 I'm the Executive Director of the Center for Election Science and we focus on voting methods. So we focus on a lot of issues related to elections, but voting methods is one of our areas of focus. Voting methods are a little bit abstract and I didn't actually become interested in this for any kind of abstract way. I was interested in policy issues just like I'm sure everyone here is. There was during the 2008 presidential primaries that I was interested in health care reform and I was at Indiana University at the time with a bunch of grad students. And so we were at a restaurant and we were going around and we were talking about the folks that we were going to vote for and I was a little surprised because all my fellow classmates they were talking about candidates that did not support the health care reform that we were organized around and this baffled me and so I was a little frustrated with my classmates and I thought well either all my classmates are fools or there's something going on here with the way that we vote that coercing otherwise smart people to vote against their interests. And so that's when I started getting interested in voting methods. So we'll talk a little about a lot about voting methods but as we're talking about this this is a reminder that this is very proximal to the issues that we all care about. So first off when I say voting method it's important that we all know what in the world I'm talking about. So what does it mean to vote? So when I think about voting I think about it in two compartments. One is the expression and then the other is the calculation of that information that you're providing for your expression. So by expression we typically see something on a traditional ballot which is to just choose one candidate. That's a bit of information that you're providing. It's not very much information but it's a little bit. You can also rank candidates that's another way of providing information. Approving as many as you want sort of thumbs up, thumbs down, scoring on a scale. These are all ways of providing information. So that's one part of a voting method the information that you provide. The second part is the calculation. So it could be just adding up to those, could be going through a particular algorithm. So you're doing something with the information to give you a result. So you have a winner and a bunch of losers. And the voting method should not only determine the winner but it should also give you information about all the other candidates that were involved in the race. And so it's important to remember that the voting method determines this person, the winner. And this winner determines the policies that affect all of us. It affects policies on environment, dealing with global warming. It affects poverty, homelessness, war policies, and our healthcare system. So when I talked about voting methods some of it will perhaps get a little bit abstract but we have to remember that the voting method determines the winners and the winners determine the policies which affect us. I'm going to talk about three different types of voting methods. I'm going to talk about our choose one method, plurality voting. I'm going to talk about approval voting. And I'm going to talk about insert runoff voting or rank choice voting because the Green Party seems to like that a bit. So it seems appropriate. So with our choose one method, its technical name is plurality. Sometimes it's called first pass or post. So its hallmark is this loop for one. So plurality, the direction is I'm going to tell you to choose just one candidate. And so this is the information part of the voting method that I mentioned before. And just for your own experience, I want you to try to imagine for a moment a way to offer less information for the choose one candidate. That laughter is the reason why plurality voting is considered among academics to be the worst voting method there is because you start off with practically no information and then for some strange reason we expect a good result to come out of it and it doesn't happen as we all recognize. For plurality voting, you choose one candidate and then you add up all the votes. So what are some of the minuses about plurality voting? So let's just imagine for a moment, so vote splitting is one of the issues. So when I say vote splitting, we can look at this example. So say we're trying to figure out the best actor. And so we've got a bunch of actors, four of them that seem to be a whole lot like Michael Keaton, almost as if he included Pauli Short and some D movies. And so 79% of people say we like Michael Keaton's platform. We like the Michael Keaton platform. And then the other 21% say, well, we like Pauli Short and Tino Mann really made an impression on me. And so with Michael Keaton, if there are four candidates just like Michael Keaton, what happens is the vote splits four ways. So the Michael Keaton vote is less than 20%. And even if people overwhelmingly like the Michael Keaton platform split four ways, less than 20% is less than Pauli Short. And so you can have a terrible candidate. Absolutely, 79% of people don't like Pauli Short. And yet here, because there are four people just like Michael Keaton, Pauli Short wins. And so this vote splitting, we see this all the time in elections. And it's absurd that because we use this kick for voting method that limits our expression of information and the way that they calculate it that we can have a result where people overwhelmingly for one candidate over the other and you can have such a bad winner. So it's not like Pauli Short was like sort of a close second favorite but drastically different as far as preference. And then the other issue that we have is something that we call favor betrayal in the voting method world. And what I mean by this is something that