 Yes, perfect. Not everyone knows this. Thank you Madam Chair and thank you for the committee to carry my testimony. I think it's past five minutes. It's a pretty simple bill. I have an amendment that I'll hang out afterwards. So House Bill 1265 is an act permitting municipalities to adopt a system of approval voting. All approval voting is allowed to vote for more than one person. In the way that this bill is written, it's allowed you to do that at the town level or the city level, both in the primary election and in the general. So let's say you have your local race. There's more than one person you like. Maybe you think that person doesn't really have a good chance of winning. It removes the spoiler effect. So to take it to the presidential level, this bill, by the way, would not be for presidential elections. So let's say you like, let's say Representative Pearson loves Ralph Nader, right? But you also loved John Kerry, right? So maybe you vote for John Kerry because you don't want to vote for the Green Party. But then you think, you know, if you had an approval voting system, you could then vote for Ralph Nader and John Kerry in the presidential election. And what ends up happening, you know, as a Republican, you know, in the presidential race, we had Romney as the nominee, but a lot of Republicans weren't a big fan of Romney, but they voted for him because they thought he had the best chance of winning. So all this does is it creates a much more efficient system that we currently have where the person who's actually the most well-liked is the one that wins versus people psychologically voting for the person they think has the best chance. The way I've written this bill too, it's not a mandate. So it doesn't force any town or city to use this kind of voting. It just gives them the option. So I personally would say it's a good thing, but they don't have to if they don't want to. And then the amendment is, it just rewrites it a little bit, it would say, so right now the way that the bill is written, I just didn't cash it until at the end of the filing period, the way the bill is written now, it's saying that the top two go to the general. That's not as efficient as saying you vote in the primary, the top person in the primary then goes to the general. So you can vote as many people as you want in the primary, that top person then becomes the nominee. So that's all the amendment does. That's your proposed amendment. What's that? Your proposed amendment. That's the proposed amendment that I have, yeah. And I would also recommend to have another amendment that would just give some specific instructions of what the ballot is supposed to look like as well, which I am going to include in here. So I would actually not vote for this bill in its current form. I want those amendments. Would you pass the amendment? My pleasure. Anybody have a question? Thanks. Please ask Hardball. Thank you, Representative, for taking my question. I don't know if this is for you, but anywhere in the United States. I believe there is at least one place. We actually have someone here from the Center of Election Science, so maybe he can answer that. I'll be testifying in a minute. Yeah, I'll take that kind of question. So not in political elections, it's easy. Why don't you wait and we'll ask the question. For the questions, we'll represent this. Thank you for your testimony. You're welcome. Thank you. Carol? Thank you. So I've passed out the most of what were the frequently asked questions on the Center for Election Sciences website because I was not aware that someone from that Center was going to be here. But that gives a lot of basic information about what is approval voting. And there are several private organizations that use approval voting. The New Hampshire Liberty Party uses approval voting for the election of their co-chairs. The Libertarian Party in certain circumstances uses approval voting for elections of certain officers. There's a straw poll just over the weekend that the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire conducted, and that used approval voting. The major benefit of approval voting, and I know that several of you on this committee are election officials in your various municipalities, is it completely removes spoiled ballots when someone either intentionally or accidentally votes for too many candidates. Current statute says that if they vote for too many candidates and you cannot determine the intent of whom they intended to vote, that's a spoiled ballot. Overvote, the entire ballot is rejected. With approval voting, you don't have to worry about that because then you can say, well, they mark a circle for candidate A and candidate C. They both get a vote. Representative Schlein mentioned Ralph Nader, and that reminds me of the election recount in Florida back in 2000 to where people were looking at the ballots and trying to determine if it was a pregnant Chad, a hanging Chad, a full-blown Chad. Which one of the Chads did they intend to vote for? Well, with approval voting, you don't have to worry about determining which single candidate they intended to vote. If it appeared that they intended to vote for multiple, every candidate for which a vote was cast winds up being counted. And there's a question about, and not asked necessarily by this committee, but generally asked of how approval voting lines up with one person, one vote. And instead of thinking of, well, somebody might vote for more candidates than somebody else. Well, there are a lot of multi-member districts in New Hampshire and somebody might wind up bullet voting for one candidate instead of voting for up to five or up to seven or however many they can do. But no one would argue that someone else's vote weighs more. So think of approval voting as being able to vote either yay or nay on each candidate that's up for election. So it is completely in line with one person, one vote. And it's a much more efficient form of voting and you don't have to worry about those four ballots for that wasted vote. And I'll raise the vote for Robert University and a board member of the Center for Election Science. So Representative Science Bill is to allow, not require, cities