 I'm really lucky to be the executive director of this organization called Democracy Found, which is a Wisconsin-based initiative focused on final five voting, which is what we'll talk about. But before we get into that, just a little bit about me and how I came into this space. So I've worked in politics and policy work for over a decade, mostly in health policy prior to this work, and have served in local government. I was on the city council in Madison where I live. And had had this frustration in both of those worlds, in the policy world around health policy where there were so many things that I knew from a policy perspective we could do to improve our healthcare system, right, that made perfect sense, that were really common sense solutions regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, but that constantly when you try to do those things, politics would shut down any progress. You couldn't get anything done when it came to the big stuff because of gridlock nationally. So there's this frustration in working in the policy world, and then simultaneously, because I'm all frustrated about the fact that I can't make any progress on big picture items with healthcare, I'm like, well, I'll run for local government. That's where you can really roll up your sleeves and get things done, right? And it was. I mean, that was the pleasant surprise for me in city government, if you don't pick up the trash and plow the streets and all those things, right, replace the sewers, stuff really, there are consequences. So people want you to do that. And there's not this silly partisan affiliation after your name and local government here in Wisconsin. And so you create really interesting coalitions to get things done together. So I loved it because there was this ability to, right, work with someone on something and then on the next project you'd be on the totally other side of that project, right? And I don't really agree with them. But that was the beauty of it. That was the beauty of it. And we actually got things done that way. So I was at this point in my career where I was just looking for something new. And this work that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is all inspired by a woman named Katherine Gale and her co-author, Michael Porter. Now, Katherine is a Wisconsinite. She ran Gale Foods in Germantown for many years. And her co-author, Michael Porter's Harvard Business School professor, very renowned in the area of competition theory. And I read their analysis, and it was like this light bulb was going off that explained all of these problems that I was seeing in the policy world and in the political world that I was so attuned to, but explained in a way that just made sense from a root cause perspective. So I'm not going to dive into the theory and the book, right? There's a whole book, so we're just not going to take the time to do that today. But if you are interested, feel free. And I've got a couple of handouts out here after that you can grab and learn more. But suffice to say, we can sum up the problem with a very simple Venn diagram, which, as you'll see, is not intersecting, as you would want a Venn diagram to do. So to say, in our current political system, acting in the public interest is not likely to get you re-elected. So if our elected officials do the jobs that most of us want and need them to do, they're likely to lose those jobs, which, again, from a system's perspective, is crazy design. Why would you do that? So that's the problem that we're going to try to talk about how we solve today. So what seems to be going wrong that this is our current situation in politics? We know it's bad when Congress's approval ratings never go above 20 percent, when in our elections essentially 10 percent of the population is determining 86 percent of the seats in Congress. We'll talk a little bit more about how that crazy statistic happens and how we solve for those things. So there are a lot of ways that you can try to fix systems to improve results. But ultimately, for us in the work at Democracy Found, it was critical that the work that we do be truly systemic, not be inadvertently red team or blue team, that it be something that's going to work on the functioning of democracy to make it most accountable and ultimately produce results in governing, which, again, for most of us, if we did the jobs that our members of Congress did, we would get fired. But they don't get fired, right? They keep getting re-elected time and time again. So again, that's what we're going to try to solve for today, especially when you consider the work, again, also the work that we do. It's not partisan, but it's also not blaming of politicians, which is to say, if you're operating, you can be the best person ever with the best motivations and intentions. And if you're operating in a broken system, you're still not going to get anywhere. So that's what we have to solve for. So when you look at politics as an industry, which is what this analysis did, which was really kind of the interesting light bulb moment that I described for you all to me, it gets down to two rules that we don't think about very often, but two structural problems that are getting in the way of us having some intersection in this Venn diagram. So let me go over them quickly. So the first is party primaries. And we know this, I think most of us, especially if we're civically engaged, that most elections today are decided in the primary. Whoever wins in a party primary is very likely to be the candidate that wins in the general election. Making general election votes virtually irrelevant. They don't really matter because you already know who's going to win based on who made it out of a party primary. So that statistic from earlier in the 2020 elections, according to some analysis that has been done by our partners at a group called United America, they looked at all the congressional races. And that's where we now know that only 10% of the population effectively elected 86% of the members of Congress. That's right. I mean, just like sit with that for a second, right? Because that's fundamentally misrepresentative and not the way we would expect for our elections to be operating. But I would argue to you today that that's a huge problem in and of itself. But the problem that I'm extra concerned about to make us more depressed is that that party primary problem extends to governing. So imagine for a second with me today that you are all members of Congress. And you're looking at some common sense bipartisan compromise to an issue that you care about. For me, it's healthcare. You choose the issue that you care about, big national issue. Something that would move the needle forward, problem solving. You would think when you're looking at that piece of legislation as a member of Congress, you'd think, well, is this good policy? Is this going to achieve the ends that that policy is