 Such a nice room, comfortable chairs. I'm Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program here at New America. And I want to welcome you all to a discussion about the possibilities of ranked choice voting as an approach that can revive our democracy in various ways, potentially solving a bunch of different challenges. This is an event in a series of events for New America's 20th anniversary. New America was founded in 1999 with the idea of creating a home for a new generation of both people and ideas across a wide range of public policy questions. I'm kind of one of the old timers, although I wasn't here at the 1999, but I did know the founders and saw the creation of it. And fundamental ideas about reforming the political system have been part of the DNA of this organization from the beginning. As my colleague Lee reminded me, that ranked choice voting was actually in the book that the founders wrote called the Radical Center. Ranked Choice Voting was one of the ideas that they promoted. That book is not really a bible for what we do, but it is kind of part of that. And then I was here, came back to form the political reform program in 2014. And our kind of founding ideas like, can we introduce some fresh thinking into the conversation about reforming American democracy, getting beyond some kind of stale solutions. And as we've evolved, I think we've found that ideas around ranked choice voting and electoral reform more broadly of that type have really taken on a far more salience, have attracted new constituencies, begun to seem like a really viable solution, both when we look at it kind of from the top down and we see communities kind of turning to this set of ideas as they look for themselves for how to strengthen democracy in their communities. So what we thought we'd do is pull together a panel of people who are kind of working both at the big level and in the field on talking to people about these ideas, promoting these ideas, helping them understand the problems it would solve, problems it wouldn't solve. We approach all these things. One thing I always say about our approach to political reform problem solving is like no reform is a super magic bullet. There's a great essay by Nick Peneman who runs issue one that came out last week of like there are no silver bullets in political reform. It's a set of ideas that have to kind of work together and this can be one of them. And any kind of reform idea kind of gets refracted through the culture and demographics of a community and I think we wanna touch on some of those ideas. So without wasting a lot more of your time, let me just introduce the panelists. I'm gonna start with one question, get us going and then we'll have some discussion here and then open it up. So starting from my immediate right is Grace Ramsey. Grace is a consultant on electoral reform issues working with a lot of communities and worked for a long time with the organization Fair Vote. Next, Grace Evan McMullen is the co-founder and executive director of Stand Up Republic. He was a candidate for president in 2016 and he's from Utah where there's a lot of interest in these ideas as well. To his right, Christopher Lamar is legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. Another organization that was kind of founded around the time of this one and has some, I've had a long connection to Campaign Legal Center and they're helping a lot of communities figure out but not just the political but the legal challenges facing these kinds of reforms. And then my colleague Lee Drutman, who is a senior fellow in our political reform program. Lee is the author of a book that's coming out in January called Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, the case for multi-party democracy in America and he has an even more expansive vision of what's possible here. So what I wanna do for those of you in the room and for the C-SPAN audience, I wanna make sure we have some clarity on what our CV is, what we're talking about here. So I'm gonna start by asking Grace to talk about when you're out in a community and people are curious about this idea but they haven't really heard much about it before. How do you describe it to them? And I'm gonna let you do that and then we'll do the rest of the panel. Sure, so for a little bit of context, I came to this work for the first time in 2013 in Minneapolis where they used ranked-choice voting. They had passed it in 2006 by the voters and then had used it in 2009 but none of the races had been particularly competitive. So in 2013, there was an open seat for mayor and plenty of competitive city council races. So I came to this work in a voter education campaign to make sure that the first time that ranked-choice voting was really going to factor into the results, that the voters were aware of the system being used for one and how their vote was going to work. So in that case, if I was talking to a voter who was planning on voting in the mayoral election, I would say ranked-choice voting, while it may be a new term, is what it sounds like. Voters are able to rank their choices in order of preference. A lot of times we'd say your first choice is the candidate you love, the second choice is the candidate you like and the third choice is your candidate that you can stand. Now when we count up those votes, we count just first choices, just like any other election. You only take the votes for the favorite candidate to make sure that we have an accurate view of where the voters stand. Now our ranked-choice voting differs from a standard election is if no one gets a majority. So when you're electing one seat, you want to elect a candidate with a majority in the system, 50% plus one. So if no one's reached that threshold, we eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes. And voters who selected that candidate as their first choice would have their vote instantly go to their second choice. This process continues until one of those candidates does reach that threshold of 50% plus one. So that's kind of the basics. For different cities and different systems that are used to elect, whether it's a city council, a mayor, whatever it may be, there are different ways that you can apply ranked-choice voting, but for the voter, the basics are you're gonna rank the candidates in order of choice. Great, and Grace, when you're talking to people about it, do you say, here's a problem, like what do people talk about when people say, what problem are you solving? Sure, one thing to be very frank that I found is if you talk about politics, people will provide you with the problems that they see very quickly. I haven't really come across a voter who says, everything's great, let's not change anything. But I think in different circumstances, it can be applied differently. So in Minneapolis, the situation that we saw was that we had an August primary that narrowed the field to two. In the August primary, we'd see turnout from 15 to 5%. Students weren't back yet. So this is a large cost to the city to open up the polls and do all of this, but also it's not necessarily an accurate view of the voters, right? You're having 15% narrow that field, and there's kind of disproportionate power in that, at least in my opinion, and so the city decided to eliminate that primary election and just have one general election using ranked-choice voting. So essentially having the same conversation when more voters were present. And this is a situation where the primary would have been a non, you're talking about nonpartisan. So instead of two rounds, you're going with one round essentially. Yeah, and then there's several other situations. There's cities that have adopted this because they had a runoff election, where again, the problem's different. It's just on the other end of that general election. One place where I've heard a lot of discussion and we haven't seen much movement outside of Maine is primaries generally, even if they're partisan primaries. There's several examples that we've seen where there have been really fierce partisan primaries, where there have been several candidates. When you're seeing things like vote splitting or a large field, you can get outcomes that aren't intuitive to a lot of voters, like people getting through with say 25% when a majority of voters didn't approve of them as a candidate. So this can be a way to work that and also for party unity. If you have this large field of candidates, you can build to consensus with this rather than having a knock-down drag-out fight before you've even gone up against the other party. Evan, you wanna check up how I talk about it? No, I mean, I kind of wanted gray. You can talk about how you see it as something that relates to your experience. Yeah, well, it's interesting. We're all sort of the way we view life is through often a prism of what we've already experienced and not to get all philosophical right off the bat, but I spent over 10 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, so I often see a lot of the challenges the country faces from a national security through a national security frame. And this is one of them. I look at the country and I look at the political polarization that we're experiencing that's not my own assessment. Pew has this great data that they've collected over decades that show our parties moving towards extremes ideologically or at least away from each other, and yes, towards those extremes. And the more that happens, the