 I am Caitlin Peña. I'm the Director of Operations and Programs here at the Center for Election Science. I'll be kind of moderating the event. So if you guys have questions, you can stick them in the group chat. Actually, since it's such a small group, we can probably let you all just unmute yourselves and ask questions aloud, too. But I will just go ahead and hand it all over to Kirsten. But if you do have specific questions that you want to stick in the chat, you can help answer those as well. But yeah, go ahead, Kirsten. Great. Thanks, Caitlin. Well, I'm Kirsten Elliott. I am the Director of Philanthropy here at the Center for Election Science. And I'm noticing some new names. So for those of you who this is your first time joining us, I want to give you a little bit of a rundown on who we are. We are a nonpartisan national nonprofit that is trying to change the way you vote for the better. And in particular, we advocate for an alternative voting method called approval voting. And it allows you to vote for all the candidates that you like and the person with the most votes wins. And why that's really important is we see a lot of vote splitting and spoilers in our current election systems. And that leads to some really unfortunate election outcomes. So that's what we're about. And one thing that we have noticed is that the biggest barrier in getting folks to learn about approval voting is that they just, they haven't heard about it. We can't get it adopted if people haven't heard about it. And one great way to get that in front of people is to write letters to the editor. And we've had some folks who have gotten into The Economist, The New York Times, and big publications like that. So we'd love to empower all of you to be able to do the same thing for approval voting or any of the other causes that you really care about. So this definitely has a lot of applicability no matter what you're interested in. So I'm really pleased to introduce Frank Fallone. I'm gonna give a formal bio really quickly on Frank, but before I do, I just have to say that Frank is a personal connection of mine. He taught my communications law class and undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and he was just a delight. So when I thought we need to have an expert on this, who better than to have Frank because of his experience in the newspaper industry? So very grateful. Thank you, Frank. Happy to be. So Frank, as I mentioned, has been in the newspaper business. He has been in this business since the high school football season of 1974 when he first showed up in the newsroom of the Arkansas Democrat of Little Rock. Since then, he has been a reporter, feature writer, a photographer, columnist, and editor. He is a past president of the Arkansas Press Association and was an adjunct professor of journalism for 25 years at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. He continues in his semi-retirement to write a traffic column for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette to freelance for the newspaper. I have an unstable internet connection. Hopefully you can still hear me and to freelance for other publications. For approximately 20 years, he was the newsroom spokesman and reader contact. Frank lives in North Little Rock, Arkansas, with his wife, Kay, who we all learned as a master gardener tonight. They have three sons, one of whom we learned is in the wine business and five grandchildren who range in age from 10 to 17. That is Frank Fallone. And with that, I am going to kick it over to you, Frank. Oh, thank you, Kirsten. Kirsten, when Kirsten contacted me, she asked me in so many words if I remembered her and I thought to myself before answering, well, I can't remember what yesterday was and I'm struggling with today because anybody who's retired knows that the days all blend together. Not only that, when you can't go anywhere or you choose not to go anywhere and you do so many fewer things than you used to do for the past two months, you really lose track of time and days. And I mean, I know it's getting to be night because it's getting starting to get dark out there. And I think today is Friday. Am I right? It's Wednesday. See, there you go. So Kirsten asked me to talk about letters to the editor. And so I thought I would take an approach in four parts. Four parts because it just kind of worked out that way this morning when I had my fingers on the laptop. And let me tell you what those parts are and then I'll go into them in some more detail. First part is that you should know the publication and its audience. And the second part is you should know your purpose. And the third part is you have to write the thing. And then the fourth part is, well, the fourth part is just a brief note on making sure your letter is accurate. So let's start out with know the publication and its audience. You know, everybody knows that every publication is a little different. I can tell you that every day I read front to back the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, which is Arkansas's largest daily newspaper. And I also read the Wall Street Journal pretty much front to back every single day. And I tend to see myself as a fairly well-informed citizen because I read those two in the newspapers also because I almost never, ever, ever watch cable news television because it makes me crazy. It doesn't matter which one, it makes me crazy. So we know that every publication is different. What a letter that works for the Democrat Gazette might not work for the Wall Street Journal because they have different