and towns in New Hampshire to use approval voting. It's a simple thing. I think they've explained it, but I can say it again in one sentence. You can vote for as many people as you want and whoever gets the most votes wins. Under the current plurality system, you know, the current voting system called plurality voting, if you vote for more than one person, that vote is actually thrown away. It's counted as a spoiled ballot and not counted. No, that's a problem when there's more than two candidates. Say we were electing the best founding father and George Washington is in the lead over Thomas Jefferson. But then Alexander Hamilton comes along and starts to get some more fans. Well, under plurality voting, Hamilton ends up splitting the anti-Jefferson vote, actually helping his worst rival. So with a plural voting, you have the right to add a vote for Hamilton without taking one away from Washington. So that ends up giving a more honest and reliable view of who the strongest, the most popular candidate is and it makes campaigns more about the issues and not about second guessing who's more electable. And really has the more reliable, I mean more predictable, basically. It's really who's most popular and not just this sort of second guessing matter. So it's an old idea. It's been used in Greece from 1880s to 1920. It's been used in many places but it was really started to get studied from a theoretical point of view in the late 70s and since then it's been used by more private organizations and studied by theorists like me. In my own research, I found that people who had a chance to use approval voting actually rated it as simpler, easier, and more fair than the people who used plural voting in that same study. And it can use the same ballot format and the same election machines that we use today. So what I'm saying is New Hampshire towns and cities should be able to have the freedom to use this better voting system and New Hampshire voters could have the freedom to approve as many candidates as they want. Thank you. Any questions? Other questions? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for your testimony. Now on the FAQ that Mr. Perry handed out from I think your organization's website, it says under highlight it says tends to elect more moderate winners. I was wondering if there's any evidence for that or proof of that or it was all just... So for instance in my own research I did a study where I had people on the internet vote for candidates. I gave them money depending on who won so I could decide who was the more moderate candidate because I would set up more people in the middle and people on either end I would deliberately assign them to those groups. And approval voting did end up electing the moderate candidate. I actually had a map and it elected the candidate in the middle of the map more often than plurality voting. So that is something that research does support. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Perry. He has written testimony as opposed to the bill. Opposed to the bill as it's written and as was stated by the sponsor who is also opposed to it because in effect what it created is a top two primary system. What I would like to note though is that in the bill where it says the top two candidates they were assuming the top candidate from each primary would proceed to the general election. The general election should also have approval voting because you may also have independence or third party candidates that are on by petition. And the main problem with the plurality voting is it only works when there's only two candidates. When there's more it starts to have either a spoiler effect or other effects. So if the bill was amended to provide for each primary having the approval voting as well as the general election that that would take care of the needs that we have. Should also note that in the case of a municipality that uses nonpartisan elections where they have a primary to reduce the number of voters that probably could be eliminated in favor of approval voting because the approval voting can handle quite a number of candidates without problem. The other comments I had were basically covered by other speakers. I'm glad to answer questions. Questions? Thank you. Thank you Madam Chair, members of the committee. I'm David Scanlon, Deputy Secretary of State. And I just want to point out a couple of things with the spill. Local elections are just that. They're local elections and they're run by the municipality. The state really doesn't get involved unless it's dealing with state election laws that apply to any election. The first item in the bill on line four says a town may, and it's permissive, by ordinance establish this type of system. Ordinances can be adopted in different ways and it's usually done by the governing body. A change like this, how you elect a town elects its officers is a pretty important decision. And my suggestion is that the town, if this is going to be permissible for a town or a municipality to adopt they have an adoption process that includes all the voters in the municipality, not just necessarily the governing body. Second, I'm not aware of any towns in the state that hold a primary, nonpartisan or not. I know that there are a couple of cities that deal with it, but in the case of towns it would be suggested to hold an additional election in their process, which I was going to require some resources to do, but I think that's important for the committee to understand. And then the last thing that I'd like to point out is that, you know, New Hampshire's election is built on the premise of one person, one vote. And if I'm an individual in a town and there's one candidate that I really like to hold a particular office, I'm going to vote for that candidate and probably no other under this scenario. Approval voting allows another voter, though, to dilute my vote because they are taking the option of voting for multiple individuals. So there may be other entities or groups. I'm not aware of whether governments would do this, but they might. I just question the fundamental fairness of this type of voting process. I'm glad if you have any questions. Questions? Thank