 Hello. Welcome to ongoing town meeting coverage from town meeting television. My name is Bobby Lucier and I'll be hosting the program today, which will focus on the ranked choice voting ballot item in Burlington. So this program is one of a series of forms that we're hosting in advance of town meeting day, which this year is on March 7th, coming up. And before we get started, just a reminder that if you are tuning in live, we welcome your questions anytime at 802-862-3966 and you can give us a call and we'll hear your question live on the air. And another reminder that you can watch town meeting TV on Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channels 17 and 217 as well as on YouTube, youtube.com slash town meeting TV. So with that, we can now dive right into the ranked choice voting ballot item in Burlington. And I think we'll pull up the language here. So the ballot item states charter change, read the ability to use ranked choice voting for the election of mayor, school commissioners and ward election officers, shall the charter of the city of Burlington, acts of 1949, number 298 as amended, be further amended by Mending Title II, Section 5, election to be by ballot method of election runoff elections to adopt a ranked choice voting for the elections of mayor, school board commissioners and ward election officers. And so this ranked choice voting system has already been implemented for city council races in Burlington per vote in 2021 when 64 percent of Burlington voters voted in favor of installing the system, specifically just for city council elections. And now on team town meeting day this year, voters will have the choice to implement this system as well for future races for mayor as well as school board and election officials. So we're here to unpack this system a bit today and joining us, we have Ed Adrian from the Vermont Legislative Portionment Board as well as Sam McGinty, Sam McGinty who is the democracy advocate for V-Purge. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you. Awesome. So we'll jump into opening statements and Sam will just ask you to start off just to tell us a bit about yourself, why you're interested in this issue and how you're qualified to speak about the issue of ranked choice voting. Thank you so much. So happy to be here. Thanks to CCTV and Ed. Great to meet you. My name is Sam McGinty. I'm the democracy advocate with V-Purge which is the Vermont Public Interest Research Group where one of the state's largest environmental and consumer advocacy organizations and we're also one of the state's leading pro-democracy, pro-voter organizations in the state and we've worked on a host of pro-voter, pro-democracy issues ranging from same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, vote-by-mail, ballot curing, lots of different things that have really helped make Vermont one of the easiest and voter-friendly places to cast a ballot and that's great and that's awesome but there are still lots of problems with the way that we vote and some of that has to do with the limitations of a single-choice ballot and that's why V-Purge has been looking at systems like ranked-choice voting to help ameliorate some of the most common problems that we see in our elections with a single-choice ballot whether that's the lack of majority winners, spoiler candidates, you know negative campaigning and really we're so we've been working on ranked-choice voting for 20 some years or so and there's been a growing movement nationally in states and municipalities across the country and we're really excited that Burlington voters voted to bring back ranked-choice back in 2021. We've done lots of voter education, get out to vote, that kind of stuff and we're excited that beyond this past special election in December that the whole city is going to be able to use ranked-choice voting in city council elections and we're supportive of the expansion to bring the benefits of ranked-choice to virtually all local elections here in the city. Thanks so much, Sam. Ed? Thanks Bobby. Yes, I'm Ed Adrian. I am an attorney in private practice although the practice that I'm in we represent mostly municipalities around the state of Vermont so I'm constantly answering questions about fire departments and police and voting and open records laws. I'm also on the legislative apportionment board and I'm a former city councilor IRV in I think it was 2010 when Kurt Wright ran against Bob Kiss and Andy Montrow and Dan Smith and Dan Smith who was the independent thought that he would have a chance because of IRV but he still came in fourth so and I have the greatest respect for Dan. I have some real reservations and concerns about how IRV works and I'm going to call it IRV because that's what it is. One of my concerns actually is from the get-go is this rebranding. You know obviously somebody didn't like instant runoff voting or IRV so they said hey let's call it something else let's call it ranked-choice voting and Sam correct me if I'm wrong but I think they're the exact same system so whenever somebody tries to change their their appearance that's a red flag. So we're going to jump into the sort of mechanics of ranked-choice instant runoff and I'll ask you Ed to just describe what your understanding of how ranked-choice voting works and what the percentage is needed for someone to be considered a winner and then Sam you can jump in after that to if there's anything that you disagree with in terms of how it is described. Sure so you need 50 plus one the way that it works is let's say there's five people in the race you get to rank all five of them first choice second choice etc and they tally up all the votes after the first round and if nobody has 50 plus one they knock out the fifth place person they take the votes that went to the fifth place person reassign them based on how the people who voted for the fifth place person for the first choice rank the other people and they keep doing that until you get to 50 percent plus one. Sam does that sound right to you? Yeah that's that's accurate the one thing that'll add is you don't have to rank all of the candidates if you don't want to you can rank as many or as few as you want right now you can really only vote for one candidate in our current system but rank choice voting gives voters the opportunity to have a backup choice and for whatever reason if your top voter your first choice candidate is no longer viable it gives the voters to have their vote count for their next choice instead just as a Yeah you know I I like that Sam is mentioning that unfortunately what we've found and there's been studies on this is people don't like not