 I'm really, I'm really excited about this conversation that's coming up. We're actually going to get a chance to talk about another real world instance in which approval voting was was used. We're going to put our time machine hats on a little bit and go back to the 2015 Republican Liberty caucus national convention, which took place obviously before Fargo before St. Louis. And I think what happened there really does demonstrate the impact that approval voting can have both on campaigns, election results and the candidates. So, before we get started with the presentation I want to go ahead and introduce the three folks who are on our panel. The first person I'd like to introduce is Blake Huber Blake Huber is has had an interest in politics, almost as adult his entire adult life he's been involved in political campaigns since he was 17. He's been a long time libertarian activist who found out that he was a libertarian after hearing Roger McBride, the second libertarian presidential candidate ever speak in a radio interview. He's also served as the chair of the libertarian party of Kansas and served as the libertarian that served on the libertarian party national committee. Additionally, we have Steve Cobb with us. Steve Cobb is originally from California, but worked many years in the former Soviet Union as an engineer in the area of arms control. He's also been a voting reform advocate for some 20 years, including about five years on the board of CES. He's a founder of unsplit the vote. A swarm based movement that promotes the evaluation of voting methods to end vote splitting and its consequences. Lastly, we have Andy Jennings. Andy received a PhD in mathematics from Arizona State with a dissertation on voting methods. He was a founding board member of the Center for Elections Science in 2010 and served on the board for seven years, including as its chair. He has twice attempted to get approval voting bills through the Arizona legislature and is currently working on another approval voting initiative in Arizona. So that's a good introduction to our speakers. To begin with, I think it's good to get everybody a little bit of background about this Republican and Liberty caucus and kind of how did this all come about? How did they use approval? How did it come about that they were going to use approval voting? Was there a specific vote split that happened before and how did CES get involved? Steve, I think you have some great background information on all of this. Yeah, so I was in New Hampshire back in 2011 and pretty active in GOP politics mostly. And at the state GOP convention back in 2011, they had a straw poll and it's always a big kind of a fun publicity event. But so far, you know, a year before the election, there's a million candidates. I mean, literally they had, I think, 28 in that year. So when they use plurality voting, as always for these straw polls, you get this horrible vote splitting and each candidate gets just a few percentage points. So it's hardly meaningful. But it's kind of a publicity event in the convention. So that year I participated in one and actually we, some of us ran a parallel approval poll unofficially, which was somewhat frowned upon by the organizers. But we produced actually much more interesting results, more accurate results showing the true approvals of each of the other candidates. So when the RLC National Convention came up in 2015, we'd had that experience. And I knew the organizers. It was it was in New Hampshire by coincidence. Yeah, so I pitched the idea to them as a way to make their straw poll real. You know, not just a publicity event, but to make the results meaningful and that would actually make it a bigger publicity event. We get the word out because it actually was was was meaningful. So getting an outsider like CES run the poll gave it more credibility. That's great. That's, that's really interesting. Can we get sort of started on kind of talking about a little bit about what it was like kind of getting ready for this event. So you were tasked with designing the ballot and accounting mechanism and all of the pre event preparation. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So, up until that's point the Center for Election Science had been a very, very, very theoretical organization. I don't think we'd ever run an actual poll or election of any kind in real life. And so they wanted us, they wanted our organization to do it for the for the expertise that we had. So we decided, well, how are we going to do this? We had to, we went and found an excellent open source program actually that could read the ballots and then we found a scanner. Remember, we purchased a scanner on the for the CES nonprofit and we took it with us to New Hampshire and we had this program that was going to count the ballots. Excellent. And you had to put these, you had to put black corners on your ballot, but other than that, you could have a pretty standard, you know, circles that get bubbled in. So we pulled up the ballot here. You can see the black marks in the corner that was just that really, really helps the software to read this and so everything else was a bubble. We decided that we were going to run a plurality election at the same time as an approval voting election and a score election and so that's why there's three