 When we're looking at a voting method just for some additional background, voting method has to do all these things. So its primary objective is it should be electing a good winner, like that's its main job. But a voting method has these other attributes as well, such as like you, if you can make it simple, you should be able to make it simple and have all else equal, preferring simplicity, thinking about logistics with carrying out the administration for a voting method and then also looking at the reflection of support that it provides for each candidate. So not only is a voting method, is it supposed to be able to elect a good winner or select a good winner or set of winners with the candidates who don't win, it should also gauge their support well. And that's important because if a candidate really has a lot of support, but it's not showing up, then they could get marginalized in a way that's unfair, that keeps their ideas from being heard. So that's kind of a background in terms of when we're looking at voting methods, like well, first like what a voting method is, some of the things that we're looking at when we're comparing or evaluating voting methods and for this call, one of the things that we like to go into is obviously we have a worldwide crisis right now, we have an active pandemic. And so there are some factors that really come into play in terms of really highlighting the importance. So, and part of that is planning for the next inevitable crisis. Like as a society, we go through challenges all the time, the scale of the challenges can vary from moment to moment, but we will inevitably have complex problems that we have to solve in the future. So, one way that a voting method comes into play is that we want a voting method that has strong continuity. So, if we're looking at something where a government has to do planning and management to be able to mitigate disasters, those are complicated, that's a complicated structure to have to set up. And you don't want something where you have a particular administration that is working to set all this up. And yet the next administration comes along and decides, you know what, that's not a good idea. And then they break it all down. And then the administration after that, they decide, well, that first administration had it right. And you have this kind of pendulum effect going back and forth. And that's something that you can experience with the current voting method that we have. And that makes it very difficult to plan for disasters that inevitably will come up. One of the reasons that we like approval voting, which is the method that we advanced. So as a recap, approval voting is a voting method that allows you to select as many candidates as you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. So it's very simple method. One of the perks of that method is that it tends to elect a more consensus style winner versus the current voting method that we have that can kind of have this pendulum effect of electing someone from one to the continuum for one election and the next election swing to the other side. With approval voting, it tends to focus on a more consistent style candidate. So you have more continuity and you don't have these wild swings. And being able to have that kind of continuity in government is helpful when you wanna have long-term planning. So when you wanna do pandemic preparedness or other complicated long-term projects that require a lot of management and able to have these plans carry over from administration to administration. Another component is, so in the beginning we talked about what are the types of attributes that make a voting method good. The top one there is it should elect a good winner. And so we see that being increasingly apparent right now in terms of having strong leadership. So approval voting focused as you can use it for multi-winner elections, but in kind of its classic state, it's used for executive positions. And we want a good voting method like approval voting so that we can elect strong people to these executive positions because ultimately when times like this come up we need people who are strong in leadership and being able to manage these complicated situations. We don't want a voting method that elects someone that is not able to handle these situations or makes poor decisions. And another component is when, one of the nice features of approval voting is that it gets these, so even if a candidate doesn't win because you can always support your honest favorite and approval voting, it means that you don't have to worry about wasting your vote when people bring new ideas to the table. And new ideas may be just what are necessary in order to mitigate challenges that we have. And so if we have a voting method that fails to capture that support from these other candidates, we can miss out on these ideas and being able to mitigate these situations. So those are some of the highlights here in terms of why a voting method matters and how it can apply to these types of crises. So if we wanna do some questions, be happy to hear what people's thoughts are in terms of how the voting method can apply here. And you can also, yeah. My name is Alan, I'm from Fairfield, California. Can you talk a little bit about how, how voting reform might detoxify our politics? Like right now with my friend group, it's hard to even bring up politics because it's taboo. And I think that the voting system has something to do with that in that it is polarizing and can approval voting help with that? And if so, how? So any, so one reason that we can find ourselves in this toxic environment, and thanks Alan for the question. One reason that we can find ourselves in this environment is because of the way that we vote normally. So when we vote normally, we're forced to choose just one candidate. And what that does is it forces us to now provide information of all the candidates that are there. And obviously we have feelings about practically all the