harder it becomes for us to govern ourselves. We're in this grand experiment of self-governance, but we're failing to govern ourselves. You think about it, I mean, the world is so dynamic now, whether it's changes in industry, it's changes in climate, it's the way changes in the way we communicate with each other, the way information flows, opportunities and risks that are associated with that. We live in a very dynamic world right now. And so, especially now, we've got to be able to, we've got to have a functioning government, but we don't pass budgets, we don't appropriate appropriately, we don't have solutions for infrastructure issues, healthcare, information warfare threats, so many other things, climate. And that is, I look at that and I see a national security threat that we're failing to govern ourselves because our parties are so divided and our adversaries abroad are seeing this and exploiting that, opportunistic politicians doing the same, exploiting our divisions, and the net result is we can't govern ourselves and that gives rise to, I fear, even more extreme leaders that will come to power, capitalizing, exploiting those divisions and that lack of effective governance. And so, I'm one that just believes that we've got to change the incentives that shape the way our leaders lead. And my view is that ranked choice voting is one of a couple of reforms that I think offer the best opportunity to change those incentives so that leaders are more incentivized to find common ground with their rivals to demonstrate that common ground, to build on that common ground. And so, how does that impact policy? It impacts policy by, Grace and I are running against each other and Grace has got some really strong supporters that just are never gonna come over and support me as a first pick, but I have the opportunity to show some common ground with Grace and then hopefully win her voter second choice and maybe the same is true in return. And that can give way, I think, to ways forward on even the most divisive policy challenges that the country faces. And so, that's really what motivates me. That's why I'm so passionate about this is that I think the country is facing a real weakness associated with the political polarization in the country and that ranked choice voting can change the incentives or do a lot to change the incentives to remedy that. Chris, how do you see ranked choice voting evolving? Yeah, I mean, I think sort of almost piggybacking off of Evan's really nice philosophical quote about the way you see things like working at a nonpartisan organization, the thing that I'm really concerned about is the responsiveness of politicians to voters. And so, with ranked choice voting, one of the things that you see in a lot of these elections is that instead of getting, having to choose between maybe two candidates who are sort of on the polar opposites on the very end of these spectrums in terms of the political positions that maybe aren't actually that popular within the electorate, with ranked choice voting, the thing that you see is that sort of the politicians coming back into the center and talking about ideas that are actually very popular amongst the electorate. So, again, getting into policy positions, if one of the really things that I'm really concerned about is that you'll see elections where if something's hyperpolarized, you'll see it's more of a get out the vote campaign of politicians saying I wanna make sure that the 15 people, if it's 15% of the people who vote for me, I wanna make sure that those 15% of those people come out and vote for me instead of making sure that I don't care less about the 15% of my group and more so focusing on the remainder of the city that I'm trying to get their elections out. I think that's my main concern. So, that's a pretty interesting, so in a way, there's an implicit problem there which is that elections that are primarily about mobilization create a different tone than elections that are actually about persuasion of undecided voters, so that's, yeah. Yeah, I've heard stories of people talking about campaigns when they're going door to door where the, you know, you're knocking on the door and you say who you're voting for in this election and someone already has their first choice, but normally that's like the door slams on your face and you just go into the next house, open that person hasn't made their mind up, but with ring choice voting, you can say, well, who's your second choice? Who's your third choice and so on and so forth. So I think that's sort of the way you can. So it keeps the conversation going, even, yeah. I mean, one thing that, I mean, I wanna get to Lee, but one of the things that we haven't discussed as a problem is the challenge in certain places that in addition to mobilization, you could have a winner who doesn't have a majority, right, which is what led people to the idea in Maine. So it was another potential, I don't know, is that, it's interesting that none of you kind of described that as part of the problem to be addressed. I mean, it assures that a winner at least has majority support, some kind of support. Lee, you wanna talk about, I mean, I think you kind of have a bigger, maybe in some ways a bigger ambition for where all this could go. Yeah, well, I agree. I'm gonna, I think we have a large degree of consensus here on the panel that we're in this moment of really destructive binary hyper partisanship that is a fundamental threat to our system of government, which demands a high level of compromise and give and take. And the way our two-party system is currently operating, everything is about destroying the other party for an hour electoral gain. And we are having this panel discussion as the storm clouds of impeachment cover this town. And it's amazing to see what Republicans are doing right now to support Donald Trump despite the stream of revelations of offenses that he has committed. And that is a function of this binary hyper partisanship that Republicans in Congress can't break with Trump because there's no other party for them to run as, except for the Democrats. And a lot of them are not gonna run as Democrats for obvious reasons, all of them. If there were another party, a center-right party, if there were a ranked-choice voting system that created space for third parties who would not be treated as spoilers because voting for a third party or a fourth party in a ranked-choice voting system is not wasting your vote, it's expressing your voice, I think you would see a lot of Republicans breaking with the president, maybe running as forming a new party. I have a book coming out in January called Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, the case for multi-party democracy in which I advocate for ranked-choice voting and I advocate for the multi-winner form of ranked-choice voting, which would create multi-winner districts and allow districts where maybe five representatives go to Congress and the top five finishers after a ranked-choice voting process. And that would really create space for multiple parties. Now, one of the things when we look comparatively around the world, most democracies are multi-party democracies. The US is really a rare and strange two-party system. And it's not because Americans only want two parties, it's because we have electoral institutions that make it very hard for third parties to compete. We have winner-take-all, first pass the post, plurality, electoral systems. And I think multi-party democracies allow for more flexibility, more fluidity, more voter choice, more voter engagement, because voters are more likely to find a candidate in a party that represents them. And every election is competitive. In our winner-take-all, first pass the post system, we have 85 to 90% of congressional districts that are not even competitive. It's because when partisan voting is high, it's clear who's gonna win. Now, right choice voting, multi-member districts, that becomes a little less certain. Parties compete everywhere. And voters have a real opportunity to express their voice. So I think, although it's not a silver bullet because there's no fixing politics, I think right choice voting, particularly the multi-winner form, which brings us to a modest version of proportional representation, would actually fundamentally solve a lot of the core problems that are really roiling our democracy at this moment. And I think it's, to me, it's the most important reform that has a chance of happening in the next five to 10 years. So in a way that, like, you're almost envisioning the mechanism of ranked choice voting as opening the door to the possibility of both multi-member districts and multi-winner systems and multi-party democracy. Now, I assume, like Grace, when you're talking to people in a community and most of the people who are potentially supporters of this idea, many are Democrats or Republicans, as they start out, that might not be the best starting point, right? Is that a solution that people are looking for yet? I mean, I don't wanna trash Lee's idea because he's my colleague and friend. I'm holding. But I'm just curious, like, I'm just curious if any of you, like, does that vision kind of work yet? Yeah, I mean, I think the easy answer is not quite. I think a few things are true, though. I think since the 2016 election, for whatever reason, people from both sides of the aisle are awake in a way that I think a lot of them weren't. Whether they're