 It's like my stats application. Yes. I'm too superstitious. Yeah. I'll reframe because I know Chris doesn't like it. Okay. I'm saying I did it right. So I'm allowed to start. Well, thank you, everyone. Most of the folks on here I know, which is very great and a testament to all the hard work we've all done. If you're new or if you're watching live, thank you. Hopefully we can answer some of your burning questions about Prop D, about Prop D, about Center for Election Science, about approval voting. We got it all. So I will introduce myself. Maybe you guys saw my introductory video today. But that would cover all the bases. But the short version is I am Chris Raleigh, Director of Campaigns and Advocacy for the Center for Election Science. And I work on the campaigns. And we have one major campaign we're working on right now, which is the St. Louis Campaign Prop D for Democracy. We have been helping them out for almost two years at this point. But I will also kick it over to the rest of the Center for Election Science. Oh, yeah, sorry, bro. You can watch that later. But I will let the rest of our team introduce themselves. Aaron, you want to go first? So I'm here in Chicago, Illinois. As maybe you know, we really embrace the virtual nature of our organization. So we are all over, down to best in California, though. I started the organization in 2011 with a group of online voting geeks and folks with math and engineering backgrounds. And we've made significant progress since then. And we're very excited, particularly with what's going on now in St. Louis. Hi, everyone. My name is Caitlin Peña. I am the Director of Operations and Programs at the Center for Election Science. I came on board about two and a half years ago when the Center for Election Science got its first dose of major funding. And Aaron was able to go full-time and hire me and another staff member. So I've been here since we helped on the campaign in Fargo, which became the first city in the U.S. to use approval voting. And now I'm really excited to see if St. Louis becomes the second. I'm Andrea Denalt. I organized the campaign in Fargo after Jed Limke led the initiative and had been working on approval voting for a couple of years. I just recently got back in with the Center for Election Science and working now as their national campaigns and advocacy coordinator. That's a long title. I always forget. But yeah, I absolutely love what we're doing. I love election reform. My background is in human rights, primarily anti-racist work. And I do think that plurality voting is an arm of white supremacy. And so for me, this is an extension of the human rights work that I've been doing for a year. So happy to be here and happy to be part of the team. Wonderful. Well, thank you, rest of CES team. I will, I am assuming, even though I have talked to most of you for a very long time, we might as well go start at the basics. So I'm going to go over just a little primer with everybody just to make sure we're all on the same page. And for those of you on Facebook Live or all over the country, you can follow along. Yes, you. Good. So welcome to the CES Town Hall. We are, of course, CES, the Center for Election Science. You have heard of the people, but you have maybe heard of the organization, but what is it? We are a national non-partisan nonprofit organization. We work for the benefit of everyone, not maybe not every organization that works in electoral politics, maybe has everyone's best interests in mind. We legitimately are here to help as many people as possible. We have this one way of improving that system, approval voting, which we love, which is carnal voting, which is a type of voting. You're going to learn way more about families of voting if you follow us than you've ever imagined. But approval voting is a quick and simple way to change our system. And as Aaron mentioned, we are a small team, but we have been moving pretty fast. Aaron started the organization in 2011, right? Aaron, he's nodding. And, you know, it is such a pleasure to work with so many people across the country already at this point. We have six chapters. We recently just received seven RFP proposals for potentially new places to bring approval voting to where they live. So we're moving pretty fast. And another big thing is where do we get our money? Oh, we get a lot of money from donors like you. Thank you very much. If you are a donor. But we have, it's called concentrated funding, right? We get, we have one big funder, which is open philanthropy project. Open philanthropy project is focused on long term solutions to global problems. So pretty cool that they think that we are long term solutions to global problems. Hopefully I got that right. But other folks you may have heard of, probably for democracy, started by St. Louis folks. They saw that in St. Louis that people were getting elected with less than, definitely less than 50% of the vote, but less than 40% of the vote, 35, 30% of the vote people were getting elected by in the significant elections. But it was grassroots. There's a couple of folks, one of which is a college student who decided to do something about the broken elections in the city. And they, you know, and he felt that it was having an impact on how the city and the government were working. They asked us for money. And they won. They applied for a grant and they won. Just like how we applied to the open philanthropy project and what so too did property for democracy. They won. Because they have great people on their team, Mallory's on their team right now and hopefully Benj and Tyler and Rashin who are the steering committee of property can join us or are watching at home. They are all incredibly impressive people who will have long and illustrious careers after this campaign. But really what has motivated us to support them and to work behind them is their passion, their passion for not only reform and trying to get things done but trying to get things done quickly. Right. St. Louis needs help today and we're happy to help and approval voting was a good solution for them. We know that many people have heard mostly of ranked choice voting. Right. That's okay. We've been around for a while. Approved voting in this case. Despite it being good and