 Hello everyone, my name is Chris Raleigh. I'm the director of campaigns and advocacy here at the Center for Election Science. We have people from all over St. Louis, all over the country on here today. So I will give our quick little pitch to who we even are. We are a national nonpartisan nonprofit and we work to empower people and communities with better voting methods. Namely, and for the most part, we work on approval voting, which is why we're so excited about Prop D. Almost as excited about approval voting is we're so excited to work with these folks. We're so excited to work with Michael Butler and Kathleen and Mallory and hopefully Rashin joins us later today. Hopefully he joins us. But tonight, the point of tonight is to sit back, relax a little bit. We're gonna have an interesting conversation about not just approval voting, but we will go over that. But how can Prop D really impact the lives of people in St. Louis, which we are very excited about. And we have some amazing people that have stood up and worked on this measure. That being said, if you have not heard about Prop D before, you're gonna hear a ton about it tonight. Proposition D, D for democracy is on the ballot this fall in St. Louis used to be able to say November 3rd, but election day is election month now. So it's a little bit harder. So this fall, Prop D is on the ballot. And Prop D has three parts to it. One is moving St. Louis to a non-partisan primary. So everybody in one primary. And then using approval voting to go to a top two runoff. Approval voting obviously is what kind of got us interested, but the whole package is very exciting. And we hope people really show up in numbers to vote on it this fall. So how we're gonna do this today is, I'm just gonna lob these guys easy questions and they are going to tell us why they got involved in this effort and really what they think Prop D can do for the people at St. Louis. That being said, I will give them a very proper introduction and I'll let them introduce themselves a little bit as well. But I'll start with Michael Butler. Michael Butler is a St. Louis native and a long time civil servant. He served in the Missouri House of Representatives from 2012 to 2018 and was then elected as the city's recorder of deeds in 2018. Michael also has served as the sixth board Democratic Commitment and the outgoing chair of the Democratic Central Committee. And if he wasn't busy enough, Michael and his wife welcomed their second child into the world earlier this month. So thank you, Michael. Anything else, anything else I missed? Oh, he muted himself. Okay, cool. Means I did such a good job that we'll get back to him a little bit. In the meantime, I will introduce Kathleen Farrell. Kathleen is a proud resident of St. Louis City and has served as the co-president of the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis from 2011 to 2017. She began the Voters Guide partnership with the St. Louis Times Dispatch, a voter resource that reaches over 250,000 people each election with candidate and ballot issues that is spread across seven counties. In addition to the League fought voter suppression and voter ID laws and the state legislature and courts increased its partnerships with other advocacy and social justice groups. She came to St. Louis in 2002, become the head of the Department of Communication at St. Louis University. She just retired as a professor. And of course, what better things to do in your retired days than work on voting reform? But she retired and her expertise was public argument and communication, which is much needed right now and volunteers in various ways in the community and St. Louis Public Schools. Kathleen, how are you doing? I'm okay. Did I miss anything? Yeah. Good, good. And then finally, I will introduce Mallory Rush. Mallory is the campaign manager for Proposition D. She is a lifelong St. Louis native with 15 years of marketing, fundraising and community organizing experience with national and local nonprofit organizations. She holds a master's degree in public service from the Clinton School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Mallory. Hey, everybody. Thanks for coming out. Of course, thanks for having us, Chris. Okay, and has Rishine joined us yet? So I'm wondering if Rishine might be a little held up. I know, so for everyone on the call, Rishine is a huge community organizer and activist. And I know that. Oh, here he is. Oh, awesome. Hey, Rishine. He's joining, so it might be just a second before he can talk or hear you. Yeah, we'll let him catch his breath. Mallory, I was thinking the same thing though, so no worries. We could offer him some grace. Yeah, absolutely. I was just gonna say he's, I think, likely very involved in the protests that are happening today around the verdict in the Breonna Taylor case. So we're really grateful to him for coming in from the streets to hop on to the call. Wonderful. Well, I will just do Rishine's bio as he's getting ready. Rishine Aldridge is a St. Louis native and local activist. After the shooting death of Michael Brown in 2014, Rishine at just 19 years old was appointed the youngest member of the Ferguson Commission by the governor of Missouri. He went on to be elected as St. Louis City's fifth war democratic committeeman. And earlier this year, he was sworn in as the youngest member of the Missouri House of Representatives. Rishine was an early supporter of property serving as one of the five official petitioners during the signature gathering phase of the campaign. Rishine, how you doing? Can you hear us? We'll get him online soon. Well, that being said, we will just jump into the questions and Mallory as the campaign manager, I will start with you first. All right, hit me. So you are the campaign manager. You've been out on the front lines of getting the word out about property and your best short summation. Can you tell us what property is? And then what have you heard about? What have people been saying about property? Absolutely. So I will first start by saying that I joined the campaign in June of this year. And so compared to some of these other folks on the call, I'm actually a little bit of a late addition to the team. Kathleen, Rishine and Michael have all been engaged in the work prior to my coming on board. And so it was really amazing to join such an awesome team of community leaders who were already doing this work and really just helped pick up the ball at the 80 yard line and help move us towards the end zone for all you football fans out there. So Prop D is a municipal election reform in the city of St. Louis. And Chris went over this at the beginning, but for anyone who's joining late, I will hit it again. So Prop D makes three key changes to our municipal election in the city of St. Louis. It opens up our primaries. St. Louis is one of the only cities left in the country using a partisan primary system so that when you go to the polls to vote for mayor and alderman, you still have to request a party ballot. 