candidates and not just the one that we expressed information about. So this is really providing a scenario where we can hardly provide any information at all. And we might think about how this plays out, for instance, in the primaries. So we saw in the democratic primary, for instance, that there was some hostility between some of the supporters from different campaigns. Whereas if you kind of think about it and take a step back, it feels kind of weird for some of them and that when we look at them just kind of like afar, it looks like they have a lot in common and yet we're seeing a little bit of animosity there. And part of that is that, and we had done a poll on this too, when so when we gave people the option to choose multiple candidates they took that opportunity. And so there are a couple of articles in particular that see how that plays out. There is one and Caitlin can add them into the chat window. One is looking at the poll that we had done just before Super Tuesday. And then another one was looking at the election, taking a Snapchat in November. And there we had compared multiple different voting methods. And so what you see there is that when people are given the option to choose more candidates, they do. And that can play a heavy role in terms of the way that we're able to communicate about politics. So for instance, if we see a couple of candidates with similar ideas, we can look at them and say like, hey, like both of these candidates, they're doing like from your personal perspective, you could say, oh, well, they're really supporting this issue that I care about. I'm really excited about both of them. Whereas when we're forcing the scenario with this choose one voting method that we're stuck with now, when we're looking at it under that lens of this choose one voting method, now we can't say, well, I like both of those candidates. I like to support them both. We're in a position where we're having to like push between those candidates and really force that divisiveness. And that's merely the consequence of being able to provide such little information. So approval voting being able to support multiple candidates really does help to potentially address that situation by allowing, by making it so bitter, so we'll get stuck in the situation where they're forced to choose and support only one candidate, even when they lack the ideas of multiple candidates. Thank you. Excellent. Hello. Hello. Yeah. Hi, this is Joyce from Seattle. Hi, Joyce. Hi. So I just have a few things I'd like to say and maybe you could jot them down. And if you want to talk about any of them, that'd be great. And I'll just lay them out. All right. I believe we should have all paper mail-in ballots like we have in the state of Washington. I believe that all Americans should be automatically registered to vote at age 16. I don't think you have to ever prove a party affiliation in order to vote. I think we should have rank choice voting where you pick your first, second, and third choice. And it does not have to do anything or third choice and it does not have to be in any particular party. It's just whoever you like. I think all primaries should have these mail-in ballots due on the same day and no states go before any other. That there should be no more caucuses and this kind of disparity between caucuses and primaries based on state by state. It should all be primaries. And let me see if there's anything else. And the winner should win by popular vote only. There may be other things I just can't think of them all right now. All right. Well, you've laid out a nice wish list there. I think a lot of these come into play right now. So we're seeing, although it's a little outskied, the scope of the voting methods that we look at, but it's certainly adjacent looking at, for instance, at paper ballots. Perhaps something else that you might like to add to the list is something like risk limiting audits. I know Colorado has taken the lead in that. So there are a lot of adjacent measures that support our democracy. With our organization, we do focus a bit more on approval voting. So the bar is pretty low to where we're at now. So stuck with the choose one voting method. It's kind of when we look at the options that we have for voting methods, it really, the choose one voting method is really the bottom of the barrel in terms of options that we have. So looking at the, so Caitlin looked at shared the, if you look in the chat, the Super Tuesday poll as well as the November poll that we had. And one of the interesting things that really kind of helps to highlight one of the reasons that we push approval voting over some of the other options. So there we didn't see so much of a difference with the winner of the election. But what we did see was a big difference in terms of the reflection of support that other candidates got. And one cool thing that we did, which I'm really proud of our team for putting together is we had a control measure for both of those polls. So we had an honest assessment control measure where we asked people, okay, tell me what you think about these candidates on the scale of zero to five. And just we want you to be honest with your assessment. We're not talking about viability. We just want you to assess these candidates. And it looks like for late joiners, they can't see the earlier link there. We'll blame Zoom on that one. So we had this control measure on top of that. And for the second one, we had an extra cool control measure. And that second one was we, much like the other control measure kind of having a utility or a type of a Likert scale. For the other one, we asked people to rank their options in an honest way. So in kind of a similar fashion with the way that we did for the scale. And we use that to see how candidates would do head to head. So we had these control measures for these kind of honest control measures for these polls as well. And when you look at those and you superimpose them over the results that we got, you