect a bucket of raindrops for us. And then you bring your bucket over and you put it in and together we build a flood. But if we don't have a flood, there's 9% of the people on the left, 9% of the people on the right who are gonna give us too bad choices and it's not working anymore. It's not working for America. And so we need you. The people on the panel are not the important ones tonight. It's the people watching because we're toast without you. So I just wanna thank everybody who took the time out of their afternoon slash evening to come listen to us talk about this. And just know we get involved with Rep Us, find out how you can help from wherever you are in the country when the heat is on and we've got four or five of these measures going on around the country and you can help virtually through a texting program. I got a text from someone in Columbus, Ohio about a race in Nevada. While I was in Columbus, Ohio visiting my parents, it was the craziest thing. And it just shows that you can help from anywhere. So I wanna thank everybody who's watching this and let you know, it's not just that you can help. We literally can't do this without you. We just can't. Well, I'm so grateful. Congratulations to all of you on your victories last week. I'm so grateful for you spending your evening with us and sharing your amazing experience with us. And I feel fired up. That was a great call to action. So thank you for getting us fired up for the next round of anti-corruption campaigns. Maybe some of the folks listening on this call will be speaking in a couple of years on our next panel. So appreciate you for inspiring us. And so I wanna close our conversation by thanking you all and introducing represent us as board chair, John Devon who's going to close out our evening. Thank y'all. Hi everybody. Thank you. The pro-democracy victory is described tonight and the dozen others one across the country would not be possible without the hard work of many, many people. I love that raindrops to a flood analogy. To the campaign leaders and their teams, thank you. To all of the volunteers who phoned, texted, wrote letters to the editor, canvassed, thank you. To the thousands of donors who contributed $10, $20, $50 a month, know that your contribution added up to an amazing set of victories for democracy. So thank you. We would not be celebrating these wins without each and every one of you. As was mentioned tonight, it's a big team and we need every single one of us. I wanna thank again the campaign leaders who volunteered their time to share their work with all of us tonight, really inspiring. But now is the time for our call to action. Before you go, I wanna share some ways to get involved and directly support these campaigns and future campaigns through the work we do at Represent Us. We don't know yet exactly what campaigns and efforts we will need, who will need your help in the future. But by signing up with Represent Us, you will know when the time is right. We know we will be building a massive grassroots effort to win in Nevada again in 2024. Can you sign up for that today? No, Joe and his people are taking some well-deserved time off. But if you sign up with Represent Us, you will know when Joe and team are ready for you and we'll connect you. In the future, there will be many other efforts just like that and they will need you. Get engaged with Represent Us as a donor or a volunteer or maybe both. And you will be connected to the right campaign at the right time. Join us by clicking on the link that was just shared in the chat. Through that link, you can let us know how you'd like to help us end corruption in politics. In the near term, we can keep our movement skills strong. As Josh mentioned, we're activating for demonstrations against the independent state legislature theory in front of the Supreme Court on December 7th. You can volunteer immediately to phone bank to rally participants or be a participant yourself. Thank you very much for joining tonight. Together we can win these campaigns and bring us closer to our vision of building the world's strongest democracy. Thank you and have a good night.