you. Thank you. Will she please? Yes, ma'am. Is there anyone else that wishes to speak to Vote Bill 1265? Are all the voters to vote for multiple candidates for an office? Representative Green. Thank you for hearing my testimony. For the record, my name is Keith Ammon, representing Hillsborough District 40, and that's New Boston, Mount Vernon, Milford and Collins. And this bill is related to the previous bill, so some of these ideas are going to be familiar to you. The previous bill dealt with enabling municipalities to adopt approval voting, and this bill applies to state-level offices or statewide elections for higher office. I'm going to pass out a card when I'm done my testimony that has some interesting facts about approval voting. It'll probably coincide with the handout that you got. I just wanted to point your attention. In that handout, it addresses the diluted vote concern that some people raise. So I'd like you to pay attention to that. Approval voting, it sounds kind of like a foreign concept. I learned about it maybe four or five years ago, and I was surprised that I had never heard of it before. And you've heard previous speakers mention that we currently use plurality voting, which means you get to vote for one choice. That voting system isn't in the Constitution. It's not required by our state or federal Constitution. It's just the way things have always been done. And I think it's good from time to time to time to reexamine the way that things were done, and maybe we could find a better way to improve. So approval voting, this is how I understand it. This is what makes it easy for me to understand. You've probably filled out a form on a web page. And sometimes there's multiple choices in whatever answer you're filling out. And some places on the form, maybe you have three circles, so three different options. And those circles only let you pick one. So if you decide to pick a different one, your previous choice gets cleared. So that's similar to plurality voting. On other forms on a web page, there are checkboxes, where you get to check off as many as you want. That's approval voting. And so let's say a thousand people all filled out that form, the plurality voting option, you would add up those, you would count those votes, and you'd come up with a number. With approval with the checkboxes, you'd also do the exact same process. And you would come up with your tally, and you'd be able to decide who was the winner. So I hope that makes it a little more clear, checkboxes versus circles on a web page. If you think about where we are nationally, politically, there's a lot of discord in the country. Politics has gotten very polarized, with both sides are shouting in their echo chambers, and they're not listening to the other side. And sometimes it's the simple rules at the bottom that create outcomes later on that you might not anticipate. And I think plurality voting is contributing to this discordant and disarmament, because people feel somewhat disenfranchised. And I'll give you some examples. This is a common saying at election time. People will say, I'm voting for the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils. Approval voting eliminates that. There is no lesser of the two evils. You get to vote for what you want. There's also dirty tricks that happen in politics, where money on one side will give money to a spoiler on the other side to dilute the vote. And dirty things happen with money behind the scenes in politics. If we had approval voting, that wouldn't matter. It would have much less of an effect. I see approval voting as allowing people to have more choices, allowing more ideas to flourish in democracy, in the platform of democracy, because more people will be heard and have to stand on their own merits as opposed to gaining the system by trying to cut the knees out of the other guy. So, with that said, I'll take any questions. Questions, representatives? Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for your testimony. I guess my issue or confusion is that at the end of the day, we're still going to get to a general election where there's a Republican candidate versus a Democratic candidate. And in that scenario, I don't see approval voting being of benefit unless you have people that are voting for both the Republican and the Democrat. So I guess I don't see the impact on the general election. I can see how it will impact the primary. But when it comes to the general, I don't see how this will fix our political system. So I agree that if you had, where I would be voting in the general, it doesn't make, and when you had it at the primary, it might not make a lot of sense. And a previous speaker on the last bill brought that up with the previous bill, right? There are other parties that run, and they're marginalized now, but if you could vote for the Constitutional Party and the Republican Party, or the Green Party and the Democratic Party, it gives those other voices a chance at the table instead of being, you know, silenced forever. Basically what's happening. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I was just wondering what you thought the general effect of politicians over the last 200 years of the effect of plurality voting has been on their positions? On their positions? You know, there are stories that, I forget who they were, like Thomas, one of the first presidents to run under my mind is Charlie White, but one called the other, from alphabet in the newspaper, you know, you probably familiar with the story. So there's been contention for a very long time. I think that if people couldn't game the system by trying to split the vote, you know, there's a, there's so many things you can find online about plural voting, where it's, there's a video called Fruitville. I don't know, it's kind of a little bit corny, but, so there's a, two fruits are running, they're both polar opposites. And then a third one runs that's similar to one of them. Those two split the vote and that, you know, the other one automatically wins. And, you know, that scenario plays out in just about every election. Hopefully that answers your question. