 All right, well, thank you all so much for being here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Caitlin Penya. I am the Director of Operations and Programs for the Center for Election Science. If you're new to the Center for Election Science, we're a non-partisan nonprofit and we're dedicated to empowering people with better voting methods. So the voting method that we mainly advocate for is approval voting. It is super simple. Basically, it just allows you to vote for as many candidates as you like on your ballot. The votes are tallied up and the candidate with the most votes wins. So essentially, instead of being forced to choose just one candidate on your ballot for a particular race, you can choose as many as you like. And so we have multiple people from across the country here today to talk to you about their campaigns that either successfully got approval voting implemented or the campaigns that they're starting up to hopefully get approval voting in a new place. And we're gonna talk about how that intersects with voting rights, right? So these days, we're hearing a lot about voting rights, voter suppression. There's voter ID laws that folks are arguing over. We've got automatic voter registration, vote by mail, lots of different reforms that people are putting forward to try to influence the way that folks vote, influence who gets to vote, who doesn't get to vote, whose voices are heard. But something that often gets left out of that, right, is voting methods. We know that choose one voting the way that we vote now, it really does silence a lot of voters. It leaves them out of the process or when they do vote, their votes really aren't heard, they aren't counted into the system in the way that they should be. And so this is something that we have been trying to raise awareness of is the fact that the way that we vote our voting methods truly are a voting rights issue. So that's what we're gonna be touching on today. We've got six different, or five different activists from across the country who are here to share their thoughts with you. We've got folks from Fargo, North Dakota, St. Louis, Missouri, and Fort Worth, Texas. So it'll be interesting to hear how approval voting could be a benefit in all of these different locations. So I'm gonna start out, I will introduce you to all of our panelists. I'll ask that if you have any questions, feel free to write those in the chat. I'll try to save 10 to 15 minutes at the end of the event to go through and poll some of your audience questions for our panelists. Try to write question in all caps at the beginning just so that it's easier for me when I'm skimming through. But other than that, I will launch right in, start introducing folks for you all. So first off, we've got Andrea Denult. If any of you are familiar with CES, you might recognize Andrea. I'm gonna spotlight her here so that everybody can see her. She is our National Campaigns and Advocacy Coordinator for CES. In 2018, she organized Fargo's campaign to adopt approval voting, and they became the first city in the U.S. to employ approval voting. Her current role with CES is to grow national chapters and advise organizers on strategy, secure more wins nationwide. Her background is in market research, human rights, and legislative advocacy, with an emphasis on indigenous causes. She is, and I'm sorry if I mispronounced this, Andrea, I've heard you say it multiple times, but she's an Anishinaabe, right? Anishinaabe, yes. Anishinaabe, descendant of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Then we've also got Joan Hubbard on the line with us today too. She has been a real estate broker, engaged in residential, commercial, and institutional sales for over 20 years. She holds an MBA from Lindenwood University and a bachelor's degree in business administration from St. Louis University. Joan is a member of the League of Women Voters, a Metro St. Louis, and she was an active member of the coalition that brought approval voting to St. Louis in 2020. So so glad to have you on the line with us, Joan. And now we'll go to her compatriot in St. Louis, Kathleen Ferrell. She's a proud resident of St. Louis City. She served as co-president of the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis from 2011 to 2017, and she's currently the leader of the St. Louis City League. She was also a core member of the successful approval voting valid initiative that resulted in the election of a mayor and older persons with a majority vote in April, 2021. She's currently involved in the Reform St. Louis Valid Initiative campaign as well. So thank you for being here, Kathleen. And then I would also love to welcome Tisa Legget. She is a former Fort Worth City Council candidate, and she's also the Vice President of Advocacy for the North Texas Commission. She graduated from the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism with a degree in Journalism and holds a Masters of Science degree with a focus on sustainability from the University of Texas at Arlington. She was recognized as a 40 under 40 by the Fort Worth Business Press and appointed to the Blue Ribbon Citizens Committee established by the Tarrant County Commissioners Court to review the future needs of the JPS Health Network. She was also recognized as a future leader by the Fort Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Fort Worth Black Chamber of Commerce. So happy to have you with us, Tisa. Thank you. And I'm former at North Texas Commission Vice President of Advocacy. I'll just name that, that's on me for sure. Gotcha. Okay. All right, and then we've got, last but not least, Wesley Kirk. He's also from Fort Worth. He is a photographer, filmmaker and community organizer born and raised in Fort Worth. He runs a voter education resource, which we'll be talking about called Vote Fort Worth, which works to make elections and voter information more accessible. He's also laying the groundwork to bring approval voting to Fort Worth. So thank you so much, Wesley. So happy to have you. Thank you. Oh, thanks for having me. Okay. And so with that, we will get started. We