 My name is Kristen Elliott. I'm the director of philanthropy at the center for election science. We are a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to empowering communities by improving the way that they vote. One of the big ways we do that is we help communities that are suffering from broken elections with advocating for better voting methods and primarily we like approval voting because it's a really simple cost-effective way to bring about that change. So we are currently working in St. Louis, Missouri to make it the second city in the U.S. to adopt approval voting and one of the big questions that we get you know is like well why St. Louis? Why do they need this? So I've seen Wally speak several times in St. Louis and he knows a lot about especially recent elections and why this is so needed so we wanted to take a minute to have a conversation with him today. So I will be moderating the event if you have any questions. You can ask them in the chat and I will try to get to them either by responding to you or at the end we will let you ask them to Wally. You can also use the raise hand function if you would like to ask a question. One little housekeeping rule is if we can try to keep this pretty focused to approval voting or to St. Louis that would be great. There's a lot of big voting methods topics and we want to make sure that we kind of stay on topic so we're respectful that we're going to time. So that's that for me and with that I'm going to turn it over to Chris Wally our Director of Campaigns and Advocacy so that he can introduce Wally and go on. Great thank you Kirsten. As she said I am the Director of Campaigns and Advocacy at the Center for Election Science so that means I work with our partners throughout the country who are interested in advancing better voting methods especially approved voting. We work especially with folks in St. Louis, St. Louis proves and Wally has seen that work hopefully which I know that he has and we are talking with Wally today as he has a front row seat to a lot of what's going on in not only St. Louis but in Missouri so I will give his formal introduction and I'll let him introduce himself. So Dr. Wally Seward is a very decade of experience as a in civic and political engagement. He started out as an organizer just like myself. I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point and from 2011 to 2017 Dr. Seward was the Director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life at the University of Missouri St. Louis. During that time the Center established itself as a statewide hub for public ethics information conferences workshops research best practices legislative tracking community collaboration and more. He is an avid woodworker he says and enjoys animals so now he is the Director of Civic Engagement and Focus Impact Fellows at Focus St. Louis. So Wally thank you for joining us and please tell us a little bit more about yourself. Well happy to be here thanks for the invitation. So let's see a little bit more about myself. I did start as an organizer back at the envelope calculation I've knocked on probably 150,000 doors over the course of a door-to-door campaign organizing mostly around consumer issues utility health care not candidate campaigns these were all issued campaigns. After that went to grad school got my PhD in political and moral theory thought I was going to go the kind of traditional teaching route ended up running a Center for Ethics and Public Life which really gave me the opportunity to kind of build bridges between the people who study politics and the people who actually practice it. So the goal was to have informed decision-making in the public sphere but also to bring public sphere actual experience back into academia to inform the discussion there that definitely needs to be a two-way street. For the past three years I've been the Director of Civic Engagement for Focus St. Louis which is a nonprofit that does leadership development in the St. Louis region which gives me the opportunity to hold a lot of public forms get engaged in a lot of campaigns that are going on both issue campaigns protests candidate campaigns going on in the region and addressing some of our regions most powerful and most pressing issues. I have actually found St. Louis to be an amazing place to do politics partly because of the problems that it does have. We have the nation's problems kind of boiled down to a nice concentrated stew. I like to think kind of everything runs to the middle. We sit in between north versus south east versus west rich versus poor role versus urban black versus white old industrial economy versus new entrepreneurial economy like it's all right here St. Louis has the nation's problems so we can find I'd like to think that that means where the space where the solutions are going to grow right is where the disease is most prevalent is where the resistant bacteria kind of evolves so that's the hope but that's what I've been doing for the last few years and happy to be here. All right well thank you Wally and I will start with basically the title of the talk which is how do we get here so if you want to give just a brief again you said you moved there in 2011 but just what have you seen you know being there a decade now nearly a decade you know what have you seen in the briefest history you can give us the elections in St. Louis. Sure well the elections in St. Louis first of all there are many many right because St. Louis city is only 300,000 people the city itself proper St. Louis county which surrounds the city is more than double that and the metropolitan region includes about seven more counties but we're talking only about St. Louis city proper with the STL approves because we want to get our tophold in the region so I'll talk a little bit about the city proper and to give you a sense of the kind of civic arrangements in the city city is roughly 50 50 black and white we have a relatively small Latinx population we do have a sizable foreign born population that range from all over Bosnia and East Asia that are part of the picture as well but because of the history because of the demographics because of the prevalence of these issues the African-American population is really the core of kind of how are we trying to empower folks that haven't had power in the past that kind of power vacuum for large segments of the St. Louis population can be seen in the St. Louis governmental structure we have had a black caucus in the board of alderman for only about 30 years that's all and that caucus is like most caucuses deeply fractious and has a very very difficult time presenting united front on issues and that deeply fractious kind of nature of the politics in St. Louis has been seen in the elections I can give you two very very recent examples of elections that desperately needed help so in St. Louis of course we have still the traditional primary where the pluralistic winner of the primary takes all and they are then the nomination to go on to the general because St. Louis is prominently predominantly