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Thank you representative. Is it possible that under this system that this bill has been open, that someone that the voters didn't really want to get elected because he was just innocuous enough that everybody just gave him a pass, him or her, and that someone could come out on top because they've got a pass from a great number of people and some of the more opinionated candidates who might have been elected otherwise would be eliminated. Someone who didn't really represent the country could get elected. I just hope that the voters were educated enough on who they were voting for. I mean, that's the case now. If you look at the handout, there's a little chart on the back that talks about the different voting systems. And approval voting actually gives people more of what they want. And it also has the benefit of not being very complicated. It's very simple. There's other more complicated voting systems, but approval voting is very simple and out of all the voting systems in the Republican primary now, there are, or there were, 17, 18 candidates, crazy number of candidates. 30. And so approval voting, you'd get to vote for Ted Cruz and John Casey. And it would change the discourse a little bit where they're not attacking each other. They're trying to get elected on their own merits. Thank you. For the question. Thank you. Representative Dean McCoy. Thank you, Madam Chairman. This is the committee for the record. My name is Dan McCoy. I represent the towns of Epsom and Pittsfield in Marama County. Just I agree with the previous speakers that approval voting is simply a superior system to our current system. It's not the best imaginable voting system. There are others, but it has this distinct advantage of requiring no new equipment, no training, no special procedures and no computers, etc. All the other even better systems would require computer equipment and more training, more knowledge, etc. to make a mistake with the approval voting system even in our own system it is possible for them to make a mistake and have their ballots thrown out. It's simply a superior system. If we think about the fundamentals of what are we doing in an election? In an election we're making a group decision as to who do we want to hold a particular political office. We're asking you and you and you and you and you what's your opinion of who should hold this office and we're somehow combining those answers to get to make a group decision. Let's use the upcoming primary as an example, the Republican primary. So there's what, 10, 12, 15, I don't know how many candidates on the ballot and let's suppose at the end of the day it's won by Donald Trump with 32% of the votes. How do we know if we see that result? Well, we know 32% of the voters thought that Donald Trump was their favorite, was the one they wanted the most. What about the other 68% of the people? What do they think about Donald Trump? Well, all we know is Donald Trump's not their first choice. Is he their second choice? Is he their last choice? Is it somewhere in between? We have no idea. But with an approval voting system each voter gets to make a choice, albeit a very simple one, about each candidate. So Donald Trump, would that person would he make a good president or not? Yes or no? Casey, would he make a good president or not? Yes or no? Bush, yes or no? Paul, down the line. Like that. So at the end of the day when you see that let's say an approval voting system Donald Trump won with 53% of the vote. We know that 53% of the voters thought that Donald Trump would make a reasonable president and no one else got as many. There was no one else who thought Donald Trump was but there was no one else who was better, had more voters on their side than Donald Trump. But if at the end of the day it turned out to be Casey or somebody else we would know that the most voters think that Casey or whoever it is is qualified to be president would make a reasonable president than anybody else on the list. So we have, in a sense you have a lot more information about what the voters think about each individual candidate with this system than you do with the current system where all you know is a very little bit about each individual. With this system you have more information going in so there's a better decision being made at the end of the day. So I guess with that I'll take questions. Questions? What about one personal vote? Thank you, I seeded this question. So Mr. Scanlon talked about this and in all respect to him I think he simply got it wrong. We have the phrase one person one vote right? And if you look at the history of that phrase it actually has a different history in Europe and in the US. In Europe it was because it was about everybody being involved in the election because in Europe when we started out there was only property owners in England that were allowed to vote and what that meant was especially if someone owned a home in one place and a business property in another place they got two votes. They could vote here and there like that. And so first of all people who were not property owners couldn't vote at all and in some cases people got multiple votes because they owned multiple pieces of property. So the one person one vote phrase was counter to that was saying look everybody should have a vote regardless of their circumstances including women including themselves. So that was what it was in Europe. In the US it was more about redistricting. So one counter example to one person one vote is the US Senate right? The US Senate is explicitly all state we have two senators California has two senators we have a huge advantage in the US Senate compared to California as an individual voter right? So we're very we're not one person one vote in that sense in the US Senate but for every other kind of an election and the Supreme Court requires all state and local elections to be one person one vote what they mean is that each district is the same size. That's what that phrase means in the US that you can't have a district like for US Congress that has three million people when your other district has one million people that's not fair you have to redistrict and make them both two million