we'll tell you why it's good. Just wouldn't work for their city. They couldn't do it. It costs too much money. So we're, we're happy to be that tool for for communities to use in the future. So property has three parts. And I'm just going to talk about two of them very quickly, because they're a little bit of a no brainer. So nonpartisan primary, what does that mean? So in St. Louis, Democrats have a primary, the Republicans have a primary, the Greens have a primary, the Libertarians have a primary. All the other folks in the city have a primary, just like how you would for president or governor to send their, send their nominee to the mayoral or city council election. If that sounds silly to you, you probably live in the 80% of cities that don't have that. It's, it's one of those things that it's basically across the country. As you can see on this map, all the green ones are nonpartisan elections for first city elections. And yellow is partisan elections, like I mentioned. So folks don't, at the city level, partisanship matters just a little bit less. At least that's what a lot of people believe. And that's why it is so prominent. Most places also have a top two system, right? The only way to kind of make sure you get 50% is to have it only be two people in the end, which a lot of states constitutions, and other laws said that they have to have more than 50%. So the only way to do that is to have 50%. Or is to have a top two run up, excuse me. Now you may be saying to yourself, well, like, why does this matter? Why does this matter? And what is the problem in St. Louis and St. Louis and in other cities, a lot of people run for a lot of different elections. People have all types of options, which is fantastic. They just have really crappy ways of saying to people that they like. The end of the top 100 US cities, on average for the, for an open seat for mayor, 7.8 candidates ran. Right. And so what does that lead to that leads to a problem called folks pudding, which we will talk about a little bit. These two work super great with approval voting, approval voting, like this picture says, you can vote for all the people that you like, all the candidates you like, the one with the most votes wins. In this case, it'd be the top two. So just like how Helen and Jim move on, they will also move on to the top two in a run off. It makes systems, you know, it's like, it's like a good spice, right? You can, you can technically cook without it. But there comes a point where it just makes everything better. Approval voting is very similar to that where you just want to even want to do another election once you once you learn about approval voting. And, and another big piece of this is, how does it look? What did the final results look like? This is just a poll from that the Center for election science did in spring of this year around the Democratic presidential nomination, we did Democrats because they're the ones who had competitive race. In the blue, we asked people who we who they want to vote for, and we let them do it three ways. And the blue is the old way. Plurality pick one, you can see it's pretty split, so I'm evenly split between two three candidate. Ranked choice is the red, you know, the rank choice that you rank them, and then you do a couple of run offs. And at the end, you have someone who gets over 50%, if it works out. The rank choice and its best light, which after I think in this case was about 12 or 13 rounds, ended up with someone having 50% over 50%. Green is a proof of voting. As you can see, people's true support for these candidates is seen. Right. And, and if this was St. Louis, the top two in this situation would move on to the final round. And you can do it because it's free. That's a big, that's a big help, right. You know, the cost of time extra does one of the main selling points in St. Louis. And in that CS we deserve every city every locality every state deserve better elections, regardless of any, you know, having gobs and gobs of money to pay for. You know, is it's accessible. Everyone can understand that you can, everyone can use it. Sometimes there's a lot of voting methods out there, and they can get complicated fast, either complicated to do, complicated to, to understand. You know, voters deserve, and it's important for democracy for people to feel good about knowing how they voted and seeing that and the end result. What it is, we can do it tomorrow. Every machine in America basically can do proof of it, because every machine in America can do it makes it free. It makes all of our elections possible to be improved tomorrow. That's not the case with it may be the case where some people live in some localities. That's definitely not the case everywhere. So it's free and you can do it next day. And it's democratic, right. Vote splitting is when you have maybe one or two people you like, or there are similar candidates, and they steal votes from each other, like in that graph I showed earlier. Approved voting virtually gets rid of both splitting is very hard for both splitting to happen because you can vote for everyone you like, and the community wins because they get a winner that they they want that they like. Imagine that sounds kind of novel. People are interested in voting a different way. We did a poll last year in St. Louis. And, you know, some traditional groups that, you know, for one reason or another. Don't vote at the, at the same rate as maybe people with more education or wider folks. Traditionally, unfortunately, vote more who have a history of voting more folks that have been either disenfranchised or not as feel not as involved in democratic process have really shown interest in voting and approval. We don't know there's a great question political science, why people don't vote, why people don't turn out there's a thousand different theories, right. We're not saying that this will make people go vote. But it definitely seems like it makes people interested in voting. And it's not just a democrat thing is not a republican thing is not independent thing. Across the board, you can see all the stats here, people are interested in using approval voting and how it may impact their willingness or their excitement to go vote. And good thing for St. Louis and