 Now just for those, just a really, really quick summary of approval, approval voting is basically you vote for each candidate that you like, and whichever candidate is liked by the most number of voters wins. And so you're choosing a candidate that has the largest consensus. And it prevents the spoiler effect, which is a big deal that, you know, Aaron probably going more detail about. So Aaron's gonna talk about how he, how they went from having virtually no resource to being actually able to implement approval voting in different places. Let's talk about the movement, how it's been successful, and maybe what lessons we could learn from that. So I'll give the floor to Aaron now. Cool, thanks. And I'll go ahead and share my screen real quick. Let's see. Cool, and we go. All right, so able to see all that? Awesome, yeah. So kind of preview everything that we'll be talking about. So I'll briefly go over pool voting very briefly. The business update that you kind of already on board with that component, I'll go through and talk about the simple production science, how we started. You're gonna see kind of a very scrappy organization without many resources and how we grew from there, how we had those early wins with Fargo, how we were able to succeed with St. Louis, and some of the structure and strategy that we're changing with as we're moving forward. So that's gonna be kind of what we're talking about overall. A bit about me. So I co-founded the organization in 2011 and looking at voting methods for a very long time. Been interested in EA since 2016 and started to do conferences when I was in 2017. Also personally do jujitsu, which is strangling and chokes. It's a very great exercise as well. And also do a lot of lock picking as well. So that's me, the, so here it's a brief history of CS. So I'll start off by maybe mentioning approval voting, which is what we focus on pretty heavily. And there's no side on this just because we're gonna go over it kind of superficially. So organization really early on started to move forward with approval voting because of its simplicity as well as doing well on other factors like winner selection and doing a really good job of capturing support for candidates. So it did well and kind of the quality so you would want a voting method to do well in, but also it was very practical and simple. And because of all these factors collectively, we really went forward with that and approval voting itself is just selecting all the candidates that you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. So that's the method that we are pushing. So when you see, you don't know already if you see approval voting comes up that's what we're talking about. So we all have our kind of own personal stories for how we got interested in voting methods personally. It was during the 20, see that was a 20, 2008. So it's going back so far, the 2008 election and during the primaries, I was in graduate school as my second graduate degree in public health. And talking with other friends and classmates and during the discussion everyone voting against their interest and talking about it and really being somewhat fine with it. And I found that really annoying. And so that really kind of led my spurt towards going and thinking about voting methods, thinking about why people would go and vote against their interests, particularly people who were so enthusiastic about certain causes. And so in 2008, like I really started to think about voting methods and even realized that it was a thing because before then I don't think I realized that voting methods was a thing that was an actual concept. And so after learning about voting methods I scoured the internet just seeking more information and in doing so had stumbled across a Google group that had been around well before. I had even come to be aware that such a thing as a voting method existed. And it was filled with engineers, mathematicians, people with political science backgrounds and it was just a frenzy of discussion. And so in talking with folks there, we could see that there is more of a pivot towards cardinal type systems, which deal with scoring. And so I had asked the folks that are like, well, like what are you doing anything to try to make these voting methods a reality? And they should meet some work that they had done in terms of documents for incorporation and bylaws. And it really didn't look that organized. But at the same time I said, well, like it doesn't look very good, but I don't know how to do this either. But you know what, by that time I was in law school. So while in law school, I had joined the non-profit incorporation project, which fortunately my law school had. Unfortunately they don't have it anymore, but I was very lucky with my timing that they had it when I was there. And so got to learn how to do all kinds of bureaucratic fun. And so after learning how to do all that bureaucratic fun, all those documents that were kind of in disarray before suddenly became more organized. And in 2011, we filed the articles of incorporation for California. And the resident agent there, one of our initial board members lived in California. So it was very simple to make him the resident agent, just a person who receives mail in case you get sued. Every company's got to have one. And the other documents we got are 501c3 status acknowledged by the IRS in 2012, which was just a little bit after I passed the bar. And so this was, this fun paperwork was the official origin for the organization. So now in 2011, so I found that perhaps crappy website images are a good way to show your timeline in terms of progress, particularly as a virtual organization that's kind of our outer face. And so in that top left, you see the 2011 website for the Center for Elections Science. And then as it progresses forward in 2013, so it's 2011, 2013, 2015, bottom left is 2017 and then bottom right is 2020. And one of