 Before I begin, I'd like to state that our organization is non-partisan, but I'm aware of my audience right now So I'm going to be hearing it towards you Centuries ago some people that have long since died have decided on our voting method. We call this chronology and despite advances in mathematics and political science, we've been obedient to this method virtually entirely without questioning it and It's become so pervasive that when we think about what it means to be voting We tend to confuse voting itself with plurality voting are both for one method and so That's sort of the degree that we're talking about So what I want you to start thinking about is should we be questioning our obedience to this Vote for one priority voting method and should we be concerned with alternative methods? so To begin I want you to Understand what I mean when I say a voting method When I say that I mean when voters give an expression of their opinion on a state of candidates And that information is translated to select the winner or winners and right now I'm going to be focusing on voting methods that select only one winner and What does it mean to be a good voting method a good voting method is one that gives an accurate reflection of support For all those candidates and selects the candidate that best represents the electorate Now It's sort of the beginning here with the expression with voting Now with priority voting. We're told to select one candidate That's it and if you're brazen enough to choose more than one candidate, then they fill your ballot away So I want you to think for a minute Is there any way to offer? less information than choosing one candidate Really think about this. Can you give any less information than that? I thought about this for years and I haven't been able to come up with anything So I find it bizarre that When we offer so little information and we put our ballot in the ballot box We expect something magical to happen We expect our voting method to spit out our result that represents us and yet we're dismayed when it doesn't happen The mere fact that we go through the motions of democracy is not good enough That's that's a fantasy So I want you to Think about what if we did other things the same way that we did voting the same way that we approached voting with priority or vote for one method so imagine the scenario where You have a loved one that's missing and so you go down to the police station to follow your missing persons report and they lead you down the hall and They introduce you to a sketch artist and the sketch artist you greet them and they say I want you to tell me the best feature about your loved one and In this in this case we'll say it's we'll say it's your wife and you say my wife. She has this beautiful mouth she has these deep red lips and When she's laughing she bites her tongue in this way. It's amazing And you start to go on but before you get far the The the sketch artist he stopped you he put he puts his hand out. It says That'd be enough Now given the information that you provided How good of a sketch do you think this person is going to come up with? You have a pair of floating lips He's going to be sending a search party out for the Rolling Stones logo He's not going to find your wife and Because our we do this same approach when we do we offer so little information and we expect this amazing result to come out and And we get surprised when it doesn't happen But we don't have to do it this way. There are alternative methods We have methods that allow you to Approve of all the candidates that you like you can rank candidates. You can score candidates So imagine going back to the scenario Where you followed your missing person before and you get out to the sketch artist and we'll have this sketch artist and Body these alternative methods and we'll say that the police department has Inspired that previous sketch artist So the sketch artist would ask okay Well, tell me all the features about your wife that you find pleasant Well, you can start with her mouth But you can go on you can talk about how her dark hair goes past her shoulders her cheekbones her eyelashes and The sketch artist might ask you to rank the features And so you talk about how you love her mouth the most how she has these really sparkling eyes And you like them a second you get the sketch artist could ask you to Score all the features about your wife and here you can get really in depth Your wife may not like you doing this by the way But what you come up with is a detailed assessment of what she looks like you're gonna get a picture of What resembles to be your wife and the search party is going to have a much better Chance finding for this way and looking for that Rolling Stones logo and When we offer expression this way with alternative voting methods I'm surprisingly we get better results and that's a large portion because we offer information Much more information than we do under priority Now there are other ways that priority Distorts our electoral process other than choosing for outcomes Priority is also responsible for having people marginalized and exclude candidates So I want you to go back to a familiar election and 2000. This is when Nader ran and Nader he He wasn't in the debates and that's not Unlike many other many other elections now with with Nader he Didn't have a lot of support, but some people They did support him and among those people