everyone around the country, somebody's already tried it, Fargo. Andrea and her gang have gotten it in Fargo, and they had the first ever approval voting election this summer. And people liked it 60, not on here, but 62% of people liked it. 71% of people said it was easy. So that means 9% of people who didn't like it. Still thought it was easy. This is my favorite stat 69% of people said they could vote for their favorite right that's vote splitting. That's people seeing immediately in the first election that vote splitting can get taken care of with approval voting. And good thing for Fargo, same machines, no big updates, basically same ballot, same piece of paper, I just said vote for one or more. The biggest thing and these last two, the biggest thing for people to get passed is their mindset, right. We've already, we've always done it this way. This is always how we do it. Or I like the candidates that I have. That's not the point. The point is your vote is something that scares, right. It's scarce because it scares, you know, there's only one there's only, you know, there's only so many about there. So what do people do they tear each other apart to make sure that they get, you know, enough votes for them to win. And then once they get 20, 30% of vote, they stop. Right. They stop. They treat you differently because you only have one vote or they know they already have your vote. Right. You only have one vote. So you are the least powerful in this situation. You know, you won't vote for a candidate because you're worried about splitting your vote. And so what happens, people don't run or they, they, they run or they don't get traction or they get told, you know, I need someone who can beat such and such. And it's hard for us to see past this because this is all we've ever done. You know, we're trying to change that in this situation. You know, we want to make sure people understand your opinion should not be limited for basically any reason. I'm telling you, your, your opinion should be limited to one, despite the number of options you have. If you have more power, if you have more votes campaigns and governments as someone who used to work on campaigns, I'll tell you, people will treat you differently. People won't skip you people won't assume that that you're only for them. It makes more ideas possible lets you support more ideas as you saw in the example of the Democratic poll. There was a lot of support for maybe folks who got very low support in the polls now were they going to win. No, but they show that people like their ideas and that's really important. And finally something that's really important to us to have leaders God forbid that thought like us that were more in line with the values of most people that wanted to do something for the most amount of people possible. That's why we like to prove voting so what can you do. If you're on chapter volunteer with us or property. Donate to either organization, both will be very excited for that. Join the CES community on our discord which is like a messaging message for spread the word to your friends and get our email updates. And that I think you are fully primed on approval voting and and the like, and please for the rest of our little presentation, put your questions in the chat, and we'll make sure we get to you. So do we have any wants to start off with a question jet. Oh, Rob, Rob just stuck one in there he says one question for anyone who wants to answer it how much have you all heard about ranked choice voting when talking to voters in St. Louis. Well, I have only done so much, but I would be your maybe a little bit to hear from any of our St. Louis folks. Just Rob to say in general. It's not St. Louis but basically when I talked to anyone I've ever met, or met in a situation where I'm trying to like table or something. We know that the number one thing people have heard of is ranked choice but it comes up a lot. Now in St. Louis and I'll speak a little bit for Mallory and them because she's not working tonight we are that some folks have some folks who have some kind of a conflict ranked choice voting and providing some do it on purpose. Some people legitimately have a hard time figuring out the difference. Just like how I mentioned our minds right now are kind of in a scarcity world. Right. There's not a lot of room in people's thoughts for more than one voting method, let alone two, let alone three, let alone, you know, how many else we have. But hopefully I did enough for Mallory that she feels that she doesn't have to chime in today. Can you give me a thumbs up. Maybe I can say something to. I'm Kathleen Farrell and I'm, I don't have an official title. I'm with the League of Women Voters we got very much involved in this. I think that every place has to look at their individual situation. And one of the things that we looked at here was, first of all, very practically, we don't have voting machines that can deal with ranked choice voting. It doesn't look like we're going to have them forever. That's the first practical thing. The second thing is, like Fargo, you may think St. Louis is large. But it isn't. Inside, we have very tight boundaries. We had white flight out. And we have about 320,000 people inside the city limits. Jeff just asked what's the difference between St. Louis and St. Louis County. St. Louis is a very peculiar place in many ways. And one of the ways it's peculiar is that it is both a city and a county. It is St. Louis City County. And then outside of it, particularly to the west and south and north is St. Louis County. If you put the two together, we've got about Mallory, two plus million people in that area. But we're very different. And there's been lots of discussions about joining the two. I don't see that happening. I digress. When you have a smaller city like that, and I grew up in Chicago, you know, which is a big place, and Fargo is a Midland size city. It's much easier, I think, to get name recognition to run for office. You can get your message out there. And I think that having approval voting also fits that situation. It really is possible for a new candidate to run in that first race and that primary race and get their ideas out there. It's possible. You can drive from one end of the city to