I'm sure all of you have experienced. So you go to your friends and you say, there is this Green Party candidate that is awesome and they agree with everything that you agree on. So you're perfectly aligned with one another. You should vote for this person. And your friend says something like, oh, that's great. They do agree with everything that I agree on. But I am not going to vote for them because they are not going to win. And so this is a terrible behavior that Friday voting exhibits. And so even though we may love a candidate, it could be our perfect candidate ever if we perceive that many people, if they perceive that that candidate isn't going to win they do not vote for that candidate. And that results in otherwise great candidates giving an artificially low amount of support. And plurality voting does this. So some of the pluses of plurality voting are choose one method. It's really easy. So you choose one candidate and you add up all the votes. And another reason why plurality voting is good is because, well, that's about it. So that's plurality voting. So a plural voting is another way of voting. Again, we've got these two components, the expression part, and then we've got the calculation part. Right here we're talking about the expression part again. So the expression part of a plural voting is to choose without ranking or anything. We're just choosing as many candidates as we want. And then the second part is to simply add up those selections. So we vote or approve of as many candidates as we want and we just add them up. The candidate approved the most or voted the most wins. That's the plural voting. Some of the minuses of plural voting. And here you have to forgive me. Voting methods, while many of them can be are very simple. When we explain and get into them, it can be a little bit complicated and I will try to make that as much not the case as possible. To be complete, I want to try to touch on some of the criticisms of a plural voting. One, looked at something called the majority criterion, which says that you shouldn't have a majority of people prefer one candidate over the other and then have the minority candidate win. A plural voting technically violates this, but it does it in such a way that is not a big deal. So here we are looking at an example where we have one group of voters and there are 100 voters single. 99% of them have slight preference for A over Barbara. But because of the plural voting, they say that they choose both of them. So 99% while having a slight preference for A over Barbara, they choose both. Group B, just one voter, prefers Barbara over A and so they choose just Barbara. And so here we have a result where even though most people had a slight preference for A over Barbara, Barbara wins. So in this example, this isn't something that's very likely to come up. But in the result, what we see here is that even though we had perhaps a less than desirable outcome, the result is not catastrophic. So even though these voters technically got their lesser preferred candidate, they still like that candidate an awful lot. So one of the things that you're seeing is the plural voting. All voting methods have their hiccups, but some voting methods are simply better than others. And what you see, but they all have their hiccups. With the plural voting, when it does exhibit some strange behavior sometimes, what you notice is that the results are not catastrophic. But we can see right away with our other issue with plural voting that when we saw a vote splitting, we saw a catastrophic result. So polyshore winning in that other sort of hypothetical election, that was a terrible result. People overwhelmingly did not like polyshore by a lot and they got polyshore in that election. So another issue that comes up is something called later no harm with the plural voting. One of the things that you notice with the plural voting is that it has a big preference for the electorate as a whole. So it wants to make sure the electorate as a whole gets a good result. So with later no harm, there's one issue where you have to decide whether you want to support multiple people or whether you just want to put all your eggs with that one person. Here we can have it so that if in an election you go ahead and choose both your compromise candidate and the candidate that you like the most, you could make it so that you make the person that you like the most doesn't win and your compromise wins. So that's one criticism and that it perhaps encourages people just to go with their favorite and that bit. But there's a risk there with the plural voting. With the plural voting, you have this nice thing where you can look among the front runners and you can say, okay, well, I really don't want that other candidate to win. Perhaps I don't want that Republican to win. So I'm going to hedge my bets by perhaps also choosing this compromise candidate, this Democrat perhaps. But I'm also going to choose my honest favorite. And so approval voting gives you the opportunity to hedge your bets. But if you decide to go all in and just choose your honest favorite and not compromise, there's some risk there. So that's all it's saying. There's some of the pluses of approval voting. So we can go back to this vote splitting issue. So we've got the Michael Keaton platform where he's claimed himself and we've got Pauli Shor. So before we ran into an issue where we had 79% of people liking the Michael Keaton platform. But it was split four ways because we had four candidates just like Michael Keaton. And then we had Pauli Shor. Well, if we're doing approval voting here, we don't have to worry about splitting our vote. We're indifferent as to which Pauli Shor wins or if they're all pretty close to us. If we like all the Michael Keaton, then we're pretty indifferent or we don't