are going to start out here with Andrea in Fargo. So Andrea, two years ago, you were, well, I guess almost three years ago now, you were one of the leaders of the campaign that brought approval voting to its first US city, Fargo, North Dakota. So can you just tell us a bit about what prompted that initiative for approval voting in Fargo? What issues were facing the city? Why were people so clamoring for approval voting there? Sure. First of all, I just want to preface this by saying I chose a terrible day to have a spontaneous phone call with a North Dakota historian. And so you're going to have to babysit me. How much time do I have because I'm very afraid that I will take some time away from the matriarchs on the line with St. Louis as well as the rabble-rousers of Texas. All right, we've got 10 to 15 minutes for you, Andrea. Oh wow, double what I was thinking. Okay. 10 minutes. We'll go with 10 minutes. Thank you. Yeah, so mathematically speaking, Fargo was a city that had some very obvious vote splitting in the Fargo City Commission. There were, I believe, around eight candidates who were running for the same seat. And in looking at the results, it really kind of looked basically like an eight-way tie. And so people were winning with really just sort of like abysmally low numbers. And so after that, the city commission decided to appoint a task force in Fargo to come up with some sort of a solution to this vote splitting issue because people were winning with like 16, 17% of the vote and it didn't really give the community a lot of confidence that the people who were winning were actually like the true preference of the electorate. So this task force was formed and they looked at a lot of different options. You know, rank choice voting was considered. Moving to award system was considered. All kinds of ideas were brought into the table. And then anyone who's been following CES as a die-hard will know about the notorious Jed Limke. He was the like sort of engineer mathematician on that task force who was able to really just sort of focus on, you know, just pure numbers. And in his research, came across the Center for Election Science, learned about approval voting and was completely undeterred by the fact that it had never been done before, really in an American election, you know, at any level. Just because for him, you know, he just understood the numbers really clearly and the mechanics of how it was, you know, the most fair voting method he found in his research. So he brought the recommendation of this task force to the city commission hoping that they would actually pass it because the city commission, they're the ones who appointed this task force, but they, you know, they punted and they punted and they tabled the vote until Jed, out of his own stubbornness and tenacity, decided that after a year or so that we would turn it into a ballot initiative. And so at that point, you know, once it was sort of like, you know, a movement to bring a lot of people into getting this passed, that was sort of where I came in. And I'm not a mathematician or an engineer. And so I'm much more interested in telling the story of Fargo, not from a mathematical perspective, but the actual, you know, the juice, you know, what really happened there politically, that galvanized so many people. And I'll say something, you know, that might sound a little bit loaded, but I'll bring it all back, so I don't wanna scare anyone. But there's one particular commissioner with the city of Fargo who in lockstep with the Trump administration at the time had been lobbying to ban refugee resettlements. In Fargo, and North Dakota actually has one of the highest refugee settlement per capita populations in anywhere else in the country. So, you know, it makes up a large part of our community, a large part of our economy. And when that particular commissioner was trying to ban any more refugee resettlement, it created a huge stir in the community and throughout the state. So much so that there was a recall petition going around. They ended up not going through with the recall just because the activists who were working on that found out that if anyone were to have signed that petition, who wasn't a full US citizen, it would have been a deportable offense. And so they pulled the plug on this recall effort. But a lot of the folks who worked on that were a lot of the people who sort of made their way over to volunteering for approval voting. And I wanna be very careful about that bit of the history because that wasn't necessarily the only thing that motivated people in favor of approval voting. We definitely had broad support. The ballot ended up, or the measure ended up passing with almost a two to one ratio. We won in every single precinct in the city. So we certainly weren't campaigning on demonizing any one particular commissioner. But we also weren't campaigning on, this is bad math. Like it wasn't a math justice movement either. It was a movement to just make sure that whoever it is that lives here is being accurately represented and historically, the numbers that we were seeing gave people no confidence to believe that that would be true. And so the other thing that I think is important for folks to understand about North Dakota is that anyone who lives in like larger metropolitan areas throughout the US probably either doesn't think of North Dakota ever. I know that I'll have conversations with people where I talk about being from North Dakota and five seconds later, they're asking me questions about South Dakota, we're not on the radar of anyone. But there's a really interesting and unique history here for being the first to try something. So, and this is where me talking to a historian an hour ago, it's gonna, you got a babysit me, I'm telling you. But North Dakota about a hundred years ago formed something called the nonpartisan league where they started these entities that still exist to this day. So a state-owned bank, a state-owned elevator and mill and these are actually entities that are still successful and actually have led to the stabilization of our economy