columns. So we were going to design this so it didn't confuse people, but we told everyone and they announced that the approval voting results were going to be the real results. Everything else was for research purposes. So the middle column there, vote for one or more was the was the approval voting section. We also wanted to make sure we were kind of official in terms of making sure that people who were allowed to vote got to vote, and no one who wasn't allowed to go allowed to vote got to vote and so we came up with a system where we, we printed the barcodes and Steve and I held on to those tightly. Those were the control item. And then when people came into the convention and were allowed to vote we would we would check their name off the list and give them a barcode at the same time, and they had to put the barcode on the sheet in the top right corner in order for it to be read and the software that we found could read that barcode and could put it all could put all the votes into a into a CSV file and count them quite quickly and so we showed up with a thousand barcodes and a thousand sheets of paper and then we didn't have to be as careful with the sheets of paper these could be. These weren't the control item they could be handed out and shown to people and and given out it was just the barcode that we had to be careful with and control items so we think we did a pretty good job. Steve went and found a ballot box that locked and we put a padlock on it. I believe and so they folded up they put their barcode on place their votes, hold it up their ballot placed in the ballot box and they knew that it was secure. They knew that everyone could only vote once and no one who wasn't allowed to vote could vote. So we think it was a pretty good, a pretty good setup and a pretty good run for our for our first election here we also at the end we scanned all of the ballots and we put them online for a period of time so you could type in your serial number and see your ballot image online and you could see all the other ballot images and you could make sure that they were all you could check the CSV and make sure they were all tallied correctly and all that so we wanted to have an official process that was secure but also you know we wanted to illustrate transparency so we were striving for all of those things and I think we did. I think we did pretty good on all counts there. Yeah, and that sounds like you said that's about as transparent as it gets that's pretty great. Well, thank you that's that's really interesting it's, it's quite a complicated thing to put together so that's awesome. And then, so it's my understanding that the Rand Paul and Ted Cruz campaigns. They came to this campaign, really looking to win right they showed up with a lot of people. How did, did they know there was going to be approval voting beforehand, or was this something that they learned at the at the event, and how did that how did they react to to learning that it was an approval voting content. Yeah, we, we made this agreement with them somewhat in advance but not not very far so the campaign certainly knew they had time. This was supposed to be Rand Paul's victory right. He, he's the more libertarian candidate his father's Ron Paul. So he was pretty confident winning it, but approval voting gave the Cruz campaign gave Cruz the chance to upset Rand Paul, right, because people could vote also for the second choice. Even though Rand might be most preferred. If Ted Cruz could get the enough approvals, and then bring in more of his own supporters right to higher turnout from his campaign. He could. He could, he could tip the balance upset Rand Paul, and that would be a big media story. And so, that's how it started the, the, the, the turnout war. And speaking of that it's according to the numbers, it wasn't like a massive uptick in, in attendance and turnout. triple the expectation. Yeah, their, their, their previous maximum had been about 250 and they were expecting that for the selection year, and they got nearly 800. So those are the two campaigns. And you think approval voting probably helped to inspire that turn out. I mean, it was a whole package right it was just it. CS is participation and use of approval voting is really raised the profile of the straw poll from being just kind of a little gimmick, like at most conventions to, you know, a central event. Sure. I've got a question for you, you, you had a, you had a table at the event and I know we're talking about six years ago. But as you, as you hear, do you remember hearing anything about from individual voters that were talking about their experience casting a ballot any, any kind of murmurs in the crowd, as, as they were considering how to approach and Sure. And I remember it really well even though it was six years ago it's like it was yesterday. So people had come up to me and they'd say, How do I do this. They tell me I should only vote for one but how do I do this. And so we went through the ballot, I explained to them, you vote for all your favorites, you cast your support for each candidate that you believe in, or that would represent you. And each situation, it's not a zero sum game that's not when lose each situation, you're supporting a candidate. And if you want to a lot, the candidate that has a broadest