have very strong preferences among them. But we really don't want Pauli Shor to win. Well, we can go ahead and support all of the Michael Keaton and our vote isn't split anymore. And so this voting block stays cohesive whereas before it split up and you have a vote splitting effect where a highly undesirable candidate wins. With approval voting, you don't have to split your vote up. This is especially helpful in primaries when you have a lot of candidates that are running that happen to be similar. The other issue that we saw with quality voting was the favorite betrayal issue where you can't choose your honest favorite in some cases. Well, with approval voting, we do not have to worry about that. This idea of always being able to choose your honest favorite, this seems like something that's pretty simple and that most voting methods should allow. Well, it turns out that mathematically it's actually really difficult for a voting method to be able to have this property of letting you choose your honest favorite no matter what. That's exactly what approval voting does. It doesn't matter what the situation. It is impossible to have a situation under approval voting where it hurts you to choose your honest favorite candidate. So if you go into an election, there's a Green Party candidate and they're using approval voting. It doesn't matter if that Green Party candidate is not going to win. It doesn't matter if it's independent and everyone hates that candidate. If you like that candidate under approval voting, you can always choose that candidate. And if you want to have your best by having to say the outcome, you can still do that. Approval voting gives you that freedom so you can always choose your honest favorite. Ranked choice voting. This is one the Green Party has a bit more of a background with. So with ranked choice voting, there's the expression element. So with voting methods, there's the expression, there's the calculation. Ranked choice voting lets you rank your choices. But notice, and also ranked choice voting has other names like instant runoff voting. So we're all talking about the same thing here. In practice though, with ranked choice voting, the expression element limits you to choosing just your top three choices. So you're giving your expression of your first three preferences in order. In the second, the calculation element, this is a bit more complex. Instant runoff voting, it takes that information, there's ranking, and it pushes them through an algorithm. It looks at the information and says, look at the first choice of votes of the ballots. And is there a candidate that has more than half of the first choice votes? If yes, that candidate wins. If not, look at the candidate with the least number of first choice votes. And then you eliminate that candidate, have that candidate's ballots transfer over to their second choice votes, then you now treat them as first choice votes. Now you look at all the ballots, and you add some of the remaining ballots that are there. Do the first choice votes, are those greater than half for any candidate? If yes, you have a winner, if not, you go through that loop again. The calculation is a little more complicated with instant runoff voting, and there's some key points in here too that are important. The first step, looking at the first choice votes. So it looks right off like in the expression part, but you're providing a good amount of information. So you're providing your choices for the path three. But the algorithm, at any one point, it's only looking at a part of the information. It's only looking at the first choice votes. It's not looking at the rest of the information. So the second choice votes, there's on instant runoff voting's radar at any one moment. Same thing for the rest of the ballot. The other part, you look at the votes of the remainder. So as this process goes through, you get ballots that are exhausted. You have people that don't rank their entire ballot, and so ballots get eliminated. So when it asks that question each time in its algorithm, does any candidate have more than half of the first choice votes? It's only looking at the remainder of the active votes. So sometimes you hear the idea that instant runoff voting always gets a majority, but it's important to recognize that within that claim, it's only a majority of the remaining ballots, not all the ballots that it started with. So instant runoff voting, you've got the ranking, and then you've got the algorithm that it uses to calculate the results. So I'm going to talk about the drawbacks with instant runoff voting. One thing that instant runoff voting does is it can create a scenario that happens about 5 to 15% of the time, depending on which simulation that you use. It can have an effect where voters can rank a candidate that's higher and it will actually hurt that candidate. And vice versa, it's possible to rank a candidate that's lower and actually have it help that candidate. There's a technical term, which I won't be asking you again, called non-monitonicity, which describes this property. This is just an example of how it can occur in an election with greens. And this has happened in actual elections. This happened in Burrington in 2009, and their election. This happens about 5 to 15% of the time, and when instant runoff voting chooses a winner that is also not the plurality voting winner, we see double the ratings occur, so 10 to 30% of the time. The other property, which I mentioned before, that instant runoff voting falls short on, so with plural voting you can always choose your honest favorite no matter what. Sometimes it's proposed that with instant runoff voting that you can always choose your honest favorite. This is actually not true. With instant runoff voting, because it's algorithm is a bit complex with the way