for a hundred years. What's interesting is that when you're looking at partisan maps, you'll also see North Dakota is deep red state, right? We're in Trump country. And I think a lot of, a lot of the other approval voting activists were people who knew the reality of our state's history. And the reality is that we have not always been so deep red or so deeply conservative. We have been very much like a united people who we might disagree on some, I guess idealistic issues, but we've historically been really good at agreeing on problems and fixing those problems. And so yeah, we have had years where all of our representatives in Congress were Democrats with a background of like an all Republican legislature. And oh, the other thing that's unique about North Dakota, there's no voter registration here. And so what that sort of means is that people don't ever like to publicly affiliate with a party if they don't have to. A lot of folks in North Dakota are very proud independence, right? And when you look at the history, that actually really shows this ability to sort of like for folks to think for themselves and really make decisions based on policy rather than like a group identity. Yeah, and so in Fargo specifically, and we will have to wrap up here in a couple of minutes, like how do you, when you started running the campaign for approval voting, how did you see it, see those ideological differences playing into the way that approval voting, like the dynamics that approval voting would bring and how that might connect to the idea of voting rights and making sure that everybody's voices are heard. Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of where it comes, just down to the simple math, right? Yeah. One thing that the task force didn't want to do was limit how many candidates could run. They decided it's great, right? If a ton of people want to run for office, let them. We don't want to eliminate the amount of choices that we have. But what we do want is some way to like actually accurately measure every candidate's support in the community and approval voting was the best way to do that. Did that answer the question or did I get lost again? No, I think you answered the question. Yeah, I think one important piece there in Fargo was that, and you touched on this but just want to kind of reiterate it is that candidates were winning with such a small percentage of the vote and then other candidates who had similar platforms or may have had kind of similar ideologies were losing despite having more overall support, right? And so from a voter perspective, that's really, it's as if their voices are being ignored that what they want is not actually factoring in, right? Yeah, and just real quick, I'm glad you brought that up because when I started to, during the campaign I interviewed a lot of like candidates and former commissioners from years and decades past. And a lot of them basically confided. It wasn't a big secret, but they did say that they would get together with folks who did share the general political ideology and amongst themselves they would decide who of us is going to run because they knew clearly that if they all ran, they'd probably all lose. And when both splitting started to get really bad in Fargo it was because those candidates stopped doing that. And I'm glad they did, right? Because I don't want people in sort of back room conversations independently deciding who of us should run when realistically they're all a little bit different and something that might look like a nuanced difference to one voter might mean all the difference in the world to another voter. And so one thing that's in my mind incredibly important with approval voting is sort of like disrupting the idea that groups of people are monolithic. So whether that's the party that you belong to, the race or ethnicity that you belong to these are just arbitrary constructs when we think of these groups as monolithic or interchangeable, if that were true what would be the point of having elections anyway, right? Yeah. Every election is predicated on this sort of promise that the next person is gonna bring something new and interesting and tasty for voters. And so, yeah, I think that approval voting really opens the door to just a much larger array of ideas and that it really forces candidates to campaign on policy rather than a group that they belong to. Absolutely, and I know that's something that Tisa and I were talking the other day and that was something that she was mentioning and I'm sure she'll talk about it and she gets a chance to speak about the fact that issues should be the most important thing, right? It shouldn't matter. The political party, whether you're from a mainstream party or a third party or you come into the race earlier come into the race late, the most important thing should be the issues. But so often that gets swept under the rug, unfortunately. Well, there's so much more that we could ask and talk about about Bargo but we'll have to move on here to St. Louis to chat with Joan and Kathleen, the two legal women voters, legal women voters members in St. Louis. So the two of you as members of St. Louis, Lee, you've worked on a lot of voting rights and enfranchisement issues within the city, I know. So Joan, could you fill us in on why the league thought that approval voting was an issue that you all should get behind? Why did you join in that coalition in 2020? Well, I am going to, first of all, hello to everyone. I am going to defer to Kathleen for the details but let me just start by saying my interest because I am a fairly new member to the league and I've been interested in voting and in St. Louis, we had a situation where we have a situation where everyone pretty much belongs to one party and so we had a situation where we had seven or eight people running for office out of the same party. So we wound up with both splitting, all kinds of people were asked to drop out because we knew that they could not win but the worst thing in the world I have found is the ego. That ego tells you that you can win this and everyone else is telling you