popular support, you express that support. And the fear you that you really need to be concerned about is, if you support two candidates, but you don't vote for both of them. A third candidate could come from behind and knock out the one you favored the most. So a lot of people really understood that they were confused, but it was great. It's probably worth explaining a little bit what I mean the campaigns. This was important to them so they started calling their supporters they started asking their supporters to come down. There was a lot of recruitment going on and so people would come just just for this straw poll they would come and the first thing you would do is walk over to their campaign, the one that had called them and asked them to come down there and so if they were, if they had been in the Cruz campaign they would walk over to the Cruz table and ask the Cruz table what what is this I never voted in a in an election like this before how does this work and the Cruz, the Cruz campaign would tell them oh just just bullet vote for Ted Cruz put him for your plurality vote him for your approval vote, put him for your five score vote and leave everything else blank and turn it in that's, and the Rand Paul campaign was doing the same thing they were calling people and they were getting people there and they were showing up and people were showing up so when Blake says that that the voters were saying this guy's telling me to vote for just one. That's what was happening is it was the campaigns who were going and trying to get a hold of the voters and trying to tell them how to vote. We, it was fascinating to find a few people who were brought in by the campaigns and would come up to us and be like I want to learn more about this approval voting and we could. I wanted to explain to them what approval voting was what that second column is you can vote for all that you like. And then, and then we can have a much fairer election because the candidate with the most support is going to win. And there were people who were brought in by the campaign and they would whisper to Steve and I they would say campaigns telling me to just vote for one but I'm going to vote for. I'm going to vote for all of my favorites I'm going to vote for three or four, and when the room was too busy we could send them over to Blake and be like oh you want to learn more about approval voting go over to go over and learn about approval like so there was several. There was quite a few voters who learned about approval voting and liked it better, even though they were brought in by the, by the campaign so that was kind of the dynamic that was going on. Was it was it was it sort of chaotic as the vote was happening or. If Andy would agree it was pretty chaotic. What I really found interesting is the people came in brought in by the campaigns did bullet vote in many cases, but the long term Republican Liberty caucus members. Those are the ones that really wanted to do it the correct way, and they wanted more information to explain why I was there and fat manning the booth, Frank Adwood and I in Colorado started doing approval voting USA. I met him at a libertarian event when I first moved to Denver, a dozen or so years ago. I said to Frank, you're nuts, you'll never get this adopted, you're wasting your time. Let's work on electoral college reform. He offered me this book called gaming the vote by William Poundstone. Anybody watching this video if you get that book. It's like $7 on Amazon for the Kindle version. How can I help you'll learn about the wizard and the lizard you'll learn about all these situations that come up. We're splitting the vote is so very bad. And then I read the book. Three days later I called Frank up and said, Frank, I've drank the Kool-Aid how can I help. It's a major change from now it's not going to happen to what can I do and for the last 10, 10, 10 years or so. Frank and I've been touring on the country. In fact, right now, I'm camping in Washington in the approval voting van. So you're still out there right on. You bet you can tell I'm in my van right here. It's awesome. Very awesome. So, I'm curious about the count. So now you you have another count from Sesame Street but the vote the vote count. You, you have this, this approval voting event. And then, so how did that all go. Can you talk a little bit about how the campaigns were reacting to the counting process we now know with all the chaos of this last year. How important that that can be so tell me about how that was. Yeah, when we went to count the votes. We ended up running them all through the scanner. The scanner worked great scan them all in about five minutes and put the results in a CSV file and we could import it into Excel and we had the results in about a half an hour, but there was a step before that because the campaigns didn't trust the scanner and they didn't trust us and they didn't trust the program and they didn't trust anything so before we ran anything through the scanner. We, we have this there was this big boardroom table I'm going to share my screen here. So we can see there was this big boardroom table, and we took out the ballot box and we plunked it down on the table and we unlocked it and we pulled out all the ballots and we, we set out this pile of 800 ballots. And then one of these