democratic that primary is essentially the election and since it's a plurality win we have right now a mayor and a president of the board of alderman two of the most powerful seats in city government who got elected in a primary with less than 33 percent of the vote in other words 60 plus percent of the voters actually preferred someone else but then when it got to the when it got to the regular election the only choice was between a republican who nobody whom nobody in the city was voting for and the one democrat that came out of the primary so that's the president of the board of alderman lewis reid and our mayor leida cruisin it was those two elections although there is a long history of this happening those two elections really laid bare the practice in St. Louis of stacking black candidates essentially what that is is you stack the the primary with black candidates which divides the black vote and then the white i can't the only white candidate the race mayor leida cruisin in this case wins by only getting elected by 33 percent of the vote which meant that she only had to focus on certain areas she only had certain sets of constituencies that she had to keep happy and that's a practice that goes way back i can't talk about that long history i haven't been here since 2000 i've only been here since 2011 but it's become really obvious if you watch recent elections here now lewis reid the president of the board of alderman is african-american he's been there for quite a while i would not consider him a member of any kind of progressive wing of the democratic party as deep ties to existing interests especially the big issue in st lewis development handing out tax subsidies and to developers he is very much a part of kind of business as usual on that front both he and leida cruisin and their their election wins really really have unfortunately at a time just five years post ferguson have solidified re solidified that business as usual politics here in st lewis i think that that the voting systems that we are talking about here with approval voting can definitely have a massive impact what exactly that impact is of course hard hard to predict as always when you mess with systems those outcomes are difficult to predict but it's really hard to imagine outcomes more broken than the current ones so i'm i and i'll i'll hold there because i've been talking for a little bit um i as we come up to it i can also talk a little bit about how i think approval voting will hopefully kind of shift those dynamics thanks well i bet that was an awesome overview so uh just uh kind of i'll weave in some of the questions from the from our folks as we kind of see them and curse them also um i was really interested to hear you know about the stacking when i saw one question in in in the um uh in the comments so can you explain a little bit more about how that would work and basically kind of what why would people do that why would yeah then why would people um sign up to help stack or beat or yeah that's a really good question um so the stacking is a simple explanation for a complex phenomenon right um when when when we look for instance at the last may or election and we looked at seven eight nine african-american candidates uh one kind of mainstream white candidate um i don't want to accuse the african-american candidates on there of somehow being having been hired and callously on the on the ticket simply only because someone taught them into helping the only white candidate get elected right that's that's it's generally not that blatant but it's also not that difficult to motivate and push folks to get into the election for their own personal uh a grandizement reasons um and i don't want to i don't want to downplay the importance of hard fought primaries right primaries and party elections in inter intro party elections build strength within movements uh they weed out uh they weed it's important that we have those kinds of those kinds of debates and discussions oops sorry sorry everything's okay sorry everybody it's all good uh so what happens a lot of times i think is that candidates who have a relatively small base of support don't have say a city-wide base of support are encouraged to run are given some resources to run um from sources that largely see them as a distraction although they might not themselves see themselves that way um but the the result is uh that you have a large portion of the voting uh public in st louis have their vote split between several candidates uh that they are torn between um and leave a candidate that they don't prefer to actually actually win the election and and you seem very excited to kind of give us your idea about how approval voting may improve the situation so why do you think that okay well so for instance if we look at the president of the board of alderman race uh there were essentially three viable candidates in that race one of whom was the uh was the incumbent uh the the louis reid the present current president of the board of alderman one of whom was uh meghan green who was a who is a member of the board of alderman very progressive uh a white candidate the other was jamil and ashid african-american state senator with a long history of work in the region um and i know a lot of people that were really torn between those two candidates they knew they weren't they weren't down with the status quo they knew they didn't want to continue things as they were but they got really really torn between those two uh candidates so i won't get into the specific details of why those two candidates presented a very difficult choice especially for progressive voters but so we had to make this choice right which and and the the the calculus isn't just which one of them do i prefer the calculus is also which one of them is going to get enough votes to beat louis reid and that's one of those classic coordination problems i don't know what to do till i know what you're going to do but you don't know what to do until you know what i'm going to do and nobody's allowed to say anything or nobody's telling anybody who they're going to vote for because we're all friends and nobody wants to make anybody mad so um in the end what happened was that louis reid won the election by just a tiny tiny tiny margin won that primary then went on of course to win the general election if approval voting had been in place i could have checked both megan green and jamil annashid and i would have been able to register that these were my two preferences and anybody that was voting for one or the other that could that would have been preferred let's say you voted for jamil annashid you would have preferred still preferred megan green to all them to uh president reid you could have done that you could have voted for both in which case then the top two vote getters which may have been votes too it may have been uh one of them and president reid would have gone to a runoff and we would have had a real choice between two viable candidates in the general election as opposed to uh essentially just the choice