that it calculates votes, it's difficult for me to explain this verbally, and so we actually created a video on it, which I'm going to show you now. Let's say there are two major parties in your city. Imagine that you like one better than the other, so we're going to call them the good party and the bad party. Here's the good news. The good party has a 10-point advantage in your city and wins most elections. The bad news is that your city uses plurality voting, and the upcoming election for mayor has three candidates, and you really like the independent candidate at this time. Even though he's your favorite choice, you know you can't vote for him. If he takes too many votes away from the good candidate, that would cause the worst candidate to win. Wouldn't it be great if your city used a voting system that didn't have this problem? How about instant runoff voting? Then you can vote for your favorite. With instant runoff, when your ideal candidate gets eliminated, your vote moves over to help the good candidate win. That's great, right? But what happens when your ideal candidate does even better? What if he actually beats your second choice and your second choice gets eliminated? Unfortunately, that puts us completely at the mercy of these voters that we have no control over. Those who voted for the good candidate. And who did they put for their second choice? It would be nice if they had all put our ideal candidate second, but they didn't. It takes only one-fifth of them putting the bad candidate second for him to win this election. What happened here? Doesn't instant runoff eliminate the spoiler problem? It turns out that putting your favorite first in instant runoff is only safe when your candidate is very strong or has no chance at all. In between, there's a good chance he will have to face your least favorite candidate before he's ready. In this way, putting your favorite candidate first will cause your least favorite candidate to win. Ouch. In fact, if you and some of your fellow idealist supporters had forgotten to show up, then your favorite candidate would have been eliminated, but your second favorite candidate would have won. Does this problem happen in every election? No. This does not happen in every scenario. It doesn't happen this way when the third candidate pulls supporters from both of the major candidates equally. But it does happen whatever he pulls mostly from one and not the other. To me, that sounds like a lot of the three-way elections in America. What about later no harm? Instant runoff advocates are fond of quoting the later no harm principle. Adding a second choice, third choice, or more to your ranking will never hurt your first choice. Guess what? This is completely true. But note how carefully it's worded. It never says that it's safe to put your favorite candidate for your first choice. With instant runoff voting, your choice has to be a safe candidate, someone who can beat your least favorite. Putting your favorite candidate first might cause your second choice to get eliminated and your third choice to win. So later no harm is great, but it's not a promise that it's safe to put your favorite first. Be careful voting for your favorite with instant runoff voting. You might eliminate the strongest candidates and cause your least favorite candidate to win. If you want a voting system that avoids this problem, then you care about the favorite betrayal criterion. The favorite betrayal criterion says voters can never get a worse result by expressing the maximum support for their favorite candidate. Approval voting is one system that passes the favorite betrayal criterion. So that looks like favorite betrayal, and it demonstrates that instant runoff voting actually does not pass the favorite betrayal criterion, and that it's not always safe to brand pure armist favorite as first. A property which approval voting does pass every single time. Are some of the pluses of instant runoff voting? Now, priority voting or choose one method is an awful, awful voting method. And so it's very sensitive to screwing up what it does all the time whenever there are more than two candidates. And it's very sensitive to the spoiler effect. Instant runoff voting, to give it credit, it does mitigate the spoiler effect. So when you have a third party that's not particularly strong, it's not terribly difficult to have those groups transfer over to another preferred candidate. So it does mitigate the spoiler effect. So another part is it's just not priority voting. So like I mentioned, priority voting is a terrible, terrible voting method. The bar is very low to be priority voting, and indeed, instant runoff voting is better than priority. Looking at some of the studies done on the priority voting, so in 2007 there was a study done in France. Now we may not recognize a lot of these names here, but there's a pattern that a priority voting has. So here in 2007 we see two of the major party candidates from in France, and we see all of these are third party and independent candidates. Now here it actually turned out that we had a new winner, but there's not always a case with approval voting. Sometimes the winner within the voting method is the same in all, practically all the voting methods. A winner in priority may very well be the same winner that you'd find in instant runoff voting and approval voting. In this particular election, what we saw however was that a more moderate candidate happened to win under approval voting compared to when just regular priority was using. So what we saw with approval voting is that it tends to favor moderate candidates and for a particular electorate the moderate candidates, and you can imagine a normal distribution of ideology from voters, a moderate candidate that fits right in the middle of that mountain of voters is the