80% of cities nationwide don't have that system anymore and we shouldn't either. So we'll open up our primary system so that everyone is on the same ballot. Second, it will implement approval voting. And the thing that is very cool about approval voting is that it's really gonna cut down on the vote splitting that we've seen in St. Louis. So instead of having to just choose one candidate, you'll be able to express your approval for all of the candidates who you like in the race. And so what we've often seen is two or three really similar candidates running in very crowded races. And though their platform might be the most popular, they end up not winning because their vote is diluted by only being able to choose one person. So it's really incredibly important that we're able to put approval voting in place in St. Louis so that we're actually voting for candidates that share the values and ideas of the majority of the voters. And then finally, it takes the top two candidates from that primary contest and it pits them against each other in a top two runoff election. So the cool thing about the top two runoff is that it actually makes the April election matter again. So right now, races are basically entirely decided in the Democratic primary and everyone in St. Louis knows that. So in our last municipal general election in April of 2019, we only had 10% of voters that even bothered to show up to vote, 10%. So if we're gonna have those elections and the city's gonna pay for those elections, we should make them matter and we should take the top two candidates that voters like and value and we should give them a fair chance to have a final race between the two of them. So we think that all of these things together are gonna come together to form this trifecta and really change and improve the way that we do municipal elections in St. Louis. And people here are excited about it. I've been out in the park the last couple of weekends down in Tower Grove for you St. Louisans out there and have been handing out materials and signs and folks are coming up with questions. They're curious, they're interested and more than one person has come up to me and said, I'm so excited about this. I think that this is the most important thing on the ballot this November and that's really saying something. Wonderful. That's very exciting to hear. Yeah, when people are bugging you in parks saying, coming up to you and saying that this is the most exciting thing, yeah, I think you're on to something. Rishin, as we mentioned a little bit, you've been working on issues throughout the city and throughout the region involving police brutality, racial justice, those are super incredible things. What got you interested in the movement as well or separate or together with elections? So I mean, it took me a minute to kind of realize it but you can't have, you know, you can't have protests without policy working together. And sometimes we just kind of want one or the other. Before running for office and not being a state reference committee man but before that I've done a lot of activism for us. I mean, in the city of St. Louis which Ferguson isn't too far from St. Louis everything in St. Louis is like really close. It takes about 20 minutes. You have on 70 or 40, you get that pretty quick but you know, in 2014, this was the epic center of everything that happened with the death of Mike Brown. And in a way where we really start having different conversations about like criminal justice and looking at it in a different way of not just equal but more equitable, right? And I think over time that Ferguson effect of what we called it trickled into politics where you seen people move from, you know, protests to politics, even till now, Cory Bush, who's our congresswoman, once upon a time Bruce Franks who was a state representative, you know, you seen these people, John Muhammad move from protest to politics. And then we kind of moved from, as we started to connect with people like Mike and others that started to build relationships, you know, you move from kind of like protest to policy. And in the city of St. Louis, you know, no matter if you're on the state level or local level, city of St. Louis, everything hits back home and to see some of the recent elections and the way that certain individuals, especially as we're having like real tough conversations in my city, you're talking about closing a workhouse, you're talking about things that actually on a local level, we can make policy change in certain departments and really get some real criminal justice reform or housing reform or economic justice reform, or reparations in on a local level. But the way our current political system is set up, it don't really allow for those tough conversations, you know, you have that one race in the August primary that you moved to the general and in the city of St. Louis, if you win your August race, most likely, you know, you're gonna win the general race. So for me, it was about, as we moved to more policy, as I heard about Prop D, I thought it was a good idea for people to be able to, especially even as an elected official, you know, we got a voter engagement problem in the city of St. Louis. We love to register people to vote, but we forget about engaging people. So this gives us an opportunity as elected to continue to work hard for the general election and making sure that we're reaching out to voters, having those tough conversations and actually giving voters kind of a mandate of a vote and not just 30% of the vote or 40% of the vote. And then, you know, you're elected into these positions. Yeah, thank you so much, Rashin. And Michael, as our other fellow elected, you know, we are also curious, you know, what brought you here? You know, not many elected officials are banging down the door to change how they are elected. You know, I'm curious to, again, learn what brought you here. And you've done such an amazing job advocating for Proposition D on the radio and news, you know. So part one, what brought you here? And part two, you know, what are those big questions you hear when you maybe go out and you talk to folks? What brought me to support a property is I just like good policy ideas. I mean, I got into politics to get involved in new and good and bring good policy to my city and to the state. I started out as a state representative at the age of 26, around the age Rashin is now. So he's carrying the torch much higher and stronger than I am. And I'm not as exciting as Rashin. So I'm more of a policy walk. And it was just a good idea. I first heard about the idea at the former chair of the Central Committee, which the local singleist Democratic Party organization, which me and Rashin were on. Rashin was actually a like a founding member of like the local organization. And someone came and presented at our party meeting. I think, and if I remember correctly, I think Rashin was one who asked, hey, can they come present? And when I first heard the idea, it was very, I don't know, I wasn't skeptical. I was like, wow, this is interesting. I was very interested. Rashin smiled and he said that most of the Democrats there are like, I don't know about this. And when I began to research more, I was like, hey, let me, this is interesting. Let me research more. Everything I did in the state legislature and hear 100 ideas a day where she don't you in the state legislature. So you learn to research things. You can't go with your first instinct or whatever everybody else says because those folks would change their mind, too. So in the day, Prop D in Mapua voting really solves a lot of our issues. I mean, when you're in research, when you find that we're the ones that need reforming, we're not the outliers when it comes to the way our municipal elections are running around the country. And you consider that, it's a no-brainer. It's just a very good policy idea. It's something that locally, one, have a non-par selection that has a runoff. Kansas City does, Chicago does. San Francisco has ranked choice in some way and it's since some of this. I mean, other, when large, there's the parties that have always had these runoff elections. But they throw approved voting on top of it. I