expected to achieve? You're going to look at it and see if it's supposed to actually work. Maybe you're even going to ask yourself, is this something that the majority of my constituents would want me to vote for? I'm an elected representative. I should consider that in my vote. But all those questions are fundamentally irrelevant because there's one question that matters more than any other question. And that question is, will I make it back through my party primary if I vote for this bill? And the answer to that question on the complicated stuff, on the hard solutions that we're looking for bipartisan consensus on is almost always no. So it means that even if all the other answers to the questions are yes, it's good policy, it's going to achieve the ends it wants, all your constituents want you to do it. If you can't make it back through your party primary because you voted for it, why would you vote for it? Because that's the incentive that helps you keep your job to keep doing all the other good things that you're doing as a member of Congress, right? These things, the incentives are going to drive the outcomes. So that creates this problem where the party primary is essentially, we sometimes describe it as like this eye of the needle through which no problem solving politician can pass. Because you're just, you're going to get primaried, right? We hear that all the time. It's not just a noun, it's a verb. We're going to primary you if you step out of line and don't, you know, vote for something that's bipartisan. So we don't get results. That's one of the reasons that we don't, that's a major reason that we don't get problem solving legislation achieved federally. The second reason relates to our second structural problem. And it's the reason that we don't have accountability for the fact that we don't get results. Because none of us like the fact that we don't get results. We're very dissatisfied in fact. But for some reason nothing seems to change. There's no accountability to our elected officials for not delivering results. And that's because there's no competition. So this competition lens that we're looking at, that we're looking at is really indicative because if you were in any other industry with as much money and, you know, platform and whatever that politics provides and people were delivering the results that we're getting in politics, there would be a new entrant to the market to meet our demands as customers of saying we're dissatisfied, right, in any, because there's a market there. But we don't see that in politics because there are these huge barriers to entry. And plurality voting is that barrier to entry, which is to say how we vote limits kind of inadvertently but directly who we get to vote for. So we don't think about it a lot, but in any election in our current electoral system where you have maybe three candidates who run, someone could win with 36, 34% of the vote, right, meaning that 66% of the electorate actually preferred someone else. So that doesn't happen very often in reality, but it could because in our system, you just have to get the most votes to win. You don't have to get a true majority. So what that means and why do we don't see that very often is instead of having three candidates or four candidates or more candidates, the two major party candidates say, oh, don't get in the race because you will be a spoiler, right? You will take votes away from me who you generally agree with on most things and then you're inadvertently going to elect the person you really don't want to elect, right, by voting for this spoiler candidate. And if you're not a spoiler candidate, you're probably just wasting your vote on that person, right? A third party or an independent candidate, we hear this all the time. It's just a wasted vote. Why vote for them? It's a wasted vote. And so this means that often people don't even put their name on the ballot. Even if they're interested or they might be a good candidate because they're told you're never going to win, you have no chance. So again, thinking about competition, politics is one of the only industries where we're regularly told as customers that less competition is somehow better for us. Again, it just doesn't make sense. So what do we do about it? Because it doesn't have to be this way. I've kind of thoroughly depressed everyone in the room now. So how do we change this to make it better? Because we do have the ability to change it to make it better. And that's what this electoral innovation we call it, final five voting. So what is final five voting? Final five voting is two steps. It's a change to the way we vote in our primary elections and our general elections. So in the primary election, instead of having to choose whether you're going to vote in the Democratic column or the Republican column, now you see all your candidates, regardless of their political party, on one ballot in one column. And you pick your favorite, regardless of political party. So in this example election, maybe my favorite sports team is the Green Bay Hackers. And the Green Bay Party is my pick for this particular office. But the Milwaukee Party might be my pick for a different office. And we can't do that right now on our ballots. That would invalidate our ballot in Wisconsin if we did that. So instead, just pick your favorite candidate. And the top five candidates advance to the general election. So what this does is it shifts the competition from that eye of the needle primary to a general election. And now you've got five candidates in that general election. It allows for differentiation, for ideas, for real campaigning and competition to happen, and the election to be decided by the general electorate. Because the way it works is it's essentially, it's an instant runoff election. So you use this tool, a ranked choice ballot, to say, OK, my favorite candidate's the Packers. They were my favorite in the primary. So they'll be my favorite in the general election. And I can stop there if I want to and my vote counts just as much as it does today. But if I also want to tell you that I like the bucks and the brewers are fine and I don't really like the forward and I definitely don't like the admirals, I can rank all of those choices, as many or as few as I so choose. And my ballot counts. It's not a wasted vote. It's not a spoiler. So what this does is it allows us to count all first place votes first. And if someone gets a majority, over 50%, the election's over and that candidate wins. But if no one gets 50% support, instead of saying, OK, in this particular election maybe the bucks got 30% support and so now all of a sudden there are winners, which is how this would work in our current system, we drop the candidate who came in last. Who has the fewest first place votes? They're out of the race. So it's like a runoff, but happens instantaneously. They're out of the race. And anyone that