between the one candidate produced by the democratic primary and a couple of other candidates from other parties uh that no one saw uh as serious so approval voting just in terms of that story just shows like what it would have been like for me as a voter to be able to register my preferences better from a more academic viewpoint if we look at voting as a mathematical theory exercise and how do we get as much information out of every voter about their preferences as possible through this one visit well then the approval voting gives you a lot more information about my preferences right because you saw that i voted for jamil in a sheet i would have preferred megan green um you you could get all that from me and you can give a better picture of the voter's actual preferences so if you think of voting as that kind of math informational exercise approval voting is a huge leap forward in terms of understanding the actual preferences of each individual voter um you can get more precise uh right rent choice voting for instance might give you a precisely which ones i prefer above others but i'm not sure that that's a vast difference and that was actually a form of voting that we couldn't institute here in st lewis without a major change in our infrastructure without the machines themselves being changed um so i think approval voting is a really really powerful tool and i think the folks here in st lewis it's going to be very very interesting now that we've actually gotten the question on the ballot we don't know exactly which election yet if i remember right ben's here so he can he can answer that question um but now that we've gotten on the ballot it's going to be very interesting to see the responses from kind of the powers that be out in st lewis right those folks that have been getting elected from their wards uh or from the uh from very small power bases that are going to have to start creating a wider campaigns because they can no longer win with 30 of the vote um so i'm very curious what that's going to look like and who's going to come out of the woodwork to say this is good or isn't good one of the measuring statistics for st lewis is always how does this help bring power to traditionally disempowered populations uh poor populations in st lewis uh largely african-american populations i think the answer there is clear uh given the stories that i have been telling um but there are a lot of folks in the african-american political power structure that's that um will react more along the lines of preserve my power structure and less along the lines of this is better for democracy so it's going to be a complex reaction from the public i'm guessing there's going to be some public information that needs to be done there is so much good information to unpack there walley um i have several questions in my own brain but we have some in the chat but i think are great so you touched on this just a little bit um that call and asked why do you think approval is better for st lewis than rank choice or another method so i mean obviously there's the you know technical component right now of the machines just won't handle it um i want to say that and benjamin singer with uh st lewis approves is on the call too so benj may be able to give um some info in the chat here but i want to say that was like a couple million dollar uh investment or somewhere along there like a very large financial investment for the city but i mean if that wasn't the case if somebody was willing to come in and take care of that you know do you think approval voting is the right option or um you know would you be looking at something like rank choice or score um you know what are your thoughts there walley on what would really make sense so um i don't know if i would prefer rank choice to approval voting one of the issues that a lot of people bring up with these voting systems is the the complexity of the choice that voters are faced with um and the nice thing about approval voting is it's a nice short instruction line right put a check mark next to every candidate you approve instead of put a one next to your top choice your your two next to your second choice things like that although i tend to say i tend to give the voters more credit than a lot of people do i think they're they're empowered enough to make those decisions so i don't know if i could say um you know whether rank choice or approval voting would all other things be equal which one i would prefer it is true that rank choice if you look at it as that kind of mathematical informational question rank choice gives you more information about the voters preferences because they can check mark for uh candidates for approval voting you know they they're okay with those four with rank choice that you would actually know which one of those four is their top second third choice if you ask me in a completely you know made up world if i could just bring in any voting system that i wanted what i would probably go for is the same thing we do online every day which is the five star system so you give every candidate zero through five stars so that kind of rolls all those systems into one because i could give candidates five stars and they would be like yep i approve all these four candidates i could rank them give one of them four stars one three stars one two charts one of them one star i could give one of them five stars and i could give two others two stars and zero stars to a couple of others like there is a fast amount of a way that i can i can formulate that that and that's the way that we do online product approval right for for amazon right now how many stars do you give this product they did all this math and they figured out how to suck the most information out of the consumer that they possibly can now again i the most important thing is yes that's in so you know in some fantasy world where we can just start from zero that might be what i would want but we also don't want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good and i think approval voting here in st louis is ready to go it's on the ballot our machines can handle it it's a simple thing to explain to voters i think it's actually a really good for st louis at this time thanks walley i'm going to bring up something bench in the chat brought up a little bit which is and you brought up a little bit which is the people that win right they win and and they have uh and i'm talking you know more morphously not specific people right can you explain more how you know and you can go into a little bit more detail later how the vote splitting hurts the voter right we know that maybe the community but how does the vote splitting and and the winning by kind of these little margins maybe affect their mandate maybe affect the decisions that they make um you know you get a firm row seat and you're dedicated to how these folks make decisions so how could something and it's not the first thing people think about so how can how does this vote splitting or these small margins hurt or change how they make decisions yeah so the