motivated or whether they're scared, whatever their reasoning is, I've seen that across the country. We've seen turnout up in municipal elections, which we haven't seen in 20 years. I mean, so we're seeing more activity than we have. And I think one thing that we've realized is I think for a long time you don't think to question the status quo. These are systems that you were raised to believe had always been around. You didn't, we don't think about how young democracy actually is and that the systems that we created were right for us at the time, potentially, but we weren't taught to reconsider those on a regular basis unless you're talking about redistricting where every 10 years we think about it, but the systems are still in place, right? So I think once you give people the opportunity to think about it, I've seen largely a positive response. One thing that's been interesting is the entire time I've been doing this work, it's largely been in a C3 space. So I'm mainly educating, I'm not advocating as much, but I've found that once you introduce people to these ideas and say this is the problem that you're seeing in your community, this is the solution I'm providing you, education is actually mostly what's necessary. It's to say that this is the system that exists and here's how we think it can be changed, people are welcoming to that conversation, it's just a matter of presenting it and presenting it in a way that people can digest. I'll admit I don't use, first pass the post very often, I don't use plurality very often, you know, you try to use it in the language that people are going to understand and make it something where it doesn't feel theoretical, it can feel very real, but people are definitely open to changing these things. Let's, since we have this audience and C-span audience, let's define quickly first pass the post in plurality just so we can use it. How are you putting it? It's not hard to do, you all could do it. You all could do it, but just so we're clear. First pass the post is a nickname, basically comes from horse racing, that whoever is ahead gets the most votes wins. Now that doesn't necessarily mean a majority, you could get 30% of the votes and win if the other candidates get less than 30%. And that's a, this was a 1430 innovation that came from the British countryside. They used to, it replaced consensus voting which turned out to be somewhat difficult and the framers who were debating a lot of things in 1787 didn't debate electoral systems because there was only one electoral system at the time. It was a candidate based, whoever gets the most votes wins. That was what elections were and it wasn't until the mid 19th century that electoral reformers started innovating and coming up with different ideas. Ranked choice voting was in innovation in the early 19th century. J.S. Mill was a tremendous proponent of it, the Tocqueville also. And over the course of the early 20th century, a lot of these systems caught on. Australia has used it for a hundred years. Ireland has used it for a hundred years. That was probably more than you bargained for. Definitely more than I knew. I said anybody could do this. Anybody could do that. Let's pull back to kind of that bigger picture that we were talking about, of what's the potential of a system with our CV in place? What's kind of the big dream that either you Evan or Chris have of what becomes possible in our CV world? For me it is the enactment of policies that the majority of voters agree with. And I think it's as simple as that in terms of what the goal is, for me anyway, for our CV is just seeing politicians who are actually responsive to the things that voters want and politicians enacting things that voters actually want within those jurisdictions. Good, good, we'll go. Yeah, I would, we have to realize now that there are politicians, many of them, who as a matter of political strategy, try to divide us. We know that some of them are very visible, others are less visible, but it's a strategy. I mean, think about that, think about our leaders in order to gain more power for themselves are trying to divide us as a strategy for them to gain and hold on to power. And it used to be that this would have happened in deep red or deep blue districts where you only had to worry about your primary. But that's even, we've gone beyond that now. You see moderate Republicans in the house, for example, and I could name names, but I don't exactly want to shame them in this moment. But even Republicans in the house who are generally thought of as responsible and more forward thinking and moderate, still conservatives but more moderate, even they now are adopting a divisive approach. They're abandoning the strategy of, all right, I'm gonna do what I need to do to get through the primary and then turn, at least then, to a unifying campaign. They're abandoning, and they won on that in the past. They used to win on that. But now they're changing. You watch their rhetoric now and it's not that. It's, they find a way to get on board with more senior divisive leaders in their message, including, I'll say, the president, in my view. And so that is a very alarming fact and it's something that should concern us all. Our leaders should work to unite us. I mean, it just seems so basic, but we're a weaker country where our system of self-government fails when we're so divided. That doesn't mean we have to agree on everything certainly. We're not going to and we should have vibrant debates around all kinds of policies. But around, for example, our values and around the health of our system of self-governance, there needs to be greater unity than there is right now and we certainly can't have leaders who are purposely trying to divide us and therefore weak in the country. We just can't have this. And I'm genuinely worried that if we continue on this track, we may lose the America that we've known and even in its imperfect state, we may lose what's been good about America and it may not take that much longer. And so I do, what my vision is, and I like Lee's vision of opening up the political process I've run as an independent before, I think there should be more competition, more players. I want that too. But as a, you know, maybe as a more immediate impact or a concurrent impact, I just want leaders who work to unite us and work to therefore strengthen our country and help it survive modern challenges and thrive in a modern environment. Oh, I, yes. The binary political system that we have, it has a zero sum logic that if I make my opponent seem evil, venal, corrupt, then I win. There's a, it's a lesser of two evils logic. Now, in writing my book, I did some research and I tried to find out if, like, there was a phrase, the lesser of three evils and I did some crack research on the internet. I found it. It was the original title of a martial arts film. Which did very, very poorly under that title. It was a well-reviewed arm. And they changed the name to Fist of the Warrior if you're looking for it. But there's no lesser of three evils, because in a three-person race or a four-person race, if you start attacking your opponent, you look bad too. It's not, and so, I mean, obviously candidates should draw distinctions among each other, but you look really bad when you go negative and you start questioning the patriotism and loyalty of the other candidate. And that's what all of our politics have become. And it's so destructive. There's a Pew survey out today that showed the level of how partisans thought about each other. It was bad in 2016. Actually, partisans now are even more hateful of other partisans in 2019 than they were in 2006. Where does it go from here? So in the past couple of years, we've had some real successes with ranked-choice voting. I mean, we've had Maine. Kind of snuck up on me that it's on the ballot as a charter reform in New York City. I am so sorry to do this, but I sense we're shifting to another part of the conversation. Can I just build on this? Yes, so please do, please do. Yeah, so there's talk about how ranked-choice voting could make the tone of campaigns a little less negative. And Lee mentioned that. And I think a lot of people dismiss that as, okay, we're in a democracy, it's rough and tumble, there's gonna be intense debates and we shouldn't really worry too much about the tone. Maybe that's sort of a Pollyannish desire to concern yourself with that, or concern. And Lee's sort of talking about that, but I agree it's so important and enough to interrupt your transition. Yeah, go for it. And I just wanna say that the tone of our campaigns does really matter. And the reason why it matters is because it impacts the way our leaders, the tone of our leaders' rhetoric in their campaigning mode but also otherwise impacts the way we think about our political rivals and the other side. And if it's negative, or too negative, then I believe it closes us off, it makes us, it closes us off to listening to the other side. And when we stop listening to the other side, first of all, our ideas get weak because they're not challenged. We put ourselves in a little cocoon and we've got our ideological purity test that we apply to ourselves and others and we're not listening to anyone so our ideas aren't challenged and they just get weaker and weaker and weaker and ironically the weaker they get, the more committed we are to them. And we don't get anywhere as a country and we actually start breaking apart and all