they marked their voters get their second choice to count. So it's this process of elimination and reallocation of votes until someone crosses the threshold of 50%. We can go into this more detail if people want to in Q&A. But what this does is it allows you to have real competition. Because now candidates can get into the race and instead of being spoilers or wasted votes, people can mark their preferences down as they like it. Indicate that there's apparently a lot of support for the Packers, and even if they don't ultimately win. So this system, in summary, is to create this intersection in the Venn diagram. So let's play out how that works. So if you are now looking at that bipartisan piece of legislation again, you're no longer only worried about a party primary challenger. Because in a top five primary, if you're the incumbent and you're doing a good job on most of your work and your constituents generally like you, you'll be in the top five, right? No problem. And then in the general election, you can create a coalition of support of people marking you first, maybe second, maybe even third on their ballots and get that 50% that broader electorate support in your general election and craft a win. Because, right, you shouldn't probably be voting for that legislation anyway if the majority of your constituents don't think it's a decent enough idea that they're not going to throw you off the ballot for it. So it just changes these incentives to allow our elected officials to solve some of the complicated problems that require some nuance and collaboration across party lines, which is basically prohibited by our electoral system currently. So the other thing that I didn't say and build up to this, I kind of alluded to it, but it's not likely to change necessarily even who gets elected in certain districts. And that's not the intent. The intent is not to make a blue district red or a red district blue or to even change necessarily who gets elected, but the intention is to change the incentives for that elected official so that they can do things that the majority of us actually want them to do in governing. So they get to act differently, even if it's the same person getting elected. Because I'll tell you, I've been a lobbyist for a long time. There's a lot of times behind closed doors, they'll tell you, oh, that makes perfect sense. I totally understand that policy and you're exactly right, and I can't vote for it. Because if I vote for it, I'm gonna get primaried. So stuff gets stuck, right? And it's not serving our country well. So final five voting, we've talked about what it is. Before you all think I'm completely nuts and promising some utopia and this amazing solution that's gonna solve all of our problems, let me be clear that I think there's no silver bullet for democracy. Final five voting is not a silver bullet for democracy. It's not gonna solve all of our problems. Democracy is still gonna be messy and hard, but at least in this system, there's the opportunity for it to be messy and hard and maybe get some results to show for it. So freeing up that opportunity is what I can say personally, I'm really most interested in and what has gotten us all at Democracy Found to come together around this concept in Wisconsin. There's some proof as well with final five voting. This combination of an open top five primary, they're doing four in Alaska, but an open primary and a ranked choice general election was just passed by voters in Alaska in 2020. So they'll be using it in the 2022 election. Municipalities all across the country have been using a ranked choice ballot for local elections for years. So there's a lot of kind of proof that's already been out there that the system can work. It's just a matter of tailoring it to get to the things that we think are most important in achieving results. So in Wisconsin, we have introduced legislation here in our state to pass final five voting for our federal elections. Our bill was introduced earlier this spring with bipartisan support. We're really committed to making sure that there's Democrats and Republicans that are advancing this bill in our state legislature. So we had co-authors who were Democrats and Republicans in each chamber when we introduced. And it's moving forward and it's gaining traction. So the state journal and the La Crosse Tribune have both editorialized in support of the bill already, which is great, and we're advancing the conversation. So anytime like you heard this morning, there's an opportunity to talk to Rotary clubs, to groups like you all, to others to just start talking about this. That's what we really need right now because this is new and a lot of people haven't heard about it. But when they do hear about it, they get pretty excited because it's something that is systemic and could make a real difference. And we can pass it at the state level. It doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Our elections are not kind of preordained by the US Constitution. The Constitution says, states, you determine how you wanna run elections. So there's the ability to get this done. So we have a group that's come together. This is our group to our leadership to kind of advance this in Wisconsin. Really fascinating group of people from across the political spectrum and really trying to take the message out there to more people and bring more of these, I call them influencers, just people in the community who can say, give with a head nod, right? To say, yeah, this is something that matters. We should give it a chance. We should open up our ears to think this is something that might make a difference. So this is our website. If you're interested in learning more, please check it out. Sign up if you wanna join our email list and learn more. I think I'll end and then we can have lots of conversation but I'll end by saying it's really frustrating to see how little we've come to expect out of politics lately, right? We just kind of give up on the conversation thinking that it's never gonna get better. I think so many of us, so we don't even go there, right? We don't even go there with our friends and family who might feel differently because I'm kind of worried about opening the door to this nasty world of what politics has become. And there are these really powerful ancillary benefits. I call them ancillary benefits because the benefit I think is most important in Final Five is getting results and governing. But if you imagine, in our current system, every incentive is just for our one candidate or the other to throw mud at the other one. They just want you to hate that other person so much that you're gonna vote for them. That can be the motivating factor in our elections these days, not a motivating factor of gosh, I think that person would do a really good job, right? That idea about that policy solution is really smart. I'm gonna vote for that person. So having