the things that you see with these is that we do a lot of focus on articles, and really resources. And when you don't have any money, that's about all you can do. You can't really do much beyond that. And in 2013, we did that Plantsville video with Mayor Blueberry, that's the one on the top left that you can see there. And it was the first explainer video on approval voting. And so we did a crowdfunding project. It costs like $10,000 or $11,000 to do that. Whatever you see these videos from folks doing promotional stuff, it's expensive. Like when you think like, oh, that looks really good. It's like, well, it's probably because it costs quite a bit of money and talent to get that done. So that we use quite a lot in marketing for approval voting. And the other thing that we had done aside from the video, getting a bunch of articles on the website, we also built up a board of advisors as well, including Stephen Brands, who set the academic groundwork for approval voting, as well as a bunch of other hot shots, including William Poundstone, whose books really inspired a lot of folks to get involved in the movement. So in 2015, sorry, in 2013 became the executive director. And for a while, I was also kind of running a couple of organizations at the same time and didn't have the capacity to be able to really put CS really where I wanted and all of our board wanted as well. And in 2017, I went to my first EA Global and during that EA Global, I met Will. And fortunately, he was very excited about the idea of electoral reform and was familiar with a lot of different voting methods. And he was able to make the introduction to open a fine-through project. And after a whole lot of vetting over the rest of the course of the year, we were able to get our initial grant of about $650,000, which for our comparison, before this, our largest amount of income for a year was under $50,000. And so it like ranged from like 10 to $50,000 a year. And you can't do much to change the world in this manner with that kind of budget. So after that grant, we brought on, so the folks in the back row are the board of directors. And as far as staff, we have Katelyn and Kirsten in front there. Katelyn is our director of operations and programs. Kirsten is our former director of philanthropy. Having full-time staff is really amazing. So we could do all kinds of stuff even with a very small team. And we were able to do that with the result of the grant. And so now that we had funds, we had set up this organizational structure. And fortunately, we had already started a relationship with some folks in Fargo, North Dakota. So this is that story of Fargo. And it is the Fargo, of course, that you're thinking about the one with the wood chipper and that's Katelyn by the wood chipper. The, I think that's a copycat one. Like that's a replica. The actual one is out in the front of their lawn at the Visitor Center in Fargo. But that's the same one. And the reason that Fargo was an interesting place to be is because like a bunch of cities, they have a terrible vote spitting problem, which happens anytime you have more than two candidates that have some competitive and sometimes even not so competitive candidates that can change the outcome of the election merely because candidates with similar policies or backgrounds run at the same time and you have the vote dividing between them. I think it'd be difficult to tell who wins and the person who does win, even if they are the right winner, what are you gonna do to lead a city when you have 22% support and you know that 78% of people voted against you? So the council itself realized that that was a terrible problem. And so they created a task force and the task force job was to fix the problem of the city's elections and think about a new voting method. And fortunately, one of those folks on that task force was the these are a lot of tall people in this picture, although it can be difficult to tell, but Jed, the person on the task force behind us is about six foot eight. I'm six foot one. So like just like a bunch of tall people in this picture. So Jed on that task force had reached out to us and said, Hey, our city has this issue. I think approval voting is gonna be about to help address the issues that we have. We also can't afford fancy voting machines. So not only does it look like your approval voting method can solve the issue that we have, but it can also do it with the resources that we have as well. And so Jed, after making friends with us, went back and convinced the rest of the task force to advance approval voting and recommended it to the council. And the council did a whole lot of nothing for quite a while. And so the Jed got tired of nothing. And so he went and got the signatures necessary to get it on the ballot itself. And after you get on the ballot, of course the work doesn't end there. So Jed went and did a bunch of media stuff. We provided a grant for him and the organization he started, Reform Fargo and went on the campaign trail in the city and did a whole lot of campaigning, a lot of outreach. We also did an education campaign alongside him and this is Dakota. She was a volunteer in Fargo, this is her daughter and they did so much work. There was so much work doing outreach, doing door-to-door, a lot of logistics figuring out, texting, planning. Dakota took time off work and reduced her hours during the campaign so she could do even more volunteer work. Really amazing. So I just wanted to take a moment to point out how awesome she was. And this is her daughter. She made the news doing the campaign work. And all that work paid off and we managed to win that campaign by 63.5%. Which is also very helpful because it also makes it harder for folks to repeal the voting method when it has so much support too. So you may find that sometimes when you change the voting method in the city, some of the people that got elected by the old voting