of that and we also become more vulnerable to disinformation and we know we've got domestic and foreign entities pumping disinformation at us all day long right now. It's a major challenge we face and the extent to which we demonize the other side in a way that to an extent that we stop listening and our minds are closed, we're not trying to understand anymore, we become vulnerable to lies about each other and that impacts even further our ability to govern ourselves. I guess that was worth it. No, it was totally worth it because I want to stay on it a little bit because I'm, I think this is a great idea but I also worry that there's a lot of factors that create that negative tone. I mean, part of it is just, the attention environment, it's so tough to get through. So the idea of that sort of idealized, Juergen Habermasian, we'll explain that. That's not the Habermas. No, I mean it's sort of like broad discourse where everybody's participating and listening to each other. It's a hard thing to do and that's not just because there's Fox News. I mean like lots of things, it's a lot harder to get through than it used to communicate in either direction, right? It feels like it's harder for voters to get through to politicians and vice versa. So I guess I'm just like, is it enough? What does it need to go along with to have that effect of changing this question? I'd like to share a little bit about how we talk to candidates who are running in these races when we're either training them or just talking to them generally. And there's a few things that I think can maybe provide a little bit of a through line to what we're looking for there. And I think the conversation has become more about who you're campaigning against than who you're trying to represent. And so I think when we shift those incentives, then we find out that one, you're gonna have to talk about policy a little bit more than you're probably prepared to. If you're busy talking about your opponents, I don't know, previous life in whatever way it's manifested itself, whatever your OPPO research told you, you are not presenting a plan. You're presenting an alternative to this bad thing. And in these conversations that we have with candidates, the way we largely view elections now and the way you're going to approach them is a Venn diagram of these are the people who are with me, these are the people who are against me, and then this is who's up for grabs in the middle, right? And that's who you go after. You know who's in your camp, you know who will never vote for you, and you're scrambling for those folks in the middle who may be undecided, and I think they're disappearing rapidly and the tactics that you're gonna take to even get people to that space are ugly, quite frankly. And what we tell candidates now, a key phrase is, distinguish, don't disparage, is that you're gonna have to present ideas that are different from your opponents. You are going to have to highlight how we, you know, we talk about how this can pull people back to the middle, and I think there's something there for sure, but also maybe not back to the middle, but you have to present people with an idea to either accept or reject, right? And I think a lot of times now we're saying, just don't vote for this other person, and that's not a vision. And what we tell candidates when they're running is instead of thinking of this Venn diagram, you're thinking of concentric circles, right? You're thinking this is my base of support. These are the people who are gonna show up for me. Maybe they're donating to my campaign, maybe they're knocking doors for me. So that's my base. I know that they're gonna rank me first on that rank choice ballot, but then you take a step out and you think, okay, if that doesn't get me to 50%, how am I going to build on that base? How am I going to bring more people in and convince them that the vision I'm presenting is one that appeals to them? And so it just completely shifts the incentives of how you're viewing your potential constituents, right? If you're viewing 40% of the people as merely against you, even if you win that race, you don't view them as your constituents in the same way. And some elected officials do. I know of several people who will take the calls, hear the concerns of constituents who may be of the opposite party, but it does seem to be disappearing rather quickly. And so I think when you shift these incentives, you shift not only what a campaign looks like, what voters expect from somebody. I mean, it's a job interview. We should be interviewing these people adequately, correct? So when you're doing this, I think changing those incentives, one, puts it back on the voters to say, what matters to us? What are the values that we wanna see in our elected officials? What are the things that are affecting this community that we want you to legislate on? And then shifts those incentives for the candidates to say, I need to pay attention to what's going on here and I need to be responsive. So I think by shifting all of those, it's a less us versus them. And it's more, what does this community need and how can I best represent it? Yeah, I feel like you're talking, there's something, I mean, we had a big discussion of rank-trace voting here in this room a few months ago. And I think one of the things I learned from that is there's not only like talking to the voters about this idea, there's also talking to the candidates about it. It's not automatic, right? The candidates wake up and say, hey, different system, I gotta communicate differently. It's anything, it's a change, it's a challenge and there's education on two levels, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you don't want candidates accidentally acting against their own interests, right? And also just, you know, it's a chipped-in culture, realistically, an in-campaign culture especially, but also in governing. And I think preparing both voters and candidates for that. One, seeing voters hold candidates accountable to the things that the system promises is something that has been very cool to see as somebody who works on this. We had a candidate back in 2013 kind of throw a jab in a debate and people were, and this is Minnesota, so it's very nice. It was like, I don't like that idea potentially maybe and people were like, oh my God, the nerd. So I think you see people reinforce that, but they have to understand one, the incentives for candidates, the understanding of the system, but also the leverage they have as voters, the power that they have. And that takes education. I think we are very accustomed to either feeling voiceless or trying to yell as loud as possible and showing alternatives so that can be helpful. And how, I mean, I think while we're on this, obviously money is a big factor in how people communicate as well. And how does rank-trace voting intersect with either how money in politics works now or how it might work with some changes? I mean, some of you work on that issue also. Do we all look at Chris? I don't work on this issue particularly, so I'm trying to think of the answer. And quite frankly, the answer is I don't know in terms of, I don't know how money in politics has worked in the main congressional elections most recently with the rank-trace voting, and so that's really what I was thinking about. Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure yet. Well, I mean, I think the most interesting experiment to me will be if they do do it in New York and New York City has the very, what I think is a kind of ideal system of matching funds for small contributions that will be an interesting test. Now, of course, more candidates means the money, potentially money could matter more as if a bunch have too little to even get to the gate, but maybe rank-trace voting will help. But at the same time, you're eliminating the cost of a runoff election that got 6% in 2013, so I mean, citywide, you're also saving money to fund this kind of thing, if you have a matching fund. So I did wanna talk a little bit about what goes into, what you've seen go into the idea catching on and what seems to happen, what seems to click in a community where people get interested in the idea and move it forward. And then I wanna talk a little bit about challenges and then we'll open up any of you. I mean, I- Oh, you guys are more up there. Yeah, I'm happy. I mean, there's a lot of different places where we're talking about this, so I'll highlight a couple and talking about why it was right for that community. Santa Fe, New Mexico used rank-trace voting for the first time in 2018. Before that, they had further, at least for their mayor, they had a one-round election in March in an even year, but I mean, their turnout was pretty low, not surprisingly, but also they were having people elected with far less than the majority. And so I think a lot of times it's finding the problem that exists and why rank-trace voting is the solution. So for folks there, it was you shouldn't be punished for having more choices. There shouldn't be unintended consequences for people wanting to step forward and represent their city. So having a system that allows all of those people to run but also make sure that a candidate that's elected is supported by the majority of the city is important for the representation of those voters, so that's one example. In Maine, as we saw, our political system is designed to work pretty well if there's two candidates. You'll