one that represents them best. So whatever moderate means for a particular electorate approval voting tends to favor that candidate. So that's how this particular candidate exists as a moderate candidate which approval voting tends to favor. Now looking at all these other candidates we see a huge growth in the support when using approval voting compared to priority voting. So here we see almost 6 times as much support, 8 times 10 times, 9 times 9 times. You can imagine if the Green Party got 5 to 6 or 7 times as much support as they do now and the reason that this happens is because of that criterion, that favorite criteria. Approval voting can always choose your honest favorite. And the other nice thing about approval voting the algorithm, the way that it calculates votes it looks at all the ballot information. So what you're seeing here is all the information that people gave on their ballot all at once. You can't do that with IRB and while you deal with priority you don't start with any information to begin with so it doesn't even matter. So here you see a much more accurate reflection of support from third party independence which is a common theme that we see in approval voting. Here 2009 study in Germany here the result was the same with priority and approval voting but you see the same pattern here all these third parties of independence they all get a ton more support under approval voting compared to priority and again that's because you can always choose your favorite in approval voting and that causes third party independence to get a much more accurate reflection of support. And here we see another look at a comparison which is an exit poll study done by Occupy Wall Street. Now here the numbers are going to look kind of strange just because it's in New York City so if this seems like a little bit of a liberal electorate that's because it is. So here we see priority voting, it's a runoff voting and we see approval voting here. Now what's interesting here is when you look at priority voting and you look at it's a runoff voting it looks very similar. That's because with it's a runoff voting you're only looking at a snapshot at any one point and so here you're just seeing the first towards those. And so it's difficult to give you that reflection of support for third parties of independence. So when we think about the voting method it's not just important who wins. It's important to also see how the particular voting method gauges the level of support for all the other candidates. Because that has a huge effect. A lot of the time with the media that make this argument they go something like well if your ideas were really good you would have pulled better or you would have done better in the election. You did terribly in the election you pulled terribly and so your ideas must not have been any good. So that's the rhetoric that they give and the excuse that they give for exclusion. That is based on a false assumption and it begs the question as to whether the way that they measured that support was any good in the first place. And it wasn't and the reason it wasn't because they used plurality voting which is an awful awful voting method. But when you use approval voting and we see here with approval voting you have this includes signed. So signed got under 4% with both IRV and plurality when you look at the snapshot that IRV gets with approval voting when you can see all the informational ones. You see over 50% approval for signed obamacillans in the landslide but you get that accurate reflection of support. So when third parties independence are able to get that accurate reflection of support you can't marginalize them the same way you can't marginalize the candidates getting 20, 30, 40% of support. You can't keep them out of debates and you can't call their ideas stupid anymore when they're giving them much support. So that argument they use doesn't work the same way anymore when you're using approval voting. So you one quick video on approval voting. What is approval voting? Simply put, it's a better way to run an election. Let's take a trip to Plantsville. It's election time and Mayor Blueberry is campaigning hard for a second term in office. She won the last election with 65% against her opponent Mr. Squash and she still enjoys strong support. Once again, Mr. Squash is quick to challenge Ms. Blueberry. But this time they're joined by a third challenger, Mr. Peach, who shares similar views with Mayor Blueberry. Mr. Peach sweet talks almost half of Blueberry's supporters into switching their vote to him. While Mr. Squash holds the same 35% he had last time. The votes are counted. And what's this? Mr. Squash wins? Blueberry and Peach have split the fruit vote. How did this happen? Peach's supporters also like Blueberry, but couldn't say so on their ballots. A simple solution is to change the ballot from vote for one to vote for one or more. Allowing everyone to state all the candidates they support. They're called Approval Voting. With Approval Voting, the election would have gone quite differently. Peach's supporters no longer fear that a vote for Peach will help elect Squash. Instead, they show their sincere support for Peach and also Blueberry. They want to prevent Mr. Squash from winning. And they do. And Approval Voting accurately reflects Peach's support. Mayor Blueberry wins the election. Democracy is restored. Approval Voting is more than just a smart idea in plan spell. It's a smart idea anywhere you vote. Approval Voting is used by organizations across the globe and for good reason. It's democratic because the candidate with the most support wins. It removes the spoiler effect. Even losing candidates get an accurate reflection of support. And voting your favorite never hurts you. Start the conversation on Approval Voting and share this