that you cannot. So we needed a way to allow for people to have the opportunity to have their space in the sun and then get us to a point where we could get a level of voting that made sense. We were trying to get almost 50% of the vote for our mayor, for instance. And we couldn't get that because we had like eight or nine people all sharing the votes. And if they're all from the same party, you know, they all have the same issue. So my interest was in doing something to improve the opportunities for voting in St. Louis. And so I said, approval voting? Oh, okay. Well, I can try it. And so I started working with Kathleen. And so here we are. We, you know, passed our petitions. We wrote postcards to get it on the ballot. And so we did and we were successful. With that said, I'm going to share my time with Kathleen because she has the detail. She is the head honcho of this activity. Thank you so much, Joan. Yeah, Kathleen, feel free to share. What do you think about why, why did the league, you know, you're known for supporting voting rights, voting and voter enfranchisement. Why did you think that approval voting was such an important reform for St. Louis? Well, first of all, I want to say, you know, for those of you who are not familiar with the League of Women Voters, can everybody hear me? But they're different kinds of leagues. Some are quite cautious about getting into the prey of things and ours does not happen to be one of those. We have been in court to stop photo voter ID since the beginning and we still have been successful so that you don't have to show your driver's license to vote in the state of Missouri. That's amazing given what's going on. So we're known as being rabble routers. And for those of us, for those of you who don't know St. Louis and I will say, I have been to North Dakota. One of my sisters lives in Dickinson. So I've been there a number of times and know it's not South Dakota. And the rest of my family lives in Fort Worth. We're a very different kind of city. We're a very poor city. We're extremely divided city, racially, ideologically. And we're living in a state that hates our guts. So us in Kansas City and then it's the rest of Missouri if you were following the news. So we had a situation where our split politically and our both splitting as Joan so eloquently described it is not only a long racial line, but also the splits within those racial lines. So we have all kinds of machines. And we have, so we have in the Democratic Party which has about 80% of the voters. I mean, the struggle here is between the traditional old school Democrats. And just to let you know, we do not have a professional board of older persons. I think Caitlin and Andrea have observed them attacking us in person. They don't even have staff to help them do research. It is an old school ward politics to where you call your older person to get your trash taken out, okay? So that's the kind of government that we have. Who you know depends on what you get. So the split is between the young progressives who are coming up through the party ranks with different ideas and wanting to make things very different. And in my case, I think much better. And the old school who has then combined with some of the traditional black politicians who don't wanna change anything. And other politicians of color who want to be more progressive. I just wanted to give you the context of what we have. We're at a crossroads and we did not have leadership and our leadership didn't have a mandate. And for the last 15 years, we have elected a mayor in St. Louis who has less than 40% of the vote. And in the last election, we elected a mayor with close to 30% of the vote, okay? And that's what you get with all this vote splitting as Joan talked about and also Andrea talked about. So you don't have anybody who has a mandate. You end up with a mayor that nobody is happy with and you end up with candidates of color who were fighting among each other just so you could run. And therefore you did not get a black mayor when we should have had one, okay? Now, this also happened at the Aldermanic level. We had where you would have older persons elected with close to 20% of the votes sometimes. Because if you had 50 or 60 people, I mean, excuse me, five or six people running, you can imagine what it was like. The way our election system is structured, we have a March primary, okay? We have lots of elections here. We have March primary and that's the election. That's the election. Whoever wins the Democratic primary and then runs against the Republican candidate who maybe had 600 votes in an election for a city of 300 plus thousand. And a couple of maybe of independent candidates and that was that. So we were having a general election with about 10% of the population showing up because it was already decided. So the league of course knows that you've got to have a mandate from the people and you also have to have a system where different points of view. So when a group of young folks came to us and we had a citizen initiated petition drive here, it really did come from a grassroots effort who then turned to the Center for Election Science for assistance and said, will you join us? We researched all the voting methods. We found out, as Joan said, that approval voting was, we thought the best system for us and we said we're all in. And we were the major partner. What we have ended up with, and so we had a pretty quick campaign and it's tough to run a campaign in a pandemic. I'll tell you that. But we were on the November ballot. We won by close to 70% of the votes. And what was interesting was that across the wards and the wards, we have a very segregated city. We won most of the wards even when the politician there was opposing us because we were also talking about them, who got elected with 22% of the votes. And there's a lot of wheeling and dealing in the city. We don't have a conflict of interest policy so you can well imagine what goes on. Nobody is happy, nobody had confidence. Okay. At the very end of the campaign in November, all of a sudden the status quo figured out that we