 Welcome back to Vote for Vermont. My name is Ben Kinsley. I am the co-host, co-producer of the show. And tonight our host, Pat McDonald, is out. She's doing some traveling, so I have Executive Director of Campaign for Vermont, Eric with me. And we also have a guest, a very cool guest tonight. We have an interesting topic to discuss. We have Betty from the Vermont League of Women Voters and the St. Alvin, or the St. John'sbury chapter, correct? And we're talking about rank choice voting and instant runoff voting, which is a very interesting topic. So with that, we can dive right in. So Betty, tell us a little bit more about rank, well, actually first, let's talk about you a little bit and to talk about your background, we ask all of our guests to do that and then talk about, move on to the topic of the evening. So I'm Betty Keller, as you said. And I guess the, probably when I was 12 years old, I wouldn't have wanted to be introduced this way, but I'd say a pretty core part of my identity is I'm a PK, which is a preacher's kid. Okay. And so my big life choices are based on what I believe I am called to do. Very cool. And so I grew up, my early years in Illinois, my father was going through college and seminary. We have my mother working full time and my grandmother caring for us in the home, which is just such a wonderful blessing that we had. And his first church was in rural Illinois and his first churches, he had two churches part time in each and then his second set of churches was in East Montpelier, Vermont. So we moved here before sixth grade for me. Spent my first couple of months on Joe's pond until the percentage was available. And thought I was gonna go into journalism and then my junior year of college decided that I was doing a little one week shadowing experience in Boston at Houghton Mifflin and said, you know, I'm not really sure this is what I wanna do. And so a lot of prayer and reflection and decided that I was called to go into medicine and went to UVM College of Medicine, trained for family practice and including the full range, including obstetrics at the University of Utah, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and served on the faculty there for a year, worked in St. John'sbury, family medicine obstetrics. It was hard working full time. By that time I had three children. It was hard working full time and being on call every other day. So we thought we would try an HMO, CHP was in Burlington and see if part time work better. And by that time I had worked in several different areas, several different venues like in a university setting, an urban underserved setting in a private practice, you know, solo every, well, you had been solo than it was us every other day. Now I was doing the HMO setting. So I'd been in a variety of practice and said, you know, none of them really works right. And I'm not seeing my kids enough and I don't wanna practice medicine until we have a better system. I'm gonna stay home with my kids. The childcare had been tough. And so I just decided I was called to be home and I've been home ever since. And as the kids grew, I started volunteering in more areas. And about 2004 I started doing media around racism in Vermont and then switched over to healthcare since I have a lot of expertise in that area so I could actually do a good job of interviewing people. And so moved over toward that in the 2008-ish range was very active while we were trying to get a universal healthcare system here in Vermont, which is the fiscally responsible way to provide healthcare for your citizens. And I firmly believe that Americans are smart enough that if all of Europe and Canada and Australia can all do it, then I'm sure that we can do it too. Just have to figure out politically how to get there. And so in the course of this, it came to me that until we can get our political system to work as a better democracy, more reflective of the people who live here, that we will not get a good healthcare system. So I, in 2000, so I think spring of 2016 is when I started becoming more active in the League of Women Voters. And the draw for the League of Women Voters is it's nonpartisan and it's grassroots and it's just very firmly grounded on voter participation and encouraging people to be active participants in the democracy becoming informed. And that was just really calling to me as a way to try to make change. And you're a volunteer for those folks, correct? Right, I have been a professional volunteer for a while now. Right, I have volunteered for a P and H P that's a Physicians for National Health Care, Health Program and a volunteer at NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And a volunteer, well through my Church of Chorus, the United Church of Christ, I was working on the uprooting racism task force is when I first got involved in the media. And then the League of Women Voters now. So tell us briefly a little bit more about League of Women Voters of Vermont, what your main focus areas are, what mission, what's your mission? Oh, so I guess I could just, for anybody who might be interested in participating with League of Women Voters, it's a national organization since 19 or 20, right around the time women were getting the vote and we needed to teach women, how do you vote? How do you register, how do you vote? How do you make the time to get to the polls and how do you learn about the candidates and the issues enough to vote as an informed citizen? And then working with immigrants over the years, in the past we have been much more open to our immigrants because we were immigrants. My own, all of our families were immigrants and those were 100% Native American. And so over the years it's been important to teach our immigrants and our refugees how to vote, how to be active participants in our democracy. And so that focus has been ongoing throughout the years that League of Women Voters has been working. There are state chapters and within each state there can be, so those are called leagues and within each state there can be leagues also, so we have leagues in the Chittany County area and in Central Vermont. St. John's Creek's not actually technically a league, we call it a unit because we're not big enough with enough paying members to call us a league. But we're actually one of the most active areas in the state. And are there any other of those like chapters, those around the state, yeah. There are a little foci, it just depends on your volunteers and who's busy and calls the meetings and when it drifts off. In the White River Junction area there was one a few years ago and it just ran out of volunteers to put that time into it. You have to either recruit new people or people move. Some of those have not been as active recently. But there are folks in the Rolanda area and the Bennington area but