see that approval voting really did the best out of the voting methods that were there, which also included the choose one voting method, as well as the rank choice voting method. Both, so rank choice voting, for instance, it's better than the choose one voting method in terms of capturing that support for the other candidates. But when you compare it to that control measure, you see that it really falls short and kind of fumbles a bit in a number of areas with that candidate list in both the November poll and the one on Super Tuesday. And this is also within subject design. So each respondent is replying using multiple voting methods. And that's a way like, that's a technical way of reducing air within the study. But when you look at approval voting, for instance, it doesn't perfectly align but it comes pretty close to the control measure. And it does much better than both the rank choice voting method as well as with the choose one voting method. And you get that nice reflection of support. So not only do you get that clear winner, who matches the high utility score and the all winner with the control measure for that particular sample. So not only do you get that, but you get that nice reflection of support all at the low price of a very low complexity cost. So you get, so you're getting that with a voting method that is very easy to express information on a ballot. Looks basically like a normal ballot. You're just picking the many as you want. And it's easy for people to understand which is just simply adding the votes. So for that low cost of complexity, you're getting these nice results that match well even against a nice control measure. So how does that appear on the ballot? I mean, like you're saying, I don't understand. So rank choice would mean you pick your first, second, and third choice. How does this approval method show up on a ballot? So maybe we can add another link in there to get some visuals. Kim, maybe you can add some, she's already, Kim, it's already on it. I see her typing away. Thank you. I'll, as, so there's that approval voting 101 link that I can't just add it in there. And one of the things that you can tell from that is that the ballot looks a lot like our normal ballot. So when you go to vote normally, you see like your list of options and you get like a box next to each of the options. And normally it says, just check one of those boxes. And that's what we're used to. With approval voting, you're still electing one person here, but instead of checking one box, you can still check one box if you like. In some cases that makes sense still, but you're allowed to check as many boxes as you want. And that's the only difference. You'd still add up the check marks, most of the twins for some folks in the, that are a bit more techie. You might think of it as a difference between a radio button that we normally see that allows you to pick just one option, like doing an online survey versus a check box, which online, which allows you to pick as many as you want. So for folks that are thinking about it and like maybe a user experience thing with the internet forms, that's perhaps another way to think about it. But isn't that ranked choice anyway? Cause you're picking more than one person. So that's interesting. So there are a lot of different voting methods that allow us to express more information. So a voting method, it has these parts to it. So a voting method has the expression element where you're putting information down and that information could be all kinds of different information. It could be choosing just one, it could be ranking, could be selecting more as many as you want, could be scoring on a scale. Then you got to do something without information. And if we look just within the class of ranking methods, so it's, right choice voting has a little bit of a weird name in that, like it overlaps with an entire class of voting methods. It has other names, which in the field of voting methods, I think the field does kind of a bad job in naming stuff. So like we see a bunch of voting methods with multiple different names, like even the method that we use now, we're maybe a bit guilty of it ourselves in that we call it a choose one method to try to add simplicity to it, but it goes by plurality of voting, first pass the post. Ranked choice voting that we're talking about also goes by like instant runoff voting, hair method, alternate method. Like it's got a long list. So we're very bad about this and I'll apologize on all of our behalves on doing such a bad job with the naming within the field of voting theory. So if we're looking at say like ranking methods, they're all kinds of ranking methods. So there's ranked choice voting, also known as instant runoff voting. The way that works is that you rank candidates numerically from the candidate like you like the most, you rank them first all the way to the candidate that you like the least. And then it looks at the candidate who has the, so you look at the first choice votes, if the candidate has more than half of the first choice votes, then you have a winner. If not, you look to the candidate with the fewest first choice votes, eliminate that candidate and then transfer those votes over to the voters next choice preference. And then you retell looking at the first choice votes again, someone has more than half, you've got a winner. If not, you keep doing that cycle. And so that's, I'd say kind of moderate complexity in terms of voting methods when we think about the, like the whole survey of voting method options that we have out there, but there are other ranking methods as well. So for instance, another one is board account. You again are using ranking data. So from the voters perspective, it looks the same, but from the calculation component, that other important part of a voting method, you take those rankings and then you translate them to scores. So a candidate ranked is better, gets a higher score, and then it diminishes on down the