video. Then, join the center for election science at electology.org. Better Voting starts with you. The last slide then we can go right away. So, Approval Voting isn't something that we have to wait for our government to give us. This is something that we can do in internal elections right now. So, here this is an example. I looked at the candidates at the Green Party presidential nominee and so this is a simple thing that we can do in regular thoughts. All you're doing is changing the direction between one or more. And there are a bunch of unfortunately you won't be the first one but you will follow with a lot of great company. So, as Kat mentioned before there's the Texas Green Party uses it, the Texas Libertarian Party the National Reform Party uses it for their nominee Colorado Libertarian Party National League Party a lot of third party use it but also organizations. United Nations uses it for a while. A bunch of math organizations. We were the consultant for the Webby awards this year. They do internet internet awards. It's a large multi-million dollar organization. They use Approval Voting because of us in the athletic processation of America. We're also starting to make contacts at ESPN as well as other athletic organizations to try to change the way that athletic awards are voted on as well. So, this is something that's useful in a variety of contacts including with third party organizations. Questions? This seems to make sense when you've got a winner takes all election where there's only one person elected. That's a good point. We're talking about this within the context of a single winner election. So, mayors and governors. Within multi-winner, we have to have a completely different conversation. This is complicated. Can you give some idea of that conversation? We're voting for members of the ISC for the Greens where we've got two or three people on the that will be elected out of a group of five. What works for that? So, if you're doing something like a committee you have to ask a couple questions. So, here you're talking about a multi-winner election. Three people are being elected at large all at the same time. So, you have to think of what's important for you. If you want your winners to be very similar and sort of grouped around the median of whatever the ideology or the feeling is of the electorate you can use what's called a block system. And a block system under approval voting is pretty simple. So, you would have all the voters choose many cancels in one. So, you look just like a regular approval voting ballot and then you take the top three votes. And then that'll get your result which is very homogenous with its outcome. But they're all going to be clustered around the middle. Now, if you want a proportional result proportional voting method seem to get a little bit more complicated and you can still do that with the approval voting. So, say you want these three people that are elected to be the first. So, the first person that wins will be right in the center and then you have the rest of people representing the groups that didn't get their say within the first person elected. And to do that you have an approval voting ballot. So, you choose as many as you want. And then it'll get tossed through an algorithm which reweights the value of the ballot for people that got someone elected. And so, they have a little bit less power within their ballot after they get someone elected. And that gives other people the opportunity to get someone elected. That's how it works with a proportional version of the approval voting. How would range voting or some other system treat that situation in terms of getting people from the center or people from So, score voting is another, it's a different voting method. And like Kat said that score voting works by you score each candidate on a range, say zero to nine. And the candidate with the highest score wins or highest average, it doesn't matter. Highest number The highest score. So, the candidate with the highest score wins. And now are you asking how that would work with the multi-winner context? Yeah, well how would that do in terms of getting a variety or people from the center? Okay, so, score voting like a approval voting tends to favor moderate candidates or candidates that are aligned within the center. So, just like a approval voting. And the way it's blocked version would work. I would think that if the if the if the voters of the candidates was very skewed that it could also give variety, couldn't it? It'll hit your writing medium. So, yeah. Approval voting and score voting, they tend to get results that are right around the middle. Yeah, yeah. And that's important to say, whatever middle is for a particular electorate. So, a moderate in San Francisco is going to be different than a moderate in rural Texas. So, is score voting basically like approval voting? It's just a different kind of approval voting? Yeah, so score voting and approval voting are both of the same sort of class of systems called cardinal systems. Cardinal? Cardinal systems. Yeah, cardinal, like the bird. And they tend to both elect moderate winners. The way that for multi-winner election using score voting, if you wanted a block outcome that was more homogenous with your winners, you do the same thing to take the top three scores and you do a similar effect with if you wanted a portion of outcome that would sort of eliminate the vote. You would dock the weight of a particular ballot once the voter got what they wanted. That way other people got a chance to have their same. So, it works similarly. Now, as far as performance goes approval voting and score voting score voting works a little bit better as far as how it performs but not a ton better. And that's why we mainly push approval voting. And this is what Kat said while in her