the other in 20 minutes. And I think also very practically you need to look at every situation. But those are two factors that I think are important at least for me. No other questions yet in the chat. If anybody does have questions, Tony, Joe, Michael, Rob, any of you have questions. Jeff, feel free to let us know, stick them in the chat. Since it is such a small group here, we could probably even let some of you unmute if you feel more comfortable just sharing sharing out loud. Well, we did get a big question from from Michael just now. So, Michael is talking, it sounds like about a previous, some of our are polling from 2016 from the 2016 election so this might be a question for Aaron. I'll just read it aloud. In case there are folks listening on Facebook. So the question is asking about polling that we did in the 2016 general election. The top two in that polling were Hillary and Bernie Trump was number three. Michael says then today you show a simulation of the 2020 Democratic Prime Party primary, where the top two were Warren and Bernie. I think this is a problem on two levels, one the pitch seems to cater exclusively to left wingers to a primary election typically has less than a third of the turnout of the general so isn't it problematic to eliminate candidates like Trump or Biden in the first round like that. It would be better to find one candidate and then find the second one from ballots that didn't approve the first candidate. So, Aaron, I don't know if you have a response here. Sure. So I think one of the things that Michael is looking at is the proposition that's in front of St. Louis and then also thinking about okay well what about presidential elections what if we did presidential elections this way. One of the things to think about with approval voting is that it's simplicity really lends itself to a number of different contexts. So, in the state of Missouri, you have to have they they interpret majority in the, sorry, in the general system required to use a choose one system. And so, just by the parameters of what we're dealt with in the state of Missouri, and working with the folks in St. Louis had to use a system that used approval voting during the primary process and then using a top two system in the general voting. Now that's not to say that in every context approval voting has to be implemented this way. You can do it in a variety of different contexts. So for instance at the state level, you could have closed primaries and everyone in their closed primary using approval voting and then in the general election, have approval voting again with all the parties nominees in addition to independence. And you can do that. And part of the reason you can do that is because approval voting is very simple and it allows it to be flexible at the same time. In terms of the examples that we had for instance in the 2016 election and the 2020 election in the primary. There's some good turnover that being maybe more tailored to liberals. The thing is, like, this is just the way the data rolls out like we don't like, like we don't control the data in any in any way, we set up the design, and we make it as fair as possible. This is just the way the data comes out so in 2016. We had to design and Caitlin for free to throw the article from the 2016 election in there. The, we had a design that used within subjects in terms of each respondent being able to respond under each different voting method. And then we had another component which is between subjects which meant that half of the respondents of the 2000 respondents so 1000 had a short list, which was Clinton, Trump, Johnson, and Stein and then the long list that included those four plus some other nominees including Sanders, Cruz, Bloomberg and some others. And in that longer list. Sanders did well there he tied with Clinton in that in that experiment under approval voting. And the, it just happened to come out that way. And then with the Democratic primary, the same thing we used a very similar design. There was within subject design, where we had each respondent responded different voting methods and then we had to control measure on top of that. And there in the earlier part of the year. In November, Warren did a little bit better under approval voting with Sanders and second and then a little bit later in the earlier part of the 2020 year. Sanders looked a little bit better under approval voting with Warren and second, and we also have a good idea that this was a good approval voting actually did a good job measuring candidate support because we also had a control measure and approval voting did a good job mirroring that control measure. So, we really painstakingly look at these designs when we set them up and try to make them as fair as possible. Also, the idea of a control measure was a novel instrument that we included. So we're also really on the cutting edge in terms of research methodology with these approaches. But again, we try to be as far as possible when we do these. And when we're looking at different types of setups. It's part of what we're doing is we're working within the parameters that we have in front of us. And I think part of the issue there, Michael, as Chris noted in the comments is that, you know, this year, the, the, the competitive race with lots of votes butting was in the Democratic primary right just because there's simply that's that's where there was a primary with lots of people to follow. If there had been a Republican primary this year, we would have pulled on the Republican primary so it's, I completely I hear your, your concern there, but it's, it's kind of about where, where are the interesting elections where we can really see these, the votes butting taking place. And unfortunately, we only had funding, and we had a, at the time, we didn't have very much funding and so we actually had a crowd fund to get the funds to do the poll in 2016. Ideally, if we had the funding available, we would have done the Republican primary. All of us love data and really sharing it and being able to analyze it. So, yeah, yeah, we would, we love to take in data and look at the way these different voting methods shake out at really every opportunity that we can. It just happens that these have been the opportunities