tough thing about how office holders make decisions is they do it all inside their head right we don't have we can't open those doors however there's some really clear dynamics at play here um so first of all there's really difficult questions about how public officials should make decisions right i mean we you can go way into background questions of should they should they actually make decisions based on what they believe their constituents interests are what they believe their constituents preferences are because often those can come apart right they can think that this is better for you even though you think it isn't that's that's a separate question probably another big consideration for them is holding on to the power that they've gained and this motivation always often gets short shrift as though it's automatically negative for an elected official to take into account what it's going to take for them to keep their office but the truth is that is something an elected official is honestly working in the interests of their constituents that is something they have to take into consideration right um i mean you can just look at like what's the dilemma for them when they see a big massive contribution to their political action campaign uh right uh campaign um they can say i can accept this massive amount of money that i know is going to come with strings attached or i can unilaterally disarm and give up the election to my opponent who i think is going to do horrible things to the constituents i'm trying to protect right so that's the kind of moral dilemma they're in and there's a similar thing if you're sitting in office and you have to make a decision that even though you believe it's the right decision it's going to hand your opponents some kind of a weapon or a fodder or a way to get you out of office next year and you have other political priorities besides just this one decision right because that's the tough part about political office it's not one decision at a time it's 10 000 decisions every time because it's not just do we spend this $20 to fix the pothole it's do we spend this $20 to fix the pothole or help the schools or hire some more teachers or or or or or or or right so they're constantly in this dilemma and so when we think about when they're making decisions about how to maintain their power what we would like to do is we'd like to have the systems that put them and keep them in power as as closely connected to the interests and preferences of as many voters as possible and the difficulty with the winner take all primary is they only have to win with that 30 of the vote which in this city can mean hey i've only got to win in the central corridor and south and far south city which is relatively white and relatively conservative compared to the rest of the city conservative inside the democratic party from a spectrum um and so in order to maintain power in order to keep power those are the populations that they're going to be pandering to and any action whether it be right or wrong that endangers their connection to that particular interest group is going to be one that even if they wanted to do it maybe they have to make the political calculation i can't simply because i'm foregoing my ability to be in this office and implement all these other political priorities that i have it's not always cynical it's not always power grabbing for the sake of power grabbing it's also holding on to the power for the sake of the ideals that you got into public service in the first place right i mean as a public ethicist i'm amazed how much time i spend actually defending people in public office as opposed to telling them how they ought to do their job because everyone's like oh yeah public ethics that's an oxymoron isn't it ha ha ha wink wink i don't know it's not an oxymoron it's a repetitive phrase uh politics is the only answer we found to possibly the most difficult ethical question that faces us which is how do we live together inside of a society and maintain the cooperation and collaboration that keeps our society strong while also recognizing and allowing every person's individual version of the good life uh and their own personal political preferences how you square that circle is not a single system it's an ongoing process and that's politics politics is ethics and most people that especially the most people that get into local politics do it because they feel like they have a constituency to serve because they have issues that they want to put on the table if we allow those who step up to the plate to get to the table to get elected with only a small constituency that's the constituency that they're going to pander to and a yeah that gives them that in some ways makes things easier for them because they only have a certain limited set a cohesive set of constituents that they can keep happy and keep their job but it also limits them it limits their ability to consider the interests and the preferences of other populations in the city especially populations in the city that have traditionally been disempowered so i think approval voting by forcing uh first um people to give their true preferences and hopefully getting rid of some of that spoiler effect in the primary but then also making the general election a runoff between the top two vote getters so it's not that in the general election i i have to vote i have to choose between the democrat candidate and the other guys that 30 people voted for inside of the green party the libertarian party and the republican party in st lewis like that's not a choice uh so if i get a real choice in that general election between those top two vote getters now we're starting to just see a little more access to power for populations that haven't felt it in the past which also means those populations might actually have to show up in those communities they may have to show their faces in those communities and listen face to face to folks in those communities where they really haven't in the past i think you have hit on such an important part of this walley which is that there is such a need to like you said earlier to bring power back to the people especially those people who are just not having their voice heard um and i think it's it's really interesting if you're um a center for election science person and you've been on these calls you're probably geeking out right now with walley about the ethics side of this and we're talking about the voting method side but something i think that we often overlook in our conversations is you know what does this actually mean for a human in st lewis and so i would love to pose that question i mean um i have a very vivid picture of the day that i came to st lewis and sat down with uh rachel aldridge one of the members of the st lewis approves committee and we sat in this coffee shop and met people in st lewis and i was so inspired about how ruchine said this could help people but in in your point of view you know what does this mean for a saint lewis and who's not being heard right now who's not being