rankings. Another one is a class of ranking methods called condorsay methods. What a condorsay method does is it uses those rankings to simulate pairwise comparisons between all the other candidates. And you can see that in that second one, the article looking at the Super Tuesday, we use the honest rankings to set up a condorsay matrix. So you see this pairwise comparison thing. If you ever look at like contest or sporting events, you may have heard of around Robin table. So you could think about it like that as well. So a condorsay method, another type of ranking method uses those rankings to simulate who is able to win head to head using all that ranking data. So the mere fact that we have a voting method that's providing more information than choosing just one candidate doesn't mean that it's a right choice, but it just means that like it's not the choose one voting method that we have. So fortunately, we're in a position where we have all kinds of options and the reason we go with approval voting is because not only does it do well in its major job of choosing that winner, but it has some extra bonuses too. So like we can see in those articles, it does a good job gauging support for other candidates even when they don't win. And then on top of that, you're getting all this great stuff for very little complexity. So it looks practically like the same ballot that we have now, really easy to calculate. And we get some extra bonuses, like it has features like being precinct summable, which is nice for administration. That means that you don't need all the ballot data together in one place. You can do it precinct by precinct. It makes, you can do audits with insert and runoff voting or ranked choice voting, but it's also a bit, it's quite a bit easier to do it with the approval voting. So that simplicity also integrates with other components as well. So thanks for the question, Joyce. You're welcome. I just was wondering if you're looking, I don't wanna dominate the questions here, but if you're looking at a ballot and you're using this method, can you just tell me how it would look if you say you had these names on the ballot for a primary? So you had Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg or something. How would that appear other than boxes with their name next to it? I don't understand that. The same, that's a beautiful thing. It's exactly the same. You can just check more than one. So you could say, I like, you know, I could say I like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. I can check both instead of just one. On the last city council, I can, you know, check everyone, but the guys on Amazon are the checks too. Like, that's the thing. Not one more than another. I mean, you're putting Bernie and Elizabeth equal or what? Just approving, just approving. And so the way that you would tell the difference between an approval voting ballot and just choose one ballot that we're used to is the directions. So the directions normally it says, choose no more than one candidate. The directions would be replaced from choose as many candidates as you approve of or as many candidates as you wish. There are a number of different phrasings, but the key element is you can choose one or more. I think what Joyce might be getting at is there's an intuitive sense that if I'm ranking candidates, I'm giving more information. So that means I'm going to get a better outcome. But I think what you were getting at before is that, in fact, even though you are giving more information in some sense, the way that those votes are tallied up can end up not producing better outcomes in the result. But still, I think we should all remember here, if you're in an area where one of these alternatives, whether it's star or ranked choice or approval, if any of those has momentum and you're part of one of those movements, please continue working on those movements because it's so much more important that we get away from plurality than that we like pick the perfect alternative right now. I think that's one area where we highlight. So a lot of advocates in the space, one of our favorite things to do as a group is to put plurality voting in the center and kind of beat up on it a bit. So that's one of our favorite past times in this space. And so kind of like on that note, we can perhaps do that a bit. So for instance, the primary itself, when we look at, for instance, the data that we collected, comparing it just to the control measure, we see that among the voting methods that we looked at, plurality voting did the absolute worst that there was. We have a gauge of what that reflection of support looks like when people will express information honestly and plurality voting really messes up. So in the November one, it failed to distinguish among the leaders there, even though there was a clear leader according to the control data. And then it just completely failed and collapsed in terms of trying to gauge that support for these other candidates as well. The only thing that our choose one voting method has going forward is that it's simple and people have used it before. And that's about the end of the list of things that it's got going for it. And that's one reason why we're seeing all of these other approaches spark up. So we have like a number, there are a number of different organizations out there that have that push for different methods. And if we imagine the voting methods like it, so we talked about this idea of a condorsay winner. So a condorsay winner is a candidate who can beat everyone else head to head. There's also this concept in voting theory called a condorsay loser. And so that's a candidate who would lose to everyone head to head. And that candidate would certainly be our choose one voting method if we stacked it up against all the other options. So thanks for the reminder to bully around the current voting method that we have because it gets away with way too many free passes. To Alan's point, speaking to the notion of