were for real. We were sort of sailing along and we had great polling, which the center helped with. And we thought that we were going to win but all of a sudden about two or three weeks before the election, the people who were seated in positions of power figured out, I don't know why it took them so long that we were rolling and they came out hugely against us. And it was a vicious and unpleasant fight. We ended up having a number of candidates on the board of Alderman who hadn't had a chance before and several of them got elected because their voices were heard and the top two candidates from the election in March then went on to have a runoff in the April election. We had serious races. And out of that, we put four new people on the board of Alder persons who were excellent people. And we elected a mayor to Sharad Jones who's got a lot of national attention if you've seen her. And she won clearly and she won across the city which I also thought was very interesting. And we have a mandate. Now we have all kinds of problems but we are moving forward and now we're working on the board of Alder persons. The league was all in and I just cannot tell you we logged thousands of hours, et cetera, et cetera. This was probably the biggest local project we've ever done, right, Joan? Yeah, that's about it. And everybody was on the same page which is we needed to make democracy work. And we wanted to hear from candidates across the spectrum and we wanted our mayor to have a mandate to lead. And so that's why we were all in. And I will also tell you particularly those of you who are working on the Fort Worth and I think Andrea's great work in Fargo will also demonstrate this. You need to look around and see about who can be your ally. And sometimes that's surprising, okay? Because lots of people don't have confidence in their governments. Lots of people don't think that their city is going in the right direction. And if I look at Fort Worth and we can talk about this later, I see Fort Worth as the staunch Republican place but it's changing. It's changing a lot, it's getting purple. And not only that, you've got progressives, you've got independence and you've got moderate Republicans who are now Hongkai, excuse the metaphor but the Texas one, right? Hongkai by their own party now. And I think that that's why you're ripe to win. I can tell you that through this campaign, we energized all kinds of people who had not been involved in politics before. And in the League of Women Voters which you think is a bunch of old white ladies like me who just do safe voter registration at public libraries. I cannot tell you the increase of members from communities of color and young people, young activists who saw us as allies, who joined our ranks and now we're working on all kinds of other things as well. It's just a very important thing. And when you're depressed about everything in your country and your state and I know that people on this call are experiencing that, you can start in your own backyard and make a real difference. And I think that's all I've got to say, Joan, did I forget anything? Well, I would just like to add that the engagement of the League of Women Voters in Prop D spoke to the community as their willingness to try something different. We all knew, everyone knew that what we had was not working. And so how do you try something different? So the League stepped up, joined us with this organization and we got out and promoted Prop D and we were looked at very favorably by the community. Okay, let's try, why not? That's a great point. And I think a lot of people when they see that the League has endorsed something that helps lend credibility, right? Because it's an established institution, it's something that people trust. So it's really fabulous that we had your backing there. And I think that Kathleen, your point about this being something, it's, we're talking a little bit about Democrats or progressives or this or that party, but it really isn't about any specific party, right? Approval voting, the main point of approval voting is whatever the consensus of that community is, that is what should come out of it. So if you've got more Republicans, if you've got more Democrats, if you've got more people right in the middle, whatever it is, it's going to help find the consensus of what the most people want. So you really get a result where everybody's thoughts and opinions are factored in and candidates aren't able to just kind of focus on one tiny slice of the electorate, which is what they do so often now. Yeah, it is about the issue. That's what we say to people, it's about the issue. And so we hope you will join us in this effort. Awesome, thank you so much. Well, I would like to make sure we have time for both Tisa and Wesley. So Tisa, you just recently ran for city council and Fort Worth district six this past summer. So can you, as a candidate, can you tell us what that experience was like? Obviously you were a candidate under our normal choose one system, right? So how do you think that the way that the election went, how do you think that our current voting method affected the dynamics there? Sure, I was saying, amen, amen, amen, amen. Throughout the last presentation, I think for me, there was the feedback of was I spending the vote district six, we had two African-American candidates and one Anglo who was, who identified with the Republican party in Texas and Fort Worth, Texas. We have a nonpartisan city council race though. It is nonpartisan. However, people do look at your voting record and try to figure out what side of the fence you're on and there's argument on whether you should be able to identify. I did steer clear of it because of my background, I'm able to kind of be in any type of space and I use that to my advantage. So that way I could approach voters on either side of the aisle. There was dialogue in the beginning about whether I was in direct conflict with the other candidate who filed first in July. I love that feedback of the split with young progressives and old school who have combined with black politicians. That's exactly