in front of us so far. So one question in the chat that said, What do we want to do next. Let's go next, which is a great question. I think that was Joe. Joe, we have just, we have just closed our first ever round. We have just, we have just closed our first ever round of asking the public essentially for proposals to ask us for for money, or to, you know, to bring a providing where they live. We have gotten seven proposals, seven great proposals from all over the United States, some folks from our chapter program which chapters are just kind of where people come in and they, we meet on zoom and we kind of talk about you know, how we could work on approving and different states and different cities. And it's totally grass roots lead we just offer the room, right. And so there are, first off, and I will be very remiss as a campaign person, but did not say. Best, we are really hoping that St. Louis wins on, on Tuesday, and then we all know on Tuesday and this all might be a much shorter ride than we imagine. If it's not so, you know, we are cautiously optimistic about St. Louis on Tuesday Mallory Kathleen, the rest of the coalition have done an amazing job, an amazing job building such a great coalition of folks. And, you know, their Mallory's probably working right now that's probably why you know she's not in the chat but that's good. You know she's she's got quite the sprint left. So but yeah we're hoping that if people are interested in doing it when they live, or in their state. You know, if the laws are willing we mostly try to work with ballot measures right as we see in St. Louis. Politicians are not super excited about changing the way they got elected. I think somebody that they said it wasn't fair. Well, they work for the people. And sometimes the people have to get out there and demand the change. And that's, that's a good way of doing it with a ballot measure. But we have extensive resources. We are developing kind of a legal ish research networks to help folks look into local and state laws. And that's my job. That's Caitlin's job. That's Aaron's job we're to where we are a tool we are resources to help folks who want to bring into where they live so If that's what you're interested in please follow us join our discord and get involved. Any other questions from folks. We did just such a good job when speechless. I think you answered all questions in the presentation Chris. That's what I'm saying. Knocked it off at a time. Well, you know if that's the case. Short and sweet. I really appreciate everyone coming out we will drop our website and the way to reach out to us in the chat. Feel free to ask us anything. That's why we're here that's why we did this today we want to show you guys that volunteer question. Oh, Okay, so Joe wants to know there are different types of volunteering. Can I talk about which kind. Well, we have Joe we actually have a lot of volunteers and we are we are trying to get more people involved. There's only four of us. We had five. Tomorrow will have four. One of our folks is leaving tomorrow. But we are looking for volunteers to help with campaigns to help, you know, get the word out to if you have any sort of expertise like legal expertise, or even media, like marketing expertise, we have one volunteer. Shout out, you may be watching. Who helps, who helps Mallory and their campaign, you know, with their digital ads and all kinds of great stuff like that so we're really looking for people with skills. We're really looking for people to want to get involved the best way to get involved right now is we have a couple programs called volunteer project lead volunteer project volunteer organization. Volunteer organizer and room captain volunteer project lead they are we really lean on them to do like kind of heavier lifting research projects. A lot of people like that volunteer organizers, their job is to help us well organize, you know, shakes and trees to have to work with Andrew and I on that. And the last is room captain so we have our chapter meetings every two months will have one in November. There's all we have many more chapters than we could actually and we do them all at the same time kind of help our save our time. And so we train folks to have conversations with all the cities and states and stuff that we can be in, which is a really cool problem that we have is that there's way too many folks for us to all talk to them. So, if that's something you're interested in please check it out and sign up and the other thing I want to point out is we have a sign up form our website to start a chapter. So all that means is, I'm interested in doing something. That's all it means doesn't mean I'm selling you my first born. It just means I want to get involved. I want to get people in the room. We have, we have really great data we have a really great network of folks. I was telling someone in a Midwest state how many people, you know, 140 people that were CES supporters lived within 20 miles of his house. He didn't even know that's what's kind of cool about proof voting is that you want to start something there'll be plenty of people help you. We also had a question that did come in on Facebook from Scott he asked do you guys think it makes sense to go directly to the large voices in each major party. I think he's referring to, you know, getting their support in order to help advance approval voting. I can speak to that from experience a little bit. I think this happened both in Fargo and in St. Louis. We reached out to party leaders and all of the major parties, you know, even major third parties. In fact, they were reluctant to endorse approval voting. We had a couple of people, for instance in Fargo. There's a senator Kathy Hogan. Very beloved by everyone in the state, but she was an early supporter, and even while she was running her own campaign for Senate was also out collecting signatures for us and Fargo which was great. But in terms of getting like official party endorsements they've been near impossible so far it's not say that won't work in the future. But I think based on the feedback I've gotten from talking to elected officials. They are reluctant to get behind it because quite frankly I think a lot of them are worried about how it might essentially