method may not be super enthusiastic about you changing their voting method. So having heavy support among the citizens is gonna be able to help with that. And we were able to see approval voting being used just recently. So this was technically a two-person election. They will also use it for their mayoral election. But the two camps, the one got over 50% support whereas before, like we saw that 23 support not sent in. So Fargo is done with that. Exciting to see that before. And so at the start of 2019, we were able to get another grant from Openville. Again, money is the way that we were able to do this work. And so this was for over three years going through the end of 2021. And we wasted no time. So we also brought in a new staff person. So the bearded fella in the front row, that is Chris Raleigh. He is our director of campaigns and advocacy. We've also got some new board members and I see Caitlin and Kirsten as well. And so we brought Chris on and he was able to help us do a chapter program which we'll talk about shortly. Also around this time, Robert Wiblin was able to interview us and talk about our work on the 80,000 hours podcast. And it turns out some people were listening to that podcast. One of the folks in St. Louis, Rob Schaeff listened to it and shared it with a friend of his, Benjamin Singer. He was working at Trudy Integrity. He's in the back of the table there. And they had a bunch of experience doing down to work in the past and they were also pretty fed up with their city's auctions which like many cities had terrible vote splitting. And so we made friends with the folks in St. Louis and you can see some of the votes splitting that was going on here. This is the St. Louis has a closed primary system where you have this kind of a general closed primary system where the advanced candidates for their respective parties move on to the general election. And so like many cities, it's very democratic dominated. So basically whoever wins the democratic primary is pretty much a shoe in for the general election. And so we see again terrible vote splitting here. And St. Louis being having a large black population here in this case, there's actually a lot of those putting among black candidates which caused someone who could be considered less representative as the winner. The mayor as well, who won the selection during a lot of the protests that had gone on over the past year also used an opportunity to dox a lot of the protesters naming their names and addresses of protesters in the public. So that was the kind of reputation that the mayor had. And so working with this group, STL approves and you had a lot of people here who were really experienced with that initiatives. We had folks, a lot of key stakeholders from the community, including some folks who were elected officials and here what we're doing, seeing it getting put on the ballot again and going through and doing the campaigning, we brought on a ton of folks who were supportive of the bill, sorry, supportive of the initiative, number of elected officials, a lot of key stakeholders, the lead women voters, also elected officials like Corey Bush who openly supported it, SEIU. So a number of key players supporting the initiative. And on election day, we see that it won, we beat our record with Bargo this time it passed by 68%. So again, having a real large, large victory. So all that work paying off. So maybe a little bit of a recap there. So you see this bullet point here of over 200,000 voter contacts. So while we have really a great idea here that does a lot to sell itself, it's also important that we run competent campaigns. And so this is just like one bullet that, and you see all these other points as well with all the allies that we've made during this campaign. But it really is a lot of work. And so we don't take any of this for granted. We had good polling ahead of time, but still we made sure that we did the work to make sure that this was a success and made sure that people knew what they were voting on and knew what they could look forward to. And this was also, we had a lot of vocal opposition from the St. Louis City Council as well, which voted and passed a measure to oppose the initiative that would change the way that they got elected. And the mayor who won with all this vote splitting right after the proposition D, which was for approval voting passed, she decided that she was not gonna run as an incumbent candidate. So that was pretty big news as well, that someone who was able to benefit from vote splitting decided that she was not gonna run. So what does this look like in the future? We look into our crystal ball courtesy of David Bowie. We have a chapter system and this we can thank due to Chris Raleigh. And again, like it is taking this kind of step back. It really is amazing. And really for me, really proud of what we've been able to do, not just with Fargo and with St. Louis, but with this chapter system and moving forward with such a small staff. I mean, you saw in 2018, like there were two other staff. And in the beginning of this year, there was a third other staff. And then we also brought in a contractor, Andrea Denault, who was in the picture among the tall people. She was the tallest right behind me. She did a lot of the campaign work on the ground in Fargo. And she's also continued to work with us now, but not a lot of people, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of intelligence, a lot of strategy. And really that's what it's taken to be able to allow this and as well as the resources necessary. But as you can see from all these little Google maps, little indicators, we've got folks all over now. These are all places where folks are indicating that they want to be part of a chapter. And so we are all over the place. And so what are chapters? So the chapters are self-organizing groups. They are independent of CES and they are all over the