represented so the first thing i'll just give a huge shout out to ruchine uh he's a friend worked with him a number of occasions um and he's in terms of you know kind of community voice and understanding the communities that are in pain he's definitely the better source than i am than i am but what i hope is that communities in st lewis and that is not just the african-american population right that can be the bosnian population that can be our foreign-born population that can be all kinds of populations latinx population start to see general elections in which candidates that they supported even though they weren't necessarily the top tier candidates might actually get a chance of being in that general election because they make it into the top two in that runoff uh they hopefully can start seeing people that uh look like them talk like them think like them have some of their community experience have some of their background experience in the general election uh which is the election everybody thinks of uh you know when the decisions are made most voters are relatively low engagement voters i hate the term low information voters because it makes them sound idiotic like they're just they're desperately trying to figure out the three jobs in the school and the kid child care and they're like they don't have time to study every political issue and every political candidate so they have a limited amount of personal kind of energy that they can put toward engagement on this front and so what they think of is the big election they think of the the general election and if the general election is a top two runoff between the top vote getters they're getting a real choice between two viable candidates not just a candidate that's a democratic that they now feel and i'm putting words in their mouth that the democratic party is shoved down their throat and a bunch of non-viable candidates right um now it's only a top two uh so it's not immediate and they don't get everybody on on the on the ballot that they would like but it's definitely uh i think a huge improvement and the polling uh that the project did and bench can probably talk a little more to this but the polling of the project did especially in the african community right up front people felt like this would better reflect their interests they felt like they even might be more likely to vote if this were the process because they felt like their vote was going to have a bigger impact so hopefully that's the that's the result thanks walley i uh you talked about this in one piece which is how you know i'm i came back from campaign world right so i've had those conversations you said where you know where do we need the votes right where do i where do we need to cut up the votes and oftentimes you know the it's the goal of the campaign to try to talk to as few people as possible because they only have so much money in time yeah let's say we get this proof that that uh proof voting but the rest of the measure goes through um can you tell us a little bit about a little bit more about how the campaigns are now and how you think maybe the campaigns might change is right because that's how most voters like you said have any opportunity to interact with their potential decision right yeah um i mean it's a bit of a rabbit hole when you talk about insider speak for voter contact inside of campaigns right because it is a world that has to has a really weird contradiction inside of it which is vast optimism about what the voters can do and vast skepticism about who they can actually bring to the polls um i mean i remember Bruce Franks jr uh who it was a leader in the Ferguson protests then stepped up and and was elected to be a state representative um ran a really interesting campaign because uh you know once once it got going brought in some uh kind of consultants that run these kind of campaigns and they said okay you're going to contact the people on this list these are the people that have voted in the last three elections uh from these districts and he said no i i don't want to contact just the people on those lists and he starts getting the real talk right we only have the money the time the manpower to i to contact this many people we need to make sure that those are high value targets and he said well talk about high value targets we flipped through the book to the list of the people in the back that hadn't voted in the last three elections and points to his own name it says um right so right so what kind of potential is in here that we're ignoring um so the the hope would be that while campaign managers instead just campaign inside of campaigns are still going to be doing those calculations right limited resources value our targets they're still going to be doing that uh we can't change their calculation because that's their job and that should be what they're doing what we can change are the systemic uh kind of um the settings that push them into only contacting voters in certain areas and certain kind of high value uh voters because they know um that say in the general election they're only going to have one democrat on the on the ballot they are going to focus much more closely in and that democrat their campaign consultants are going to say look all the all the kind of hardcore democrats are going to vote for you anyway we don't need to do outreach there or all the people in this community uh that want this thing that you've said you're going to do don't have any other choices so we don't have to do outreach there um if there's somebody else on the ballot if say the runoff the president of the board of alderman race here had been a runoff between uh i think it was megan green that actually got the second amount of the second highest number of votes by just barely and lewis reed that general election would have had a vastly that different dynamic in which both megan green and lewis reed would have to do a citywide outreach there was virtually no outreach in that general election by lewis reed because he knew he didn't have to do it because he's the only democrat in a particular democratic city so he didn't show up in communities he didn't feel like he had the answer to those that i think is is one of the primary changes there in terms of the calculus that campaign professionals make when you get down to the general election you are going to have a second viable candidate on that it's going to appeal to democrats in the city and you're going to have to do a citywide outreach in order to make sure you win instead of just riding the the party letter uh into office and that brings up a little bit the uh you talked about candidates not showing up you know and kind of maybe taking you know sitting on their doors a little bit what uh as we all think as as ces and as and stl proves it's here what are some uh types of civic engagement that you seen that do work really well what should you know if uh what have you seen that really motivates uh folks and maybe if you have any other stories of have you talked to people about uh you know approved voting