threaten their power and their ability to manipulate is a strong word but it might threaten their ability to campaign and in the way that they are used to. I will say that, you know, Fargo City Commission races are non partisan. However, all of the candidates who run, you know, definitely have their political orientation that's fairly well known. And one of the former commissioners in an interview that I did with him during the campaign told me that he and all of his colleagues who shared that same political orientation and we're thinking about running would get together and decide amongst themselves. Okay, who are we going to run so that so that we don't split the vote and so that you know it will give us a greater chance of winning or, you know, having our political orientation on the commission. Which, you know strategically the smart for them to do that. But you know the argument that we made in Fargo. I think just from a citizen's perspective is that we want a variety of choices and we don't want a handful or five or six people to be deciding amongst themselves who to run. If someone has, you know, the gumption the stamina and the ideas and they want to run for office, I want them to run for office and I want to maintain my choices. So, yeah, historically speaking it's been difficult to get elected officials and party leaders to endorse it, it isn't to say that they're all against it. But so far that hasn't been shown to be a great strategy. Yeah, and Scott put a couple of additional comments in in the chat on on Facebook, and it sounds like he's actually referring more to, should we go to the parties and say, hey, you should use this for your party primaries that you have less votes waiting. Absolutely would it make more sense to like go and get it implemented in those primaries rather than going city to city to city. And he's talking about you know the national level so for Andrew Yang or Pete Buttigieg like we saw in that poll that Chris put up there that you know Andrew Yang probably wasn't going to be the winner even under approval voting but he was able to see how much support he actually had, right, or, you know, same with Pete Buttigieg or any of the other candidates they could get a much more accurate reflection of that support. And in some cases, it is possible that it would change the outcome because there aren't similar candidates buying for the same piece of the pie. I know that Aaron Helen makes this argument all the time but primaries themselves are actually the prime, like the perfect application for something like approval voting specifically because, you know, the problem that approval voting addresses are both splitting amongst similar candidates who share overlapping platforms they share a similar base. And, you know, if you have this like hyper partisan race, you know, like, nationally right now we've got Donald Trump and Joe Biden, they're really probably not like stealing votes from each other, or, you know, Joe but when you've got a large body of candidates who are really similar in a lot of different ways, that's where vote splitting happens the most. And so, yeah, primaries are an ideal scenario for approval voting to improve democracy and making sure that, you know, when it does get to the point where we are at a general election. We have people who who won their primary did so with broad support. There's one question here from Michael he less of a question more of a comment about how, and it's good because I've, you know, we've heard this about the money involved. Right. Okay, it's much easier to to to spend on a smaller group that it is to get on a bigger group. Michael I got in the back of my mind I think that in 2018, the average congressional race spent $50 per voter. Right. Whereas in major city for major metro mayor of Houston they spent, it was a it was a big controversy because they spent one is between one and $3 per person. Right. The money here in general, and the system is crazy. Right. One thing, you know, people argue that it's going to cost me more money. I think, again, keeping your mind, those are people who don't want to talk to more people. Right. And when you work on a campaign like I have your goal is to to to narrow down to the smallest group of people possible. But I think we also need to work past that mindset of, you know, everything's going to stay the way it is we're just going to be able to vote for more people. Right. I think one thing that we we hope that happens is people with more exciting ideas, get out there, people who who motivate more people to work on their campaign, get out there. Right. There's an only Seattle as a, as an example, because I see that up here, but, but it's also a good example that they have a type of publicly funded election. Right. They know that's not necessarily what we're working on. But Seattle has publicly funded elections. They have a non partisan top two primary. 20 people run. Right. They brought so many people to the table. It worked. They got more options. They got more people to run. They just have a crappy way of counting, counting people support. And I think the mayor still got like 30, 30 ish percent of support so Now people say that gets all worked out in the runoff, but I've worked on a lot of primaries and largely the money goes to people who are seen as viable. Right. And a huge part of viability is of not being viable. Right. Is that is vote splitting. We already have a successful candidate. We don't need two or three. Right. You're depriving the voters. And, and they're not able to give, they're not able to attract resources because they're not seen as viable. But at the end of the day, if, again, just to use the presidential primaries as an example, there were a lot of people who cared a lot about some of the other candidates that got 2% 4% of the vote. Right. And they were able to fund right now. It's a national election, but them just even being able to show the support for their ideas is incredibly important. And you bet. You bet the next time around people see, oh, I can get 30% of vote 40% of vote or 40% approval by tapping into this person and their ideas. You know, I more ideas, bolder ideas. I think we'll, we'll get bubble up to the top. And again, we, the whole system is going to