filling in the blanks if they have the opportunity to do so you see that a lot with the senate races if people can vote strategically you know when we used to have a six person district senate district now there's two three senate districts but you know this last time there was actually one person that I only one out of three that I actually wanted to be the senator so I just voted for them but if you look at the percentages of people that will actually take that option and you look at the studies that have been done people think they're wasting a vote by not filling in the other two choices which is it's an opinion but it's not a true opinion because the vote is actually strengthened by not voting for those other two now if they want all three they want all three but I think the vast majority of people feel the need to rank everybody because it's there and they have the opportunity to do so so what impact does that then have on the on the election results well the problem with rank choice voting at its core is that there's no way for people to understand how it works once you get past the first round now I want to say the mechanics of it are understandable but you can't game out how you know if you if you vote for this person strategically who you think might come in fifth place out of the example that I gave there's no way to determine one you know in what order the other four people are going to come up whereas in the traditional voting system you always know that if you vote for one person that person is either going to win or lose and if there's an issue with that then we should just do it like we've always done it and have a runoff election or sorry Sam in the alternative what I would support is an open primary or open caucus in the case of city council elections and the top two or three vote getters they could be progressives all progressives all democrats all republicans or mix thereof or independents the top two or three then progress to the finals so you actually don't ever have to have a runoff election or the top two let's say because that way you don't have to deal with this 50 percent question so that is a system that's easy to understand that doesn't require any separate instructions that there's no barriers to for people that are older disabled english language learners that meshes well with the system that we currently have in place I'm going to jump to Sam for just your take on why you support this measure or don't and yeah you can take it away awesome well just to just respond briefly to what ed had to say rank choice voting is is really simple right you know the the idea of ranking things in order of preference is something that we do in our daily lives you know we're running a lot of voter education right now with Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavors for example and if I go to the grocery store and I'm thinking in my head like I really want to have fish food for dessert tonight but if there's no fish food at the grocery store I can have a backup choice and settle for chunky monkey or you know have you know chocolate therapy or something you know and that system is really intuitive and it's something that we do in our daily lives from small things like ice cream to really big decisions like where we're going to go to college or where we want to buy a house and voters have found rank choice voting to be really simple all all the polling from the major cities that have implemented it found that people were you know in the the 80th or 90th percentile in terms of voter confidence and voter understanding and it is a really easy to understand system and and on your point about strategic voting that is a really big problem with our single-choice elections and our first past the post elections or even a top two runoff election where voters have to go to the poll and really pick between the lesser of two evils if I go to the poll I have to vote for the candidate that I think has the best shot of winning because I don't want my vote to inadvertently help my least favorite candidate instead but with rank choice voting and this is one of the main reasons why we support it is I can go and vote for the candidate that I like the best and they may not have a great shot of winning right like they may be you know the Bernie Sanders in a presidential contest they may not actually win or have a real shot but I can still cast my vote and rank someone as a second choice and once Bernie Sanders or another candidate to that effect is eliminated my vote can still count for that second choice instead and that kind of moves and eliminates a little bit of that strategic voting because at the end of the day voters should vote their conscience and that's really important if I can yeah I mean I love the fact that you brought up Bernie Sanders because as many people are probably aware if we had instant runoff voting back in 1981 Bernie Sanders probably wouldn't we won't probably want to know who he is right because we know what happened in that race what happened was was that a spoiler Democrat or ex-democrat got in Dick Bove he's doing Bove's restaurant who sucked out about a thousand or so votes the incumbent mayor and Bernie were separated by 17 votes but it's it's pretty clear to the people that were watching at the time that the vast majority of the the Bove votes would have gone to the incumbent mayor and not to Bernie and so we wouldn't have had Bernie Sanders and you know in regard to the ice cream analogy it's cute but the problem is is that you're dealing with an electorate of one and this is not an electorate of one so yes we make choices all the times we rank things in our heads all the times whether they're colleges or ice cream but we only have to negotiate that with ourselves and maybe one or two other people who we live with thanks Ed we have a caller coming in um I'm going to take the call in a second here um okay I'm going to take the call here hello you're live on air can you share your name and your question with us yes hi my name is Lillian and I just want to know if you guys could talk a little about the benefits of ranked choice voting regarding candidates I heard it helps like more BIPOC and presenting people at the office is that true uh Sam we'll start with you for that one certainly um so a lot of the data that's been coming out of ranked choice voting elections across the country have indicated that it's helped elect and help encouraged run more females and BIPOC candidates it's no small secret that they are largely underrepresented in our elections and ranked choice voting really helps to open up that candidate field it's well documented that women