people you see? So and that was in response to cases where states even though during a census they didn't redistrict they only redistricted when they got an extra representative or lost a representative then they redistricted but other than that they left it the same and the country went through a period when people moved from rural areas to cities and the consequence was rural areas had more representation than cities because they weren't redistricting correctly so that's what that phrase means here there have been court cases about alternative voting systems such as instant runoff and others where people are making putting on their ballot multiple pieces of information like in approval voting and people have challenged them as violating one person one vote and those challenges have not been upheld it's again what if you think about it what you're asking the voter to do is make a decision about each individual on the ballot so that decision could be for or against so there's nothing if one individual happens to like three people and another individual happens to only like one person they still express their opinion in some sense on every person on the ballot they've made an equal decision about every person on the ballot they've had an equal participation in the election so I reject Mr. Scanlon's reasoning on this because it's simply not correct thank you I'm going to chair, sorry following Brett Souza's line of thought I'm seeing you're taken out at Trump or Cruz because they're a strong candidate and then we're going to end up with Militose candidates people that are least objectionable is that what you're looking for I see a strong personality that's going on both sides or Bernie Sanders I don't think that the impetus behind this bill has any, I don't think at any of our co-sponsors I could speak for myself and I was once the prime sponsor of this bill years ago the impetus has nothing to do with who different is going to win elections and in fact I personally think who wins election will be almost identical to the way it is now I don't think there will be a lot of changes certainly not as has been said in the general election apparently any changes and the primary might move around a little bit but the point is it's just simply a superior system and we think we would like the ability of voters to express themselves more than they can now and we'll get better results now I don't think they'll be very different in particular let's go back to the primary example and let's say Donald Trump is the leader and Ted Cruz is number two and the others are somewhere behind that with the current system of voting let's say a voter is in favor of Jeff Bush alright but he has to think to himself ooh do I want to waste my voting for Jeff Bush I really hate Trump so therefore maybe I'll vote for Cruz instead right so we push voters to vote for one of the top two candidates because those are the ones that can win and they don't want their vote to be wasted so with approval voting that kind of consideration goes away the voter doesn't have to kind of pre-judge the election or guess what's going to happen or anything like that the voter can say what he really wants to say which is Jeff Bush but in the same time they can say well I really hate Trump so I'll also vote for Cruz and like that an even better voting system would allow somebody to rank their votes or what's called score voting which is like what you do on Amazon when you vote for a product you say this one's a five that's a three that's a one like that that's score voting that's an even better system but computers training thank you for your testimony my question in the absence of the rankings or the score voting is there still a different weight that's applied to different votes where somebody may only want to vote for Trump and somebody else that may want to vote for three different candidates no yes thank you for the question but we could stay here all day talking about other voting systems that are not in the bill and maybe we should talk about that offline but basically there are if what you get from the voters is a rank this is my first choice this is my second, this is my third which is what happens in instant runoff or congress set or some of these others there are multiple different ways of combining those to get a reasonable answer and there's theory about what's the superior way and what's not so that's a for another day kind of question aside from the example of this being tried in the last century in Greece are you aware of it being tried anyplace else yes thank you for the question as far as I know only in a lot of different private type of organizations you know I know the IEEE was at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for example uses it for their, to elect their president and their board of directors that kind of stuff but so it's in a variety of private organizations I know Dartmouth used it for a while in their board of directors that kind of thing so I don't know of other public examples but I'm probably not the best person to answer their question further questions thank you yes thank you I'm going to ask people to keep their testimony make it a little shorter and if you have written testimony to just kind of read us some books I'll read the written testimony James Hi so I testified on the previous as I said I'm a doctoral candidate in statistics at Harvard and board member for center for election science so I've definitely got a lot of studying of these kind of issues I want to speak to a couple of the things that have come up one of them is the one person one vote sort of question really this is one person one vote because you get one vote yes or no on each candidate and everybody gets that same power so if a person who voted yes for three people was getting more power than the person who voted yes for one person well wouldn't the person who was voting yes for everybody be getting the most power of all but that's silly right they're not really affecting the results at all in fact you know depending on who's ahead or who's behind you know really the votes that matter are the ones for the two front runners the two people who are the closest to