gentlemen was from the cruise campaign and one of them was was from the Paul campaign and they both wanted to see me count every ballot so we went through that stack of 800. And we divided them into four piles the piles that voted for both. Paul and Cruz the votes, the, the ballots that voted for neither Paul and Cruz and the ballots that voted for Paul but not Cruz and the ballots that voted for Cruz but not Paul. So those were the four piles. And we we divide them all up into those into those four piles and then we hand counted the ones that mattered which was to them the ones that voted for Paul but not Cruz. that voted for Cruz, but not Paul. So we had these four stacks, and then we wrote down the count to satisfy these two campaigns, and then we turned around and ran everything through the scanner real quickly in it. It went, but it was fascinating that we could do both, right? Like we could do an electronic version of the count, and it went great, and we could also do a hand count, a hand count version of, in this case, we knew who the two front runners were, and so we could divide the ballots into four piles. That's not quite as easy as plurality voting, where every ballot is mutually exclusive. You know, Paul, or Cruz, or neither, or both, couldn't go in the same pile, but, and if there was three candidates that cared, then you got to divide things into eight piles, or seven piles, or things like that. There gets to be more piles, but it's much easier than rank choice counting by hand, or score voting counting by hand. It was very, very convenient to count these ballots by hand. These campaigns, whenever I would put down a ballot that voted for Cruz, but not Paul, or Paul, but not Cruz, they were fine. I would put down ballots that voted for neither. There was a few of those, and then I would, anytime I would put down a ballot that voted for both Paul and Cruz, they would both shake their heads. You could tell they were both thinking like, if this wasn't approval voting, this ballot may have voted for me, but not him. So there was this, the campaigns, they want loyalty, right? They want to call people and get their commitment, get them to commit to vote for their candidate and no one else, and that's just the way the campaigns operate is what we realized. It was fascinating to be a part of that, to see that dynamic going on, but this is how we, this is how we counted the vote here was with the hand count and then the computer count after that. It was wild. I can imagine having them just watching you like a hawk as you're counting every ballot, that's fascinating. Let's see, so let's talk a little bit about the results. Basically, I'm gonna share my screen here and we'll take a look at what the results look like. Oops, hold on one second. Let's hold my screen. Okay, here we go. Okay, share. And so as you said, you did a, you did the star of the plurality voting, the approval voting and the score voting and you can see a little bit of differences with each different voting style, but we see that Rand Paul comes out ahead, but again, I think the most important thing to note is that you do get that information that we miss when you're talking about approval voting with the plurality system. You get to see a full view of what the voters actually wanted. And so were there any initial surprises to you about the results when they were tabulated? You're probably asking about Gil Fulbright. I love that. Is that what you're hitting at? Yep. That was a satirical candidate being run by an organization you may have heard of called representus, represent.us, reading great organization, great people. And so they brought some fun to the event. They had this satirical candidate named Honest Gil Fulbright. And they paraded him through the event. I think he's a comedian, a professional comedian. And so he wasn't in the original ballot, but they had people writing him in. And they begged us to count those write-ins when we did the tallying. So okay, throw him a bone. And turned out you got more votes than Jeb Bush. So yeah, that was pretty embarrassing. And that became national news for Jeb Bush's campaign. When you look at those results, it was interesting after we finished counting the results and we made the CSV file, we realized you have to be very, very, very careful what you use for the denominator in an approval voting election, especially one that was not that many people over the number of approval votes were not that high over the number of voters. You have to be really careful that the denominator is the number of voters, not the total number of approvals. That's the first mistake that a lot of people make. They put all the approvals in a column of their spreadsheet and they do a sum and then they do another column that's dividing those columns by the sums. And if you do that, then no one will ever get, or only one person can ever get above 50% approval. So we had to make sure that we were careful when we did the spreadsheet and we tallyed up those votes so that at least two candidates could get more than 50% of the vote. And we felt like it was legitimate. I mean, both Cruz and Paul were approved by the Liberty Wing of the Republican Party. I thought it was fair for that early in the election cycle when you had that many candidates and that wide of a field