and that and the ballot measure in general yeah so what kind of civic engagement works i mean that gets almost into a little bit of a theory of change right like what what what actually gives you uh options for change well people ask me for about for a theory of change um i always i always have two two things number one stories number two pain those are the only things that create change stories are the only thing that have the possibility of changing individual minds uh right the the story of michael brown in ferguson um the story the stories of police brutality that we're seeing around the country now that everyone has a video and social media um that's on an individual level when you look at institutions the only thing that creates change is pain for those institutions if they feel the pain uh they they will respond in terms of civic engagement connecting to those two things um i think that's why stories about how past elections might have looked given approval voting are important uh because when you talk about process issues it's easy for people to kind of you know glaze over um unless they're all process nerds like we all clearly are um so i think uh the when you talk about process brings stories to the table the process was like this the process would if it looked this way here's the story of how this would look different here's the different choices you would have here the people with stories more like yours that might actually make it to the general election where you have the opportunity to elect them in terms of pain right now um the citywide elections that this approval voting would apply to their the pain for those offices would be that they have to reach a much broader audience in order to successfully make it back into office uh the pain for them is going to be the way that machine politics have worked in the city in the past and those are institutions right that's not people that's those those are institutions um isn't going to work the same way anymore because the pathway to that electoral office has changed that's going to create pain for them when they say hey we've still got the same limited resources for our campaign but now we have to do outreach beyond the central west end and uh south city and actually reach into some different areas north city downtown in order to figure out uh in order to get those voters engaged because we're not going to be able to get elected with that smaller voting block um that we had before so stories and pain um and an important piece of this is also the fact that our voting participation is just abysmal uh in the united states right we we we seem to be happy to fight wars for this right and then let it just languish i don't know that i have any similar bullets for that uh for that question i wish i did i would have to go back to piece of the problem is how easy it is to tell a story about corruption and callousness in office and how easy it is for people to say people that are elected people that are going for elections they're just power hungry assholes pardon the french um i have no reason to put them in office they're disqualified simply because they've raised their hand for office in my head because it's only that kind of those kind of people that do that and i think one of the most powerful things that have that has happened here recently in st louis is we've had some relatively non-traditional folks get get elected into spaces bruce frank jr would be a huge example if you're in st louis and you know a little bit about the story about that election and the political family and machine that used to run things in that district uh that he had actually ended up having to go an illegal battle against them about uh illegally turned in uh absentee ballots in order to get into office but him making it into office uh right regime making it into office um we are seeing another huge one this isn't in the city but the fact that majority white st louis county ejected the 30-year prosecutor who failed to make a case against the officer in the michael brown uh shooting in ferguson and put in a progressive african-american prosecutor is mind blowing especially the fact that it's the county that did that and i think it's the stories of michael brown it's the stories of what progressive prosecutors had managed to do in other places it's the stories of the people that we have sitting behind bars right now who are losing their job losing their apartment losing their family because they can't afford a five hundred dollar bail on that speeding ticket they got six months ago on a car they don't own anymore and to a residence where they don't that was sent to a residence they don't live in anymore those kind of stories are changing people's minds about what it means to be engaged and who they can affect um and i think that's one of the most powerful things we that's what that's one of the amazing things that the close the workhouse campaign has done here in the city of st louis you know anything about that uh they're working to close a very old medium security facility uh that has a long history of treating inmates inhumanely um and is really not necessary anymore given the other facilities that we have in town um and they are both telling telling stories of the people who are in that facility the their lives that they have lost simply because of you know a traffic ticket or a failure to pay alimony or some technical violation like that that puts them into into jail for six months because they can't afford bail they're telling those stories on the one hand and they're making people understand the human cost of these policies and on the other hand they're creating pain for the people in office by advocating and organizing and bringing people to hearings and bringing people uh getting people to make phone calls and write letters and it's working they're they've got a two-prong uh they get a two-prong effect there and the number one thing that creates civic engagement is a win right when to close the workhouse actually manages to close the workhouse hope the ever and the hopefully everybody gets that sense look we did this now let's move on to the next thing let's talk about good god healthcare right let's talk about transportation let's talk about housing let's talk about let's talk about uh capitalize on those wins that you make um they are often hard to capitalize on because they come usually anti-climactically after years of a fight and maybe a legal battle and by the time the decision gets made in a court somewhere that's way out of the headlines but just make sure that people understand the victories that can happen for instance with stl approves um i mean this this has been underdog fight from the beginning uh in a lot of ways and here we all were we're ready with these signatures uh and we're going to be putting this thing on the ballot i think it's got a really good chance of passing and that as margaret mead said is because a very few dedicated individuals decided to change elections in st louis see that understand that get people to understand