throwing your support behind local initiatives, I'm wondering what suggestions you might have to offer us in terms of how we might move forward to bring this conversation to a broader audience to develop official platforms, get the measure voted on. How do we move forward? Regardless of what method is preferred, what steps would you recommend for getting stuff done? Sure. And kind of a purpose with the work that we're doing, obviously we push for approval voting and it takes, and we've got a good track record for that. So kind of sharing the way that we advance a better voting method. So the system that we have now that's in place is that we ask people, so when people sign up for our newsletter, which I encourage everyone to do on the call, if you go to electionscience.org, it makes it really easy to sign up for our newsletter. So you go there, sign right up and then you will get an email from us. And also if you are in an area that has a lot of other supporters there, you will be invited to a local chapter. And let's see. So once you sign up for the newsletter, if you're in a geographic area that has a lot of support, you'll be invited to a local chapter. And we use those chapters to advance people to basically form a committee and an organization to advance a bell initiative. So we've got some experience in the space. We've already successfully helped the local group in Fargo and North Dakota to pass their approval voting. We did that in 2018, that passed by 63.5%. Right now we're doing the same thing in St. Louis. So Fargo was 120,000 people, St. Louis is over 300,000 people and we're just continually scaling that up. And we have these chapters in multiple cities. And so we work with these local chapters and from there they form a formal organization and then we help them with logistic support and help them with the ability to get approval voting on the ballot. And they are doing an advocacy campaign while we do an education campaign alongside it. And that type of setup or approach to doing this so far has been pretty successful. So we're looking very promising on a road with St. Louis and we had that huge win right out of the gate with Fargo. So we're looking forward to replicating that. And that's the model that we used to do this. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And Caitlin also shared the link for the chapter program that we have. So any other questions? I think I saw one in the chat about statewide initiatives. Like right now are you just doing city by city or any statewide initiatives that you've heard of? I love that enthusiasm. Like so the overall model that we've taken with this like as an organization, we have like a research component and we're working to develop that. We have a lot of material on our site and we've done these polls. But obviously we have this advocacy component at the same time where we take the data that we have and push it to get... So people actually are able to get the benefits of a better voting method. And our overall tactic has been to show proof of concept because here we've taken a voting method that while it's been used in other organizations and studied since the late 1970s, hadn't been used for government elections in the US and hadn't been used anywhere since Greece in 1920. So I had a good hundred years. So we had a lot, a pretty big lift there. So the strategy that we had was to show proof of concept and then replicate and scale. So with Fargo, that was the proof of concept component. We had to show that this could be done as well as like along that timeline as it's being used, collect data and seeing how things work out. St. Louis is that replication and scaling and then we plan to do that into even larger cities. And part of it is just the resources to be able to do that scaling. So like the, some of the smaller states out there are around a million. And so it requires the kind of being within that space to move up to that. So we have it on our radar to move into states but we're taking progressively higher, higher leaps. So like right now, technically, I mean we're moving exponentially in terms of the size that we're looking at. So St. Louis is two and a half times the size of Fargo. And our Vermont, or I see is pointing out that there are really 500,000 people in Vermont. So I think they're trying to focus a little bit. So with St. Louis being two and a half times the size of Fargo and then going to the cities that are, or cities or states that are more than double the size of that. So far like we're moving in terms of exponential growth, obviously exponential growth doesn't last forever. And given the situation that we're in now, I sure hope that exponential growth doesn't last forever for the staff people, like to see that move into an S curve and kind of plateau out. But so states are certainly on a radar that is part of our overall strategic plan but it's just a matter of having those winds that allow us to move into that. And we are, and it's also kind of a balance of when we're looking at places, we have to have the concentration of support and that location. There are a bunch of legal issues that we have to look at. So obviously they have to have the ballot initiative as a tool because it's very challenging to get representatives to agree to a different voting method than they were elected by. So we have to basically not ask them and use this work around using ballot initiative. So there are a number of components that have to line up as well as we're choosing a selection but we will eventually get into states as we're hitting bigger areas. So there's a question about divisiveness. And we were able to get into that before. A part of the way that approval voting addresses divisiveness is by allowing you to express opinion about more than one candidate. And the current setup just kind of putting us in this corner of basically having us fight against candidates even when we have a lot of common ground. So it sounds like this is in some ways a fledgling