place. They can be representing cities, states, metro areas, we are meeting virtually. This is a second nature to us already. We're used to meeting virtually all the time. We've always been a virtual organization. We've embraced it. So this whole pandemic thing has slowed us down, probably the least among many organizations out there. Like we took it pretty well and stride as well as one could. And these organizations, they do key parts, like identifying and working alongside us, identifying the legal components. You've got 50 different state laws. Some places don't let you do balance, some places do. Some states don't allow cities to change their voting method because we have weird complicated rules like home rule, don't rule. And then on top of that, if you're talking about a city, some other state law may prohibit a city from doing voting in a way that doesn't agree with some kind of state statute. And so you got to research that for all the states or at least all the states that you are interested in having cities run initiatives. And to do that, it takes some legal research. So you're up with some of that legal research. When you're doing some of the state stuff that have ballot initiatives, it's not quite as bad because you're changing the state law when you're doing the state level ballot initiatives. So the legal research isn't quite as relevant there, although it still be useful in other concerns. But of course the state initiatives are much more expensive because they require many more signatures and you have a lot more people that you have to reach out to. The other component is polling. So we saw like for instance, and we can learn from others. So for example, if you're in Massachusetts, you may have seen that the RCB initiative did not pass. But when you look at some of the polling, it looks like it never really looked quite very good to begin with. And so as a data oriented organization, we look at those types of things more seriously. And so we look at polling to inform our strategy and to figure out where we wanna prioritize. And then with the polling legal answers, following that it can make much more sense for an organization to go ahead and do more formal steps of incorporating and then moving along closer to going ahead and initiating that campaign. And so we work with chapters to help them do all that and go through all that stuff, to go through all those steps. But in addition to resources, well, I'll go to the other part of the moment. And joining a chapter is very easy. As you saw earlier, our website looks really cool now as opposed to perhaps what it looked like in the past. And so you just go and click that join the chapter program. We've got a whole chapter page and it's really easy to join on. We group chapters by time zone. It's very fun to get to meet all kinds of cool people who are interested in moving their democracy forward. The other incentive for organizing and running chapters, so we also provide funding using request for proposals program. And that provides the funding for being able to do these other activities as well as being able to support and provide some of these technical resources and knowledge for being able to address those initial hurdles. And as we can see, we've got a number of proposals from places all over, including Seattle, Utah, all these awesome places that you can see in front of you. And that's just right now. Like, this is the first time that we've done this and we've already got a bunch of really cool prospects. And there are some others that aren't listed on here that are also pretty exciting for us. And so like the basically the way that we do this is like we require funding, running balance issues and having the infrastructure to support this is very expensive. If we look at other organizations and this is kind of a fun kind of way of framing it, when we look at other organizations that work in this field, say like looking at ranked choice voting and we look at their budgets, their budgets really push the 5 million annually mark. And there are multiple organizations that push almost exclusively ranked choice voting that have budgets of that size. And so it really is expensive to do this and like for us to be doing what we are at a budget right now of about a million a year speaks to what our abilities are and the ability for us to be able to leverage the resources that we do have. And so using these resources to run these resources chapters, provide them the necessary support that they need and going through and helping to do it in more cities and also going to end the States. And notice that now like previously both in Fargo and in St. Louis we took more of a say more passive approach in both those cases, they came to us here. It's a little bit of a mix. So folks are reaching out to us but we're providing these resources and are able to more strategically kind of pick who we were able to running to support based on strategy and logistics and resources to be able to go forward. And as maybe another kind of quick note can to show the acceleration of the way that we're going in this election cycle, looking at these ballot issues that passed, the Alaska had just barely passed with its initiative by about a percentage point for a ranked race voting there. And for a while it was down. So actually had Alaska not kind of scraped by with this win, our approval voting would have brought, this would have been the first election cycle where there were more new cities using approval voting than ranked choice voting. Just to kind of, it was very close for that being in the case this particular election cycle to give you an idea of the acceleration that we've done with the limited resources that we have. And we're very proud for moving at the pace that we are. And so that's our history. That's how we've accomplished these wins and this is the strategy that we're using going forward. Thanks. Thank you.