be hopefully reimagined on the money front soon, but I don't think it's totally fair to compare right now to it. Maybe in the future. But we'll see hopefully it's more vigorous debate and that will really kind of bring some attention. Okay. We have one. I'll, I'll give this one to Aaron. It's about ranked choice voting. And so, our stuff. The only thing I'll say is we will, we are not going to say, you know, our position. We want people to make up their own, their own mind. And we meet it. We, the status quo is awful. Like that. But the status quo is awful everywhere. If it, if it wins and the people of Massachusetts want it, great for the people of Massachusetts, the people of Massachusetts don't want it. You know, we got to start all over again, but the people deserve something better. So one question, and I'll put it like this only because we get it a lot is why would, why would a place pick approval voting over ranked choice voting. And I'll let Aaron kind of do that one. Sure. So it looks like. The question is about Massachusetts. What happens there. And I think either way, in terms of how it shakes out. We keep going according to our game plan, which is working with communities all across the country, and making sure that they are aware of the options in front of them, and giving them the tools and resources that they need. So they decide that approval voting is the tool that works for them and their community. So I think regardless of what happens in Massachusetts mess, the people of Massachusetts are going to decide what works for them with their ballot initiative. But there are a number of communities throughout the rest of the country that had that question before them still. And again, like that game plan doesn't change regardless of what happens to Massachusetts. And so let me let me just comment on that. The group voter choice Massachusetts which I consider to be, you know, not legally but in effect a subsidiary a fair vote has raised about $6 million and is doing publicity campaign with fliers in the mail and on the web and what it adds. And there is a group in opposition to that that's raised $200. And so the public, you know, here's like nobody much talking about other systems or, you know, the possible negative consequences of RTV and a $6 million campaign in favor of it. So, assuming it passes I don't think that that necessarily means that the voters understood enough to decide what they were voting for. They hear a group talking about all the problems of plurality voting and those problems are real. And they're presented with one solution as if that were the only solution. I can I can understand the concern that that you're raising there, David and the from like from our standpoint, they're deciding between this awful choose one method and rank choice voting. We recognize how hard it is to move forward. And also it's important that data points be out there as well so that we can learn more about these election reforms as they're implemented throughout the country. We know that really anything is better than the choose one method that we have now. Obviously, we strongly prefer approval voting over Frank choice voting, but at the same time, we, we want to see people move away from priority voting or choose one system. And so when that's an option for folks, we're going to leave it to them to make that decision. And for the people who are making up the decision of, okay, do we use probably voting or, or something else. So for folks who aren't yet at this stage where the where they have an initiative in front of them for for another voting method. Or they're they're looking at approval voting is as an option. Those are really the folks that we're looking to in terms of making sure that they recognize what their what their options are and being able to work for them after they come to the conclusion of what works best for them. Thank you. Andrew, did you want to talk about your experience of Fargo in that case. Yeah, kind of both Fargo and you know why, why approval voting over rank choice voting so I will start by talking about how I got involved in approval voting to begin with. I was living in Bismarck, North Dakota. No one knows where that is, but it's three hours away from Fargo. And this was in 2017 I think I just saw a random Facebook event happening in Fargo, talking about some lecture was happening on voting methods and at that period of time I was like very upset about voting methods and I was convinced that we all needed to adopt rank choice voting. And so I thought that I was probably going to a lecture where I would be learning about rank choice voting and when I drove the three hours through the snow and ice to come listen to this lecture that I was so excited about. And I was like, oh, approval voting. What's that. But the only reason I bring that up is because I like for rank choice voting people like, I'm your people you're my people. I, you know, for me it just had to, it took a certain amount of like resolve to understand thoroughly how both methods work. And if Fargo is concerned, you know, we sort of had this like cheeky rebuttal to people who would ask us like why aren't you pushing for rank choice voting, and you know, Jed would always say, Well, if you really want rank choice voting, you can start your own ballot initiative and go collect your own signatures, and you can get rank choice voting on the ballot. And that was, you know, for at that time that was, you know, the easy answer to that question. But now that we're expanding in all these different cities, this very valid question is coming up constantly. And you know, in the case of Denver who is in the process of forming a chapter right now. I was just looking at the possibility of adopting either one of those two. So, I've been involved in a lot more discussions recently about the differences between the two and I just think it's really important for people who have, you know, have yet to guess that approval voting is better. I just want anyone out there to understand that rank choice voting really just doesn't work the way that most people assume it works when they first hear about it because intuitively it obviously sounds better to be able to rank your order of preference because we all have these