stage for this organization. And I'm wondering two questions. One, what do you need? What would be optimal in terms of support? Be that volunteers, be that funding, be that highly visible mouthpiece, what have you? And second question, which organizations are you partnering with to help that share common goals in an attempt to share resources and that sort of thing? So on the first question in terms of what can folks do? So it may not be completely new that we're talking about something where a lot of people don't know about it. So the biggest thing that our choose one voting method has going forward is that a lot of people know what it is. And in many cases, they aren't aware about their voting methods. And so being able to share the work that we do and let other people know that this is an issue that they should care about because there are other voting methods. And also being able to help make that connection when people are talking about an issue and saying like, you know what, I'm so annoyed that this policy that I care about is just not getting traction. It's not getting air time by candidates or when a candidate does bring it up that they're getting marginalized. So people just see that end result and they aren't necessarily aware of some of the tools that we have available like approval voting that addresses that concern. So being able to help bridge the gap in knowledge from these challenges that we're facing and the tools that we have available and being able to share our work to help bridge that gap in knowledge. So that's one component that you can do. And then like I mentioned before, we have these chapter systems set up. So by sending up for a newsletter and also there's the chapter link that Caitlin shared in the chat window. Those are ways to get involved directly. And those like by getting involved and being active in those chapters, that is a huge deal because ultimately that's how these things happen by the work of folks in these chapters. Like mini nonprofits, this is something that's quite expensive. Really our organizational capacity could be much greater. Like we are very nimble and we're very quick. For instance, the first major funding that we got at the end of 2017, within a year of that, we hired staff and got approval voting implemented in its first US city. If that doesn't say efficient and nimble, I don't know what does. So we're very good at what we do, but we can absolutely scale up and do more effective work with more funding and we share in how efficient that we can be. So those are some of the highlights in terms of what folks can do, in terms of sharing the work that we do, letting other people know, donating. Again, this capacity is what allows to achieve these outcomes. And then if you are in a place where we have a chapter being involved there, so those are some of the common components in terms of other areas that we work with. Whenever I'm traveling, I'm constantly working with local chapters of the lead woman voters. There are a number of other groups that normally talk with as well. Open primaries recently we joined with them in supporting the group in St. Louis, STL Approves, that's working on the initiative there. And so those are some of the examples. Have you considered doing like a TED talk that lays out the grand vision for how this is going to save democracy in America and also give, this seems like a great topic for a TED talk where you can get in a little bit of depth and just being on that stage would give a little bit of legitimacy to the ideas. That's a great idea. Yeah, that is a great idea. We have, so we do have some talks out there and Kailin might be able to share some of them. One, two that I'm thinking about in particular, one from EA Global and then the other from the TED talk. So the one hyping up the main leader in the city of Fargo. And that was a fun story to tell. Might a lot of fun given that talk, which is really about someone just refusing to say, like recognizing the problem, refusing to say no when the city ignored him and then going ahead and doing it anyway. That was one of my favorite talks to give. And then the other one for the, that I gave a talk at an organization with EA Global, that one is looking at kind of the topic area as a whole and why it makes sense as a cause area and why approval voting particularly makes sense. So those are a couple of talks and I see Kailin going through the interwebs as we speak, we're going to find them. So you should see those in the chat window. Once she's able to grab ahold of those. Looks like there's a couple more questions in the chat. You might have to scroll through a bit. Cool, let's see. So we've got the Vermont. Let's see. Get some voting method comparisons. Here's a fun one. This is from Joel. So Joel was asking about, with the approval voting, does it make sense to ever choose just one person? And the answer is yes. There are a number of circumstances when it makes sense to choose just one person. But what's important about approval voting and see I'll, I know you're, Kailin, you're working on giving the talk. Thanks. I'll find the other link here. I go through- I got, both of the talks are down there. So if you want me to find another link, I'm free. Are they, are they on there? I don't see the links for the talks on there. And I think you're muted. And I'll add the critiques. Sorry guys. Yeah, I was accidentally sending the message just to Joyce instead of to everyone. Well, I hope you enjoyed the talks, Joyce. Yeah. So the, so the question there- Thank you. Yeah. The question was about, what does it make sense to choose only one candidate? And certainly, yes, there are absolutely conditions where it makes sense to choose only one candidate. What's important about approval voting is that you have the option to choose more. And the option, so even when, say, most people, even like 75 or 80% of people choose only one candidate, having the option to choose more and that remainder choosing more than one