they're various levels of activity. Gotcha. And what are the kind of the main focus areas for the league right now? I know I've worked with a couple folks of the league in the past on different policy areas but what's kind of the big broad strokes right now? And you want to know in Vermont or in the nation? In Vermont specifically. Okay, right. So, well voter registration is always, every year you have new crop of 18 year olds who have not voted before and we want to get them all to feel like that is part of who they are. That's their responsibility and their blessing. And we are on college campuses, we're at high schools, things like that, at citizen naturalization ceremonies. And also in the legislature, advocating for things like voter registration automatic, registration through driver's license and that sort of thing. We don't, a lot of those things have already been done in Vermont, we've. Same day voter registration. Yeah, we have, our state is actually pretty advanced as far as like having open primaries and not having states trying to get rid of voters off the polls just based on oh they missed one election or two elections and so we take them off the polls, we don't do that here. And so we don't have to, and our polling places are fair. We're not trying to make people travel 30 miles to get to a polling place or closing them down in parts of town where the poor people live or anything like that which is happening across the country in a number of different places. And we don't have polling places getting changed the last minute, oh my gosh, when I was, so legal women voters as nonpartisans. The next thing I'm gonna tell you is something that I do as Betty Keller. I don't do it as a legal women voters, okay? But when I was in New York City during the primaries, I was there for a reunion of a summer school program that I'd gone to and I was knocking on doors for Bernie in Brooklyn. And so in Brooklyn, the polling places changed. I was trying to tell people that their polling place was at that school and they said, oh no, I got this notice from school saying that they're not gonna be the polling place. So some, there was this mixed message of like is it gonna be at the school or not? Like how could you be changing this on the Friday before the election? So, but we don't do that kind of stuff here. I'm not aware of it happening here. Yeah, I feel like this is pretty much always like a set place and it doesn't change a whole lot. Yeah, I mean you might have to change if you used to do it in the local Catholic school and now you want to do it in a non-partisan and non-religious place. So in St. John'sburg it used to be in the Adams school, but then when they built a new school, it became Father Lively Center and so it was a religious place and then we moved it to our new school. So, you know, it's pretty straightforward. Right. It's not that hard to find where you're supposed to vote. And the primary that was just a few weeks ago was the first time I believe that we've actually implemented same-day voter registration. Like it was the first vote where someone could go in and register a same day at their polling location. Uh-huh, okay. So I think the numbers are relatively low. I don't know that there's a whole lot of awareness about it the first time around, but. Right, whenever you pass new legislation, there's a little lag until people figure it out. Yeah, so it's rolled out now I believe and hopefully people will take advantage of that. Right, so other things the League of Women Voters do is to inform people about the candidate's positions and it's not like we write up and can write something slanted about them. We send out questionnaires to them and ask them to send us, so it's in their own words. Right. Unfortunately, sometimes you have better response than others and it's kind of a useless manual if only one party's candidates respond and we can't really do anything with that because then it looks partisan. So we're in a little bit of a bind and so right now we're in flux about how we do that candidate information but we do continue to do our forums. So if a town asks us or if say the library wants to sponsor a forum or candidates from one party get together with candidates from other parties and they agree that they'd like a forum then or if citizens just say, hey, can you guys or organize this thing that's going on in our town and then we will take that on. So two years ago I did one in Lunenburg when we were requested this fall we're gonna be doing and we did one in St. John'sburg at that time and this fall we're definitely doing one in St. John'sburg I'm not sure where else we've been asked in my local area but that happens throughout the state. Yeah, one of the things I know from having worked with candidates in the past like there's so many of these questionnaires that they get it's hard to know like how hard to find time to respond to all of them, I think is what a lot of it runs into. So you think you might have a little copy and paste plan and it's like this is your position, pop it in there. Everyone should coordinate and have exactly the same survey question and just copy, paste and everything, yeah, so that's great. Are there any like legislative initiatives that you're leading into this year that are kinda gonna be the focus? Well, so the league has something that they call their program for the biennium and the national organization does it on the even years and the national program is to make democracy work and across the country any state where gerrymandering is a big issue they're focusing on gerrymandering. Other states where there has been and sometimes it's the same states where there are issues regarding pulling places getting moved and things like that then they're addressing that. In Vermont, we don't have issues with those things so much. In our state program, we decided to include civics education and I think there's something on climate as well and then also ranked choice voting. Now ranked choice voting has been on the program a number of years ago and actually they collaborated with a number of different nonprofit organizations and in 99, I think it was passed in one house or the other and then in 2000, it was passed in both houses but the governor vetoed it and a few years later, Burlington had asked to do ranked choice voting for its local elections so the councilman may or that sort of thing and for a town in Vermont to do something major like that they actually have to get state approval because it's their town charter. So they had to go through the state legislature and the state did end up approving it and then actually only one or two years like very few election cycles, they already turned around and came back and said we don't want this. Now that's another whole story. Yeah, there's a whole story behind