understand what happened and why it happened, but when there's three and all three are viable, you can have all sorts of stuff happen. And for voters in Maine, I think it was nine of the last 11 elections were decided, or were won by a candidate who didn't have a majority. So this isn't a Republican thing, a Democratic one. None of the last 11 gubernatorial, sorry, yes. And so you're seeing this issue arise regularly. That was an interesting place to phone bank because I actually stopped looking at any partisan designations when I was on this phone list and was just calling people and finding that if I presented the problem, they provided me with whoever they were mad about, whether it was LaPage, whoever it was, there was always an answer. And so when you have situations like that, particularly seeing that the system that exists doesn't reflect our political realities, this is a logical solution for a lot of people. So there's different instances, but I think it's seeing how that system isn't accurately representing the role of the vote. I think there's also a real opportunity at the municipal level, at the city level, where elections can be less partisan anyway. And so there's less of a partisan fight to begin with. In Utah, now there's a state-sponsored pilot program and two cities have taken advantage of it and are implementing ranked-choice voting in their elections, and there are a number of other municipalities who considered it in this round and who may adopt it in the next, and that's something that we and others are working on. But I think there's a real opportunity there. I also, you know, another piece of this that I'm passionate about is just how empowering this is for voters, you know. And, yeah, for Republicans and for Democrats and for everyone, really, and I find that, you know, that argument that it empowers voters, it puts more hands in the people, it resonates with people across the political spectrum. And I think that's really important because sometimes, you know, I've had conversations, for example, with moderate members of Congress who I was sure would be supportive of ranked-choice voting and at least for now, or at least initially, I was wrong. And the reason why I thought they would, for sure, support it is because I think they would fair probably very well. And I don't think ranked-choice voting is only a way to support moderates. It's not exactly the way I think of it, but I more think of it in terms of unifying leaders. I think that ranked-choice voting incentivizes more unifying leaders and so I've gone to more unifying leaders and said, what do you think about ranked-choice voting? And I've actually been surprised that they haven't been as supportive as I thought they would have been because they were elected under the current system and they'd like to just keep that current system. But when you go talk to actual voters and you tell them that, hey, this is, we can just make a change to the ballot and I think it's wise to not overcomplicate what this is, we can change the ballot so that when you go in to vote, you get to more fully express what your preference is. I mean, it's crazy if you think about it that now you only get to just choose one person. Life isn't like that. It's not like that in any other way. I mean, we rank where we like to go out to eat. We rank our sports teams. We rank our friends, we rank our parents and our family members and I'm kidding about that, but we children, everybody. But it's just such a normal thing. We go through life sort of with a set of preferences that are evolving and we're considering these things and that's part of being free. But somehow when we vote still in most places, we have to pick this, we have this one boring way to just say who our one pick is. And I think voters, when you talk about it in terms of empowering them, whether it's people who are pretty far on the right or people who are moderate conservatives or centrists or people on the left, I think there's an enormous possibility to build strong passion, not just support for this change. Yeah, that reminds me, I think one of the good public education exercises that a lot of people have done are those kind of like things where at a brew pub we rank the different beers or people have all kinds of tricks like that. Favorite ice cream? Yeah, in New Mexico, it was lunch food, so it was like burritos, taco, like Southwestern beer. In Utah, we did desserts and that's how we sell our ice cream. Which is your favorite? It's one of those little things that helps to distinguish different states and different communities. We could. I don't know how many we could do. Stick around for the happy hour. Or if you're watching at home. Go to your fridge. Before we open it up, and I do want to open it up soon, I guess I want to just get your senses of what you worry about, two things I think. What you worry about and what you think we should know more about. We've talked a lot with political scientists about the area of research we should be looking at here. What do you all think, both fears and unknowns about ranked choice voting or for landed ideas? I think my fear right now is in the implementation space to get in the weeds a little bit like the federal agency responsible for certifying election machines. They just recently certified one of the software, basically like these software that's actually able to do ranked choice voting. And so I'm worried just more broadly about how states, once you're really in the weeds about software programs and all of that stuff and making sure that people understand what happens when you're involved in the ranked choice voting space. There are various ways about the surplus votes and what happens if we're talking about multi-member districts, if candidate A is over 50% plus one, what happens with those votes that are over the 50% plus one for that candidate? Like do they go to other people? And if they do, how do you figure that out? And so trying to explain that to people. The drip quota. I was trying not to say drip quota, but. I was going to say you lost 10 points. But so it's very easy when we're talking about a mayor or if you're talking about what do you want for lunch between these three options. But once you get in the weeds a little bit, trying to explain that to people, I think is really, really difficult. We talked about the constituency of candidates and helping them understand it. Voters, election administrators are an important constituency here too. And it definitely changes their lives in significant ways. They do in Ireland, which is they just make it this big national event where everybody's following in and they're reallocating preferences. And then people really get into it in Ireland. Yeah, but how was the education effort 100 years ago? Absolutely, you know. Took some time. Yeah, they did a war 100 years ago. Evan, what do you worry about or want to see? What do you want to see more research about? Well, I guess what I worry most about is just those who have risen to power in the current system, come to office in the current system, fighting for the status quo because it's served them. And they have enormous megaphones. And they can use them to beat back reforms that the country needs because they're afraid that their interests, their narrow, parochial, personal really interests will be harmed. And that's what I worry about most. But I will say that I'm not afraid because I just think that there's even with regard to that because I just think that there's so much potential to generate so much popular support, frankly, cross-partisan for this reform. I think it's very powerful. I don't think it's as hard to sell as some people would like us, you, to believe. But I do think it's those sort of trying to protect the status quo because their power is wrapped up in the status quo. I think that's the real opposition here. They're the real opposition, not Republicans, not conservatives, not or Democrats or progressives. I think we can all be united. There's a real possibility, a real potential to unite people around this reform. But I think the real opposition is going to be office holders, frankly. What do you want to see more like dug into? What do we want to, what questions do you want to ask? Oh, I mean, the work that I'm doing right now is educating voters about this in various communities where this is being implemented. And I think, as I said before, a lot of what I do, I don't feel the need to advocate. I think education does that by itself. But I think we really need to invest in that in a lot of different ways. And I really worry that if I'm coming in at this point when you've changed your election systems, but you weren't educated on what your city council does or what your state legislature can do and things like that. So I just kind of worry about where we're at in terms of folks knowing what's actually going on. I think the national level gets a ton of attention. And there's this kind of circus going on that's really pulling focus when there's a lot of things happening on the ground level. I mean, if you're talking to a non-voter in the Midwest, when you tell them that their city government is who decides what roads get plowed when, they're now a city voter. But people need to know what's happening and that at every level of government decisions are being made for you. So for me, and the places where this is happening, we're finding that coming in with these education programs and making