winning and everybody just gets one vote on each of those and so it really is still just one person one vote and on that same sort of question about Rep Susa's question about wouldn't this lead to sort of like milk toast people in my research and in other research that I'm aware of generally the tendency for the like average sort of run-of-the-mill voter is to just vote for one or two not to like spread their vote over every person just to be against somebody that does happen occasionally but it's only when somebody very strongly feels that such and such a person is absolutely the worst candidate and not just like I'd like to see somebody to let's try somebody else so generally the sort of milk toast like nobody really knows who it is candidate in that kind of environment like in theory they could win but it doesn't really happen in practice similarly on the question of whether this is whether this matters for for the general election as opposed to just primary election we've had a lot of talk about how it would improve in this case you know the this year's Republican primary but in the general yeah it's true generally there really are only two candidates who have any chance of winning and in that kind of an election it's not going to really change things what it does is it avoids the spoiler problem if there's a Ralph Nader or some other candidate who comes in and gets a few votes but not nearly enough to win but still actually changes the result even though they were nowhere close to winning but they actually change the result that's a problem and that's a pathology that you can avoid with this kind of election system and it might not happen every year but when it does it's a big problem so I think it's worth having a system that prevents it also you know in this country's history there have been times when there weren't just two big parties it never lasts for very long it always settles down again to where it's clear what the two parties are and what their sort of platforms are but there are these transitional periods every so often when that has to change when that has to realign and this sort of makes that realignment safer, makes it so it doesn't just break down in the middle of that realignment and makes it so even when that's happening you know the most popular candidates are still winning and that really eases that kind of transition it's not going to make it happen if the voters don't want it if the voters do want it to happen it sort of lets it happen in a smoother safer way for the country or in this case for the state so those are my sort of points again I have done plenty of research on this so I'd be happy to take questions right thank you for your testimony in regards to your research what is a one of the mill voter so I mean right I mean I use that phrase but basically what I meant was that the majority of voters generally tend to tend to not vote for more than you know two or three candidates even when there's a lot on the ballot and they generally don't vote for people they've never heard of just because they don't like them for the questions thank you thank you for your testimony that's okay so again for the record I'm representing Sean about 90% of what I was going to say has already been said so I'll make it really quick I'm up here as a representative but also as a voter as all of you are I guess what I want to leave you with is when you're at the ballot box and you're thinking about who am I going to vote for maybe not all of you have this experience but I know I've had this experience where there's someone I really want to vote for and I feel like if I'm going to vote for person X that I'm going to waste my vote and all this bill does is out of the principle that every person's vote gets fully self-expressed I think the the intention behind that saying is every voter should have their say in the political system should be able to fully express their choices in the political system and I know I don't have my choices always fully expressed in the political system when I feel that maybe one of the people that I like the best is not one of the major candidates and I'm going to waste my vote and I know I'm not the only one that has had that experience in life so this just corrects that issue and I think that when something has been done kind of forever and no one really thinks about this you know I never even heard of this system until about a year ago when I discovered it I go wow this is you know even just doing some basic research this is so much more efficient I mean and the outcome is more representative of the people and I think you know if you're committed to that this is something you need to be far so that's what I want to leave you with question great yes yes yes thank you Madam Chair and members of the committee I'm very much in support of this bill and like the approval voting concept many of the things that I have here are already discussed but one of the unique things about the presidential primary is for New Hampshire the voters in New Hampshire are starting the process but it doesn't end here what we do is provide information for the voters in all the other states to make their informed decisions so this gives a way for those voters to better gauge the candidates that are here and running in this state and I didn't call the Secretary of State's office for the presidential primary in a couple weeks the Democrat ballot will have 28 names on it and the Republican ballot will have 30 names on it one other thing that I didn't see was mentioned it's possible for more than one candidate to get more than 50% of the vote but we would still go with the highest vote together because there may be more than one person that's acceptable to the majority of the people I listed in there the website which is also on that card I know the speaker one of the things I did was I did a quick check on I just clicked on Google approval voting and it quickly came up with 6 million entries so if you want to do some more research I'm sure it's going to be very easy to do thank you good afternoon I'm Ian Freeman the New Hampshire Liberty party and as a third party I obviously support approval voting it allows more people to