the ability to rank your choices on a ballot and get to that degree of nuance, potentially even between the same party candidates in a general election is gonna make our, I believe make the possibility for governing, for trust and faith and institutions just strengthened. And the tenor of campaigns to change in a powerful way to help people re-engage in what is fundamentally the greatest experiment. Our representative republic is this total experiment that relies on us and participation. And sometimes it feels like lately we've been discrediting the importance of that because we think that all we have to do is vote, but ultimately we're also responsible through our government in the design of how we vote of these systems themselves. And so it provides us a huge opportunity to make a real difference. So with that, let me stop and let's do questions. Can you show that one slide that you showed this morning that sort of shows the final thing and then it's down and everything? Yeah, so Johnson can walk through. So I've got these, this is how it works in kind of practicality of how you tabulate a final five election, which is to say, all right, here's the, oh, that's my little attempt at looking creative and having images. Subpar, right? So the primary election is pretty self-explanatory because you just vote for your favorite candidate. And then the top five vote-getters, so right, the people who have the greatest number of votes in that primary are gonna advance to the general election. General election as we talked about, you have that ability to rank your ballot, and then you count all first place votes first. So in this, this is actually an election we did in Milwaukee a couple years ago. So the Bucks were in the playoffs at the time as well. And they did pretty well in that first place votes alone, but not over that 50% threshold. So it triggers that runoff process automatically, which is to say you can see the winners kind of displayed differently. These are first place votes. So because the Bucks only had 30%, not over the 50% threshold, you drop the forward. Anyone who voted for the forward has the opportunity, right, they happened to rank the brewers second. So you saw all those votes essentially transfer. Everybody else's first place vote is still counting because they're candidates still in the race. Continue that process. Elimination until someone goes over 50%. Go Packers. So ultimately, the Packers were not the plurality winner because it was Milwaukee, it was exciting the Bucks were in the playoffs. They had this weird 30% first place support. But most voters were generally, the majority of voters would say, okay, well generally we like the Packers. They're acceptable to us in the broadest sense, right? Even if they weren't their first choice, at least 52% in this very hotly contested sports election that we had, did cross that threshold and got 50% support. So that's how the tabulation works in a ranked choice election. So sometimes it's more aptly described, and I've kind of said this, but I think it's important to think about it this way as an instant runoff election, which is to say people are somewhat familiar with runoffs because they happen in other states, but we think about them as having to kind of do the election and then come back with a narrow or slate of candidates and cast your vote again and cast your vote again. And that, there's challenges to that, right? Logistically and getting voters to come back and turn out. So this is a way to achieve that same goal of making sure that whoever wins has the broadest support in a pragmatic way that can be tabulated through the machines and statistics. Yeah, here, here. Does the state have to sign off on this before local government can do it? Yeah, it's a great question. So from a strategy perspective, often I get asked, why not start with local elections, right? Because the state has to sign off on local governments doing it. So in order to do a ranked choice election, say at a municipal level, you would still need to pass state legislation. So, I mean, speaking very frankly to this room, I would say when we look at the problems in politics, the problems are coming from the national level, right? The biggest problem is not necessarily our local governments. And so, and maybe some people feel differently about that, but I would say that the tenor of politics being so broken is federal. And so, this focus on interrupting both the primary problem and that plurality voting problem is a really important combination in why we're starting with that, with our ask of the legislature. Yeah, I had a question over here. Yes, and then we'll come here. So I've lived and voted in Cheyoyin for over a hundred years now. And I have never been represented in Congress. My guys never won. And it's because of gerrymandering, I think. We have in the room somebody who's done incredible good work on that, Mary Lynn Donahue. I'd like you two to have a conversation about how this does or doesn't get affected by our continuing gerrymandering. Yeah, so here's my answer to that and then feel free to jump in, Mary Lynn. Okay, so, right, gerrymandering is something that people often ask us about because it's a problem we're all very familiar with in the state of Wisconsin at this time. What Final Five voting does is it doesn't change, it's not gonna change the district lines, but it is gonna make sure that your vote now matters more than it ever has in the past. Because in the past, you basically just have two choices, right? And so if you're not gonna vote in the primary of the candidate who's likely to win in whatever district, your vote really doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't. It sounds really harsh to say it, but it doesn't. And so then, right, the interrupting of that that happens with Final Five is that now your vote matters because maybe you have in this particular area a couple different red candidates, we'll call them on your Final Five ballot, a blue candidate, maybe an independent candidate. And through that series of runoffs, your ranking of who is your second or maybe third choice starts to matter. It comes into play. And so now, maybe you're still gonna elect that same person who wasn't your first choice vote, but that person has an incentive to pay attention to you in a way that they have zero need to pay attention to you, frankly, right now, electorally. So because now they're gonna want your second or third ranking. And you get this opportunity, I mentioned this one this morning, so I'm just gonna reinforce it because I think it's such a good example. So many of us are familiar with when Perot ran, being a third party candidate in the early 90s, right? Perot, everyone was like, why are you putting those charts and graphs up there? All the political people, right? They were like, nobody votes based on fiscal policy, right? The electorate doesn't care about that. They