sure voters are aware is doing a lot of that work. What's scary to me is that it's not already happening. Because I think if people were more aware of the systems and them being taught more about these systems, these changes would be happening faster anyway, because they'd be taught to question those things. So it sounds like you're almost talking about more than just here's education about how RCD or electoral reform could work. But here's fundamentally an education who's responsible for what, right? And how to think about your relationship to democracy. Yeah, that we come in with the intention to teach about a specific system and end up saying, and here's why you should participate in it. And so in terms of the education work that we're doing, I feel really good about it. I think once people are given that opportunity, they really take to it. But it's alarming that it doesn't happen anyway, unless there's a change. Could I give one more concern? I'll just say, I mean, this is maybe a little bit inside of, it's perhaps inside baseball, but I still think it's useful. And that is that these efforts to educate the public about reforms like ranked choice voting and then to drive those reforms forward, it costs money. And they're in the political philanthropy space, obviously there are people who are contributing to these efforts and supporting conversations like these and efforts like those of our organizations. But I still think that the political philanthropy space is collectively still considering whether to, how far to go in supporting ranked choice voting as reform and they're still feeling it out. They're seeing sort of forward progress and that's already happened in Maine and elsewhere and what impact it has. And it's still a very cautious posture, I would say. And I would of course like to see it be less cautious and let's get on with it and let's get after it. But I think that's something that still needs to happen. I share Evan's fears that we will be too cautious and too slow and continuing on the status quo with each election we're running a higher and higher risk, I think of some sort of fundamental legitimacy crisis. I mean as for the downstream effects of this, I think they're positive. Democracy is not something to be solved, it's a living breathing system that is always creating new problems and if it's not, then it's not working because democracy is how we settle our disagreements. And as long as there's a diverse, complicated society we're gonna have disagreements and we're gonna seek to resolve those disagreements. But the electoral system that we have now is antiquated electoral system. It doesn't work for a modern complex democracy and it's creating some incredibly perverse incentives that are playing out or just around the corner from the White House. And it's all too close. I think I'd like to open it up and someone will bring you a microphone. So don't start talking until somebody's brought you that microphone. And if you have like an institutional affiliation that brings you here, please say what it is. Woman in the beige in the middle. Betiel, I'm just an R-C-V enthusiast. Welcome. Thank you. So we talk a lot about this being good for the voters and so within R-C-V initiatives what is a level of courtship or partnership with organizations working to extend voting rights with consistently marginalized communities like African-Americans, rural communities, American Indians and so on. And is that even a metric that the R-C-V community holds itself against? And if not, why? Where does that fault lie? And is there even a movement within that to affect that change? Super important question. I can start. So I think there are two parts to that. The first part is, in a lot of this space, like when I'm working in historically marginalized communities, when I'm talking to candidates and I'm talking to the elected officials, there's a lot of, I'm trying to think of the diplomatically. They don't like this stuff. Like this new thing that they believe is gonna like basically lead to them losing their seats and then these communities not having someone to actually represent them in their communities. On the other side, when I'm talking to voters about this issue and you explain it to African-American community groups, they understand it pretty quickly and it makes a lot of sense to them. And so there's almost this like dichotomy of who in these communities actually really like these proposals. And it's not just rank choice voting. It's a lot of other democratic reforms, stuff that I've been working on where like you go to the candidates and it's just like they're not listening. And then I go to the community that sort of invited me there in the first place. And it's like, yeah, that makes total sense to us. Like we don't understand like why, like why aren't we doing rank choice voting like a long time ago? And so in my experience, like there is this dichotomy and I can't like grasp like why that is or like how to sort of like get over that difficulty with the elected officials. But that's just what I've been seeing so far. Is it the same thing that Evan talks about that they just know that system? I mean, I think that's a part of it but I also think it is just like the historical marginalization of the fear that I mean, not to change subjects a little bit but the thing I can mostly closely compare it to is when it relates to independent redistricting commissions and gerrymandering, like the idea of these candidates are concerned about losing their seats or being written out of their seats because of whatever the rules are or the criteria are based in these independent redistricting commissions, right? Even with partisan gerrymandering, like you'll still pack an African-American district and that will still be a 100% African-American district no matter what happens in certain states, right? And so that seat for that community will always be there and it'll always be represented by historically the same person. And so getting like, I don't know, just again getting over that difficulty has been really hard for me. Let's- I will say this is a movement that has grown drastically within the last five years within the space that I've been within it. And I think there's a few things that are evident in that growth. One, for a long time, if these were small cities where one person can go and if they bother their city council enough to get them to change a lot, that's a couple places that have done this where it's like one person really getting after it. And so in those situations, you may not be someone who's an organizer who's familiar with what coalition building is who thinks about where the different stakeholders are in the community and bringing them along. Now those people I think have done a good job on the back end of really talking to people and especially with education programs, but I think as the movement's gotten bigger, I think we've gotten better at campaigning and understanding that if we wanna create a democracy that is more inclusive, if we want more people at the table, or at least being able to run and be viable, I think we've recognized we need to build campaigns that look the way we want our movement to and the way that we want our electorates to. So I think that's something that's grown a lot of really just having infrastructure generally for campaigns, like really making these things something that are built, but also as part of the sustainability of a movement, winning is half the battle. Implementation is where the real fight is, and so making sure that you've brought people along on that entire journey and whether they're on board or not, if you win, you need to make sure that those relationships already exist, right? Because if it's the first conversation you're having, that can be really difficult. So I think the movement is really learning a lot in that sense and is doing pretty well I would say in the cities where it's being implemented, especially of having done the work on the front end to make sure that once that win happens, you've brought people along with you, they understand the values both for their community and generally and then pushing that forward once it's passed. So that you're really seeing the results that you're hoping to and that culture shift. Can I press this question a little further because I feel like we've talked in this conversation, we've talked about like elected officials as a category and like the people as a category. What about all the intermediary organizations, whether they're voting rights groups that are representing minority constituencies, whether they're unions, whether they're, other kinds of, how do they fit into an RCB conversation? In my experience, they've been at the table in those conversations in the states where we're working in. So it hasn't been, I mean to be like blunt, like it hasn't just been me and a table full of like old white people like kind of thing, right? Like it's been a conversation that's not 100% reflective of the community but there is diversity at the table and there is like actually representation coming from those communities. East Point, he says as a voting rights remedy. You're the liar. You're the liar. Okay, so. You're better. Okay, so the background is East Point, Michigan is the city that used to be called East Detroit. They didn't want to be affiliated with Detroit so they changed the name to East Point. In 2017, the Department of Justice, the voting section