audiences and they focus on different topics. I also tend to think of, on the other extreme, the Cleveland County Herald of Ryzen, Arkansas. Ryzen is about 50 miles, 60 miles away from downtown Little Rock. The entire population of Cleveland County, Arkansas would fit probably into a high-rise apartment building in a major city and still leave half of the top floors for other people. It is remarkably underpopulated and its people are different than people in other places. And the newspaper there reflects those differences. I think a good example is if you read the Rolling Stone, if you read Rolling Stone at all, you would see profanity in the Rolling Stone. You would almost never see profanity in the Cleveland County record. You certainly wouldn't see it in the Democrat Gazette and maybe not even in the Wall Street Journal depending on the subject. And readerships are very much different too. People in Ryzen, of course, want to read about what's happening in Ryzen. And people who read the Wall Street Journal want to know what the Federal Reserve is up to or how topic du jour right now I think for business press is how the bankruptcy industry will not be able to accommodate all the upcoming bankruptcies we're gonna see in the second or the third and fourth quarters of this year. So it's important, of course, to know your audience, know your publication, know who reads the publication and what those people are interested in. Frank, it's a good way to make sure that we know that. So I think you have a lot of experience in the newspaper industry. So this is pretty commonplace for you. But if someone especially is looking at their state newspaper, other than going with our own stereotypes, how can we make sure we know who the readership really is? Oh, I think you should just read the newspaper or the magazine. If you read it enough, then you will get a sense of others who read it. There's no doubt in my mind that if you carefully read and you don't have to study a publication, but if you read it enough over time, you will certainly get a sense of what it covers, how it covers it and who reads it. Letters to the editor also give you a very good clue to who's reading and responding to the paper. I think you're probably right about that. For the Democrat Gazette, one of the questions people have always asked is, why do you publish letters like that? And for the newspaper, the answer has always been because that is the letter that was sent to us. And I think in Arkansas that the letters to the Democrat Gazette are a decent reflection, especially of the political tone and tenor of Arkansans, because you get some of this and you get some of that and you get some of this and you get some of that. Primarily Arkansas is a Republican state now. And I say that, well, I can't say that. I would say that the letters to the newspaper are somewhere equally distributed in terms of political leanings. I think that's probably because people who are liberal or progressive are more interested or more enthusiastic. They care more right now about getting their message out. So as this group is, and so I see a balance, but people have always asked, why would the newspaper publish that letter? And the answer is because that person wrote it, sent it in, and it meets our standards of accuracy, taste and decorum. So we're gonna publish it. It would be a mistake to not publish a letter because it was contrary to the newspaper's editorial positions. A good newspaper would welcome all sides of all debates, essentially. So you should also know the publication's rules. As of our instance, the Democrat, because that publishes letters from Arkansas residents only because if you opened it up though, there are people you'd be inundated with letters from elsewhere and the people of Arkansas would not have a place for their voice. Another rule is to limit the letter to 300 words. Now, it would be interesting to know the publications for which you propose to write letters. If they have word limit, if they do, then that's an important consideration when you're writing it. Another rule that the Democrat, because that is that writers can only have one published letter a month, so as to leave room for other folks. And all editors also are pretty sharp at picking up on what they would consider to be a letter writing campaign. When you get 15 or 20 letters about the same topic that sounds awfully alike, then you can tell there's an organized effort to get this message into the newspaper and I would say most publications would resist publishing more than one or two of those letters that are sort of carbon copy. So that's something to consider as you do this. And then the second question is your purpose. What is your purpose in writing this letter? And I think the purpose in writing that letter or writing any opinion piece is to persuade somebody as to the righteousness of your cause or the sensibility of your position and maybe not necessarily to persuade but at least to get readers to think a little bit about your position. Hey, approval voting, I've never heard of this before but I get the concept and it sounds kind of cool. I mean, you may not be able to convince somebody or many somebody's with your letter but if you can reach a few people and change their minds or get them to say to themselves, you know, that's an interesting concept than you are on the way to accomplishing your mission. I also think of a fellow by the name of Paul Greenberg who was the Democrat as that's editorial page editor for roughly 25, maybe 30 years. A brilliant editorialist