and it was unknown who was the front runner. I think it was great that they both got the approval of the Liberty Wing of the Republican Party. So we were super proud to announce those results. We also, we wrote out specifically the verbiage that they were gonna share at dinner when they announced the results because you have to say, you don't wanna say the winner with 57% of the vote, you wanna say the winner with 57% approval and second place with 53% approval and that kind of thing. So we wrote out the actual verbiage that they could read and we were careful. But I think as approval voting gets more well known, those kind of things will also be more well known and will work themselves out. There was a little bit of gamesmanship once the results came out. The Cruz campaign tried to make it seem like they won because they got over 50%. Yeah, the Cruz campaign did instantly tweet out like Ted Cruz gets 55% at the Republican Liberty Caucus and tried to get that out before the official results and tried to make it look like he was the winner because 55% to most people means he won. So they were trying to kind of take advantage of the approval voting. Yeah, I mean, I'm just struck by this and the other approval voting elections that we've seen that you really do get a broader perspective on where people are. And especially at that point in that nomination contest, the polls that were out will paint a specific picture because everybody has to pick one, but that really is the first time that people were able to give a full on look at where that primary stood. And of course you see that Donald Trump didn't really register much at the time among that wing of the party, which is interesting. Yeah, I just think that's really quite indicative of the value of approval voting. Yeah, one of the main things when you look at those results is in with plurality voting, none of the other candidates got hardly any votes. One percent or two percent, but with both approval voting and score voting, the rest of the field could see their true level of support. They were getting 20, 15, 10, they were getting a true level of support. And it was distorted because it was the Liberty Wing and Paul and Cruz were both trying to win and they were both recruiting for this election. So it wasn't a, but it was I think an accurate representation of that wing, but it was fascinating to see like true levels of support for all those other candidates. It was just so much more valuable information comes out of an approval voting election or a score voting election. And it was just great to see all of those, all of those other candidates get votes and get true levels of support. And that's what you need at that level in an open, in a big primary, right? You need to see levels of support for all of the different candidates. You don't need to narrow down to front runners yet, which is what the media tries to do. And so we were super happy with the nursery effect, the ability to see levels of support for all candidates. Yeah, I mean, oh, go ahead. Yeah, we talked about the Liberty Wing of the Republican Party. Frank and I actually, is this a good time to talk about a conservative poll we did? Okay, so Frank and I were at the Western Conservatives Summit in Denver just before the debates. And we did a poll who should be on the stage in the debates. And you brought up the, where you saw Bobby Jindal had like 17% approval. So we did a comparison between plurality and approval. And Bobby Jindal was not marked on any of the ballots for plurality. Same as we saw in the comparison you just showed. Yes, go down to Bobby Jindal. Ben Carson was marked on 28% for a score, 18% for approval and zero on plurality. Ben Carson won among the conservatives. He beat out Ted Cruz. I think it was 68 to 62%, very close. But he beat out Ted Cruz. Bobby Jindal got zero votes on plurality, but he was marked on 50% of the voters, by 50% of the voters on the ballots when they could vote for more than one. So, and what the big takeaway from that event was, you could see three different categories, three different areas where the people that were on the stage were in the top third. There's a very clear distinction. The second third were people that were on the backstage and the third group, the bottom on the approval voting ballot, represented by these people at the conservative summit, were not seen ever heard from again. So approval voting, but people allowing people to show their true support for individuals, you'll get a really good idea of how much support they'll have long lasting. That's a perfect example. That's great. So the big question I think that everybody has from each time we get a chance to do this is lessons or impressions that you got from the experience. I assume you would call this a successful event for approval voting. Right? Why or why not? Customer was satisfied. And that's the most important thing, right? That's both the organizers who, we were the client as well as the participants. So they got a result that they could believe in. And is there anything that jumps out at you from this experience that would be instructive to CES and the supporters on this call and just curious? Well, for me, I went to Port Fest soon after this event. Maybe you're so after. And a gentleman there who had been at the RLC meeting