that we might get to later. Might get to later. But ranked choice voting has been used successfully in a number of places and there are a lot of strong benefits for it and so I had wanted to look at trying to do that again and do better education around it this time. There wasn't enough education for the Burlington voters and there was a lot of misinformation. They didn't really understand how it worked. They didn't understand how it worked and when they saw the result they weren't sure that they liked it but also some parties really didn't like it so it might be better for the individual voter and for the community as a whole collectively looking at the voters but not for the parties necessarily all the time. But the League of Women Voters, that's not our concern so much is how the parties feel about something is it serving the voters? Right, it's serving the voters. Yeah, so it's an interesting proposition. I think ranked choice voting is a subset of instant runoff voting which people may be more familiar with. Right, I'm not sure if I'd say it was a subset of, I would have actually almost said instant runoff voting was a subset of ranked choice voting but anyway, they're related. They're not identical but they're related. Right, yeah and I think there's one country that uses it currently for national elections. I think Australia. Right, Australia is, yeah. And they've had it for several decades, right? Quite a long while, right. Now I'm not sure if this is true now but a few years ago when I was first starting to look at this, you had to rank every choice. Like if there were eight candidates you had to rank them all the way down to eight. Right. So the idea was then you 100% would definitely have a majority on whoever the candidate was even if it went through multiple rounds. If you tell people you rank as many as you want and it won't hurt your top candidate if you rank additional people, say there are eight candidates and you only rank the top three or four, well if you rank the three or four least favorite people then you eventually, there won't be anybody to look at for your next vote and then you may actually not have a full majority but it still would have been closer. So before we get too far down this road I think maybe we should back up a little bit and let's go and do a brief description of what ranked voting is. And I know we have a quick clip that we can show that's a good example of how it works and then maybe you can kinda run us through in layman's terms what it is, how it works and what it's supposed to be accomplished. So in ranked choice voting you rank your quarter of preference for these folks and it's used already in many professional organizations it's used by motion academy awards, motion picture awards, it's used in a number of different settings as well as being used in some towns in America, some countries, some states, only one state currently has proposed using it but they have to work out constitutional issues but the thing is you rank your candidates so you have your first choice, your second choice, your third choice and your fourth choice. And now we can take a look at how that plays out. So just to show you how ranked choice voting would work so you can actually see it, first I'll just explain that there are four candidates, blue, pink, coral, whatever, yellow and purple and on the ballot I would be putting down that blue is my first choice, coral is my second choice, then yellow and then purple. And the way this looks on this board here is that the blues on top of the coral, my second choice on top of the yellow and then my purple is my last choice and then my vote is gonna go counted with all the other blue first choices. Okay, so that's how that looks. And so that was my sample, I'll put that down here again now. So everybody voted, one of these would be mine and now we'll run through all the people who voted for blue first choice are here, yellow first choice are here, purple first choice are here and coral first choice are here. There are 20 voters so to get at least 50% because we wanna have a majority of people supporting the final selection. Then we would need to have 11 voters. Half would be 10, you have to have at least one more. So that's 11 voters and nobody got that many. The largest one we have is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven so this person would need four more votes for them to actually win this outright. If they'd gotten 11, the election would be done and they would have won. Now though, we have to go to the next step. Since nobody got a majority, we look to see who got the least votes and that would be yellow. And so with these yellow votes, we say, okay, so your candidate is eliminated and who is your second choice? And we'll give those votes to your second choice. So this is going to go to blue. This will go to pink and this will go to blue as well. So now we have six to seven to seven. So the one that has the least votes is blue and again, we'll be distributing those votes to the next choice. So I'll take off their second choice. It's actually the third choice for these two voters you'll recall and it's now down to the second choice for these other folks and this person's already been eliminated too. So that will go down here and you'll see now that Coral only got one of those votes and all the rest are going to purple. So purple is gonna win after all. You'll recall purple only had seven votes to start with but once you see, you know, when some candidates are eliminated, what did they end up with? They have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. So they have 12 votes total. That's more than 11. So they won this election. So hopefully that gave a little bit more of an illustration. It's obviously a little, it's a little more complicated than an actual voting scenario but that should give a pretty good idea of how this is supposed to work and what it's looking to achieve. Yeah, it's a pretty cool system because it really takes into account, trying to find, I think, the candidate that most people can get behind, right? Because the candidate that can get the, you know, plurality of a vote in a head-to-head election or a multi, you know, with multiple candidates in it, you know, they may be able to get their base excited. They may not be able to win over or at least, you know, win over other people that are in, that would vote for the other candidates in the race. So when you have, you know, a race where there's multiple seats that are multiple people running for the same seat, I think, is where you get a scenario where something like this makes a lot of sense. So this is a pretty cool system and you can get fairly complex with it when you have multiple candidates involved. What would you say the real benefits of a ranked choice voting system are? Well, the