and actually appealed a surprise recipient for his editorial writing many years ago. One of Greenberg's rules was to don't sit down, he said, to write an editorial, sit down to say something. And I would say that to you folks too, don't sit down to write a letter to the editor which sounds very pompous and serious, sit down to say something. And when you do this, you, well, let me back up a minute. Again, what Greenberg said when he said, don't sit down to write an editorial, which he meant don't sit down to write something uppercase and uppercase editorial, something that was too serious or would simply not be reachable to the average reader. An important thing to do in any kind of opinion writing is to not, actually a thing not to do is to scold. When you scold, you find out nobody likes to scold. There was an expression in the newspaper business when I was in it and that is, he wrote that at the top of his lungs. And anytime you write at the top of your lungs or scold people for their positions of any kind, well, you just come off wrong and they will not pay any attention to you. And if your purpose is to persuade, you just blew it. I think it's important to be moral, but not a moralist. By moralist, I mean, or not moralist means that you should assume always that your opponent's motives are honest and he believes in the quality of his position as much as you believe in the quality of yours. I don't think it's any secret that one of the problems we have in political discourse in America today is the assumption many people have that the folks on the other side of the fence are the devil's spawn and should go straight to hell. And that goes for both sides of that fence. So if you assume that people on the other side of your issue are sincere in their beliefs and are not trying to control the dialogue or not trying to keep down the other classes, then you'll have a lot more power of persuasion. Again, simply assume the best of others until proven otherwise. The third part, and that's writing the thing. This is to me the most interesting part and most fun part really about any kind of writing is ensuring that the quality of the writing is such that it's fun to read or easy to read or good to read. And so let me make a few points about that. There's an expression in our business and that is avoid cliches like the plague. Now, if you didn't get that joke, back up a minute, okay? Avoid cliches like the plague. Also do not write in what we call journalese. What is journalese? It is a trade jargon, a jargon of the news business that depends on worn out copycat phrases and verbs. Let me give you some examples. Here's one. Somebody landed at the airport and was whisked away. Nobody has ever driven away. Someone is always whisked away. Businesses, you may look down the street and see that one of your restaurants has closed, but very often a news writer will say that it is shuttered. As if all of these places that are closing now have actual shutters, that's not true. Businesses are closed, they're not shuttered. We find very often that budgets are slashed. Whenever you see the word slashed in a news story, you should think of perhaps a pirate with his saber attacking somebody as he boards a ship. Heroes are hailed as in Hale Caesar. And who says these things? Who uses all these expressions and all these worn hackneyed awful verbs? Unfortunately, many news writers do. I see this kind, I see the word shuttered for instance all the time. Nobody speaks that way. This is a jargon that ordinary people do not utter. The word hailed. Well, you know, my husband got a raise and I was so happy I hailed him when he got home. Now, people don't speak like that, which is the point being that all of this should persuade you to write conversationally. I had someone tell me once that I wrote just the way I speak and I thought that was a great compliment because you don't want to sit down to write, you wanna sit down to talk to those people on the other end of that letter. One of the things that we've learned in our business, not that newspaper people adhere to this is that quality writing is also easy to understand writing. Many years ago, I mean, 30, 40 years ago I discovered something called the Fog Index, F-O-G Fog. And the Fog Index is a way to measure the comprehensibility of whatever it is. Your writing, and it was a process by which you counted the number of words in a sentence and the number of sentences in a paragraph and blah, blah, blah, and you had this mathematical formula and you would come up with a grade level. Now, in a way, a grade level is, talk about grade level in writing is, in a way, unfortunate because I've had a million people say to me, I understand that newspapers try to write to a sixth grade level. And of course, that's simply not true. You can't take 100 people in a newsroom and expect them to all write in the same way. But what you really wanna do is write in a way that helps people to understand it. There's, I write a weekly column for the newspaper and I use a Google word count app or device and I have to write 500 words. And so I write it and it comes out to 500 words and the thing counts my words but over there on the right hand side it also gives you all of these pieces of information including six or seven or eight different levels of comprehensibility. My latest column was written at a 9.1 grade level. So presumably someone who has a ninth grade education would be able to get through that thing without any trouble. I don't write it specifically that way but I can't tell you that the longest sentence