experience is that while score voting tends to perform a little bit better than approval voting, approval voting is just so easy that you sort of just give up the slight performance difference and just say, okay, this is just so easy we're going to go with this. How often is it likely that it changes the actual outcome? Between score and approval voting? Not very often. But when we say that we're doing simulations of millions of elections so we do computer simulations to sort of measure how good a footprint method is and so we could In the important percentage 2%? As far as difference of outcome I can't give you the number off the top of my head. It's also going to depend on the number of candidates that are running as well. So, those variables are something to keep in mind and it won't give you a drastically different candidate so it'll be a difference between like one moderate A and moderate B so it won't give you it won't be a difference between moderate A and extreme candidate A like it won't be that so it'll give you a similar outcome but it'll just be a little bit different if it gives a different result. So clarification and a question when you say that scored slightly better but it's much more complicated if you're referring to both one seat and multiple seat Yeah, totally And then the question is can you give us examples of where range voting or score voting is used? Score Let's see On our website it has a bunch of them Oh, I'll check And we actually put the webby awards for the first round that used score voting Is there any way to sort of like does it if you have somebody that just or people that are not informed and they just want to check everything does that see things in the first place in the second place or like for instance if there's primers where you can go over to the other side and like they want to knock somebody off it's going to be a strong candidate in the general election you know what I mean so they have everybody go in they just approve one person and make sure that you can it's risky to do that under approval voting so you can perhaps get away with that a little bit more with another voting method but with approval voting if you go in for your favorite candidate and you try to have someone else not win well you run the risk of your candidate that you really like not winning and you don't get any compromise candidates as well so it's a little risky if you try to go all in and not compromise as well does that answer your question or is there something else to it so it's encouraged that people vote for more than one percent if you vote for just one then and you get a lot of people to just vote for one sometimes it does make sense for an individual voter to choose just one but it's important they have the option to choose as many as they want so like imagine a scenario where say we're back in 2000 and we really like Nader and we've simplified this so we've got Nader, Gore and Bush and we'll pretend we're in a world where Gore is doing terribly so in this situation we may vote for just Nader and Gore is like in an under approval voting getting like five percent not going to do well then we want to make sure that we're just beating Bush and we can vote for just Nader but if we're back in 2000 in the real world and say we're using approval voting well we want to vote for Nader but we also want to head to the feds and vote for Gore at the same time to make sure that Bush doesn't win and I mean you can vote for just for Nader it's like say if you're someone that thinks well Gore sucks really bad and there's hardly any difference between Gore and Bush well you can vote for Nader and you can call some other party candidates on there too you can vote for everybody but the major party candidates and you get a lot of freedom of expression it would seem like in a case like that where you've got two corporates one of which is not too much better than the other one candidate who is really good if you have the choice of putting 10 votes for the guy you like real well and 3 for the guy you like you can stay you can only choose each candidate once so you choose I'm talking about range voting so you score them yeah if you score them you can score the guy that you could put up with maybe 3 and the guy you hated is 0 and then the guy you believe in could have a better chance of winning yeah yeah so you do get a little bit more flexibility with score voting that is true and on the ballot as far as expression goes score voting is as expressive as you can get as far as information that you provide you can't get any better so that is a plus for score voting what we find though in computer simulations is that the difference just in practice for the electorate as a whole as far as how they do and how well how good of a winner they get for a particular electorate not a huge difference between score voting and approval voting but not a huge difference and if you want to go that route where you get that extra level of expression you can do that but you sacrifice some simplicity I don't see that as a complexity that is too hard to deal with I wish there were other people that agreed with you so the one of the nice perks about approval voting is that it's ready to go you can use regular ballots with score voting it is a simple method and there are much more complicated methods but you have to use a new ballot and so just a little bit different for people with getting people to use approval voting is giving them the idea that they can choose more than one candidate which is, you see similar things when even with some of the opposite votes that insert runoff voting faces just having a new ballot is a challenge so one of the perks of approval voting, same ballot just different instructions to say you can choose as many as you want so this eliminate the primary we technically