strongest benefit is that in the end, you hopefully do have a majority and if people didn't all list all the way down to the end, then you may not have majority, but it's way closer than what we currently do. So you have the person who hopefully had the majority support and another benefit is that you have less negative campaigning because you can tell if you're saying nasty things about candidate A, if candidate A doesn't get enough votes and those people go to their second choice, you think candidate A's supporters are gonna vote for you if you said nasty things about their candidate, their favorite candidate. True. So that reduces it by a lot and it doesn't hurt to vote for your favorite person and then the other people that you also can tolerate or you also think would be good candidates or whatever your range is. And a lot of people are really concerned about that. They're like, oh, if I really vote for, if I really vote for, I really, really want yellow, but actually pink is who is going to win or purplish is who is going to win. If I know in the end it's gonna be one of those two candidates, am I wasting my vote to vote for yellow? Right, and that's something that a lot of voters struggle with is like, am I really like this candidate? I don't really think they have a chance. Am I wasting my vote by voting for them? Right, so we call splitting the vote and wasting your vote are two things voters are very concerned about. And the League of Women Voters wants people to feel that their vote counts, that every person's gotta vote and that people will be enthusiastic about going to the polls, not stay home because well my vote doesn't count anyway. I wanted yellow and they're never gonna win so I'll stay home. Or well, yellow and pink are similar in their views and if I vote for yellow that will take a vote away from pink and maybe purple will win instead or something like that. So it really gives people more sense of choice and ownership. Yeah, and I think it makes sense when you have a race with multiple candidates. So when you have like a three-way race or a four-way race for one seat it makes a lot of sense to do something like this because there are some states that have runoff elections and this is kind of basically a runoff for all intents and purposes but it allows you to do a runoff vote calculation by counting your votes but not have to hold a whole new election which is expensive and then you don't have as much turnout in your runoff as you do in your original one. You run into all those kinds of problems where if you have a vote that's that close to this you can do it one vote and you can capture all of that in one. Right, right. So if you need to buy different computer systems or print up different ballots that can be a somewhat added expense. However, if you can eliminate the primary that's a huge expense you get rid of and if you can eliminate any runoffs and you wouldn't have had a runoff if there was a clear majority to begin with. So you may not be saving money on that and if it wasn't gonna happen anyway but if there is a runoff. Now the problem is that, well one problem is that some of these decisions about whether election requires a majority of just a plurality will win. It's all state by state and within a state and maybe town by town about what are the rules for how that works. So that in Vermont, for instance, our US House and Senate seats are just by plurality. So that's where you can have that vote splitting. So if you have one candidate who may be perceived as liberal and two who are perceived as conservative, people who are conservative are like torn on which one do they think is gonna win? Cause they wanna vote for the one they think will win to make sure that they get somebody that they like. And that's really unfortunate to have people having to think that way instead of thinking who I think would be the best candidate. Which, yeah, exactly. I was trying to make that calculation of who's gonna be the most successful candidate not necessarily who's gonna represent me the best. Right, right. Yeah, and the other thing about ranked choice voting if you can have more than two candidates from a party then that really frees up the party to have more choices on the ballot. So for instance, if you have an incumbent and they've been in there for 10 or 15 or whatever years and some people think, you know, they kinda like some fresh blood and other people like, wow, you really don't wanna lose that seat and he or she isn't saying they wanna back down yet, we don't wanna push them out, all that stuff, you know? You can just run both candidates and it doesn't hurt your incumbent to have a newcomer try it out. Right, yeah, and what I think is where a system like this could be really valuable for Vermont, we don't have too many races statewide where you have more than one candidate in a race except for in a primary, right? But if we had open generals and we got rid of primaries, then a system like this would make a whole lot of sense, I think. Right, so yeah, so they're different, happens different in different years. So for instance, a few years ago, we had five candidates just in the Democratic primary for governor. And seriously, none of them had even 30, they all were in the 20s or lower. Right. And so they're all pretty close. So in a circumstance like that, it's harder to say whether, you know, whether the first person gets eliminated was like so closely to the other three that maybe they would have been, you know, favored more by some of the other folks, but it still is so much better that if you have somebody in that one, you automatically give it to the one who got 26 instead of 24%. Right, I'm just thinking back to the 2010 primary where Pierre Shumlin won. That's what I'm talking about. And I think the margin was actually more than or less than two or 3%. I think it was like one and a half percent. It was small. Yeah, like I said, they were like 22 to 25 or 26. Yeah, exactly. It was like 3% from one to like fourth place. It was like kind of what it was. Right, right. And we have a race that's that close. It would have been nice to drop off the bottom candidate and see where those votes went. Exactly, and see where those votes went. Yeah, yeah. The other thing in Vermont is that, you know, I had said we have the plurality voting for our U.S. House and Senate. However, we require a majority for our governor. Right. We require a majority for the governor to be declared a winner in the election. But if there's not, we don't actually do a runoff for our governor. We put it into the legislature. And this almost happened two years ago, four years ago with Scott Milne, because Shumlin did not get a majority and so went to the legislature. Right, right. So yeah, I'm not sure why you said almost, because it actually did. It