candidate still makes a big deal. And the reason it makes a big deal is for a couple of reasons. One is that those remainder, who choose more than one candidate, can have a material difference in terms of changing the winner. So oftentimes when we think of elections, unless it was like a total runaway, most of the time the margin of victory is less than, say, like 25%. And so being able to have that remainder come into play can make a difference in terms of selecting the winner. The other component is in keeping in mind that changing the voting method doesn't always change the winner. Sometimes the candidate is so strong that regardless of the voting method that they would win in an election. And so one of the things that approval voting does is it does a really nice job gauging the support of all these other candidates, including candidates who don't win. And so when, even if you're supporting someone who turns out to be the winner in virtually every other voting method under approval voting, if you're one of those remainder folks who are caring about some of these other candidates, then you can support them. And if you hadn't been able to do that, then these candidates would have gotten virtually no support in many cases. And so even in cases where most people support only one candidate, it could still make a difference with this remainder who choose more than one. And being able to have a material impact in terms of the winner, as well as giving that reflection of support for the other candidates. And we see that on average, the number of approvals per ballot increases as a number of candidates increases. So being able to support more than one candidate becomes particularly important as you have a longer candidate list. And that's another area where approval voting really excels is that you have the super simple ballot design even when your candidate list is very long. So it's adaptable quite well, even in that scenario. So that's a good question. That's a common one that comes up. And it's not always immediately obvious what that answer is. I saw another one on there about how can we get this going within the two dominant parties who benefit from the current choose one system? Yeah, that's a good question. And I think that goes back to the tactic that we use. So we've had in the past situations come up where we have like a wonky representative, like they have some kind of engineering or math background and they're working to do good with their position and they reach out to us and say like, hey, we like what you're doing and we think approval voting would be great for our state representative there. Like help me like draft this bill. And these opportunities have come up but their colleagues are in a position where maybe they're not looking at it as altruistically and they say, well, like, you know what? I want to get elected and maybe the only reason I get elected was because we're using this kind of bad voting method and I don't want to take my chances with something else. So we run into that dilemma of this kind of conflict of interest and that conflict of interest is exactly why we don't ask permission. So we use ballot initiatives as a tool for changing the voting method because by running a ballot initiative where we have the voters themselves say yes or no on whether they want to implement approval voting by doing that, we avoid the conflict of interest of asking someone who's already elected to change the voting method that would elect them in the future. So the way that we avoid that is that we don't ask them. We try to get as many people on board. So when we're working within a particular area we're identifying and connecting with all the stakeholders. Some of them are people who are elected. If we can get people who are elected to be supportive, we'll absolutely take that support but it's not necessary for us which is why we do these ballot initiatives so we don't have to ask for permission. I would think another tactic could be pursued in parallel would be to try and get the party's nomination processes using these things. So that they, let's say it's in the Republican party's interests to use approval voting in their primaries because they'll get more consensus candidates that will then go on to win the broader election. So like could we push it? I think you paid it out. Sorry, so could we push it by saying like, hey, Republicans and Democrats, like Democrats, if you want to win elections you should probably use approval voting in your primaries. It seems like ranked choices going that way by like turning states primary processes one by one. And that's also getting them broader attention. So that does vary by state by state. And we like we do work, we haven't had as many inroads within major parties on this front. Although interestingly enough in St. Louis we're doing an open primary system using approval voting where the top two go on to the general election. There were some technical components with the Missouri law that forced us to take that particular route but it did wind up having us work within the primary. There being an open primary which has some advantages in that context because you like for instance with a primary nomination you're dealing with a subset of the population which is inherently partisan in a way that the rest of the population isn't. So there by having it an open primary allowing everyone to take part and also using approval voting it has an even better job job in terms of getting that general support. But even say like with a closed primary which is something like what you were describing when only people within the party can vote you can under approval voting it will give you a nice consensus winner but keeping in mind that it would be a consensus winner given people within that party. Still like even with that like that would be much better primaries would do a better job in terms of getting nominees that represent their party's ideology. But so we've had limited success with those