don't care about the debt. Well, guess what? Perot showed that 19% of the electorate was willing to throw their vote away on him because they cared about the debt. So he lost, right? He didn't win any even electoral college votes, but both of the major political parties now saw that there was 19% of the electorate that they wanted to capture in that next election. So they better pay attention to fiscal policy, right? The last time we had Bill and Spudgets was for many reasons in the 90s, but both Gingrich and Clinton at the time were gonna pay attention to an issue that maybe wouldn't have made it. And Perot was able to sell finance to get to a place where he could do that even in our current system that doesn't allow it. But in a system like this, now people can throw their vote away and not be throwing their vote away. Vote for the candidate who's bringing up an issue that they really care about. Even if that issue in candidate isn't gonna win, you can demonstrate that the electorate is there on something, and it might grow over time. So there's an interaction with districts because the electorate, right, is going to be determined by the district design, but in a state like Wisconsin where you can draw maps differently, I'm talking at the congressional level to some degree, but we also have some serious geographic segregation going on in our state in terms of ideology. And so Final Five is a way to make sure that everybody gets represented, even if you live in an area where actually the majority of people don't aren't on your red team or blue team, right? I don't know if there's anything else that you would add to that, but. Well, and Scott made this big mistake by giving me a microphone. What were you thinking? So ranked choice voting is absolutely fascinating, and we're watching it play out in New York City. I mean, isn't that fun? Just, unfortunately, you have to wait three weeks for a result, which is an interesting issue, but I think there was kind of ranked choice. You think about it, Ross Perot got Bill Clinton elected, Ralph Nader got George W. Bush elected, Jill Stein got Donald Trump elected. If you subtract out those votes, those three candidates would not have won. I mean, it's just a really interesting, the United States has never been set up as a more than two-party system, so that history is really interesting. It's just my perspective, but I tend to think of redistricting as the way we really need to approach things. In Wisconsin, in 2020, well, 2018, 2020, all the statewide offices were won, but just by tiny, tiny numbers by the Democratic Party. So, you know, when you read Marley and Craig Gilbert in the Journal Sentinel, they've done really excellent work to show that Wisconsin is truly a really deeply divided and or a purple state. So I view, you'll never get your bill passed because of gerrymandering. It will never happen. An independent redistricting commission, which the Iowa model is my preference, would remove all sorts of, it would bring, I love the Venn diagram, and that's just exactly right. It would bring those circles together to some extent. You think about the, we called it the, the Goober Clown Car in 2018 when you had eight or 10 or 15 people running for governor. But in the end, it all sorted itself out. And in 2022, we're gonna have at least six, probably 10 or 15 people running for US Senate on the Democratic side, and that'll sort itself out. It has this weird advantage in that the opposing party can't spend a lot of money until after the primary is over because they don't know who's going to win. And so there's, you know, that tiny political advantage. On the other hand, if I see, I would just need to understand a whole lot more about ranked choice to really understand how it works and to make sure that if I mark somebody number four, who I really didn't like, that I didn't help get that person elected, that would be a grave concern for me. But I think the chances of ranked voting are so much higher because I do despair right now that an independent redistricting commission will ever come to be, at least I'd probably, you think you're old, I probably won't live to see it, is just a realistic, is a realistic consideration. So I think we agree on the fact that the system really is pretty utterly broke. In Wisconsin, we have 99 assembly seats. In 2020, 10 of them were considered competitive. 10. I ran in 2020, you know, wonderful campaign. It's so much fun. We raised a lot of money. I think we healthy upticket. We had a good time. People were so supportive. And I still got 41% of the vote. I mean, I ran a real campaign with really good people around me. Just all sorts of interesting approaches. And I got 41% of the vote. If I, and I'm not, will not, not run in 2022, but did nothing, I get 41% of the vote. So I mean, it's just a weird deal. So the solution I'm looking for is redistricting. If final five can't, if ranked choice voting has a better chance, I'm all in. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the, a couple of things in response to that, which is to say, so I don't think we're gonna get independent redistricting, right? There's just not a path to it, this cycle, pragmatically, politically. So in part, well, I don't go there. So that's not gonna happen. So focusing on something that could potentially happen. I mean, final five, we've got this coalition of bipartisan support. It's definitely not a slam dunk, right? This is not gonna be easy, but there's a possibility. I think we've got a really good group of legislators who have committed and are really engaged in this work. We've got a good leadership group that are engaged and willing to kind of move the ball forward in both the very pragmatic political ways that are required to get things done, but also towards this ideological, real systems improvement on both sides of the aisle. And that's, unfortunately, we can't say the same for nonpartisan redistricting right now in Wisconsin. So that's something that gives me some hope about final five in our state. And the other thing is if you really care about results in governing, this idea that things sort themselves out, right, sort themselves out in the primary and then you have kind of the candidate in the general election, it just doesn't quite work because that still means that the person who was elected was only elected by such a small percentage of the electorate. And that's the part that gives me grave concern about not interrupting that party primary system. Like when people hear about this, often they get fixated on the ranked choice voting part because it's so new and it's such a different tool. And I would say don't get fixated on that part. It's a tool. The really powerful change that final five voting brings is getting rid of the party primaries. And then giving us a way to manage through a ranked choice ballot, real competition between five candidates, which is how