in that column was 25 words, which also reminds me that there's a theory or a thought that the longer a sentence, the less comprehension a reader has and that a reader starts to lose comprehension after 12 or 15 words. So if you've got a series of sentences that are 25 and 30 and 35 words long, then what you create is something readers that we call me go my eyes glaze over. Now let me tell you that there's two kinds of me go. One is the writing, but the other is the topic. And I've read a little bit about approval voting since Kirsten asked me to do this. And I think what we got in a way with approval voting there might be based on the topic just a little bit of me go a little bit of my eyes glaze over. It's, I don't see much sex violence or drama in there. So what you're gonna have to do with your little writing is to write it in such a way that it's comprehensible. It's easy to understand. We talk about sentences that are too long. The ideally what you would have is a mix of sentence lengths, sentence lengths, you'd have one that's eight words and another one that's 15 words. And if you mix up the length of your sentences and your paragraphs, it's easier for the reader to get through it. You do not bore the reader because you have a variety of sentence lengths and paragraphs. Frank, I have a quick question. So you said we should avoid journalists, which I think is great and avoiding those cliches, but I do have one question when people are looking at writing their letters to the editor. So having a communications background, we are taught to write an inverted pyramid. Yes. But does that have any weight for a letter to the editor or should it not follow that? I don't think, I don't think an inverted pyramid would really work for a letter. So if anybody out there knows what an inverted pyramid is, just toss that thing in the trash can and move on. Okay, good. In fact, I would say Kirsten that for most news, for a lot of news writing in inverted pyramid does not function particularly well because it's formulaic and repetitive. And I just don't think when you're asking people to read eight or 10 or 12 or 15 or 20, 25 stories in a newspaper, you don't want everything to sound exactly the same. I can tell you that one of the great disappointments of my career has always been the formulaic writing of especially sports stories. Oh man. Well, there are computer programs out there that replace sports writers. You throw in some stats and some names and the next thing you know, the computer has written a sports story for you. So if you think about that, I sure am glad I wasn't a sports writer because they are all on the verge of being replaced by artificial intelligence. Oh, let's not talk about the intelligence of sports writers. Okay, one of the things I like to see in writing are cultural references that people know and understand. I can give you two that I have used more than once in my traffic column. If you think about this, what is Shakespeare doing in a traffic column? So people like to write me and complain about how badly other people drive. And I will say that the fault lies not in our stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves. Meaning of course that, you know, we should all try and be better drivers. I love to reference Hamlet's comment about the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. I use that on my grandkids and, you know, their eyes roll back in their head. Except the teenagers, they get it because they've studied it. There are several, I think, references you can make from Star Trek in your writing. For instance, that sometimes the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many and vice versa. I mean, I think of Spock in that thing where he was being eaten up by radioactive gas or whatever it was. And he said that to Captain Kirk. Now, everybody is seeing those movies. Everybody knows that. So you throw that in there and boom. I also like to toss in an occasional lyric from country music because, I mean, who doesn't love country music, right? And I'm thinking of Vicki who's there in North Carolina, which is really one of the, one of the, you know, the seed corn of Americana music comes from North Carolina. So if, you know, if you know a little bit of country or folk lyric, then you throw that in there and what you're writing in people grasping, it's really, it's a metaphor for them. And using the right country music lyric can catch people's eye, make them think, and then help them understand what it is you're trying to say to them. Frank, I unmuted myself just so that I could agree with you. And I'm sure my head nodding lets you know that I'm writing along with you. Well, one of the things I always tell my writers in avoiding the pedantic and the scolding and so on is to just put a picture either literally or figuratively but put a picture of their next door neighbor on their screen and just talk to that person, you know, and then read your letter and see if you would really say that to that person because that's who you're writing to and that seems to be helpful to people. So I'll mute myself again. One of these days, I'm going to incorporate into a column to someone I consider to be a great American and Western philosopher and that is Wiley E. Coyote for whom things never go right. What could possibly go wrong with that scheme, for instance? You know, I think editorial writers in particular should use Wiley E. Coyote as a device because he is actually universally human because we all try and we all fail. Now, he tries and fails. He tries epically and fails