think it makes us look forward-thinking in St. Louis. I like it better than ranked choice. I've been a fan of ranked choice. But I do understand a little some of the pushback. I don't agree with the pushback, but I understand it. I think approved voting solves a lot of those ranked choice issues. And at the end of the day, if we can be the first in St. I'm excited, we can be the first in St. Louis to do like first major city to do it. Then all of a sudden, we look like rock stars and maybe San Francisco will trade over to what we did. Wouldn't that be cool? We're leaving San Francisco something one day. Yes, yes, the trendsetters. I love it. And just follow up. You've been out there, as everyone has, explaining this to people. You talked about pushback a little bit, right? Not just about approved voting, but about the idea of property in general. So what are some of the biggest questions people have? And then, what normally do you say or do that gets them over that? Very good question. I think St. Louis is a 80% democratic city, 80%. Sometimes higher, we go as high as 85 as a party chair. I was hoping to raise it to 87.90 this cycle. And we just might get there. I think that people are worried that they won't have a stronghold over St. Louis politics if who voted happens. And when you're at 87%, we're not going to lose that. I mean, we're not going to lose that, unless a groundswell of 50,000 to 100,000 Republicans move to St. Louis City. And I'll be honest, I would love for Republicans move to St. Louis City. Come on, we need the population increase, don't we, Rashim? I'm not afraid of that. I mean, we're fine. But even if 100,000 Republicans move to St. Louis City, we're still going to be like 60% Democrat. I mean, the Democrats are going to hold on to our values here and our majority, our strong majority in St. Louis. I think the other thing, it's one of fear of majority. And the one thing I pushed back on that is that all the other huge democratic strongholds in the country that are much charging us, that are doing better than us, that are more progressing than us, already do this. One is four hours down the street, Kansas City has a runoff election. And we talk about diversity. Kansas City has a black mayor, has had one from the past nine years, has a black police chief, has a black county executive at the exact same time for the past four years. I mean, they find a way, and Kansas City has actually a lower percentage of population of African-Americans in St. Louis. In St. Louis City, we're about 48% African-American. And Kansas City is about 30% of African-Americans. Folks in Kansas City, because of the runoff election, I think in most cases, we're an African-American to the runoff election. Really in the past, I want to say eight cycles. That gives that African-American a chance to go head up. And not in a lot of folks don't vote based on racially, but on who the best candidate is. You look at Chicago, look at New York, you look at other. I mean, major democratic strongholds have runoff elections. And they're still democratic. They're still democratic. I mean, Republican hasn't won in these areas in very long times. That is really the biggest pushback. And when you explain to folks, hey, think about it. Are you going to, you know, we're still going to have a stronghold here in Missouri, whether we have approval or not. Most people agree. The other thing is that I obviously think Democrats should earn our vote. You should earn someone's vote, whether you have an 8%, 90% majority or not. And when you put that back on folks, hey, should we get it automatically, or should we have to earn folks' vote based on where they stand the issues, based on the new ideas you're bringing forward. And I love approval voting and the runoff election because it allows for voters and candidates to focus more on those things rather than the fact that a D is behind an event. Awesome. Awesome. Speaking of supporters, Kathleen, the League of Women Voters is supporting Prop D and was one of the early, early supporters. You know, what about Prop D? Encourage you to support it. And what did the League of Women Voters hope and maybe feel that this could do for the people of St. Louis? OK. First of all, I want to thank Racheen and Michael for when the League of Women Voters, particularly after Ferguson, knew that they had to be far more activist and work for racial justice and justice. They welcomed us. I first met Racheen as a 19-year-old young man, and he welcomed us. And we've been in several fights together. And that doesn't happen everywhere. So here we were a bunch of traditional old ladies. And we went to Ferguson and went other places and fought for the St. Louis school system to be returned to its elected board, et cetera, et cetera. And both Michael and Racheen welcomed us. And that doesn't happen everywhere. And I want to thank them for their open-mindedness. So here we had the League who has become much more advocates. We do not endorse candidates, but we too take strong positions on issues. And last summer, a small, determined group of young people approached us and said, you know, we wanted to make elections better. And they'd already done a lot of research on alternative election systems. They got a grant from the Center for Election Science. And they crafted a ballot initiative and were beginning to organize a signature collecting campaign. That was the first thing we liked about them is this was not dark money trying to get something on the ballot because they were going to get something out of it. This was a true grassroots citizen petition and people that we respected were involved with it. So they came and they presented us. And because they also knew that the League had had a key role in clean Missouri, which is being threatened now on our November ballot redistricting and campaign ethics, they thought we should be approached. And we studied it. Our board unanimously said, let's not only support it, let's work for it. And so a very small 120 group of women decided that they would work on signature collection. They would work on advocacy and do whatever we could to get this passed. Here's why. We had always supported non-partisan municipal government. It was the way to go. It was better government. The evidence was clear. I moved here in 2002 and was absolutely astonished at how badly the city government worked. Other parts of the government too. But I was just stunned by it and stunned by the vote splitting and stunned by the amount of time that this infighting took when we had critical and heartbreaking problems to work on. And so we knew that that was a better way to go. And we were very unhappy that for the last number of years our candidates who were successful or elected by less than 40%, sometimes close to 30%. It was crazy. And you would see that two people as Mallory talked about who were on the ballot who had very similar views, both would get knocked out and somebody else would come in their place. We also knew that there was dark money involved sometimes in supporting some of these candidates to do exactly that, to vote split. And we knew that that was wrong, so we were really ready to listen. So here's why we think it's important. Those reasons, and also it increases voter interest and participation, I agree, were great at registering voters. And the League of Women Voters is great at registering voters. But I've got to tell you, you have to engage voters. You have to help them get a vision of what their government should be. You have to help voters inform themselves and build coalitions and get them to care about it