what happened here. And there was feedback that, hey Tisa, why are you coming in the race later? Because I didn't file until February and the other candidate filed in July and we were trying to defeat a 16 year incumbent. The reason why I got into the race because I'm smarter, I knew what I was doing and felt very confident that we needed to have options. I did not want to vote out of obligation. I am a student of public policy and public affairs and I do not believe that you should just vote for somebody just so you can get rid of someone else. Because here was the trick in and all, the incumbent 16 years experience answers his calls. He makes sure that our streets look pretty decent. He's not a bad counselor. What happened was the district that I reside in for over 16 years, as long as he's been in office, I've lived here, I have family that live here, that the demographics changed and our needs changed in areas that he had different opinion about how to approach and how to take care of it. As I grew up, I felt like, okay, there was a candidate that I thought that could defeat him who did not. And I've seen people go against him and they'll just be within very close parameters but not defeat him. And I knew in order to really put forth a good brightness race, it had to be viable candidates and get people choices and had to pull from his base. There was no just going after a more of a progressive vote. It was really offensive to me because I saw that people assumed that because I was African-American, that I was the same as my counterpart who looks like, I mean by skin tone. And it's like, well, no, we might have the same ideologies for our social justice issues, but clearly my over 15 years experience in public policy and public affairs should be taken into account. I think if I had an opportunity to have approval voting, I think that the race would have looked very different. I was approached and was told, hey, just take a step back and let him allow him to shine. What made people think I was gonna vote for him? I think it's just so many assumptions that better made because it was a non-partisan race. So if I was going after looking to who would take care of my interests instead of me talking ill of my neighbors, as I call them. I hate calling my opponents, we're neighbors. We were into each other program all the time. So I'm not gonna say anything that I feel would hurt my fellow members. They're both good gentlemen, but we were able to beat that incumbent. When I say we, I brought a spark and interest into district six. We had the highest voter turnout. People think it's because the now current councilman who did ultimately defeat the incumbent in the runoff thinks because he started earlier. No, it's because I got in the race. It is because I show that there's people who want to vote because of something they believe in. But I was able to take a step back and I encouraged my brothers to vote for him. He only won by a hundred votes. That's it. So in the runoff, it was very slight. The argument then became, well, if you were to stay down in the first place, he would have defeated the incumbent. That is false. My neighbors were going to vote for the incumbent. I brought a different perspective and were able to bring my neighbors over to the other side. It worked to vote for the now current councilman. So I would say that my story is a tough one. The flag was difficult. It came mostly from the part that I identified with. It was not from the one that I built. And that was very heartbreaking because my policies and my ideas for increased broadband connectivity was, and the light as you see nationally here reflected was kind of overshadowed due to more of a personality versus a positive type of thing. When the feedback is, oh, he's a good looking guy. You know, I can't beat that. So I would, well, I would say he is a smart gentleman and I wish him the best of luck. But if I were to say he was the best candidate it wasn't, if I would have had a better chance under public voting, yes. Because I was able to pull the incumbent voters as well as a more progressive, which I identified with. And now with that out, Linda, you guys see what your thoughts are. And sorry, Wes, I just, I want to highlight really, just really quick. That's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that, Tisa. But I think what you were talking about with the kind of the infighting within a specific ideology, right? And we see that all the time. You see it on the left, you see it on the right. And as Andrea mentioned, you know, she was talking about how candidates a lot of times have to come together and say, okay, which of us is running this year in order to try to avoid that and avoiding the mudslinging at one another so that they can come out on top. And it's really unfortunate. It does a disservice to the candidates themselves because like you said, people shouldn't assume that just because of the color of your skin or even your political party that you are exactly the same as that other candidate. And then it does a disservice to the voters because there legitimately might be multiple candidates that they really like and support and they're not able to do that. And it sounds like, you know, we at CES, I just, as a disclaimer, I have to say, you know, we don't support any political party, any candidate. So this is not, this is not an endorsement of Tisa. I don't, you know, I don't know anything about her politically, but just based on what you're saying, it sounds like you could have potentially been that consensus candidate where you could have brought people together from both sides. Whereas our current system doesn't do that. It polarizes us even more. Agreed. I think you said it beautifully. I think that the over 1200 voters that voted for me, which I am super thrilled about, we had the highest voter turnout in my district in the city, which was a very contentious mayoral race. So, you know, I think the people voting is fantastic. And I hope that we're able to bring that to forward. I'm actually very interested after hearing from all of the