magnificently so we can all learn something also about endurance and persistence from that poor old Coyote. He should just go to Chick-fil-A. It'd be a lot easier on him if he did that. So the point I think I'm getting to is that you should take your topic seriously but you should not take yourself seriously. Now, it's easy for me to do that in 500 words. It'd be a little more difficult for you to do it in 300 words but if you take your topic seriously, you're issue seriously but if you don't take yourself seriously and if there's an opportunity for a little humorous self-deprecation, nothing makes people like you more than poking gentle fun at yourself. And maybe if they like you, they'll like the idea of approval voting. And then finally, when I use the word finally, I always think of Bill Clinton when he made the nominating speech for Michael Dukakis back in 1988, I think it was. When he made this horrible, boring, ghastly speech to the Democratic National Convention and at the end he said finally or he said in conclusion and the crowd went wild. They were so happy. So in conclusion, I think I may have referenced that in a column once or twice. I think it's also important that your letter be accurate. Pulitzer said he required only three things in a reporter or a journalist and those three things were accuracy, and accuracy. What I get out of that is that people people are eager to find fault with something that's published. People are thrilled, they would be thrilled to find an error or fact in your letter. And then they would write a scorching letter to the editor in reply and say something like, check your facts, do some research, and then you would be embarrassed by that. It's easier, I think, right now to check facts than it ever has been before because you can Google stuff, you can Google stuff. Of course, the world's more complicated than a Google search, but it is important in conclusion that your letter, even though it is a piece of opinion writing, that it is based on solid verifiable fact. And in conclusion, that is my conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I'd be happy to answer some questions if you have any. Well, I see that Bernardine has been raised quite some time. So Bernardine, I am going to unmute you now. Bernardine, are you there? Okay, I'm not hearing you. Okay, you can put it into the chat if you're having trouble with your audio Bernardine, you can type it in there if that's easier. Okay, I'm gonna mute Bernardine again for just a second so that we don't have any audio issues. And we did have a question in the chat from Colin. So Colin has a two-part question. So first, Colin asks, letters to the editor are usually or always titled by the newspaper editor. Is that correct, Frank? They are always, oh, the headlines are always written by the newspaper, yes. And so then Colin asks, is there any way to encourage good or fair titles or to mitigate the risk of misleading clickbait titles? I feel like Colin has had a bad experience with the editor. Obviously, Colin has had a bad experience. Let me say a couple. And the first one is to just throw yourself on the gods of mercy and hope for the best. Assume that the people who are writing those headlines are doing the best that they can. Having written what feels like a million headlines in my own career, it's hard to take a complicated or even a not so complicated topic and reduce it to a lively and accurate and representative headline of five or six words. That is extremely challenging. If you have another bad experience, I think it's okay to make contact with the newspaper's editor or the editor of the opinion pages, but do so in a nice and friendly way so as not to antagonize the poor, overworked, underpaid son of a gun. Perfect, thanks for that answer, Frank, and thanks for the question, Colin. That was great. Vicki, did you have a question? You were waving your hands earlier. Maybe you were just excited, which we'll do. No, I was giving Frank the high sign to thank him for the presentation. Yeah, this is a thank you, you know. And so, no, I very much appreciated everything that you offered tonight. It all resonated really quite closely to what I've been thinking and doing. Yeah. Great, great. Well, I have a question. We... Oh, sorry. Okay, here, I'll ask mine since you already asked one. So I'm curious about, I know that you were talking about making sure that you know the audience of a publication and what type of readers. And so I'm curious about how writing to a local paper might differ from writing to the Economist or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Do you think that if people are writing to their local paper, is it more likely that they might be published if they refer to local issues or talk more about how whatever their causes will affect their community? Yeah, I'm just curious about if you have any thoughts there. Well, I think that before you send off a letter to any publication, you should read the publication but specifically you should read the letters to the editor to get a sense of what other people are saying and how they are saying it. And Taylor, your message to that. I also think that most publications welcome, eagerly welcome, letters because who writes letters anymore? I think probably there are for a local newspaper, let's just say a weekly newspaper for instance, there are probably a limited number of people in its audience who take the time to make the effort to write a letter. And so I think editors are happy to get letters. They simply are. Do not say to yourself, I don't