and go vote. And that was our job too. And a part of our job we weren't doing very well. And we were trying to do better, particularly after Ferguson. So we thought this was a perfect opportunity to do that. Second reason was, it also encouraged new candidates with new ideas and representing different parts of our community. And that's what approval voting does. And I agree, forward thinking, it's much better, because you can get a sense of what the voters think about, positions on certain issues, the leadership qualities of new candidates. And you get that sort of, you know, you get a vote on that in the first phase. And even if somebody doesn't end up being one of the top two vote getters, they got it. You get a sense. You start to get to know them. And I think you have a much richer conversation. The third reason is that it allows candidates to be more accountable. I couldn't agree with Michael Moore. I have been to a number of ward organizations. I've talked privately with a number of all the many committee people who are against this. And they can't tell me exactly what. And they just say it'll destroy the Democratic Party. And I said, what good is the Democratic Party if it doesn't put forward and hold accountable the best people to serve the state? And do you really want to look at a general election and be proud of a party that turns a 10% voter turnout to elect a mayor or a president of a board of alderman, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, that's embarrassing. And we do think that these candidates should be accountable not just to the party, but to everyone. We also believe that the top vote getters ought to be in the last election. I mean, that's just simple. We ought to have those two top vote getters. Then you can have a serious conversation. You can have a serious contrast. People are going to be interested in that election. And it's going to massively increase turnout. And also, when you think about our general election in St. Louis City, it just so happens that that 10% turnout was also the election where we were electing school board members. And if you know anything about the St. Louis community, you know that we've got to do better with our schools. And to only have 10% of voters voting in that election on our school board members was a travesty. It gives elected officials a mandate and makes them more responsible to the community. And I agree with Rashin, protest demonstration policy. They work together. And people would have a meaningful mandate to lead if they had 60% of the vote even. And right now, they don't have a meaningful mandate to lead. So those are the reasons why the league supported it and why so many of our members are working hard to try to get it asked. Awesome. Thank you, Kathleen. You hit on so many good things that I want to talk about. And I want to ask Rashin, because he brought this up about getting people engaged, right? One thing we think in hope about approval voting is, on our side, as folks that really love approval voting, is that people will be able to vote for their favorite. They'll be more excited. They'll be maybe more interested. So I would love to hear from you and Michael, too, as people who have run for office, right? And as well as your own ideas, how will this change? A, do you think this may get more people involved and interested and excited? Yes or no? And as a candidate, how do you think that would change how you may approach something? Well, I can say I think for, and that's why I'm sure you got the support of me and Mike, we're the type of candidates where being a committee man over the last two years and him being the chair of the DCC, when it comes to different ways of trying to engage the community and try to figure out ways that we can continue to connect with the community, not just during election time. It's times I had to have, like, ice cream socials with Mike at senior buildings to make sure we're checking up on seniors. You got two candidates, if you say, adding a couple more months to only engage, I think that's the mission that we want to see in our city. And that's why approval voting is something we can support. But it would definitely, in the city of St. Louis, in my opinion, it would definitely help us, like I say right now, we don't really got an issue with getting folks registered. We should definitely keep doing that. There's a lot of young people that are now being more engaged into politics never than before. Folks kind of think that young folks aren't engaged, but these issues just affect them as well. We should continue to register, I'm not saying that. But what we fall short is, is we work hard in the primaries, and we try to do as much, depending on what candidate you are, you try to do as much political education and then after the primaries stop. And we kind of set a precedent, even for the community, that there's no really major elections coming up. We kind of, maybe in the general election, we got president, we may want to do a little bit more work. But usually when we have automatic races or our mayoral races, our president board of all the races, and we're not talking small structures of government, like I may be a state rep, but your alderman has more leverage and power when you're talking about development, when you're talking about actually bringing concrete change that people can see firsthand compared to policies that sometime passed on the state level and it take a couple years, right? You're talking about a mayor and a president board of all men that moves a whole legislative chamber to get policy done that affects the city of St. Louis and affects our growth or continue to affect our decline, right? So this is only gonna force electors to do more work but ultimately engage more constituents in their areas that they're supposed to represent because they're gonna have to visit them more and they're gonna have to have those hard conversations. They're gonna have to say why, you helped me get past the finish line in August but the fight's not done yet. We still got some conversations, we still got an election, we gotta win and you gotta constantly engage people like that ongoingly and not just stop in the primary. Okay, and I'll say as two elected officials, we honestly know how to navigate the system already or navigate elections in St. Louis. Well, I don't think that folks should have to navigate. If you are interested in running, then you should be able to put your name on a ballot and you have good ideas and you should be able to run and have a chance of winning. I think especially comes to local elections folks, the way our system is set up municipally and the state level and folks who are running for a state level or let's say a president, they're always afraid that they're gonna take votes away from the folks that they like. I mean, that's a legitimate candidate issue for anyone who's not as actual starving horse who actually wants to change, that doesn't feel themselves as very popular. I consider myself that person sometimes. I mean, I'm not as excited as popular as Rashin. So Rashin wasn't even who Rashin is now and he was 18, but was he prepared to run for office or he had great ideas? Hell yeah, I knew him when he was 18, he did. So I think that folks who have good ideas and who belong in office should not have these barriers or the guilt for running and approval voting really removes that. It really gives you the opportunity to say, hey, I'm just gonna run and give it all that I got and I can still vote for the person I like later on. I think that that will change the way some candidates run. How