inroads so far but I think part of that is really just a consequence of where we are in time. So as we build up these progressively larger wins this is something that's gonna be become more apparent and on people's radar. And I think people are gonna be open up to that particularly because of how easy this is to implement. So with approval voting for instance it's like you don't need any special kind of software so you don't have that same kind of fiscal cost as you might with other voting methods that require special voting machines that aren't already present. And so it has that kind of shovel readiness but I think that's something that parties will warm up to as it becomes something that's more on their radar. The question about what you just mentioned the open primary and having the top two go on to the general doesn't it highly depend on the number of candidates running at that point for each party. So let's say you have the population that's equally split between Democrats and Republicans which are two Republicans running at seven Democrats then the two Republicans are going to move on to the general election under an approval voting system. So you can't have within St. Louis the way it was a little bit different it was non-partisan. So the party labels weren't required but if you do have a group of people where two candidates are similar they could even be within. So with an open primary system where the top two go on to the general election if you do have two candidates out of the many candidates that are there that are very similar from the same party if they're also very popular yes it's possible for both of them to advance. That's why criticism of a top two system you could have other systems where you take that same kind of setup where you have a non-partisan open primary and using approval voting and you can have it to like the top three or the top four go on to the general election. It doesn't necessarily have to be two and St. Louis we did it as two because there were some issues using alternative voting methods in the general election. And so like our hand was a bit forced with that particular example but there are other approaches to do it and jurisdictions where there's more flexibility. Yeah, thanks Joel. Do we have any remaining questions before we wrap up here? Yeah, I have to sign off but I just want to say thank you so much for this. I really love this work and I really appreciate everybody in here because this really matters for the future. Thank you. You're welcome and thank you, Ellen. We're honored to do the work and we're grateful for the support and we would love to see you get involved. Thanks so much. Thanks, Talyn. Let's see. See one kind of tactical issue there for folks like him about to choose one tactic also known as bullet voting I would highly recommend you read the article on critiques and defenses of approval voting. And I think that the one argument that I mentioned addresses it quite well. There are a number of circumstances where it makes a lot of sense to choose more than one candidate particularly if it's a tight race and there's someone that you really don't want to see win it can be really important to hedge your bets to mitigate against someone you really don't like winning. And then there's a scenario that I think many of us have been in before which is like imagine a race where there's a third party or independent candidate they're not getting very much support. Normally under a choose one method you might think well like I don't want to vote for them because I don't want to throw my vote away under approval voting you're in an entirely different world. So there you can make sure that you have an impact with the outcome of the election. You can choose among your you like the best among the front runners. And then in addition to that you can also support other candidates who bring great ideas to the table that you'd like to see move up in their supports that they're not marginalized. So there are a lot of conditions in which it makes sense to choose multiple candidates and particularly with a long ballot list when you have a lot of when you increase the likelihood of having candidates there that you agree with. And if you look at the articles that we put out both the one on leading up to Super Tuesday as well as the one in November you see a lot of people rationally going ahead and supporting multiple candidates. So we have, so for other stuff you can always interact with us in the future on social media. We're on all of them I'm pretty sure except for Pinterest or not. But you can find the pictures that we take on Facebook and Twitter. We don't need to be on all of them and we're on LinkedIn. So you can join us on there. We've got YouTube videos so you can check us out on YouTube. Most importantly, I would encourage everyone to sign up for our newsletter. If you are not already signed up you can do that right from our homepage. Make it super easy because we really want you to sign up. So I want to thank everyone again for joining us and give Caitlin a moment to so she's not under pressure for getting that link. Let's see. For the, yeah, we're not on TikTok either. I think maybe some of our other staff would do better. I would do terribly on TikTok. I have no doubts about that. So the YouTube ones are up. I think someone's asking about that. Okay, cool. Is there anything else that folks need or any resources? Even if you think of it later, feel free to just email me and I can send you things. Awesome. And I put our email addresses in the chat but you can also, if you lose access to this chat you can find those on our website too on the Meet the Team page. Cool. Well, thank you all for joining us. I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter and also donate to support our work. We make it really easy to do that as you might expect on our website. And thank you for joining us. We really appreciate the support that you give. Thank you everybody. Thanks all. Thank you.