think I can get this published because you just may. Now, as far as we would all like to be published in The Economist. Of course, you know what an economist is. Harry Truman's definition of an economist, Caitlin was, you know, on the one hand, and an economist would say, and then he would say, on the other hand, what he wanted was a one-handed economist. It seems to me that the worldwide audience for that publication would be, would make it tough for you to get into it. I would say the same thing for the major newspapers that they have far, far more letters, that letter writers who want to be published than there is space to do so. Which makes me also think that, yeah, I suppose that there are comments sections for news organizations on their web websites. And that is similar, I think in a way, to letters to the editor, which is another good way to get your message out. Of course, the temptation in a comment section is to zing somebody. And, you know, I would avoid that like the plague. I'm loving these plague references given our current set up as humans. So something we talked about, Frank, that we didn't cover is, so there are letters to the editor, but then there are also op-eds. So for anyone who's heard that, what is an op-ed and how does it differ from a letter to the editor? Well, I think primarily an op-ed would be different in three ways. The first would be its length. The second would be its complexity. And the third would be the opportunity to have a bigger and better headline, since we've already discussed that. An op-ed is, well, if a letter is maybe no more than 300 words, it would be common for an op-ed to be five to 600 words. Now you're talking about, you have twice the space, twice maybe the number of words to get your message across. And it would take a somewhat different writing technique. It'd be a little bit more expansive. You know, in a way, it's hard for me to say how because when I write a feature story or a column, it just kind of happens. You know, after 50 years of doing it, if it doesn't happen, there's no way you're gonna make 50 years doing it. But an op-ed would be more prominently displayed. You'd have an opportunity to say more and persuade more. And maybe it would certainly have an expanded headline, maybe two headlines, the main deck, what's called the main deck and a sub-deck. So the difference, again, is length, complexity and opportunity. And if somebody was trying to take advantage of that, I mean, what would be their course action there? I mean, obviously it's gotta be good. Right, right. But are they still just contacting the editor if they're looking to have some more words? Right. Most newspapers, I'll speak about what I know, is most newspapers of any size have a news editor and an opinion editor. So the opinion editor, it may be a one or two or three or six man shop on the opinion side. I would say that the newspaper I'm most familiar with probably has four or five people working on its opinion pages would be the editorial page and the op-ed page. I think that right now, a local newspaper would be happy to publish a well-written, thought-out and interesting op-ed. I see newspapers that publish op-eds which are really, I'll call them propaganda pieces from congressional offices. So your typical editor, I think, would be more than happy to replace that thing with something coherent and interesting about the way we vote. And of course, that right now, not so much, but as time goes by, of course, it'll become more and more topical as we get closer and closer to November. Your topic is more topical and is better positioned for food, for thought, for people than it would be in an off year. By the time March rolls around, the dust will have settled. There'll be a new administration or the same old administration and the governors and the mayors and everybody else. There'll be either old brooms or new brooms, but the next election, it will be, what will feel like eons away. So right now, between now and November, is your time to write interesting and coherent opinion pieces for all kinds of publications. Okay, if anybody has any more questions, we're still taking them. We still have a little bit more Frank's time. Colin always poses these fantastic internal questions for CES and makes our job a little harder. He says, what is CES's letter goal? 20 letters published in 2020, one letter published in every paper in St. Louis. I'm going to unfairly throw this to Caitlin because she handles our communications. Sure. I guess I would just have to say that we don't currently have a goal. So maybe that's something that we should try to set, but we really would like to see more of our supporters writing letters and hopefully getting them published, whether they're in their small local hometown paper or if they're in a bigger publication. Any amount of exposure is good. And it's really great to be able to reach out to your local community and get those people familiar with this. Because as Christian said at the beginning, that's our number one barrier right now is just that most people don't even know that there's a different way to vote other than choosing one candidate. And so the more grassroots we can get and the more of your neighbors that you can talk to and maybe share your thoughts through a letter to the editor, the better. We do have another question now from Bernadine, which I think is a great question for Frank. How can we make election topics sound more interesting and exciting? That is, that is, that's a tough one right there. And let me tell you why. And let me