does that increase turnout? Let's say we have 40 candidates run for mayor in 20 run for president, border alderman. For a city that is still big. I mean, Salem city still has almost 300,000 people in it. I mean, I was down in Deep South city the other day and I was up in North city the next day and in pretty high North. I mean, we have a very large city. You can't as one candidate reach all those people as three mayor candidates or 10 city-wide candidates. If you're not gonna touch all those voters, the more candidates you get, the more folks like, oh, I like Kathleen for this office. And then even if Kathleen loses later, Kathleen's gonna say, well, hey, I met Rashin on the campaign trail. I'm supporting him now. We actually were, he's more in line with what I think. That is really a grassroots way to engage voters. And what you find really in election statistics, you guys probably know as a center of election science, the more folks that run in the primary, you generally see an uptick in the more candidates. You have an uptick in engagement and an uptick in votes, you generally see that. And then sometimes in a lot of cases, not all the time, in a lot of cases, those votes turn around into the general election. But more importantly, those folks who are first-time voters, they're more likely to stay more engaged after the general election and to be engaged with their government later on, especially local government. And that's great for St. Louis. That'd be great for us to have more eyes on, on our city government and more accountability and more people interested in voting because their cousin or someone they knew ran in a primary. You know, we, we, we agree, right? You know, the problem is, is if 40 people run, right now you'd only be able to vote for one still. So, and, and I do this work all over the country, that's the case in some places, 20, 24 people run, people still only get one vote. And you guys are going to be, St. Louis is going to be ahead of all of them. Do we get Mallory back? I know Mallory's having some difficulty with her, there she is, there she is. So, I have been a part of many elections. We have all been in part of many elections. None of us have been a part of any elections during pandemic. You know, how, how is that changing things? Not just how you do it, but maybe how people talk, maybe how people talk about issues, you know, how it changes the conversation on things like homelessness and, you know, even violence or what happens with the police in the city, you know, there's just that huge X factor of the coronavirus. So A, what's it like being a campaign manager in that? And B, you know, how is it affecting like the political conversation? Yeah, great questions. So to the first question, you know, I think all of the campaigns that are happening right now are just figuring it out together, right? So we are really working hard to make sure that we are able to implement the campaign in a way that feels safe, both for our volunteers and for the voters that we're hoping to engage with. So for example, our campaign, along with most of the campaigns in the city have shied away from your typical door-to-door canvassing effort and are instead doing no contact lit drops. So still getting voter, you know, information direct to voters at their homes, but not necessarily asking folks to come out on their porch and engage with a stranger, you know, which some folks don't feel comfortable doing even with a mask on. So, you know, we're doing our best in that way. I will say it's challenging, right? With a campaign like this, we wanna be at events. We wanna be in the streets. We wanna be out talking to people and so many of the things that we would have normally done and gone to and been at just aren't happening or they're happening online. And I think that tonight's turnout aside, it's great to see everybody. People are really experiencing a lot of election fatigue, sorry, a lot of Zoom fatigue, maybe election fatigue also, but Zoom fatigue, where, you know, when community meetings and events are getting moved online, you know, especially if you're working from home and you're on Zoom all day, maybe you don't wanna be on another Zoom meeting. So we've seen things like ward meetings have really low turnouts when they're moved on to Zoom where they would be, you know, three or five times higher in terms of attendance if we were meeting in person, like we would normally be doing in a year like this. So there are a lot of barriers, but we're doing our best to reach more people online, more digital ads. We're gonna have a huge text banking effort that happens next month. So if you're out there and thinking about getting involved and wanna text from home, that's a great way. You can reach voters from the comfort of your own home. To your second question, Chris, you know, I think that what the pandemic has done in St. Louis in particular is it has really highlighted and brought to the surface the incredible racial and socioeconomic disparities that have been plugging St. Louis for a really long time, right? Anyone who lives in St. Louis has at least some level of understanding about the amount of disparity in terms of health outcomes, in terms of income, in terms of generational wealth, in terms of interactions with the police, basically like St. Louis is a city where there is a long, long history of racial disparities. And it's something that we deal with on a daily basis, right? And so the pandemic environment has really has really brought that to the forefront, maybe for folks who didn't see it before. And so, you know, to find a silver lining, it's raising a lot of really important conversations that maybe weren't happening pre-pandemic. It's raising a lot of frustrations. It's raising a lot of questions about how local elected officials are handling situations and where there is a real disconnect between the needs and the voice of the community and the way that our government is handling things. And so, you know, I think that there's a great ongoing conversation that really is directly tied to the work that we're trying to do here with municipal election reform. And it's a really timely way for us to think about the impacts that our vote has at a local level. Wonderful. And one thing that comes to mind is, you know, we are Center for Election Science. We're definitely a part of this because it's a good idea. And B, we are so excited to see another city be interested in wanting to use approval voting. And I'm just gonna talk about that piece for a little bit. I'm gonna ask you just maybe a lightning round on everyone. Approval voting, and I'll start with you, I think first. Approval voting, you have to get the votes from the most amount of people possible, right? You gotta be broadly, you have to try to talk to as many people as possible, yes, we as broadly supported as possible. What do you think, and this is a question to everyone, just that fact may have on these issues that we've been talking about that aren't being addressed, right? Do you think the candidates will talk about them more? And when they get elected, you know, what incentives or disincentives do you see knowing that they have to do approval voting again in the future? Oh, I think they definitely are gonna have to engage because in some cases, and it varies from word to word, but in some places somebody thinks, oh, I'm gonna get the word recommendation to run for this office, that's all I need. And to understand that just because you have a D next to your name, doesn't make you necessarily a better candidate, and you're also gonna have to get out