did. It did go to them. I was thinking, did I miss out on something there? Right, no, it did. And so from the League of Women Voters perspective, that's not honoring the voters' wishes, because you're guessing. You're guessing how the other 8% of people who voted for whatever other candidates were on there, the Libertarian, the Green Party, whatever, all those votes in a ranked choice voting system they would have been distributing, we would know what the voters actually wanted. And here you have legislators sitting there saying, well, I think we really need to vote for the plurality one, because that was the will of the people. And it's like, no, we don't know the will of the people. And if you choose, well, maybe if you can tell, looking at the other three candidates, who do we think those people would have wanted for a second choice? But the politicians are very nervous about their next election. And they're worried their constituents will second guess them and think that they didn't do the right thing and whatever. I remember this being a major debate at the time. Among the legislators about, do I vote for the plurality candidate or do I vote with the way my district went? And how do I vote my conscience? What do you do in that situation? Right. And the ranked choice voting would give you the answer. It wouldn't be thrown to the legislature. So another place that ranked choice voting is used actually in Louisiana for a number of years, like 20 or more years. They've had ranked choice voting for the presidential primaries for military and other overseas people because of the issue around getting, if the primary, something happens different, and then you can't print out the ballot in time for the changes or the general election. Right, and mail it and get it back. And so Louisiana's been doing the longest. And they actually do their House and Senate that way too. And then there's a couple other states that have done it more recently. I think Alabama and Mississippi, yep. And that's because states officiate their presidential primaries, correct? Right. They're not actually a federally officiated election like the general is. Is that correct? Well, wait. Actually, so the results of the general are that you're actually technically voting for an elector. Right. And then the states have to follow strict rules about what happens with those votes. But still, I mean, the electors can get guidance from laws that we write. So for instance, in Vermont, legislators, electors rather, electors are required to vote for a person in the same party as, how do I put this? So when you vote, if you think you're voting for candidate A for the election and that person's like who has been across the country campaigning everything, you're not actually voting for candidate A. You're voting for the electors who have promised to vote for candidate A. Right. And so if something happens and candidate A is suddenly not available or if the electors suddenly decide that candidate A is not an appropriate candidate because something has come out in the news or whatever, those electors have to choose somebody else from the same party. They can't just get somebody else random. Right. They have to choose somebody from the same party. In state by state, some are tied that way to parties, some are tied by other ways, and some are not tied. She's an interesting, presidential elections in particular are very interesting. Yeah, they are complicated. And another whole topic on that one is the national compact, the electoral college, which we probably won't go into now. Could you theoretically put a rank, could a state theoretically put a rank choice voting method in place for a federal election? For the presidential primary, you could. For the presidential primary, but not necessarily for a presidential general. I am not aware of how that could work right now with the US Constitution. Yeah, I would think that would be tricky. Right. So it's more for senators and House members and all the state elected officials, governors, state's attorneys, all those sorts of things. And what challenges are there? Any problems that an IRV system presents? Well, actually, if you don't mind us going back a little bit, I wanted to make sure that we talked about the rest of the pros. Oh, sure. Right, right. So one thing is that the rank choice voting, we talked about some of the issues around strategic voting about people saying, well, I don't want to vote for this person who has no chance or I don't want to split a vote, that sort of thing. There are other ways that elections can work that may be better than plurality voting, but they have more problems with strategic voting. And the instant runoff voting of the various choices has the least problem with strategic voting. And so that's one of the benefits. And another one, we did talk about saving money. Right, yep. OK, good. Yeah, so in the end, basically, it has a better reflection of what the voters actually wanted. Right, exactly. So you get to a candidate that most of the majority of voters can get behind, even if it's not their first choice, it's someone they can live with. So as far as the cons, the main one is that people aren't familiar with it. And so anything new, there's going to be a certain percentage of people who don't want to change. Because how do you know what unintended consequences there might be? So they don't want to change from what they're doing now. And we would definitely need to do some education around why you're doing it so people will be willing to change. And then how do you actually do it? Right, how do you implement it? Right, right. And the printmaking might be more expensive because you have more columns on it. So you might have to have a second piece of paper or something. And the computer programming would be a little different. So there might be more, some expense in that end. But remember, you're saving the money on the end with the primaries if you're able to get rid of the primaries. Right, so you're getting rid of the whole election. Has there been any, how receptive has people you've talked to or people in government in the legislature been to the concept of moving towards either an instant run off method of some sort or getting rid of a primary and making it an open general? Have you gotten any pushback on that? So I had approached several legislators. Some that had, oh, so I didn't actually mention that there was a ranked choice voting bill, a limited one, just for the presidential primary for people who were military overseas. Somebody had, I can't remember who was the one who sponsored that bill. And I was trying to get my own legislators in St. John'sbury to co-sponsor. And I was not successful. And one thing is that you pretty much have to get the Secretary of State on board to do a major election change before legislators will want to sign on to it, since that's the person who has to implement it. That's implemented. Right, and Jim Contos, the Secretary of State, was saying there are other changes coming up regarding how we're going to be voting as far as electronic voting and things, that he didn't think that this was a good time to do that kind of a bill. So it was not raised at all. I mean, it had been, what do you call it, when you put a bill out there? But then it gets basically hacked to the bulletin board and never dropped off. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it was introduced, but not moved out of committee. Right, right, right, right. And so the thing is that I do think it'd be a good idea to move forward with the Gummer issue for ranked choice voting for that position. And some folks are, well, one thing is we have an election coming up right now. So the people who you might meet with over the summertime are busy campaigning if they're running again. And they're not sure if they're going to be there. So how much time do they want to put in looking at this bill right now? Right. And so, yeah, it might be, I'm not sure whether it would be better to try to approach them again in that November time after election. They know one way or the other. I know that Dick McCormick is interested in it again. He supported it in the past. But he'd be very interested. Senator Kitchell from my area is concerned about the bad press that it got when they tried it in Burlington. When they tried it in Burlington, yeah. And do we want to wait and see how it works other places some more? But the thing is it's actually out there. It's successfully being used in four towns in the Bay Area in San Francisco. It's been used in Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota. It's been used in Portland, Maine. So we have experienced out there. And it was successful enough in Maine that the state of Maine decided, not the legislature. The legislature and the governor were opposed. But there were enough grassroots organizations out there educating the public that they got a referendum to say that they wanted ranked choice voting. The problem with having a referendum, now we don't have that process in Vermont. But if you have a state that allows a referendum, then the way the question is worded is not vetted by people who have really looked at like your state constitution and stuff. And so there's issues about whether the law as currently written is valid, constitutional right. And if you had asked the legislator is to help you write it up, then you could have had something that would pass constitutional muster. And the legislators, because they weren't involved, aren't really that interested in fixing it. Well, and there are a number of them that don't want it anyway. Right. Yeah, yeah. So are there any circumstances, there's clearly a lot of cases where this is a good option. Are there any circumstances where this might not be the strongest option? Does this translate well to if you're trying to elect multiple people for a specific role? That's a great question. So actually, League of Women Voters across the country has supported having multiple member districts for a lot of different kinds of positions. So for instance, when you're looking at, well, St. John'sbury has a multiple member district. We have two house members and we can vote for two. And Burlington has six house members. I'm not sure whether each one is a different geographic location and you only vote for one or whether they... It's a mixed bag. There are a couple multi-member districts, house districts. The big one though is Chinden County has six Senate seats and that is, there's been a lot of discussion about that. Well, that's really interesting because the idea that in all of the Burlington area, there are zero Republicans. Now, I don't actually belong to a party, but it just seems funny to me that there would be six Democratic seats and zero Republican seats in a city the size of that. And the proportional representation with multi-member seats allows you to have members that more accurately represent the district. So that's another whole topic I don't think we'll have time for today. So we're talking about a multi-member district and I think Chinden County's kind of an extreme example where you have six seats that people are running for. And one of the interesting things, kind of looking at the results from the primary that was just a few weeks ago, is there's a huge spread in the number of votes that each of those candidates are getting, even within one party. Where you have the top vote getter getting twice as many votes as the bottom vote getter. And when you have that large of a spread, it really is difficult to say that all of those seats are representing the population of that geographic area. And I think even in other places where you have multi-member districts, you run into some of those same issues and Chinden County is just kind of an extreme example of that. Right, right, right. The whole multi-member district is not something that we've spent a lot of time here in Vermont and League of Men voters, but I can definitely appreciate that if somebody said this is a problem, can you help us study and can you help us promote a particular kind of legislation. If it was something it would look like it would make our elections provide more representative government and then we would be happy to look at that sort of thing. Yeah, I think it's just an interesting case study where you could apply something like this. Cause I see, I know back in 2014, there was some interest in looking at this both by the Senate Government Operations Committee and at the time I was working with Campaign for Vermont, we did look at this and supported the, they were looking really at instant runoff voting, different various forms of instant runoff. So, maybe we could just explain for the listeners, for those who don't mind something really tedious here. You're still here on this show with us at this point. So in instant runoff voting, you'll remember we had these four different colors up here. Instead of just taking off one tab to look at just the yellows with the ones with the least number, you would have taken all of the yellow and all of the blue. Right. And only looked at the top two candidates and for each of those groups, you would have taken the second choice for each of them unless they happened to like be each other. Like it was both yellow and blue were the first and second choices. You'd go down to see what was the, which candidate of the top two got the highest ranking for each of those voters. Right. So that those numbers would then distributed down. So if with only one round, no matter how many candidates you have, if nobody got the majority vote on the first round, only two