in New Hampshire came up to me and said, Blake, I want to do this right. How do I do this approval voting poll that I want to do at Port Fest? So that's implementation of something he heard about. Now, if you want a bigger, I don't think there's any better way you can say this was a successful event based on that. Yeah, the people, when people hear about this, they just really like it. A lot of people hear about this and just feel liberated to vote for all the candidates that they like this early in the election to say who they're voting for. I mean, I think it was instructive. I hadn't realized the degree to which campaigns would react and would maybe oppose approval voting and oppose the idea. One thing that we didn't see, it would have been nice to see three serious campaigns kind of competing for this election. I think if there's this effect that can happen where there's someone, if Ben Carson would have shown up, his campaign would have shown up and kind of contested this, they could have gone to these voters and be like, hey, vote for Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, one or the other, vote for your favorite, but come on, also vote for Ben Carson. They can make these phone calls, which is like, yes, we're not your favorite, but we're good, approve us also. I think it would have been nice to see, I think that's gonna happen in real elections with approval voting is these campaigns can make calls for people and be like, we don't have to be your favorite, but you know, we're good, just approve us also. It would have been nice to see that effect to kind of show up in this election and it didn't. It was just mainly a one-on-one, but still grateful to see the other campaigns still had a much greater turnout with approval, much greater results. And another quick comment from the Western Conservatives Summit, a gentleman when he finally got what approval voting was all about. And it's so simple, it's difficult to understand, right? So what he did, he finally said to me, okay, I think I get it now. So I can vote for the person that I think is the most ethical candidate, and then I can also vote for the one they want me to vote for, right? And my comment to that was, you've got it. I like it, that's perfect. Well, so that's the end of the questions that I had drawn up. I wanna open it up to everybody who's with us to ask some questions of our speakers. If you have anything, I'm not, I don't see anything specifically in the chat at the moment. Okay, so we do have one from Jeff Justice who says, at the time, how was Trump polling among the Republicans nationally? If I remember correctly, he had just kind of made it serious. He was in the single digits in national polls. I don't know anyone that I talked to that actually thought he was a serious candidate to actually win. It was fascinating to put him on the ballot to see the results and to see where he placed. The other funny story about Donald Trump was when a man wandered over from the hotel, this was not a Republican Liberty Caucus ticket holder at all. He did not have the right to vote, but he wandered over from the hotel, asked us what we were doing, asked us what approval voting was, asked us what the ballot was. He actually had an accent and he was from Russia and he was wearing a Putin shirt, just a picture of Vladimir Putin on his shirt. And he asked us about the election and he took a ballot and he cast a vote. He didn't have a barcode because he wasn't a member and we couldn't count his vote, but he handed it back to us. He had both voted for Donald Trump across the board. And so I thought that was, it was a fascinating experience that kept coming back in my head as Donald Trump started doing better and better in the primaries and then was president and then there's these Russian ties that are coming out in the press. It was just an experience that kept coming back to me was this Russian man who loved Putin and loved Donald Trump and that was his thing. We did not get to count his vote, like I said, but he was there at the hotel. It was interesting. A precursor of things to come. Does anybody, if you want to, Caitlin can we give folks the ability to unmute themselves if they wanna ask a question? Sure. And we do have a quick question here in the chat from SAS who asked if there are plans to use approval voting with the same group of people in the future. And I don't know of that, but I think it would be absolutely awesome if we could make this happen again in 2023. Yeah, I think we will definitely be approaching them to try to redo the experiment with the next field of candidates that comes along. Well, my question to SAS is this, why don't you do an approval voting poll, SAS? Just get in there and just make it out. You need help. Reach out to the Center for Election Science, reach out to me, reach out to Steve or Andy. We'll be glad to help you get it set up and get it run correctly. Oh, you have, you've got no idea. I'm actually working with Pat Dixon and Rock Howard down here to get approval voting for Austin City Council elections. Yes. Oh, yeah. I push approval voting on a lot of people. There you go. I was playing poker last night. Everybody was sick of hearing me talk about it, so. Yeah, never before, like, I can keep going. Justin did ask earlier if how the organizers