panelists. Awesome. Well, yeah, Wesley, so, you know, we've heard from Tisa as a candidate and how she experienced elections. I know that you recently start, well, not recently, in the past few years, started Vote Fort Worth. And so what brought that up? What issues were you seeing that made you feel like you needed to start this organization? Yeah, before I answer that, I just want to back up what Tisa said. Like, she did what should be the right thing. Like having more candidates run, especially for the right reasons and running such an issue-based campaign, that's what benefits everyone, but the people trying to convince her to drop out and let the other person have it, they were acting, making rational choices too, because the fear of vote splitting is real. So everyone was acting in their own best interest, but it's the system itself that's broken. And that's where the root of the problem is. But yeah, so I founded Vote Fort Worth last summer because we had a very important vote coming up for the CCPD, which was basically a billion dollar slush fund for the police for 10 years. And almost no one knew that the election was even coming up or understood the implications of it. And so a friend and I founded Vote Fort Worth to sort of inform people about that. And then, especially when it came to the municipal election, we had a record number of candidates run. We had, I believe, 79 candidates running for 10 races. And so right away, you can see like the vote splitting was gonna be out of control. And also just finding info about these candidates was gonna be really difficult. So that was the goal with why we started Vote Fort Worth and sort of what we do. But looking at like the bigger picture, the root causes, like, so Tiesa did say like we had record turnout, but record turnout for Fort Worth, that was 14% of voters showing up to vote. And even though Fort Worth has a population of almost a million, less than half were registered to vote. So it's just abysmal numbers. And I think a big reason for that is because voters are so demoralized by our choices and who ends up winning. Like the city has a very serious, like existential crisis of an identity crisis because the city is so thoroughly divided. There's the old, the rich, the white and the rural people who use that to divide everyone else and they get to hold on to their power and everyone else suffers and everyone else sees that even when they do vote, they're not feeling like their voice is heard. And I used to be a big fan of rank choice voting and I thought that was the solution. And then as soon as I learned about approval voting, I realized that the solutions I thought rank choice voting was fixing, approval voting fixes better because with rank choice, you still have vote splitting, you have a strategic voting, but it just gets like, it adds layers and layers of complexity. Whereas with approval voting, it's simple to understand, it's simple to implement. And the most important part for Fort Worth is it truly addresses divisiveness. It requires consensus. And one of the great things about it too is that the results are so easy to understand. It almost acts as a survey of the city. So the more a candidate runs on specific issues, the more whoever ends up winning can see how much those issues have support in their city. And so, even if a candidate loses, but they have a lot of votes for them and they run on an issue, that tells whoever wins. Like, I need to take this seriously because this percentage of my constituents believe in this. And so it really matters. And so I think that Fort Worth really just acts as a microcosm of the greater problems in Texas. The city, the state is also incredibly divided. And I think that's why voting rights are such an issue is that Texas is not a red state by any means. Texas is a non-voting state. Texas is a voter suppression state. And the new SB1 that the Texas Congress passed recently is proof of that, that they can feel their grip slipping. And the only way they can win is by divisiveness, is by limiting the voice of the people. And so the best way we can fix those issues is making the people's true feelings about how they wanna be represented more accurately shown in how they elect candidates. No, that's excellent. That is, yeah, that's spot on. And that was, I wanted to ask each of you, but Tisa and Wesley, just about the overall climate in Texas when it comes to voting and voter suppression. Like, I don't know that this is precisely true, but I've heard that, you know, Texas, it's one of the most difficult places to vote, right? So any thoughts on that? Like, what does the voter turnout look like there? How do people feel about, you know, their government and who gets elected? Yep, so if you think of like any voter suppression tool, it is almost assuredly in place in Texas. And a lot of them originated in Texas. In fact, the voter ID laws originated from Fort Worth. One person voted twice in Fort Worth. And while Greg Abbott was attorney general, he passed voter ID laws, and then it caught on like wildfire across the state. And I think they know that like, so in a normal municipal election in Fort Worth, voter turnout is 10%. And then in a runoff, the average turnout is just 3%. And remember, that's only a registered voter. So that's 3% of that 42% of the 12th largest city in the country. And, you know, with Texas as well, like we're either the very bottom or like in the bottom five of voter turnout because people are so demoralized by their choices and by who ends up winning. Tissa, do you have anything to add? You know what, Les? I think you hit the nail on the head. And what's funny was that voter choice is from how it's party. You know, I think, I don't know, but I think for Houston, I think since the 24 hour, the longer period you can go vote with such a big hit, and I think it was Harris County, correct me if I'm wrong, that had the benefit of longer hours to go vote. And drive through voting, yeah. Correct, drive through voting as well, correct. Thank you, Leslie. I think the elimination of that is gonna hurt them especially hard. And that was something