was Michael Moore so in 2000 Ralph Nader he sold out Madison Square Garden and he's with 2000 seats That's that's pretty impressive and Michael Moore was there sort of cheering on Nader but So as he was cheering on Nader That that support continued But then Florida happened and in Florida we saw the vote splitting column and so after that They the support for Nader Gwindled and especially dwindled in 2004 when he ran again Because then what happened was that Michael Moore he completely changed his tune and this is someone that is Very aligned with the ideals that the Nader supports. So this should be really surprising for us. I mean from 2002 2004 Michael Moore didn't do a 180 as far as what his ideology was. He didn't change his opinion about taxes He didn't change his opinion about healthcare. He didn't change his opinion about Foreign policy and I'm not here to Detect Michael Moore and a negative light We shouldn't blame him. What we should be blaming here is Pornality voting now Imagine if we could take Michael Moore back in time to 2004 but Have him use approval voting Well, what would have happened then what would his tune have done? Well in 2004 if he was using approval voting well He he likely would have said you should vote for Kerry to avoid Bush winning but if we're using approval voting you can keep going you can choose as many candidates as you want with approval voting so Presumably he actually liked later in 2004. He just didn't want Bush to win So he would have said go ahead and vote for Nader and he would have done it just as enthusiastically as he had done in 2000 now The fact that we We have a voting method that has someone that is completely aligned with the candidate and yet Have them campaign against that candidate. I can't imagine the situation Now with with approval voting if this were to be used now We use Polling a lot to take support for candidates and that's often the way that Debates if the big debate was used to decide who gets in who doesn't so if we're using approval voting Then they're going to get a much more accurate reflection of support And so not just Nader, but all these other voices are going to be able to come into play you can't Exclude or marginalize people that are getting 20-30-40% in polls which they can do under approval voting and what that means is you get much more competition You get much more many more ideas in place Competition is what democracy thrives on and so you can imagine that Alternative voting is really that the miracle grow for democracy For how do you go to be I don't know what probably maybe maybe round up And within the last year I moved from Michigan to DC and Michigan it was a lot like a lot of other places and that They they don't do a very good job at electing independence and third parties. In fact, I looked it up the last person to be elected governor in Michigan was James Gordon James Gordon was elected back in 1841 and and it really shouldn't even count because James Gordon was from the Whig party and Unsurprisingly, we've been using Partality voting this whole time Something else interesting is that 1841 That's also about the time that the telegraph was invented. So that's that's the context That's the extent that we're out of date on this voting method So when I say probably voting is an out-of-date voting method This is the degree that I'm talking about if you saw someone They were using a telegraph machine. You would say hey, we have smartphones now And yet we don't think twice when we walk into the voting booth and we're using this antiquated priority voting method if we saw someone and They were walking down the street with the Walkman. We would say we have iPads and MPP players now And yet we don't think twice when we use priority voting And if we were at a friend's house and they said I need to check my messages And they go to their answering machine with the cassette tape and they go through their messages you would tell them We have voicemail now. You don't have to use that and yet We don't think twice when we use priority voting now We don't have to do this. I mean we have other choices here And like I mentioned with approval voting, they don't have to be difficult approval voting You're just choosing as many candidates as you want. No, so it's wins. The only rule you're changing is that your God doesn't get it So they choose other people. This is this isn't complicated so we don't use Photography, we don't use Walkman and we don't use answering machines that run on cassette tapes and We shouldn't be using an out-of-date priority voting method. It's out of date. We need to move on Now Not everyone I'm sure thinks that we need to move on with something besides I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that you can't express yourselves when you vote I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that certain candidates and ideas are Marginalized and excluded and I'm sure that there are people that love the fact that We're using a century's old And it's no accident that our last president of the United States to be an independent with George Washington Now If you don't like those features about priority voting Then you're going to start to need to care about alternative voting methods a lot This needs to be your issue because without alternative voting methods You're not going anywhere and I also have a Video as well on So just to give you an example Just how simple