tell you what I think is a partial solution. And that is particularly for the newspaper industry, but on a lesser scale, I think for local television, what has happened is that the news media, as we know it, has been depopulated all across the country. It has been depopulated. There are probably 40% of the number of editors and reporters and photographers in America at newspapers and magazines and TV stations. Then there were 20 years ago that has, it's an economic question that people write books about. So what has happened also with this depopulation is that journalists are concentrated on the coasts. And they are further concentrated on the East Coast and they are fantastically concentrated in Washington, DC and they also cover primarily the White House. So the White House has this enormous power to influence public opinion because of this depopulation, because of what I see as this incredible singular focus on presidential politics and performance. I mean, we all know there are three branches of government. There's got the state, you've got the federal government, blah, blah, blah, you know, the whole thing, separation of powers. But it seems as if there is only one power and that is the guy who's in the White House. So to get over that barrier to interest people in something other than that, something about elections is a task, it really is a task. I would be interested in knowing, even hypothetically, what would have happened in the Republican primaries in 2016 if there had been approval voting rather than winter take all voting in all those presidential primaries? I wonder who the Republican nominee would have been. I'm also curious, who would the Democratic nominee have been? Would it have been Mrs. Clinton? I just don't know. Posing that hypothetical could be kind of fun in an op-ed piece or especially you'd want the space of an op-ed piece. So that's just about all I got there. That idea, that alternate history as they call it, could be intriguing if you presented it in the right way. Could I offer a second possibility? And that is that rather than thinking that people are going to want to hear about approval voting, they're going to want to hear about the issues that are important to them. And if we can start with that, for example, if they're concerned that there aren't enough PPEs in the hospitals or they're concerned that their schools are closing or hospitals are closing, whatever their issues are, start with that. How is that going? How will they ever get to a different reality around that? And what if they could vote a different way? Or what if they, as Frank suggested, what if they could have voted a different way? So rather than thinking that we have to start with, you know, again, with that pyramid thinking, instead of thinking that we have to start with approval voting, start with where they are. Start with the issue that matters to them to get them on the hook and then talk about how different it could be if they could actually have somebody who represented their concerns and their needs in office and how they might actually get to that if we change the way we voted. That's just another way of doing it. I think that Vicki is dishing some excellent advice tonight. That was actually what I was gonna say is that I think that something that we as an organization shy away from is talking about specific issues that could be influenced by approval voting. Think of, you know, maybe like immigration or taxes or things. And I think largely that's because we are a non-partisan nonprofit and we wanna make sure that people don't view us through a partisan lens. It's something that we're really deeply committed to. But I think that for you all, that's something that I would encourage you to do because it is something more tangible. You know, if you're really passionate about immigration and you paint a picture of children in cages, that could really move someone to read a little bit deeper and see things there and see that connection. So I think that was great advice. Yeah, I'd also respond that when you're writing a letter to the editor, your writing is an individual with a personal opinion different from an op-ed where you might be speaking for an organization with more expertise. And in a letter to the editor, this is merely your opinion. And so you can work around that that way. Listen, I have to go because I have an 830 Zoom call. I'm sorry if I have to run, but thank you so much for letting me be here tonight. Thanks for joining us, Vicki. Yeah. I'm always so impressed with everyone who has all these Zoom calls. Like everyone is very busy these days. Colin had a question and also I'll take that. He says, how about making election topics sound non-partisan in 2020? I don't know if this is in your wheelhouse, Frank. How do we sound non-partisan? Oh, I don't know. You probably should keep away from certain words that people would pick up on and say, aha, she's a liberal or she's a progressive. I can't think of any of those words right now offhand. Oh, I'll give you two. One of course is diverse. Another one is community, which is a widely used and frequently misunderstood word. It's very imprecise, but you should try not to write in the language of partisanship. And by that, I mean, I think I mean not adopt the language of a particular point of view. Yeah, I think that that makes a lot of sense. And I got some good feedback when I went to the Citizens Climate Lobby Conference. You might think of that as like a more traditionally progressive group, but they actually really value non-partisanship. And