brought a section two claim under the Voting Rights Act. What that basically means is that they were saying that the city of East Point was violating the Voting Rights Act because minority communities weren't actually able to elect someone who represents them. I think in 2000, the city was 4% black. In 2017, it was like 35, 36 or something like that. So the number jumped dramatically in the span of about 17 years. And in that span, they weren't able to elect a single African-American candidate. The seminal US Supreme Court case is Thornburg v. Jinkals. And what that case basically says is to demonstrate a section two claim. You first have to show that the minority community is compact enough to actually have a district. The second thing you have to show is that the majority community historically votes together to actually, well no, the second element is that the white voting block or the majority of communities voting block votes in a way to actually stop the minority community for actually representing themselves. So there's a third one that I'm now forgetting because the lights are on. But the point was that this went to district court. The district court agreed on summary judgment basically saying you've demonstrated these two elements but you haven't demonstrated the third. And so it was getting ready to go to trial on the third issue. On the third issue, before they went to trial, they entered in what's called a consent decree which is basically an agreement that says, and I'm not sure if they, I can't remember if they actually agreed that they were violating a section two claim but basically the point is, East Point reached an agreement with the plaintiffs which in this case is the Department of Justice to say that we agreed to enter into a ranked choice voting agreement and like to use ranked choice voting to remedy this section two claim under the voting right side. And so then that's when Grace comes in I think. I've been talking to voters in East Point. I mean, this is a unique situation, right? Most of the cities that I've worked in have not been court ordered to use a system. And also it's one, seeing the dedication of people who work for city government is fascinating just because it is often so thankless and these people are working so hard to put the best election together that they can in a very short time span. So I can't say enough about the work that they're doing. But this, I mean, it's a tough situation and I think it's okay to be honest for that because not only are you using a system you haven't heard from, it wasn't put to the voters. And this is the only situation I've ever entered into where there wasn't some public discussion about what happened. I mean, I think the city council had several potential remedies put in front of them and this is what they came up with I mean, it's been a process to make sure that people understand and I think every time we have the conversation I think we get a little bit further. I think there's a better understanding. But it is a unique circumstance with I think a ton of potential but also I think there's some risk involved of making sure that people feel that they're all being brought along. But there's been, I mean, so far some great work being done by the city and I hope I'm helping in the ways that I am but voters are receptive but it is very, very jarring in this situation and I'm glad that there's measures put in place to make sure that people are being brought along. Yeah, the other thing for reference is that this is the first case where the DOJ suggested ring-choice voting as a remedy. So that was like sort of the really big thing that caught almost everyone's attention about this consent decree. Let's, Lee, why don't you say a little bit about the potential for multi-member districts to kind of reduce that situation where you have representatives of color and then representatives who can ignore non-white constituencies. Yeah, with a ring-choice voting element. I mean, the remedy that we've used for minority representation is to carve out majority minority districts. Now, that has worked to create descriptive representation but it's had some second order challenges. One is that it only works to serve communities that are self-segregated and that's worked pretty well for African-Americans historically, although less and less well as more African-Americans move out into the suburbs and it's never worked particularly well for Hispanic voters who are more dispersed. It's not worked at all for Asian voters. Now, the advantage of multi-member districts, particularly with ring-choice voting, is that you don't have to be segregated in a community to elect your candidate of choice. And also, the ring-choice voting element is particularly important here because it means that candidates are not just reaching out to their ethnic community. You're trying to build a broader base of support which builds cross-coalitional kinds of partnerships. Now, in countries that have experienced ethnic violence and are rewriting their constitution, it's often recommended that they have ring-choice voting for precisely this reason that it forces folks to get out of their own ethnic group and to really try to build those coalitions by competing for second or third choices. So I think it has real potential to actually considerably improve minority representation. And when democracy experts kind of look across systems, what kind of electoral system is the best for minority representation? The system that we have now of single-winner districts with plurality voting is universally dismissed as the absolute worst for minority representation. Proportional representation between ring-choice voting is generally seen as much better because it doesn't force communities to self-segregate and it forces representatives to compete for those votes even if they're not gonna be the first choice of that community. I'll make sure we get some more questions. We move more quickly. The gentleman in the blue shirt here, I had to stand up sometime. Yeah, Mitch Waldrop, I'm a freelance journalist. One of the drivers of the division and hyper-partisanship you see isn't just the voting system. It's also this sort of disinformation network that finds it very, very profitable to exacerbate and inflame divisions. We all know who we're talking about. But that's not the same as the voting system but it's also intertwined. And I think it was mentioned earlier. I wonder if he could explore that a little more. How would a rank-choice system effect this info bubble dynamic? You wanna take it or do you want to talk about bubble? Are you looking at me? I'm happy to start. I just think that in order for disinformation really to penetrate and thrive, it has to be able to take advantage of our antipathy or our biases against the others, whoever they are. And when we live in a time when that's being, when that kind of partisanship and division is being modeled by our leaders, many of our leaders, B, it is something that they're using as a strategy to empower themselves. And so they're furthering it themselves. And so the incentives and by the way, the disinformation obviously helps them. And so it's this destructive feedback loop that they plug into as a way to divide their electorate as a way to help them hold on or gain power. And so we have to disrupt that. We have to interrupt that somehow. And I see rank-choice voting as a way to do that. If all of a sudden leaders can't win by being divisive, one thing, or they're less likely to win by being divisive, one story to give as an example is Bruce Pollack when in Maine. So Bruce was a sitting member of Congress and he was personally, I thought he was just a tremendous guy, very nice guy, was often the most reasonable guy in the room when I worked on the Hill among House Republicans, really tried to, he was always a unifier, he was always a unifier within the Republican Conference. And then rank-choice voting was instituted for his race in Maine and he was then confronted with this new system. And I would have, had I been advising him and I really wish I would have been, I would have said, this is perfect for you, you can thrive in it. But instead, he worked against his own interests, Grace referred to that earlier, and ran a divisive campaign even in a rank-choice voting system. But had he been a little bit smarter, had somebody advised him better, he would have known to model unifying leadership and rhetoric because that would have helped him have a better chance of prevailing and he would have then been pushing back against disinformation that's intended to divide and to misinform obviously and or to disinform and then divide. And so I think rank-choice voting helps us deal with this, helps us break that cycle by changing the incentives for these candidates, changing the incentives for them, dissuading them from plugging into and trying to capitalize and exploit the dangerous and destructive power of disinformation to their own benefit. You have to wait, you have to wait for... Can't hear your thoughts. Yeah. You guys can hear me a little bit. Hi, Austin, I work at New America. I'm curious about how you see the influence of national parties changing under a rank-choice system if say it was implemented across the board as major providers of funding, infrastructure, even recruiting candidates in the first place. As Mark was mentioning, if there are more candidates and the pool of money is diluted, could they be