were, the organizers of the RSC were convinced to use approval voting. I gave him an answer, I gave an answer to Justin, but you guys might have a fuller response. So did you need to convince them to allow us to add that approval and score voting, the approval and score voting options? Actually, the device chair and the organizer of the event is a personal friend of mine. So he'd already heard the pitch repeatedly. You can imagine. So he was already pretty convinced. He just had to convince the organization. And for the reasons that we've mentioned, it was just upside for them. Yeah, I guess the only potential downside would be if people weren't familiar with it and were kind of suspicious about this thing. But unlike some of the more complicated voting methods with a complex tallying algorithm, it's also a black box sometimes. This is pretty obvious, right? So it didn't take much to just for him to solve the leadership. I thought it was interesting. Steve asked, like we said, Steve talked to the organizers and newly organizers and negotiated for how this was gonna work. And one of the things Steve negotiated for was we get to give an hour talk to the whole, I mean, these are in breakout rooms, right? So it wasn't like everyone was in a dinner and I got to give an hour talk. It was just a breakout room and a lot of, six or seven other talks were going on at the same time. But Steve negotiated for me to give an hour talk about approval voting and voting systems and voting methods. And so they scheduled it. It was a good time when they schedule it. It was like Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. or something like that. And I was preparing my talk at which point Rand Paul announced that he was coming to visit the conference on Friday at 1.30 to 2.30. So Rand Paul was coming and everyone was excited to see Rand Paul. I half wanted to go see Rand Paul's speech instead of my own. Everyone wanted to see Rand Paul and I went down to my room at two o'clock and gave a presentation to, I think to Blake about approval voting. So our talk did kind of get preempted but there's no one I'd rather be preempted by than a presidential candidate. And it was fun to be there. It was fun that they made appearances. It was fun to be involved. It was fun to get to introduce approval voting to this crowd. Yeah, I would have gone too, Andy. I just thought I was stuck at the table. Yeah, Steve had to run the booth. Somebody had to run the booth, right? Yeah. So, well, I have posted in the chat a good write up. Oh, let's see. Looks like we got another question. What is the feeling of other approval voting supporters in regards to the gained popularity of ranked choice support? And is it a diversion from duo voting or a push against it? I'd like to say I could crack at that. So, oh, I'm sorry, Steve, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. We'll all be polite toward them. Don't worry. So go ahead. So, you know, if you walk, if you go down certain streets in any metro area, you'll find all the car dealers are gravitated to that one street. And why is that? Because people come to shop for cars. They don't want to go to one dealer. So, if score voting, star voting, ranked choice voting, if they all start getting popularity, what's gonna happen is we're gonna diminish the interest in plurality voting. So I'm in favor of ranked choice voting, putting their ideas out in the marketplace of ideas. Approval voting, in my estimation, is superior to all other choices for many different reasons, lower in cost, et cetera. And it gives the people the ability to truly express themselves. So I think the approval voting will always went out in a head-to-head match. But yeah, bring it on, ranked choice voting. If you like ranked choice voting, go for it. If you like store or star, go for it. If you want to talk about approval voting, give me a call, but be ready for a long conversation. I could add something to that. There is no one best voting method. The right voting method depends on the election you're having and the electorate, size and sophistication, et cetera. There's a whole bunch of parameters that determine the right method to use. And CES, we've been talking only about one of CES's five consulting gigs. And at least three of the other gigs we did involved other voting methods, you know, some crazy methods that were designed for the occasion. Like I mentioned for the Hugo Awards, Jameson Quinn designed. So nonetheless, there are certain patterns and you can see that there's some voting methods that are much more likely to be useful. And if you ask me what's the best voting method for election where, you know, I don't know the details about it. I'd say, well, probably approval voting would be best. So where would instant runoff voting be appropriate? It's the method that scales, it scales transitions to a multi-winner system, most elegantly as far as I know. And Andy, you're the expert here. So instant runoff voting for a single winner election is not great. It's a lot of complexity for only marginally better results. But if you want a multi-winner election, a proportional, a proportional representation, then IRV scales to STV. And that could be useful in some circumstances. Andy, maybe you could expand on that. Yeah, I think as soon as you have multi-winners ranked