don't need a primary but the primary is that it gets around the vote spitting issue which plurality voting or choose one method is really sensitive to so approval voting is a nice job buffering against that vote spitting issue and so you can just toss everybody in there and have the person with the most wins and you save a bunch of money from skipping your primary we have questions what about if the situation in the general election well sometimes some states have they're called sore loser laws and they say that using the primary you don't get a run again in the general election but let's pretend that's not the case for some states that we're talking about so the scenario is you've got a primary Republican primary and Tea Party candidate wins and then they jump in for the independent spot if we're using approval voting here so we can talk about it in different situations one whether one when the approval voting is used in the primary if you want to have a primary still and then another when it's used in the general election if we talk about it in the first instance when it's used in the primary we should remember that approval voting tends to get you a more moderate winner so moderate for whatever electorate happens to be the Tea Party candidate and the Tea Party candidate may still win but if it's not the case then the winner will be someone that is more geared towards a moderate candidate whatever that is for that particular electorate more people approve that that'll actually probably be a pleasant outcome for some Republicans because I'm sure there will be a few party folks and then the general election again, approval voting tends to prefer the moderate so if moderate does not mean Tea Party and if that Republican is a little bit more moderate that Republican will have a better shot than the general election yep, they're using approval voting yeah, now you've perhaps heard me say a couple a few times that approval voting tends to elect moderates and that's true, like our organization is non-partisan, talk to everybody and if that is an affinity when we talk to plenty of libertarians you can see we've worked with them directly but we don't care as far as ideology goes but we do see that consistency of approval voting favoring moderates but while it may not cause you to win although if there's an issue that the major parties aren't taking up you can take that issue and run with it that will get you a lot of support that you would not be able to get under plurality because if you did that on a plurality they would just say well you didn't get much support, you must have done that but under approval voting you can do that same thing and that can give you a good chance of being competitive but even if you don't win, remember you still get a much more accurate reflection of support and so even in that case you can't get marginalized the same way even if you don't win, so you're still going to bring all your issues up so the green party news I think they should what would be the consequence of that so in general we make collective decisions all the time I heard you make tons of them or planning during the workshops so there's no reason why you can't use approval when you're making these collective decisions it's also a whole lot easier than doing an insert on authority every time which it sounds like that's what you're used to doing so you can just add them up you get a good result and it doesn't take you all day and a lot of frustration to do it so you get a good result and you don't have to rack your brain so you can save them for all the other stuff that you have to do there's one saying the other party and one saying the other also start kicking their butt with good candidates that might it'll get you for the median candidate for the green party because that's your electorate in this circumstance so would approval voting help them so like in practice so as far as getting voting methods implemented for government elections with approval voting assessment done yet we're actually working on developing a sister organization a C4 to push this more directly we have been involved in a number of pieces of legislation at the state level which isn't strategically the best way to go but it just happened to fall in our lap and I asked like would you help us with this legislation and we couldn't say no but the historically the way alternative voting methods have been implemented have been at the local level so you do a referendum where the city council says we'll sign off on this you don't have to collect signatures or you do an initiative and you do a collect signatures and put it on the ballot so historically that's the way that it's been done and because this is a single winner voting method we'd like to see this started with small cities for their mayor in the interim because voting methods in general people that know have no clue about them but they do love sports and so in the interim what we're doing is we're working to have other organizations use smart voting methods like cruel voting that way people are familiar with them so things like Heisman Trophy MVP or whatever sport you like actually we I wrote an article with our chair he's also a PhD mathematician on the major league baseball campaign election process so we did that for a sports blog called dead spenders and we came up with a way for major league baseball hall thing to induct new people that was a lot better than the current system that we're using that sort of indicates the variety of context that voting takes place in and we'll be diving into all of them and we'll have more familiarity with these systems and they can start saying well if they use that for this and it works so well why do we use this awful morality method when we elect government that seems so important that's the tactical plan