there and get support and get a niche for yourself. You've gotta distinguish who you are uniquely and what you care about and why you would be good with this, and you've got to engage people, and there's no other way of doing it because if you happen to be one of the two that survives that first round, it goes to the second round, you know, in our case, we only have one month really between those elections, March and April, and in terms of our local elections. And secondly, those people that you talked to were gonna remember, and they're gonna come see you, and you're gonna have to continue those conversations, and Michael is right, you can't get to everybody, but you have to develop a presence and a reputation and, you know, competence, and the only way you do that is interacting. Yeah, and Rishina, I'm gonna do you now, you know, the same question, just, you know, I'll say it a little differently. You know, we talked about campaigning, right? Campaigning, knowing that you have an approval voting election, but like, legislating, right? Creating policy, maybe getting along or not getting along with people, right? Knowing that you have an approval voting election in the back of your mind, you know, do you feel like a lot of these issues are more likely to actually have some sort of resolution and the legislature, whether it's just, you know, right now it's a city, but in a different situation. But yeah, what effect might it have on legislating? Nothing, one point that Mike brought up. So say you do have 40 people, which I will say it is an issue, I wouldn't say 40, but like in the fifth war, where I represent, you know, just a couple of years ago, you have five people running for office, right? So you have five people running, five different ideas, and you know, a lot of folks maybe agree with this change agent or may agree with this change agent who was running against incumbent. And it kind of forces us to really, you know, have these tough conversations about the different issues that are going on and not just allowing, you know, all the, because what I can say over the last couple of years, what I've seen is some magnificent candidates that really stepped up, you know, to run for office all across the city that have brilliant ideas, but just because maybe they didn't have the money, because that's also real, right? They didn't have the money to be able to reach everyone just on the war level. You know, first time running for office, there's no blueprint to this stuff, right? So even when having the best ideas, sometimes it's people that know the way of the politics to get elected. But what approval voting does, it forces those candidates that really do have like amazing ideas that's gonna move our city forward. When we're talking about going forward, when we say progressive, that means us moving forward. And that means sometimes bold ideas and those bold ideas may not get traction in the primary, but we continue to have those conversation. You know, you can even get candidates to coalesce amongst each other. So you're kind of bringing some carotery, right? You're engaging with other candidates and their ideas and saying, okay, this is something I didn't think about as a candidate. I love to work with you. You're still in the community. I love to work with you. And, you know, work on that issue and get their support. And it only builds not just for better engagement, but it also builds for us to have candidates that are actually taking the time to really think outside the box. And for us as a community to have those tough, difficult conversations, to really be able to engage on things that's gonna impact our city moving forward. I think when she hit it round head, I wanna add that I think approval voting after the election is done on how do you govern in our approval voting city? It creates a system where it's more likely, not guaranteed, but more likely that elected officials will work together. I mean, you see that in San Francisco, at least. I mean, there were two candidates who ran during ranked choice vote and it was a runoff election, but then ranked choice, at least, I know, Jane Kim and I came in with another candidate that ran coinciding campaigns for mayor towards the end who were working together like, vote for both of us, vote for both of us. Neither one of them won, London Breed is still amazing mayor, she's still doing a great job, but that kind of cooperation, these were two supervisors who were already friends, that doesn't create the animosity that clearly occurs as candidates when you're even if you were friends before and you're running against each other for a dream job, you're gonna have some disdain. And in St. Louis, in St. Louis politics, I can tell you, in Chicago style thug, dog eat dog politics, two people running against each other, not gonna like each other at the end of the campaign. So approval voting allows you to say, hey, you know, they're gonna vote for me and you. So we don't have to hate each other. Why don't you, you know, why don't we work together? Then you continue that working together afterwards, which more likely two people running together is a bond that is stronger than anything in St. Louis politics too. It's like you're in the same group in us, but I'll also say another thing is that approval voting makes it hard to ignore groups of people. It makes it almost impossible, not absolutely impossible, but almost impossible to ignore large groups of people. And as Mallory has mentioned before, like in racial policies in St. Louis, I mean, there are candidates who win in St. Louis, totally ignoring the black community. I mean, just without going north of Del Mar and not spending, we're spending remedial amount, I'm not gonna say zero amount, we're a medial amount of money north of Del Mar, just ignoring the black community. That is the largest group in St. Louis. And I think approval voting does not allow you, there's no path to victory with the, there's a very, very slim path to victory doing that, where right now the path to victory is pretty clear, it's been going on for quite some time, is to stack the deck and then hyper, hyper into, hyper spin in certain areas. And we see the results of that. We see the results of that in our area. We see the results of that across the city. It doesn't, and when it comes to governing to your question, Chris, people continue that when they're governing, they ignore large parts of the city. And when you ignore those parts, you get issues like high crime and high poverty. And when you ignore large organizations, they're not in a certain part of the city, like if you ignore just protesters, then you're gonna get results where people don't work, the community doesn't feel like they're heard. And people on the news and have great ideas, they still don't get them passing in a local government. People don't feel like they're vote counts, they don't feel heard, they're gonna move away or they're just gonna rebel against the system you have to continue to have protests. So I think once again, the beauty is that it's not impossible, I don't wanna say it's impossible. For a policy one standpoint, yeah, you can, there's a slim path to victory for you to galvanize 35 to 40% of the electorate in a city that just hates people with the first name R, Roshin. And then you're able to just get all those people and then those same people, you can just pick up maybe 11% who doesn't have a first name R into the general election you win. That's so slim though. It's possible to slim, what's more likely to path to victory is that, hey, you gotta include folks, you gotta