voting can actually kind of smooth out some of its difficulties and anomalies. In my experience, like looking at approval voting and looking at ranked choice voting, I mean, I've examined a lot of situations recently and it's like, oh, approval voting struggles in this situation and instant runoff struggles in the same situation, right? Like it's a tricky situation for any voting system. There's the ones that both voting systems get right. There's the ones that both voting systems kind of have a little bit of a problem with. And then there's the situations where one is slightly better than the other. But I mean, to me, it just seems pretty obvious that approval voting has all the benefits of ranked choice voting. And it's just so much simpler to implement, right? Like in Arizona, we're talking about, there's a ranked choice bill down at the legislature and they're talking about new voting machines and completely new ballots and educating everyone about how ranked choice voting works. And then when you get down to brass tacks and you go to implement it, a lot of times they only let you vote for your top three, right? It's not the theoretical ranked choice voting that the mathematicians study. It's only the top three ranked choice voting which is even more problematic, right? And so it's the expense and it's the voting machine complication and it's the counting complication. It's the ballot complication. It really is like, I just try to convince people approval voting has all the same benefits and it's just way, way, way, way simpler to try. And if you can convince your legislature or your initiative or whatever to go for ranked choice voting, like, I love to see experiments done. I love to see it run. I love to see the results. I think it's good for math and for voting science to have ranked choice voting elections happening and the more data we can get, the better. But when it comes down to it, like all the same benefits with like just... But if you're gonna have a ranked, if you're gonna use a ranking method, which ranking method would you choose? You know, a Condorcet method or IRV? Yeah, there's that whole discussion too, yeah. One of the things I like to look at, I'm a photographer. So what's the best camera you can ever have? It's the one you have with you. So what's the best voting method you can possibly use? The one you always have with you. Hey, let's see a raise of hands. Candidate A, raise of hands. Candidate B, raise of hands. Candidate C, raise of hands. You're gonna always get, from my estimation, I'm not a mathematician, but I read books and I read what mathematicians do. And I tell ya, approval voting has it all. You wanna get into the weeds and go to IRV, R-C-V, whatever, S-T-V. I think Andy has brought out a proportional approval voting. There's a way to do it for multi-winner elections. Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster both worked on proportional approval voting methods back in the day. So it is possible. But I don't like multi-winner elections. In fact, I don't even like to call them winners because with approval voting, when we get to express ourselves, we win. The candidates get elected, but we win. Sure, well, I think we're all gonna get a good look at how things go with IRV in New York City soon. It's just interesting, a friend of mine sent me a photo of the sort of voter education stuff that is being sent around in New York and it looks like a clothing catalog. It's extremely huge. So I'm really fascinated to see how that all goes here in the next couple of weeks. What should be heavier? The New York phone book or the New York ballot? Exactly. Really, Blake, are they like when you said, with choose one voting, candidates win. With approval voting, voters win. That's right. I love that. Exactly, yes. That's a really great line. And we always get the person with the broadest popular support because you can vote for everybody that truly represents how you feel or that you think has the best resume for the job. I'm into that. Well, are there any other questions out there? I have a question for everybody watching. When's the last time you used approval voting? Did you try with your group to go to the same movie, watch the same TV show? Did you use approval voting? When I was married years ago, we would just try to decide on what movie to see. We went once a week to the movies. I made up my list, you made up her list. We found out where we matched and if we matched on two or three, this week we saw this one, that week we saw that one. We didn't have to negotiate. Well, we saw my movie this week. So I guess I'll have to watch your movie next week. Didn't have to go through all that angst. We just used approval voting. Use approval voting every day. Love it. Well, thank you to everybody for attending our chat and especially to Blake, Steve and Andy for sharing their thoughts. I think this was really, really fun conversation. Like I said, I posted a link to a good write-up on the event. And if you have any additional questions, you can feel free to follow up with me at micatelectionscience.org and I can get your questions over to the panelists because they're the experts. And with that, I'll go ahead and shut it down. All right, great seeing you all again. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Everyone.