candidates advanced to the instant runoff. Right, that's the top two advanced and not all but the bottom. Right. Yep. Yeah, and it's an interesting, it's just an interesting concept of trying to get to, you know, again, get to the candidate or candidates in a multi-seat district that best represent the people of the district. And that's actually how the bill was that Jim Condos had sponsored when he was a senator. I don't know if that was for a constitutional reasons or some reason, because the instant runoff voting does, the ranked choice voting does provide a better representation of the voters' wishes. Right. But did he choose to sponsor the instant runoff voting bill because it was easier to administer or because it was constitutionally easier to know it wouldn't get challenged? Yeah, and there are some questions, there were some questions, I know when I worked on that issue in 2014, there were some questions around constitutionality because of one person, one vote. And I think we run into those anyway with the multi-seat districts because you're casting six votes. So we kind of have those in play anyway in our system. But there's some questions around that and I think there just wasn't a advocate in the state house that was really like, we need to move towards this. They were kind of curious about it. And folks like the League of Women Voters was involved at the conversation at that point. Campaign for Vermont was involved in the conversation. You know, and even Vermont Public Interest Research Group was involved. And again, there wasn't a really strong advocate, just kind of come up and there were some questions around it and you know, all of us kind of agreed that was a good direction to move in but there wasn't really the drive behind it. Wasn't had the drive to get a legislator to actually push it. To actually push it, yeah. Right. The district thing is a concern in a lot of states. It's not a concern for Vermont for our U.S. Congress seats because we only have one in the house. Everybody votes for the senator who's up for a reelection which, you know, we have one one year, another one two years later, and then none the other set because they're in for six years and there's another two. But with the house members, we only get one. So you can't gerrymander the district at all for one candidate. Right, right. So that's the one that would be really good to have ranked choice voting for too. And the thought is the thought for the League of Women Voters too is to get rid of the primary for statewide elections and then use this as kind of a way around, you know, to open that general election up a little bit more. Right, and you might have to look at it. I mean, for instance, you know, if you have 13 candidates running for one seat then the instant runoff voting is less reflective. I mean, because you've had everybody. So diluted at that point. So diluted, right. That it may be harder to say that that really represents. So it might be that if a part, and so if one party has like, you know, 13 candidates and another party has five, and then you have a couple other people from other parties, it's just so many. It might be you'd have to have a limit. Like if one party has more than three then they should throw their party primary but they should pay for it themselves. Right now it's on the voters back to pay for those primaries. And if you guys can't sit down and talk together and figure out like only two candidates or only three candidates, then you know, go pay for it yourself. Right, right. Yeah, and that makes, I think that makes some sense. Where like if you have 20, I just need to remember, I can't remember if it was 2014 I think, where there was like 12 candidates running for governor and it made, I think the picture of one of the debates with these 12 candidates made the front page. Well, our presidential in 2016, you had many. Yeah, exactly, in a minute. And that's where like a primary system is actually kind of helpful because it weeds that down to just a few by the end of it. Right, and with the presidential campaign, these are people that are running across the whole country. Like in Vermont, we know our candidates or we can find out about them pretty quickly. And so I'm not as worried about the primaries. If you didn't have a primary at all, then you'd have to figure out what's gonna be your vetting process for the presidents because for one thing you could have 50 candidates. I mean, seriously, I think New Hampshire has a very low threshold for letting you get your name on the ballot and they'll have like 20 or 30 people on there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you can have candidates, you know, people that you can get on the ballot and are just campaigning in New Hampshire, you know. Right, right, right. And so if you know that a whole mess of them are only gonna get 1% and you'll have a couple of standouts, then maybe it doesn't really matter that you have that many. But if you're gonna have like, you know, if you're gonna have 12 candidates and a lot of them have around seven or 8%, then you don't have anybody standing out and that just makes it really, really hard to know what to do with that. So one question, and we kind of touched on it briefly early on that I have is, you know, what is this, how is this gonna impact candidates and how they run their campaigns? Like what effect is this gonna have on how a candidate runs? Right, so one thing we had mentioned is that there would be less negative campaigning. Right. And a whole lot of the money that is spent is spent on negative campaigning. Right. So we're anticipating that you could run an election with less money because you wouldn't need to spend so much money to counter those negative ads that were thrown out there at you and you're having to defend yourself and you're not trying to meet them with also having awful negative ads. Right. Which to me also just sounds wonderful for the voters because I am just so sick of watching negative ads. Right. Freedom of speech, yeah, but I can't get away from that. Like. Yeah, just follows you. I mean it's what, you know, first week in September I can, about three weeks from now they're gonna start up and they're gonna, we're gonna be living with them for five or six weeks. Right, right, right. You can choose where you wanna go, read something on the internet or which newspapers you subscribe to. You know, you can choose which TV shows you turn on to but you can't choose what commercials are thrown at you. Right, exactly. Because how often they come or how negative they are. And it's one of those, you know, I don't know, I agree that it probably will decrease the, you know, the frequency of negative at least from campaigns themselves. I mean you can't really, there's, you know, political action committees involved and stuff