the difference it makes um the stories that they hear have to be ones that are from from sources they trust right i mean to to speak plainly i can't go into north city and start telling these stories and try to get people involved they're good they're not going to hear it from me they have no reason to think that what i have to say is relevant to them they need to hear it from people that have their experience have their history understand their problems um and they need to hear it uh over and over again so much good information we're covering here walle i know that for some of us we started at about five minutes after the hour so i know we're creeping up on about an hour of conversation with walle and i want to be respectful of walle's time but also of everyone else's time i know many of you are joining us on your lunch break or listening while you're trying to keep working um so i want to remind you that you can put your questions in the chat or you can use the raise hand function and we would be happy to take any of your questions i know colin has had a lot and colin if we can get to yours we definitely will but i want to make sure that um some of the rest of you especially those of you who have joined plate are able to ask your um questions um while we are waiting i did want to just let everyone know that um as we're talking about this initiative to bring fairer more representative elections to saint louis um while approval voting is a totally free switch if uh you know a city wanted to enact it today unfortunately as we've been talking about during this hour with walle power structures don't necessarily lend themselves that way this can be a little bit of a difficult sell so we have to spend some money on it um so the center for election science we're leading the charge on the educational campaign side and we'll be helping voters learn about better elections so if you are interested in supporting that with a tax deductible gift you can go to electionscience.org slash stl um and if you are not interested in that tax deduction or it doesn't matter to you um then i would encourage you to go to stlapproves.org and make a donation there um saint louis approves is working really really hard to get the word out and tell people how important this initiative is and um they just can't do it without some money none of us can it's an unfortunate evil in this world um i am not seeing any hands raised right now so i'm going to go back to the chat and see if we have any questions that have popped up i'm not seeing any from anyone other than callin so callin is going kind of into a deeper dive so i'm going to uh see what walle thinks here so walle um callin is asking about proportional representation so um what about proportional representation in st louis do you think that's something that would be another initiative that the city should look at and what do you think the benefits might be and you know just how about might just things there so uh proportional representation means a lot of different things to a lot of different people uh right there's the fundamental there's the fundamental idea that if there are certain kind of natural interest groups in a community and they represent a certain percentage of the population then a certain percentage of the uh a similar uh correlated percentage of the ruling structure of the governmental structure should kind of be reflective of that population for some people it's a much more uh there are more uh kind of formal systems that that are about how elections and especially in legislative bodies how those legislative bodies are formed for proportional representation so i'm not sure um uh for exactly what the question is about or what's being proposed um we do you know i yeah and so let me ask let me ask that back like what proportional representation in what sense callin if you want to if you want to give us a give us an idea it looks like kirsten you're saying you're doing a deep dive on it next week right is there's a specific single you're talking about so we will have thorough vote canada on next week talking about their fight for proportional representation with multi-winner elections and i think um callin's point here is just that there are some elections in in st louis um like say for multi-winner races where we could be looking at that kind of reform um so just you know do we is that um you know like are we seeing the same magnitude of issues there um that we're seeing in these single-winner races like for mayor for people yeah well st louis has its history of problems with multi-winner races as well um i forget which school district up in north i think it was actually north county that actually had a federal lawsuit about how they were doing their at-large election elections or or electing by districts and they mandated an entirely new system um i i don't want to speak from an uninformed viewpoint on some of this stuff so i'm not an expert on some of those especially those those you know school board races where you tend to have multiple multiple winners those kind of lower lower level local elections in those kind of really hyper local elections systemic effects are often swamped by small level local circumstances uh somebody who get who's known really well in the region somebody who everybody you know in the community knows did x y and z or has x y and z so the smaller the smaller the electoral body gets the more that like systemic kind of statistically predictable issues start to get swamped by just local circumstances um so numbers wise for the trends to be predictable in any sense um so i don't know at all if that helps or answer the question well if it doesn't call in um has been on many many of our calls and call in feel free to email us and we can keep the conversation going um because it's always a good time digging in here does anyone else have any other questions for walley um i have a question i ask in the chat um i was wondering i think ben jen mentioned that the primary is only about a month before the general election and that's kind of not typical usually you have about five or six months between the primary and the general election and i don't know much about how elections are running st louis is that typical of all the primary general elections that you have there how does the the new system here and so many differ from the old one i do not think in bench uh correct me if i'm wrong i do not think that anything in this uh bill changes the calendar of elections um what it does do is change the nature of elections so fundamentally um there are no more party primaries there is only one general prime one general primary with all the candidates in it and then um the uh general excuse election is a runoff between the top two vote getters in that general primary um i don't think this changes the uh calendar at all and you're right that some of those calendars here in st louis are pretty fast i do not know whether that's typical of other cities or not in fact folks at ces might know a little bit more about that than i do so i'm seeing in