be around the issues, you can't just run on your party platform, you gotta include folks. So let me add to that one other thing, is that I believe that nonpartisan elections and what you see across the country, and I'm hoping you guys can back me up on this Center for Elections Science, they actually make the parties more relevant. When you have everybody running a nonpartisan, typically, and I saw a question in chat, technically everybody's running as independent, most people who do associate a political party, they're gonna want to know, hey, do you associate with the party I associated with? In Chicago, in New York, the party in smaller towns in Illinois, not too far from here, the party becomes more relevant because folks, those local party members depend on the local party to tell them who the Democrats are or who the Republicans are in that race. So it's actually the opposite, like the party is gonna have more power to say, hey, Racheen and Kathleen are more like Democrats than Michael is because he was up in Jefferson City, he hung out with a lot of Republicans. So, we really don't know what's happening to him. And people literally, candidates literally are required to go to the party and say, hey, brand me as one of you so that I can maybe run as a Democrat on this nonpartisan election. And what that allows the party to do, especially a party that is diverse and is moving much more progressive and younger in St. Louis City, is that allows that party structure to then impose its ideas and its new ideas. And our party is large, 56 members across a 300,000 person city is very large. There's a lot of new ideas and a lot of diverse talent. It allows that party to say, hey, here's what we believe in as a party before we can put a D behind your name where we can believe in you. You gotta believe in these same things. And one of those things you always approve about it. Yeah, I believe you said it either today or in an interview before parties aren't going anywhere. It's about a competition. It's about everyone at ending level wants the best person. We all want the best person for the job and the parties can help in the parties, but right now they, at the local level, it just seems like a little extra. And Mallory, you get one of the final ones and then I'll give you a softball right after this. But again, what do you think? How this can affect how people govern? You become an elected person tomorrow under approval voting. How's that gonna change? They do think. Yeah, I mean, you have to, I'm not gonna say I don't think anything that the other three haven't already so eloquently stated, but you have to reach across lines of difference, whether that be to a different part of the city, to people with different lived experiences, to people of different races. I think that there's been this really false narrative that our very limited opposition has said that, you know, approval voting is just gonna make sure that we elect milk toast candidates, which is such a hilarious phrase to me, because to me what that means is we're electing consensus candidates. And if you are running on a consensus agenda, you are going to rule, rule, you are going to govern in a consensus way. You're going to work to make sure that people are on board and that you are serving the good of the majority. And I would argue that is not what is happening right now. We live in a society that is so high, help, this meant has become a dirty word. I think we really have to push back against that. And we really have to look for candidates who want to run on a platform that is about building consensus and who want to govern in a way that is about building consensus. And I think that Prop D is what it's gonna take for us to get there as a city. Speaking of consensus, what is the consensus of this group? How do they feel about, you know, how do they feel going into the fall? And it's just something that either other places in the state, other cities around may be interested after you do this. So one, how are you feeling? And two, do you think other people are interested in picking up the torch after you, you know, hopefully bring it home? I'll do Kathleen. Well, I think we have a lot of work to do. And I think there's still a lot of voters who don't understand Prop D and how very practically it would affect how they vote. And so I don't think we can let down at all about that. I think opposition is, you know, going to continue to appear and maybe, you know, get stronger and have some money behind it. But I do think, and I wanted to say that, you know, in a city where Roshin is right and Michael is right, the party is becoming more progressive with young voters. The thing that breaks my heart sometimes is I see people who I think share the same values, turn on each other. And I think vote splitting encourages that. And I think it decreases the strength, in our case of the progressive movement. And I think that approval voting would help with that because in the end, I think it would see what people have in common. I do think that people around us will see this. There are still dysfunctional city governments around. And I think if they can see that this can work and also see it can help people understand that the political party system can be made to work. It doesn't have to be thrown out and that their vote does matter and they can vote for somebody that they really support. So I think they will come to us because they know our dysfunctions. And if we can pull this off and it produces better government, it's gonna be very attractive. All right, Roshin, same question. How are you feeling? And do you think anyone else, you know, or any of your colleagues in Jefferson city or elsewhere in the state can be interested after this? Yeah, I mean, too, I would say, you know, in this moment, you know, it's glad to be on the phone. It's hard for me not to think about, you know, the verdict that, you know, came down about, you know, Breonna Taylor. And I think, you know, Prop D could be, you know, we had a lot of conversations today. So I mean, I'm feeling, I'm here, I'm present, but far as Prop D, you know, I am excited about it because this is something that really gives, you know, folks at Avenue, like Mike said, groups that are doing a lot of amazing work. And when I say organizing here in the city of St. Louis on the ground, really organizing are to see the change and not just in criminal justice reform and housing reform, to see the city not continue to do equitable things or equal things for equitable things, right? So this gives the opportunity sometimes for those groups that, and different neighborhood organizations that push back against issues that they feel like would hurt their community or hurt their city moving forward, kind of give them more of a voice to make that policy change by holding elected officials accountable. So I am excited about that. And I think, you know, St. Louis got his first share of problems, but we do love our city. That's one thing about it. We resilient and, you know, sometimes, and a lot of times we slow to change. I think by us, you know, passing Prop D and showing how it could really be a game changer for a city that is trying to get back on the rise, right? When you're talking, hopefully, population and economically COVID has hurt in many ways, but just even in policy, right? This is something that can change. Cities with elective folks that's actually gonna implement policy that's gonna move us going 21st century and not continue to stay in a generation behind with policy. And candidates that only care about policies that's gonna keep us