we're gonna get to some degree of accountability. So again, there are various iterations of ranked choice voting that are being implemented in various places across the country. They're not all the same because they don't all, final five actually gets at that combination of interrupting the party primary and making the majority winner win in the general election. They don't all do that. So be aware. Yeah. Just, I'm gonna kind of dovetail on Mary Lynset. The reason New York, there's a huge article in the New York Times. The reason it's gonna take three weeks in New York is because they have millions of ballots, absentee votes that have to be brought in and counted. The computer can do this in a heartbeat, but it's all the absentee ballots. So that's one thing. The other thing you mentioned, Mary Lyn, is you don't want your fourth or fifth candidate to get elected because it's on the, you don't have to vote for four or five. You can vote for one, you can vote for two. So there's nothing that says you have to vote for all five, which I thought was enlightening. Right, right. If there's someone who you think never do I want my vote to transfer to this person, just don't put them on your ballot. And the other thing this morning we talked about was, this is not part of the state constitution. Right. So we don't have to have a referendum to change the constitutional amendment to change the constitution in the state of Wisconsin. You just have to get it through legislatively. And we talked about that this morning because you got these two opposing forces and neither one of them wanted. How do you get there? And you explain that to us. How do you actually get there? And how long is it gonna take to get a legislative body to agree to do this? Yeah, thanks for bringing up that question again because it's a very important piece of the strategy. And I alluded to it, but I didn't say why. So our bill is for final five voting for federal elections only. It's a very pragmatic decision because it means that we're asking the state legislature not to change how they get elected, but to change how Washington DC gets elected. And we can all agree that Washington DC is dysfunctional both sides of the aisle. We say different things. We say like corruption or we say drain the swamp or whatever, right? But we all agree that it's broken. And we don't all agree. And actually the data shows that Madison does still get some things done in a bipartisan way. There are things that happen in the state capitol when at the federal level, it's just pretty much gridlock, right? It's just constant gridlock. So the pragmatic decision is to say, let's focus on what we can all agree on, which is that Congress is dysfunctional. Don't change your own elections first. Let's do federal elections first. The other thing I didn't mention this morning that I should have is that we are building congressional support for this as well. So Congressman Mike Gallagher is in support of final five voting. That's a huge thing because it allows for him to say, I wanna be elected under this system. State legislators, please, please bring it on, right? Make this change so that I can get elected in this way. And you don't have to do it for yourselves yet. Obviously, I think over time, we'll all like this and we'll want them to do it at the state level as well. But a pragmatic political decision to narrow the bill to federal elections only for this first crack at final five voting in Wisconsin. Yeah, question. Nominations, the back part of it, I guess, how many signatures is it gonna take if I wanna run it for Congress, how many do I need, how many people can fight really only beyond it and how big a list might it be? Yeah, it's a great question. So we, in our bill, we don't propose to change anything about the signature requirements. So the current number of signatures that you have to get on the primary ballot is the same. So there shouldn't be an inordinately high barrier to entry to get onto the ballot. Now, the difference is that you're getting onto a single primary ballot. So you can get onto that ballot as a Democrat, as a Republican, as an independent, as a Green, as a Libertarian, right? Or however you wanna identify on that same ballot. And that allows for, again, this ability to just winnow that group down because it could, in a particularly competitive open seat, there could be a lot of candidates on that primary ballot because it's not, it's work together signatures to people who have run for office in this room, but it's not impossible, right? It's certainly something that if you're actually running a campaign and doing it, you can get yourself on the ballot. And so then the primary serves essentially as a narrowing mechanism for that broad slate to the top five that are generally gonna be the people who are representative of that area, that geographic area or statewide for the state Senate, sorry, for the US Senate. And so then there's no additional barrier to getting onto that general election ballot. And we aren't just throwing independence or third party candidates into the general election ballot after not having participated in the primary, right? There's something to say for the degree of name recognition that comes, earned media that comes when you participate in elections because people are thinking about you. And if you've made it through a primary, you've crossed this threshold of some degree of purported credibility, right? And so now you have a slate in that general election of five candidates who have an incentive to differentiate themselves from each other, but you also have an opportunity as a voter to learn about all these different candidates and to do it in a manageable number of candidates that it's narrowed to five. There's no magic to five. Five is the number that we believe is a good degree of competition for a general election while not being overwhelming to a voter to rank on a ballot. Two has proven to be too few. And if you look at political science research, if we were like a multi-party democracy in the United States, we'd probably have somewhere between four and six parties. So five was the number that we chose, Alaska chose four. Again, there's no magic to it. It's just that's, we believe, would allow for a degree of competition in that general that would be meaningful, long answer to your question, but we'll hear and then hear. So if we went to this system and you imagine yourself to be a political strategist hired by a Republican party and said, all right, we need your help. We gotta figure out how we are gonna get our candidate to win or emerge as the winner in this process when we might possibly have five candidates. Layout for me as a political strategist, what your approach would be, because they're gonna pay a million bucks to get this done. Right, right. I didn't trust you because you're an expert in this. To get their candidate at least into that final five and maybe even the best few of them. Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And it's not as a campaign person, here's what you're gonna tell them. You are now running your general election from the start. So right now when we're consulting with candidates as political consultants, you're running two elections. They're two very different elections. You're running a primary election and then you're pivoting and running your general election. So and often candidates act pretty differently in those two elections, which is a little bit weird as voters, right? But now you're running the general. You're always running the general because your constituency is your entire electorate. So you better be aware of that and accountable to that. You also are gonna wanna work on your name recognition just like you would in any race, right? So that's gonna be important. You're gonna do different and more doors than you did previously. You're gonna have a different and broader coalition of people that you're trying to get to support you than you previously did because your constituency is different. So we haven't done this in practice yet, right? But Alaska will. And it'll be really interesting to start to see how these things change. And depending on the district, the advice as a political consultant is gonna be different because you're gonna look at that electorate and you're gonna say, all right, here are the people that matter in this electorate. You're gonna want them to endorse you just like you would in any election, right? But the key distinction is that you're no longer telling them to run two elections. You're telling them to run one election. And the other interesting piece of advice that differentiates from our current electoral system that I'm gonna tell them as a political consultant is not to just trash their opponent. So because I want my opponent's second choice votes. So I now want to differentiate, I definitely wanna differentiate myself from whoever my competition is on that general election ballot, but I don't wanna go so far as to just make you hate that person so much because then their voters are gonna be turned off from me. And I want those voters to rank me second. So that's a very different political calculus. And it's been interesting because in places that have implemented ranked choice voting over a long period of time at the municipal level, you're actually training candidates differently when you're getting them to run. And you're maybe even looking for different candidates, right, different types of candidates knowing that your electorate is different. So, but I think those two things are the most meaningful, different advice that I would give them is that you're running one election and you wanna differentiate yourself from your opposition but you don't wanna just trash them because you want those second and third place votes of their people. Here's the follow-up question. We do have individuals, we tend to, we think we're voting for individuals. But we're either voting for pro-life or gun control or some issue or belief system that's connected to a person. So, as a political consultant, we need one guy who's just the flaming liberal. We need one guy that's just the gun-carrying conservative. But then we also need the gun-carrying conservative that's pro-christ. And we also need the pro-choice person that has a gun on his ankle. Right, right, right, right. He's hot. Right. He's a hybrid candidate. Yeah, yeah. What happens is, I mean, I'm seeing, you know, we still have the extremes but then we develop these hybrids that take number two and number four and then we got somebody in the middle, the number five, the one that is this strange blend of a whole bunch of stuff that we don't even know if they're Republican or Democrat. Maybe they're the libertarian. But, I mean, tell me what happens, you know, as a strategist when you're dealing with that. Yeah, I mean, that's the fascinating part of why competition is so powerful because all of a sudden you allow for that sort of differentiation to exist. Right now, it can't exist because our parties have so polarized themselves from each other, right? There used to be Democrats who were not pro-choice Republicans who were, right? We used to cross on some of these issues in a way that the parties have just nationally completely separated and you don't cross that line anymore because of the primary system. So now that that's gone, you allow an opportunity where if that candidate who's some mix of some of these ideological positions is gonna be the right fit for the district, all of a sudden they can run. They can't run in our current system because they never would have made it out of the primary. But all of a sudden they can run and they can maybe win, right? In a very powerful way because those second choice votes are gonna start counting and going to that person who represents some degree of, again, what I would argue is most of us want someone who's gonna be pragmatic and represent some common sense. So yeah, but in some districts, I mean, I will say, right, some districts are gonna be very blue or very red and they're gonna elect possibly a very blue or very red candidate, right? Because that's what that electorate was gonna go for and there's nothing inherently wrong with that because I think sometimes people get fixated on, like if you talk to parties about this, they think, oh, you're just a bunch of independents or moderate mushy middle people who want this final five voting thing to pass and that's not necessarily true. There's a very big difference between being mushy middle moderate and being someone who pragmatically wants to compromise to get things done. So, I always try to bring that into the conversation as well. There was, okay, but there was one, okay. I have a couple more questions, but I'm just gonna say we're getting close to the time we gotta get out of here. Thank you. Chutz being good to me because he knows I have a meeting in Milwaukee, but I'm bad at keeping my own schedule, yeah. I'm just curious, where is the Republican and Democrat national committee on this and the state parties on that? Yeah, it's a great question. So, there's no stated position publicly from either of them in support or opposition because final five hasn't reached that threshold of frankly paying attention and honestly that's perfectly fine with me for now because that gives us the space to keep doing the coalition building that we have to do to move it along. Now, as soon as it starts, you know, in 2022 we're gonna have some more ballot initiatives and this is gonna start to be a thing. So, we're gonna have some of that attention that then brings those critiques and potentially concerns, particularly from party leadership who are so familiar with running in the current system and that's gonna be, you know, whether or not a party likes this is also gonna be a state