and people of color are often targeted as spoilers in an election and either forced to drop out of a race based on you know party leaders or you know other constituent bases and not run in the first place but with ranked choice voting because of the elimination of the spoiler candidate effect there's really no reason for them not to get in another reason is a lot of research has shown that the vitriol and the negative campaigning in our elections is a is a major reason that a lot of female candidates don't get into the race in the first place and there's some great data out there from exit interviews and studies and surveys that have shown that ranked choice voting helps lower the the temperature of our politics because the candidates themselves they need to not only attract core support but help identify backup choices too and go across the aisle and when you're running an overtly negative campaign you ostracize you know huge portions of the voter base so take the may mares races across the city i think actually have a number here somewhere for rcv elected mares 47 percent are women and 53 percent are men and you take that in comparison to the 100 largest cities that don't use ranked choice voting and 31 percent of them are women and 69 percent of them are men so going into some of those factors that help open up the election we've seen some really great data that's shown that it that it does help more Sam what's the sample size on that that's a good question i mean the top 100 mares for the largest cities would be 100 sure and then rcv elected mares it's 63 jurisdictions that use it that i mean that's across the country out of the out of the hundred or just in general well so 63 cities are using at the municipal level for ranked choice but it's not the top 100 largest cities right but ranked choice voting is used in some really large cities like new york and san francisco and also a lot of really big counties in utah which is also a heavily red state sure i mean a couple of things one is i'm not sure that i totally agree with sam's position that it lowers the temperature in races because just look what went on in the new york city mayors race i mean that was a traditional knock down drag out you know mud slinging race that did attract women and by pock folks a by pock person did win but he was seen as you know one of the most conservative in the field relatively speaking former police lieutenant or or you know police officer and but also you know the politics is you know not a game for the fan of heart for better for worse especially now we live in an age where there's accessibility to all kinds of information and one of the ways that we vet people is their ability to withstand the pressure cooker of a campaign to see how they'll be able to withstand their time in office and i'm not saying it's the best system but until the time in office part becomes easier i do think they need to be vetted a little bit more in undergo some of those pressures as far as who we are electing um let me put this another way while you know i think that the the system where we have open primaries or open caucuses also encourages folks to run because again they're not spoilers if we look at california i think 50 something people ran in one of the last mayor election gubernatorial elections which is a little ridiculous but there you have it um they still got to gavin newson who is obviously one of the top-ranked candidates the whole time i would actually propose and i'm going to be blunt here i think that given an equal playing field um the system that i'm proposing versus rank choice voting actually uh elects more moderate candidates in general and i think that's better for democracy okay so we're going to turn now to what kinds of questions you each are uh fielding as you're um thinking about this issue and what so what kinds of questions and confusions are you hearing from members of the public on on rank choice voting and how do you typically respond to them and we'll start with that yeah i mean so i i think that over the years you know when this when this issue has come up and people have discussed it one of the largest misconceptions and i don't know how to dispel it and this goes back to something sam was saying is that when people think they have these choices like they think oh i'm going to vote for the second you know bob for second place then they somehow think that bob's gonna win they vote for him for second place so i think that there's this misconception that they have these other choices and they're gonna they're therefore going to you know if their first choice doesn't get it then their second or third choices is gonna get it um i don't know how that started exactly but you know here's the thing that i found ultimately at the end of the day is people don't really want a lot of people don't really want to pay attention to politics they want boring they want somebody that's going to be an adult and take care of the city of the state of the country and they don't want the drama and so they sort of tune out a lot of the background noise and part and parcel with that is when it comes to voting a lot of folks aren't as educated as they they could be because they just want you know the parties to represent them and they're less likely to look in depth into the people you know that's not everybody obviously but i think that represents a lot of people sam um we'll certainly get to that the voter misconception piece but i i agree with you adam that last part and i don't think that that is something that we should strive for in our democracy right like you look at some of the polling nationwide and it's something like well over 60 of voters identify as independence because they are truly upset with the two major parties right now and the two major parties themselves are not working together you know across party lines on really any issue and that is a disservice to voters and i look at some of the you know other things that v perk has worked on like universally mailed ballots and one of the things we heard from our members is voters really enjoyed the ability to sit down and have their ballot at their kitchen table and research those candidates and to you know really arm themselves when they cast their vote and it's great that that burlington is doing the exact same for this city council election and it's it's empowering voters to take their time with the ballot and you know to understand it and and do some of that research and i think that's a really good thing because we we don't want people to be disengaged at the ballot box and you know their participation democracy should go well beyond election