one thing that they really talked about was, even if you are very frustrated, say with the environment or with an issue with the current administration, which lots of people are, just try not to have that name. You don't say Trump in a negative way, don't say president in a negative way, and so to Frank's point earlier with the writing at the top of your voice, maybe be careful with that. Bernadine asks if there is a difference in writing in a major market versus rural? I think we kind of hit on that earlier. Yeah, I don't think there really is. The question is whether or not your letter is, oh, I'm trying to search for the right word here, coherent in the sense that it is not too far out of bounds for the content of the publication for which you are writing. Perfect, Sharon says she's very excited about changing the way we're voting. She thinks it needs to happen, but she really just doesn't even know where to start with writing a letter to the editor. Any tips there, Frank, on just how to start writing? Oh, I think she ought to read the letters to the editor in her local newspaper, and then it's so easy for me to say this because I can fall out of bed and write a 500-word column in 30 minutes and move on, but it's the experience thing. I would say, yeah, I do have some advice, and that is I've told legions of students, especially in feature writing, to take a piece of paper and write down using one or two words, the points you wanna make, and then arrange them in the order you think they should be made, and then write it that way. At least you'll have some sort of a blueprint or small roadmap to get there. Let me throw one other thing, and Vicki used the word hook. Now, there's a couple of kinds of hooks. In country music, back to country music, the hook is the thing that makes you, that's memorable about a song, like for instance, Brad Paisley's song, there's no I in team, okay? So we, no, excuse me, no, no, let me back that up. The song is, there's no I in beer. That's the song, there's no I in beer. So immediately you think that's funny and say, yeah, he's right, yeah, but okay. So that's the hook. So the hook in writing is the thing that's both early and memorable. There is something in the theory of news writing that says everything that's written should has a hot spot. And the hot spot in any piece of news writing consists of the first seven words, or maybe it's seven words, either way. So the idea is that if you don't have something in those seven words that attracts interest for the reader, you're probably gonna lose that reader. So the challenge is to get in and say it early with either fact or something that's, I won't say flowery, but it's memorably or interestingly written in those first seven words. Yeah, the hook is definitely an important part. We're rapidly approaching, even with our slightly late start, the end of our hour. So before people start dropping off because I know there are a lot of things going on, I want to remind everyone that part of the deal with you coming tonight was that I made the offer that we would review your letters to the editor if you're interested in writing one to your local paper or even trying to get into one of those publications. So my email's on the website, Caitlin's email is on the website, or you can just send it to contactadelectionscience.org and we'll all get it. And so if you want to send them our way, we're happy to take a look and provide a little bit of copy editing experience. We won't be frank, but we're happy to put some eyes on it. Colin had one last question. He said, are there any resources out there where he can see some more buzzwords that might pin someone as a liberal or as a conservative, or I would think other things that just might inflame readers? Oh, well, yeah, the resources are simply mass media. If you could probably read, I would say the New York Times and find plenty of buzzwords in there that would paint you if you use them as a liberal or a progressive. Famously, well, that's too long of a story, but read the New York Times and you'll find plenty of stuff in there that, plenty of language in there that you should avoid. Let's put it that way. Colin says he is feverishly Googling liberal buzzwords as we speak. So he's trying to learn. Perfect. Last call, if there's any last questions, raise your hand and drop them in the chat. I promise, Frank, we would keep it pretty close to an hour. And also it's storming in Northwest Arkansas. You can't see the landing, but I'm afraid I may lose power in internet. So, okay, I'm not seeing any last ones and I'm seeing some people start to leave. So thank you all for joining us. Remember, you can send your letters that you draft to us. And we're happy to take a look. And so, Frank, thank you so much. This is lovely. Well, let me say to you, Caitlin, thank you for two things. The first one is I always like, pontificating is always fun. And we all enjoy the sound of our own voice and I got to hear myself for an entire hour. Well, you were going to look on, Frank, because we'll be uploading this to YouTube later and sending it out for people who registered but did not make it. Great, good. I expect millions of views, no doubt. I am certain they're coming. All right. Thanks again, Frank. I also would like to just chime in and say thank you very much for your information. It was wonderful. The questions were great. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks, Sharon. Getting lots of thank yous coming in. Thanks, y'all. Have a great night. Stay safe out there. Send us your letters.