we could absolutely have implemented here in Tarrant County or Fort Worth as well. I think that the overall, for me personally, I can say that my family was part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I'll talk to you about that. Caitlin being approved, you know, my great grandmother, March of Darker King in St. Augustine, Florida, where you saw the pictures of the kids in the pool and the lodge owner pouring the acid on them as they're jumping out. The photographer takes a picture and gets to LBJ and or to the President's office and then, you know, the Civil Rights Act came, Voting Rights Act came, you know, sooner after that. So for me, it's very hurtful because none of these laws are to make it simpler. They're only to make it more difficult. And you would think in the time that we're in, how do we make it easier for one another to have our voices heard? Why is it this terminology called election integrity when it really deters people from coming in and to vote, to not be able to offer water? I mean, that was on the table at one point that you couldn't give people water if they're wet in the line in over a hundred degree temperatures in a pandemic. I mean, that's just main, you know? So I think for me, it's firing me up even more. So to partner with organizations and other groups to get more people out to vote, as far as getting, you don't have to have a driver's license. You have to be state issued, right? So you can get an ID card and that's it. And that will help you to go vote. So we have to just encourage our older adults that don't have driver's license anymore to get that ID card so they can go vote in person. It's very disheartening. Liz, I liked that you touched on the idea of it needing to be simple, right? For people to vote. I think all of us are, you know, nobody wants elections to be insecure for, you know, there to be voter fraud, anything like that. We all want our elections to be protected and to have integrity. But at the same time, in order for our elections to truly mean something and to truly have integrity, that means that as many voters as possible need to be able to vote. And when they go vote, that what they put on their ballot has to be meaningful. It has to translate into a result that actually represents them, right? And so that's why I think all of these ideas come together and need to be talked about together. Andrea, you might want to touch on this, but I know you've mentioned like campaign finance reform, right? So can you just very quickly, because we are actually over time right now, just talk about your idea about campaign financial reform and how that connects with like approval voting. Yeah, so, you know, if the dream of approval voting is realized, one of the side effects of that, ideally it will be that you've got way more people running for office from non-traditional backgrounds, whether that means, you know, they're just not part of the establishment, they don't have traditional education backgrounds, they're just super young or super old or, you know, whatever it is. We just, we want all types of people to be running. And so campaign finance reform is actually like one thing that has helped that, you know, bring more variety of candidates to the table, but based on some conversations I've been having recently about cities that have implemented campaign finance reform without actually reforming the voting method is that it did its job in terms of making it possible for like younger people and political outsiders, those who don't have a lot of resources to run, but when you're still using the traditional voting method first pass the post, that meant that you were increasing the pool and also increasing vote splitting. So I think that the two work really well in tandem with each other. And, you know, up until I was having these conversations in the last few months, it hadn't even occurred to me that that would be an unintended consequence of campaign finance reform. So as much as I love the idea, it really crystallized the fact that we should really be working together on these two issues. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that probably goes for many other voter enfranchisement issues, right? Because you can, if we have approval voting, but hardly anybody can vote, then we're still gonna be left with poor outcomes. If lots of people can vote or lots of people can run, but we're still using choose one voting, the outcomes are still not gonna be representative. So that's why it is so important, I think for us to talk about all of these as part of the same movement. Well, I wanna thank you guys so much for being here. We're already a little bit over time. I was giving through the chat and I didn't see any questions come through. There was lots of discussion kind of back and forth among participants, but I didn't see anything, any questions for you all specifically. But if I missed something or if anybody in the audience has questions for any of these panelists, feel free to email me with your questions and I would be happy to pass them along. And as you know, we're a nonprofit. We are trying to support campaigns like the one in Fargo, like the one in St. Louis, future ones like the one that Wesley will potentially be running here soon. He's in the midst of putting together a plan and trying to figure out what it might look like in Fort Worth. And we have other organizers across the country, including even in Austin, Wesley's neighbor-ish who want to bring approval voting to their communities. So having support from people on this call from all of you watching is really helpful. If you would like to support our work, you can always donate at electionscience.org slash donate. Always have to get that in there just in case. But we love having events like this and being able to connect with advocates, connect with those of you who come and attend. So thank you so much for being here. And I hope everybody has a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was great. Thank you, Tisa. Thank you, Caitlin. Nice to meet all of you at the amazing panel. Amazing. Thanks. Bye-bye.