day um one of the common things that i've heard as a question about casting a ballot with rank choice is whether you need to rank all of the candidates and you don't need to you know if you only feel strongly about one candidate or two candidates you only need to vote for one or two candidates uh you don't have to rank all of the candidates on the ballot thanks ham so we've mentioned it a couple times but there is some history here in burlington with rank choice voting it was installed in the 2000s and then was repealed in 2010 and now it's coming back so sam can you maybe describe a little bit about why you in why in your view it was initially repealed and then why it's come back again and whether it's changed substantially or why why we've had this kind of on and off relationship with rank choice voting uh yeah so ed gave a little bit of the background already there were three strong candidates in that race bob kiss who was running for reelection uh kurt right who is a republican city counselor at the time an anti-montral democrat uh in that first round kurt right uh was leading in first choice votes with like 33 percent um bob kiss was in second place with i think 28 percent and then anti-montral was the third place finisher like 21 percent um if that was how we were running our elections kurt right would have won that race without rank choice voting if there was no top two runoff or anything um but in one of the problems with that is at the at the time and i think it's true right now is burlington is a largely left-leaning city and the two strong left-leaning candidates split that vote um and once anti-montral is eliminated the vast majority of his support went to bob kiss and bob kiss ended up winning that election um after he was in office uh mayor kiss became really unpopular there was a scandal with the misuse of public funds and i think it was burlington telecom is that that right um and he became really unpopular and as a as a really a referendum on the mayor himself um a lot of kurt right supporters led a repeal effort to get it off the ballot um and in by all accounts rank choice voting worked as it should have that repeal effort was really thin it only passed with 52 percent support and it was the repeal was only favored in two of burlington's seven wards uh both of which were kurt right strongholds um so for the rest of the city they they didn't really want to get rid of rank choice voting and there was a really strong vote in 2021 to bring it back with over 64 percent support um we had a really strong test run on the 12-6 special election and vprik had the opportunity to do some very non-scientific exit polling of voters coming out of the polls and you know by and large the vast majority of folks said it was really positive they love the ability to rank candidates uh much sam i think just in the interest of time we're going to turn it over to ed why did you think what are you in your view is it repealed and then coming back i would agree with what sam said about you know it's some of it is was a reflection of of the weakness of mayor kiss unfortunately i do want to think i think correct sam on something after the first round i believe kurt right had 37 percent i think in which case under burlington's charter at the time he wouldn't have won because he needed a 40 threshold so there would have run off between kurt right and bob kiss um i agree that burlington's generally left leaning but there was a huge gap between bob kiss and andy mantra now both bob and andy were not dynamic candidates but i think when push came to shove democrats who voted for andy could not bring themselves to vote for kurt right just because he had the r next to his name if kurt wasn't at most other states you know he's probably a phil scott republican or pretty close to it and i've had my disagreements with kurt believe me um but i think that that my belief is that when the progressives put up bob kiss to begin with they never thought he had a chance of winning and nobody else wanted to run and they were shocked when he won the first time um so you know it's it's a little bit of that that being uh tested in the cauldron uh that didn't occur in that instance where if uh bob was tested a little bit further and pushed a little bit further then perhaps he wouldn't have won so i think we've just got a couple minutes here so we're going to wrap up with closing state statements i think you have about a minute we'll start with you ed uh thanks so much for the opportunity to speak today it's always fun to come to channel 17 and uh everybody here does a great service and is always welcoming um i you know i'm going to be voting against this i i would support a different system i do think we need a different system to make things a little bit less acrimonious but i still like the head to head nature of our elections rather than watering it down through an irv system i think that um open ballots i'm sorry open primaries or open caucuses can achieve that just the same way there has been success in those in other states um i think they lead to more moderate candidates and i think more moderate candidates are generally better for society because they create less tension thanks head sam closing statement awesome yeah thank you to cctv thank you ed for this conversation it's been awesome um myself as a war two voter um is going to vote in favor of this and v perg is strongly in support of this as a way uh to really improve our democracy by giving voters more choices and more voices um and to help ameliorate some of the biggest problems that we're seeing in our election with spoiler candidates and electing people who don't have majority support um and one of the benefits of rank choice voting if it were a if we were to do a top two runoff is uh it saves taxpayers money from a costly and separate runoff election which is proven to have low voter turnout um and and that's a problem too and and this really doesn't solve everything but it does give some real solutions to some of the biggest problems that we're seeing in our election so thank you guys so much for for having this and putting it on yeah thanks so much sam thank you sam and thank you all for tuning in um and uh stay tuned for more of town meeting tv's coverage of town meeting day local candidates local budgets and valid items make sure you vote on march seventh ballots are not mailed automatically uh this year or actually is that true they are in burlington they are mailed automatically um and um you can make sure that you get out to the ballot or uh put your vote in the mail before march seventh um thanks so much for watching and sharing town meeting tv