stagnating instead of moving forward. I'm feeling pretty good about our chances come November. I'm feeling very good about, I think, I think I commented before. There doesn't seem to be organized opposition campaign. I think I'm with Kathleen. I think we're gonna start to see it. I think they're pretty late now, but with a month out, anything can happen. I think I've known Mallory for some time. I've at least watched Mallory. I was in an organization. She ran a long time ago. So I know Mallory's on it and I know she's up for the fight. So I think that we just can't get to, the word's not complacent because I know Mallory, but we haven't seen a strong opposition yet. Sometimes that lulls campaigns into a little sleep and then somebody pops up all of a sudden and gets us. I think it's gonna happen under Mallory. So I'm feeling very good about it. I do agree with Kathleen too. I think that while there's excitement, there's also a lot of questions about it, about property. And I think this is the time in any campaign, a little 60 days out where people are still learning and still getting educated. This is the high time between 60 to 20 days out where folks are, the middle row folks are getting educated. 20 days out, I know we're gonna be kicking butt and going forward, but I'm feeling very good about it. I think, I don't think that people are gonna follow us. I don't think about Missouri and you know, I've been in the legislature. We're very much a, we're not, we're very much a who did it first state. And then we're like a, let's watch the guinea pig state. Outside of St. Louis and Kansas City, folks are gonna follow us after like five years. They're not gonna come up the first year or two years. They're gonna wait to see how the marriage rates go. If they don't like our result, they're definitely not gonna follow us, which means we're gonna like our result and that means they're not gonna like it. We're fine, I'm gonna follow us. I think they're gonna wait till we, some of the policy things we do show some results and then they're gonna follow us, say, oh, that policy, the approval voting created that policy change and now we should like, then they're gonna be like, hey, we probably should, but I don't imagine that a lot of folks are gonna try to jump behind St. Louis on this. I can see more Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Springfield, Illinois or Indianapolis, Indiana, maybe follow us on approval voting. But the thing that the other cities in Missouri who have a competition with us from time to time are gonna follow us, I seriously doubt that. Well, Michael, if they follow us within five years, that's really pretty fast. You're right, that's true, that is my hope. Well, so one thing that I will say is that, and I'm gonna protect their anonymity for a moment, but I did get a call from a city council person in a nearby municipality who had a lot of questions about this and was very interested in it. So I'm not gonna name them, but I'm gonna say there are some conversations happening and people are taking notice and actually coming out of the St. Louis County elections, which for those of you outside of St. Louis, our city and county are divorced from each other and are governed separately, which is a whole other, shenanigan that we would need a whole other call to talk about. But within the county, there was just an election for their chief executive, the county executive. That was a four-way race that was very close in the primary and actually on a political talk show, immediately following that race, we had some local sort of political wonks saying, maybe we should talk about a nonpartisan primary with a runoff and we were like, we're doing that, we're doing that in St. Louis City. So people I think are gonna see that it's a good idea. It might take a while to get it implemented, but we are excited about the possibility of this reform spreading outside of the city. And as far as how I'm feeling, I feel cautiously optimistic. Our poll numbers are really good. We have some really passionate people on board. I will say, stay tuned to our social media tomorrow for a very big announcement about a very big endorsement that's coming tomorrow. I'm not gonna, no spoilers, but it will be live tomorrow. So definitely tune in for that. And yeah, I think we're optimistic. We have a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do in the next five weeks and five days, not that I'm counting or anything, but I think we can get it done. Well, and to what Mike said, and even what you said a little bit, Mallory, folks in Missouri might be slow to pick it up, but you definitely inspired people throughout the country. I get emails every day from many people all over the country, many people even on this call that are inspired by what you're doing that are really pulling for you, are really rooting for you. And my final question is for Mallory, what can people do to help? What do you need? What could you use? Yeah, thanks so much for asking that question. So we need two things. We need people and like all campaigns at this phase, we need money. I'll just be honest about it. We've got about a $25,000 gap in our fundraising that we're gonna try to make up here in our last five weeks. We're having some really good conversations, but in order to really hit our targets on the number of doors we wanna knock, the number of radio ads we wanna run, the number of digital spots we wanna put in place, we need to get that money in. So Caitlin is being awesome and putting our fundraising link in the chat right now. So if you like what we're doing and you wanna make a gift tonight, this is not endorsed by CES, I'm doing this totally on the fly. I hope that it's okay. Would love to get you engaged as a donor. We also have a huge fundraising event next Friday night that's gonna be all virtual, really fun. We're gonna have bartenders teach us how to make cocktails at home. We're gonna send you a cocktail kit. We have a band that's gonna do an exclusive performance. They actually wrote a song about us and it's so good and they're gonna play it for us for the call. So look for information on that. And then if you don't have money, no problem, we can use your manpower. No matter if you are here in St. Louis or anywhere in the country, people outside of St. Louis can send text messages and write postcards to our voters. We need lots of folks to help with that. And if you're here in St. Louis, we would love to have you knocking doors. Like I said, doing those no contact lit drops and being with us at the polls on election day. So Caitlin is dropping all of our links in the chat for us and I will drop my personal contact information as well. So reach out if you want to get involved. Awesome, thank you, Mallory. Yes, it's totally fine to ask for money on here because we're all good campaign people and we would not be doing our job if we didn't do that. And so I will do the same thing. Make sure that if you've enjoyed today's event, you wanna help us support St. Louis and you also wanna help us support throughout the country. Please consider making a donation at electionscience.org. I'm sure Caitlin will drop it in the chat. I wanna thank virtual round of applause for our panel today. Michael, Rashin, Mallory, Kathleen, thank you so much for everything you're doing and best of luck. You have not just everyone here but everyone all over the country pulling for you guys. So thank you so much for coming out and have a great night everybody. Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for hosting, appreciate it. Thank you guys, see you. Bye-bye.