preferences, rather than, you know, just the simple like yes or no on each candidate like ranking sounds more specific more expressive. And I get that. I think the part that I didn't understand and the part that most people don't understand is the math involves the actual tabulation mechanics. And once you learn how convoluted and flawed it actually is. It just makes so much more sense. But like I said it does take a bit of resolve and determination to actually like educate yourself on on how those two are different if you are, you know, genuinely interested in being able to discern the two. And we did get a question. Oh, it looks like Kathleen. I do you mean you want to speak to Jason's question. Just very quickly. I discovered an analogy that has worked extremely well for the last month or so and that is for those of everybody has experience in the workplace when you're hiring. And in academia, you know, which is the world I come from you do it all the time. You got a call for a job. That's an elected officials post. You get a bunch of people who are interested in it. And you make two decisions. The first one is, okay, who's hireable. Who would I, you know, who do I think would be okay to hire. And to me, that's the first step of approval voting. And that means I can vote for everyone I think is hireable. And I have a lot of power there because then when I get in a runoff, I have a real choice. And those candidates can be explored better. And they'll reach out, you know, to explain why they would be the best choice. And to me, that makes great common sense. And it's the way that a lot of organizations do it. It's the way that, you know, I just think it's a good way to explain it and that's for me why ranked choice does just doesn't cut it. And so with those two common sensical reasonable processes, the people choose people. And it forces them approval voting, if it works, right, and people will do a lot more to reach out the people really makes folks and political parties, by the way, and groups that they are trying to appeal to say, Okay, it is this person hireable. And then, you know, and then you, you choose the best candidate. So I thought I would just offer that sort of persuasive tactics that I've come up with lately. Yeah, I think that's a great analogy Kathleen thank you so much for sharing that. And this is kind of this question, I think most of us on the call know the answer to. This is a question on Facebook from Jason and he asked, did somebody describe the difference between approval and preferential ballots is preferential different than rank choice. And this is a question that they're Aaron always likes to note that the voting methods field is really bad at naming things and there's like a million different names for every type of voting method. There's a lot of ways to rank choice voting, instant runoff voting preferential voting, the alternative vote, there's lots of ways to describe it and it gets confusing because there are multiple methods that include ranking that are not what people currently refer to as rank choice voting. Aaron I don't know if you have a specific answer that you'd like to get to this is preferential different choice. Sure. So I think, in terms of terminology, they're synonymous with each other. But when we talk about a preferential ballot. Voting methods are can be sometimes a bit overwhelming, particularly if you're just kind of newly being introduced introduced them the way that I conceptualize voting methods just to keep it straight in my head is I think about single winner methods, and then I have another branch over here, where I see multi winner methods, and then keep it simple to start with a single winner methods part you've got priority voting which is doesn't quite necessarily fit nearly into any particular category. Then you've got cardinal methods that involve some kind of rating setup or scoring setup. You have methods like range voting approval voting in there, and then you have ranking methods also cardinal systems. There you've got a whole bunch of them, you've got insert runoff voting, also known as all these other names rank choice voting, preferential voting here method, all these other names, but then you've got all these other ranking methods like board account ranking methods, bucklin methods, and, and so that it's named rank choice voting is definitely confusing. I didn't, I didn't name it none of us named it, but as a consequence it does make it a bit more confusing, but it's important to note that the way that terminology is used, particularly in the US, it's referring to insert runoff voting. And there are very big differences between insert runoff voting and approval voting. One, like, as we see right from the beginning, the type of information you're putting on the ballot is very different with with the insert runoff voting you've got rankings that you're doing with the candidates, so you're using technically called ordinal information. And then for approval voting, you're selecting as many as you want, kind of like a thumbs up or thumbs down, where you're just simply totaling them. And so, very different methods overall, but absolutely, you are appropriately confused by the name. So, so don't don't feel remotely bad about that. Okay, well, I don't think there are any other questions currently in the chat that I'm seeing. And we're actually about 15 minutes over the time that we had originally allotted here. But thank you everyone for attending. Thank you for to the few folks who who have tuned in on Facebook and contributed questions there as well. I know that we really appreciate you guys coming out and participating asking questions and lending your support. We will definitely keep you updated on what goes on in St. Louis on Tuesday. And as Chris is putting in the chat definitely visit election science.org if you'd like to learn more. And you can email Chris, if you want to know more about campaigns about chapters are a P process that we just started for the first time and we plan to have it manually starting starting next year. You can email Chris at Chris at election science.org. But thank you everyone. I hope you all have a great night and happy voting if you haven't voted yet. Thank you everyone. Godspeed in St. Louis.