by state calculus on whether or not they're in power in that state to some degree, right? Because if you're in a power in a particular place and you know how to do that because you know the current system so well you're gonna be the least, you're gonna be the most resistant to change. And there's, again, nothing wrong with it. That's how we are as human beings. So, you have to get over that with a degree of credibility and coalition building from our strategies, right, from their donor base, from the people who influence those political parties so that they can see that there's still a role for them in this system as well, which is to say, we're not taking partisan affiliation off the ballot. An endorsement from a Democratic primary or Democratic party or Republican party might be what's gonna make or break that end candidate who's gonna win in a particular district. They also bring resources with that. They bring, you know, power of people with that. All the sorts of organizing mechanisms that are why parties have been valuable in our political system for, since our founding, even though our founding fathers didn't want us to have parties, right? So, there's this interplay between parties in this system that's very interesting. And they're gonna be, my supposition is they're gonna be resistant, but they're also gonna figure out how to operate in it in a way that everybody learns to operate as systems change, right? So, but to answer your question concretely, there's no kind of position to date. For any of these cases, but go ahead. How will this work for individuals who there's a lot of people that I know who choose not to vote? They have no idea who's running and suddenly they're overwhelmed, we have five choices and frankly, they don't care. Which is surprising that sometimes they actually vote. So, how do you anticipate some of that? I'm so glad you asked this question because I failed to highlight a key piece of this which is when you look at the evidence as to why people don't vote, it is most, their most frequent reason is that they don't think their vote's gonna matter. It's not that it's too hard for them to vote or that it's too complicated. I mean, that's what the polling says, right? And so, give them real choice, give them a vote that matters and you at least allow them the opportunity to make that decision, right? That decision in a way that it could be meaningful for them to vote. And they can just go in and vote for their favorite, they don't have to rank, you know? There's nothing that, and they're no worse off than if they went in and voted for one candidate in our current system. And they would still have partisan affiliations after your name. So, right, if you're just a person who's gonna go in and vote for a particular party, you can still do that. There's nothing that's gonna prohibit you from doing, taking those signals. But that's another reason they go all the way back to one of our first questions which was why I focus on federal and not local elections to start. Federal elections are much higher information elections. So, particularly when you go to the local, those are the lowest information elections where most often you hear from people that they just don't know who to vote for. And federal elections are much higher information elections. And so, we believe there's also value to starting with those elections because of that fact as well. And there will just be a degree of attention and awareness and information provided to the electorate for federal elections that will allow people to do their rankings. So, in the state of Maine where they have implemented ranked choice voting at the state and federal level within their party primary system. So, it's a little bit different but nevertheless gives us some data to start answering your question. We've found that voters say that they like the opportunity to rank, that they don't invalidate their ballot to any greater degree than they do in our current system and that they've actually expanded use of ranked choice voting over time in Maine. So, there's a degree of, again, that just shows that they're actually liking it. And resources follow. So, groups that do voter information are adapting their resources to help people manage the ranking opportunity. So, the League of Women Voters put out their voter guide that teaches people how to do that and then that, in many ways, has more meaning now because you're gonna look at those issues a little bit more meaningfully because you're trying to differentiate between candidates in a way that you don't right now. And also, how in Wisconsin, they have limited publications of newspapers in areas for delivery purposes, right? Can Dora County, they don't get the Milwaukee paper, they don't get the New York Times, they don't get the North of the Wausau same thing and internet is very limited. How do you explain this to some of those areas? You have to pair implementation with an outreach and education campaign for voters for sure. Every state that's done it has included that. I mean, New York City just implemented, and this is a totally different scale, so don't get freaked out by the numbers, but they implemented ranked choice voting for their party primary mayoral elections and they used $15 million of their recovery funds for voter education efforts. So again, hugely different scale, but nevertheless, I mean, the combination of voter education is critically important to success. So, and it's also one of the reasons that we wanna do this sort of thing along the way because we gotta bring people, and we've got a two minute video on our website that if you wanna share with people to just start them thinking about it, it's a great way to introduce the conversation as we're moving towards hopefully passage of this in Wisconsin. Well, I just wanted to say that I appreciate the discussion. I think it's been wonderful, but I do wanna make sure that you make your next meeting, Sarah. So I wanna cut it off right here, but I do wanna say that if in fact you belong to organizations that might wanna hear from Sarah in the future. Please find me. My contact information is very available at democracyfound.org. I also left some handouts here that have my contact information directly on them. Some copies of some articles that we've had written about it. So take it, learn more. There's also, I mentioned we have a two minute video on our website. There's also a 17 minute TED talk that our founder, Catherine Gale, did that's a really great resource. It's basically the presentation that I delivered in the fancy TED way of delivering presentations. So way better and a great thing that you can share with people and just tell them, you know, 17 minutes, give it a watch, right? It's something that it's very good for sharing and very persuasive. So Sarah, thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you all, thank you all, thank you. Thank you.