like that. You can't really control, the candidates really, we can't really control those. The candidates can't control those but if they have strategists on their teams they should say, gee, this could backfire on us if we're throwing, slinging mud at those candidates then the one we prefer not ever get selected on the lower counts. Right, so you can do things like, you know, and some candidates have talked about doing this where, you know, they just basically say if you're thinking about starting a PAC to support me, don't. Like just stay away and, you know, you can do that, legally you can't coordinate with a PAC cause they don't, you know, you can't talk to them as a candidate. Right, right. So PACs is another whole issue. And that's a whole, another whole issue. Yeah, so let's not go there. It's at a federal level, it's a whole another. Yeah, yeah. So yes, like what, you know, how else do you think this would impact the way that, you know, candidates run their campaign? Well, yeah, this is interesting. So I was speaking to someone from Berkeley in California where they have ranked choice voting and she said in the early years when they started doing it, two candidates who had similar positions and they talked to each other about, well, you know, which one of us should run and I really, this is a good time in my life for me to do it. And the other one says, well, yeah, it's actually, if I'm gonna do it, this is a time for me too. And they had very similar positions, but instead of deciding which one of us will run and which one won't, they actually went door to door together. They knocked on doors together. They came out of their brochures and said, yeah, we're very similar. If you like him better, please list me second. So that, and there were some voters that were really confused. It's like, aren't you running against each other? So it really had to be explained to them. Yeah, it doesn't hurt me though, you know, whichever one you like better, you know, vote for that one and yeah. Yeah. Was this a multi-seat district? No. No, it was a single seat. Just a single seat. Wow, interesting. But yeah, but they figured that, you know, if you knew them because your daughter was on the Girl Scout team or they went to your church or whatever the thing is and you knew them personally, you preferred one over the other or if you just thought this person might be more effective at negotiating or was less partisan or more partisan or whatever, if there was some reason you liked one better than the other one but you liked their positions, which were quite similar, you would list someone you liked better. And since they were quite similar, you were likely to list the other one next unless there was another candidate also that had a similar position, but. That's interesting. It was very interesting. That is very interesting. Yeah, and actually someone was telling me that one of the cons that Burlington experienced was that like, gosh, there was one candidate who was actually out there saying, if I'm not your first choice, vote for me second choice. And that was perceived by some people as being a negative. To me, what's wrong with that? I don't see a problem with that. Right, exactly. And I think, you know, Burlington, we don't have a ton of time to talk about it, but I think, you know, Burlington didn't really advertise well the changes that they were making and how to use the new voting system. And they kind of had an election that a lot of people were confused about the results of, and, you know. All right, so Burlington was kind of a situation, I think of, you know, where it wasn't explained well, but then, you know, there was, it doesn't, ranked choice voting doesn't really favor parties. It really puts the weight back into, you know, on the voters to decide who they want representing them. And so for parties, especially establishment parties, I think, you know, they're able to cast that as, oh, we don't want this because it's not reflective of our interests as a party, not necessarily the interests of people. Right. I don't know what your take is on that. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. Now that they would say it that way. Now that they would say it that way, but that's essential. But that would be the underlying, right? Where it's like, you know, this is not good for our interests, so therefore it's not good for anyone's interest, that they could say. The League of Women Voters supports it because they are not concerned about the parties or concerned about the voters. The voters and making sure that, you know, whoever is elected is representative of the voters. Right, right. Thank you. So anything else we should know about ranked choice voting? We've only got two minutes left in our show tonight, so like what's, if there's one thing that our guests need to know about ranked choice voting, what is that? Well, if you wanted to help on the education process, even if you're not sure that's what you want, if you want to learn more about it, you could contact the League of Women Voters and ask them to do a presentation for you or they could send you a slideshow and you could, you know, we have the materials that Maine used that we can share. If you want to speak with your local legislator and see if we could get more sponsors or at least find out from them, you know, what their concerns are and, you know, we could figure out a strategy for how to move forward with getting this more representative form of voting. And Vermont doesn't have a referendum system, so we can't just go out and say, hey, we want to pass this law, the way that Maine did, but if people do want to move down this road, what's the best way to get involved and to start moving the needle? Well, like I said, you can contact the League of Women Voters of Vermont and the website, we can flash on the screen. Yeah, we'll put it up right on the screen for you. Okay, great. And yeah, one way to find it, if you can't remember the other one, if you don't have a pencil to write down while it's on there, is if you go to the lwv.org website and then on there will be a little box you can put in your zip code and click Find a League and then your zip code will have given you Vermont and there are choices of those two little leagues I had mentioned that are big enough to actually be leagues instead of just units and then it says the Vermont and just click on the Vermont one to get more information. You can send in, look at the website from there, get our webpage from the top of that. Awesome, Betty, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is a really interesting topic. I'm always... Great talking with you. I always love talking about these types of things and thank you for watching. I hope you'll join us again next week and until then, keep listening beyond the soundbites.