be more accurate in their choosing but I wanted to address a couple of the objections that have come up so far one was Mr. Scanlon who was worried that somehow people voting for more than one candidate would dilute the people who vote for one candidate when in fact the person who does the bullet vote in my opinion potentially has a stronger vote so this is actually something that happens today it was also asked by Representative Suza where else this happens I live in Keen and there's sort of an approval voting process there for some of the primary elections so when Keen elects its city councillors there are like five at-large seats and in the primary if there's 18 candidates for those five seats they whittle them down to 10 the ones for whom you want to see move on and that is a form of approval voting this would just simply expand that to to every race at least that's as I understand it so it is being used right here in New Hampshire right now and if you're voting in one of these primaries and you want to give a strong vote to one candidate you just vote for that one candidate so even though there's five seats that I can vote for if I really like one candidate I just vote for that one person that's called a bullet vote whereas if I vote for four other candidates for those five seats then they have the chance of feeding out that one candidate so really voting for one person is still a pretty strong thing to do under this system so Deputy Scanlon was incorrect in that presumption so I just want to let you know this is actually in use to some extent you're in New Hampshire already Questions? Mr. Greenup Thanks General Perry Thank you we've heard a lot of testimony about what would happen if this bill winds up passing but not a lot of testimony about the actual wording of the bill and I know that that's the reason these hearings are held so I want to go over the wording of the bill what this does is it makes a very minor change to the wording placed on the ballots they blow the office for example for governor currently it says vote for not more than and then there's another this would change that to just say this many are being elected so for the office of governor there's only one governor being elected for state rep depending on the district there could be anywhere from one to eleven so it would simply state this many is to be elected for the voter instructions it would say make the appropriate mark to the right of your choice or choices and then it strikes out the stipulation that if you vote for more than the number of people to be elected then your vote is not counted and I would dare say that the current system that we have is more violative of one person one vote than what this bill would actually wind up doing is implementing approval voting to where you could cast basically a favorability vote in favor or opposition to any candidate and to sort of put it into a perspective of things that you all do as legislators this afternoon you're hearing three bills dealing with election airing by public officials if you as legislators had to vote on legislation using the plurality system that I as a voter use when I go to the polls you would not be able to say all three of these bills should be passed or two of the three well you obviously would be able to say one of the three but you could not say two or all you would have to pick which one you think is the best that's plurality voting approval voting is where you guys go into your executive and you say one of these bills is good each one of these bills needs to be passed so think of it that way as far as what would actually wind up happening if you wind up passing 8B1521 which is I believe a very good bill and should be passed just want to make one more point and then I'll take any questions there was the question about sort of a milk toast sort of candidate or as opposed to very vocal vociferous candidates one thing that I see as a possible unintended consequence of adopting approval voting is I believe the mud slinging ads would wind up stopping or slowing down and that's because candidates want to increase their favorability rating and you can do that not necessarily at the expense of others whereas current voting you have to sort of push the other candidate down to make yourself stand up but with approval voting you want to make yourself look like the more honorable person so why is trying to be the more honorable person would you start slinging mud that is a very dishonorable thing so I think elections would wind up quite intended here cleaning up a little bit so very good Bill and I do encourage OTP oh and I just got information that apparently approval voting was used in medieval elections of the Pope and the doge of Venice, Greek Parliamentary elections the UN currently uses approval voting and in Oregon and California they use it for ballot measures if there's conflicting ballot measures whichever ballot measure the highest number of votes winds up being adopted Deputy Secretary of State Thank you Madam Chair and members of the committee I just wanted to quickly note a couple of technical issues with the bill in the event that the committee decides to move along first is under the instructions to voters really the only guidance that would be in the statute under this bill is line 21 on page 1 where it says to make the appropriate mark to the right of your choice or choices I don't think that's clear enough for voters to understand just exactly how the approval voting process would work and so I think that would have to be clarified on any ballot and in the instructions that would be posted the second item I'd like to point out is if a voter can vote for multiple candidates, how do you handle writing candidates how many lines do you put what if a voter runs out of writing candidates that they would like to vote for on a ballot how is that addressed so if this were to pass there are a number of probably other things in the statutes as well that would have to be reviewed and cleaned up happy to answer the questions questions could that be skinning going to be a test room is there anyone else that wishes to speak on House Bill 15 and 21 is there anyone on the blue sheet sir