the chat ben just saying that one or two months is actually pretty common in many runoffs for local and state elections across the country so it seems like uh this is mirroring that um and ben just just reminding what what walley said that you know we're not changing the election dates or anything like that so hopefully that got it that question brand if not feel free to drop it in the chat um valma asks are there any provisions to have poll watchers in polls that are non-partisan um this initiative doesn't have any language to that effect um and i don't know walley if you have anything to to add there on on this process did we lose walley sorry about that i'm back that's okay um so did you hear my question i'm having a little bit of internet connectivity issues uh but i think we're i think we're good at the moment sorry about that that is that is a okay so um i did not watchers so the question was about poll watchers and um you know if the initiative if there were any provisions to have poll watchers in the polls that are non-partisan um i don't think there's anything in this initiative that's talking about that but uh valma is saying that one of their concerns is that the election you know just about monitoring the the process so any thoughts on that walley yeah um so so i think that's right and benj you can confirm this there isn't anything about poll watchers in this bill um however that's a system uh that's already in place there are poll watchers you can register to be a poll watcher you can sign up to be a poll watcher um and so i'm i'm curious uh uh how are you doing valma it's good good to see you um i'm curious what the concern is uh about that poll watching uh having more monitoring of voting at the polling place would solve um the biggest issues at the polling place are usually uh right that the poll that the poll workers are doing the right things in terms of making sure that there is as much access as possible for the folks that are voting um and you're all frozen i'm assuming you can still hear me um but yeah we can still hear the other thing is okay good the other thing is electioneering outside of the polling place making sure people aren't uh you know getting too getting too close in um i think the the kind of keeping people away from the polls and the kind of voter intimidation the misinformation that's out there about elections um especially i mean we've seen these things and valma i know you've seen these things in the past here in st louis um that you know sending out information with the wrong election date sending out information with the wrong polling place uh those kinds of really nasty tricks i think for me would be a bigger concern uh than what happens precisely at the polling place and none of that is stuff that this particular initiative can touch right and i think it's smart right this initiative does one simple thing uh but valma you're absolutely right that we need to be looking at all aspects of the voting process where people get their information who's sending out that information where those polling places are how much access they have to get their ids in st louis city we just shut down one of the dmv offices where a lot of north city folks used to go to get their ids i don't know where they're doing that now uh right so there's there's many many parts of the process that need to be addressed and the system is definitely flawed and this is only one part of the fix well walley i think your internet is telling us your internet is telling us that it's maybe time to uh to uh for for one last question um and i want to thank you and i want to thank everyone who came out today and again just a reminder we will send this out as recording and we will share our uh contact information if you'd like to ask us questions and i'm sure others would like to do the same so walley in a perfect world we get this this reform and um talked about a little bit but i want to hear more about how do you think in a perfect world we have this system how it helps the lives of the average st louison how their lives may hopefully change i think they feel a little closer to the voting process i think they feel a little more direct effect from their votes in the voting outcomes i think they see more candidates in general elections that are folks that are somebody that they actually want to vote for as opposed to kind of holding their nose and voting for them um you know so we have more than one democrat in a general election we have more than one viable candidate in general election i think that hopefully should be a big uh change because if that general election feels like a rubber stamp party why are how are we motivating people to actually get engaged uh so i think that's going to be a fascinating difference when that general election is the top two vote genders the top two most viable candidates from that general primary uh we're going to see a lot more activity around the general election we're going to see a lot more electioneering around the general election they might get those candidates contacting them more they might get more information from the candidates they might get more information from other parties about those candidates So, I just hope that it just really rejuvenates the process a little bit and stops us from having a really exciting primary and a really boring and kind of have to hold your nose and vote general election. Wonderful. Well, Wally, is there anything else final that you'd like to plug or tell anyone as you're... As I wrap up, I don't think so. We've covered a lot of ground. I really... The one thing that I would want to reiterate again is just asking people to curb their cynicism about public officials and about voters. When you do this for a while, it's really easy to get dismissive. It's really easy to look for quick, easy answers. Stay engaged, stay optimistic. We... The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We now, I think, have a debate about where that quote first came from. I think Martin Luther King Jr. pulled it from somewhere. I think it's a long game. Every little step helps, and I think approval voting is a really powerful, positive step. I love that, Wally, and we certainly think so, too. Again, just one more reminder, and I know we have several supporters on the call, Jan Koch, Rob Blanfeer, to mention a couple, Brian Shank. Thank you to those of you who have made this possible so far. You are part of American history, as we like to talk about every time we're in St. Louis. This is a big deal, and as Wally has pointed out, it may not fix all the problems in our society, but if it can even help make things a little bit more fair, I think that's a fight worth fighting. Thank you for... Thank you, Wally, for joining us and sharing all of your insights on the history of St. Louis, and if you want to help bring this to fruition, don't forget, you can donate at electionscience.org slash STL, or you can support the advocacy portion at stlapproves.org. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks to everybody. Bye. Bye.