more empowered to pick winners anyway or if perhaps as Lee would suggest their influence is diminished, do we then empower people with personal wealth to run in a probability? That's a great question. I think we would see more parties emerging because now suddenly, if you run as a third party, you're not a spoiler anymore. In our current system, third parties are... All the ambition, all the money goes to the two major parties because only Republicans and Democrats really stand a chance of winning in our system. But I think there are a lot of folks who would organize third, fourth, fifth parties if suddenly those candidacies were not seen as spoilers and doomed. As for the money in our system, we have a series of campaign finance rules that make it very easy for people with incredible sums of money to wield disproportionate influence. That's a problem with our campaign finance law. Whether or not there's rank-choice voting or not is not going to change our campaign finance law. What I think it can do is I think make it easier to change our campaign finance law. So I think one of the reasons why we can't get campaign finance reform in Congress is because whichever party is in power benefits from the power of incumbency, which means that it's a lot easier to raise money when you're the incumbent party because people want to give to you to have access and it's very hard. And when you're always organized around trying to win the next election and raise tons of money to run negative advertising against your opponent, it's harder to support campaign finance reform. But I think in a Congress that is less zero sum, less just about my party crushing the other party, I think you could much more easily reach a consensus around some sensible campaign finance reforms that would reduce the influence of big money in politics. I also think within the parties itself at the outset, this might sound a little poly and I'm just realizing but I'm going for it. Go for it. So within the parties, I think there's been a conversation that's kind of been bubbling beneath the surface for some time now of not just what it takes to raise the money to run what it does but like the wait your turn mentality and what that is and how we create those structures of knowing when it's your time of when they've decided it's your time, whatever party that may be. And with a system like this, there's no harm in running. You're not taking anything from your opponent. So I think it is an opportunity for parties in some situations to have a more broad conversation about what their electorate actually wants, right? Cause you can have these people running in these primaries if they choose to step forward. However, that may make you feel or if there is a favorite candidate, that might be a different discussion but you can have them. And this is something that we have seen occasionally in a party contest where it can push the platform or it can push the issues and finding out what the electorate really wants and how to bring people back in. If there's anything we've seen in the last 15, 20 years, it's that people are leaving the parties at a pretty alarming rate and the largest block of voters in the United States are independents at this point. And having contests where there are new voices or different voices or a more robust conversation instead of just this is our party platform, this is what we stand for, this is what we're running on, I think could really benefit them potentially if looking to bring people back in or the other, what Lee is talking about is also something that is very likely to happen where there may be fractures within things or other parties emerging that speak to those interests but I think both can happen and they both serve as opportunities for different people just depending on how you play it. Grace, your point reminds me of something that I wanted to touch on which is I know there's been some conversation about some states using ranked-choice voting for Democratic presidential primary and there's a lot of attention on who the second choices are of Biden, Sanders, Warren voters, a lot of interest in that. What's the status of those conversations? Like are there gonna be some, do we know yet? Are there gonna be some? I believe six states have committed and I believe four states have committed and there are several experts in the crowd. I believe Alaska and Hawaii are among them but I do not have the other two in my back pocket right now. But it seems to be that that is something that in some form or fashion these state parties are considering this use. I mean if you're thinking about it, several states still use caucuses which is basically a form of- When I heard about it, I was like, well that's the idealized Iowa caucus where you're hanging out all night and trading off is like a more time consuming form of- Yeah, as fun as that sounds, there are other options. Is this on? Okay, I'm Sam with Delicious Democracy and we're working on an actual local, we're working on a local, they just introduced a local DC ranked-choice voting bill and right now I'm building a coalition and right now we sort of see this dynamic. You're talking about a play where and you reference where a lot of the black politicians are worried it'll be bad for black people and that it'll low information voters and their vote will count less so there's a lot of scare tactics happening but when you talk to racial justice and racial equity groups, they're all on board with it and so I'm wondering, one, how do you deal with these kinds of scare tactics around it? Because I think there are legitimate concerns that even you guys didn't bring up of doing it at scale might be hard. Some people say you can't do it with a really big election and also how in a presidential or electoral college system how different states or different counties, some using it, some not, how those interact. I think those are legitimate concerns but yeah, more how do you deal with these kinds of scare tactics around oh people will be able, will their vote will count less if they don't want to rank and also yeah, I think to jump off of her point, I think there is a racial justice emphasis that we could have on this and I don't see it being made enough and yeah, so I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. For me, the first question kind of depends on what the polling looks like. We've worked in certain, or we've worked with groups that work in certain jurisdictions where they asked the question that was basically like do you support ring choice voting and it explains what it is and let's just say like the approval for that in the minority community is 70% and then the next question is do you support, would you support this proposition that your congress person opposes and it's the same question and it drops like dramatically and other instances it doesn't and so like working in, like you kind of just have to really look at the field and what the field tells you and what the numbers tell you and sort of what the people on the ground tell you like there's some groups that like we don't actually need that person's support in order to go forward with this thing and other places like and in other contexts it's like if we don't have that person support like this is DOA kind of thing so I think it really just depends on what's happening in that jurisdiction before you that lets you know like how you should play that game I guess. And I'd say the most common concern you're going to get from an elected official or anybody and it is fair on its face is voters will be confused by this. There are several different ways that voters have been educated seeing a ballot is the most effective way to educate them so I mean that's something that's been achieved but a lot of it is confidence and I feel like we don't quite get that far in those conversations a lot of things that are new are scary that's just normal that's the human existence right but if you can take that and make sure that you're giving people that information ahead of time those concerns go away pretty quickly I think when we contextualize this in something other than politics because that's the new application like Evan said we think this way all the time if I'm going somewhere if I'm going to a movie theater and I've decided I need to have popcorn today at this movie theater and the movie I want to see is sold out I pick the next movie I want to see and I go to see a movie if that's what I'm trying to do right so I think kind of taking that out of context and then putting it back in can be really effective but a lot of times I think in organizing this is always true it's messengers are essential and I think doing that organizing on the front end so that it's either constituents who are older voters who are saying this is something that I really support this is something that I understand this is something that I want to engage with and I'm here to educate my community about it I think that can be really powerful in those situations where even you'll still get the same response to be clear I think a lot of times people who are elected under a certain system believe it is the best because it worked for them right and that's completely intuitive but when you're trying to change that thinking I think there is some kind of grasping at what makes sense to them or what their initial fears are and if you've done that work on the front end to make sure that you have that coalition that can speak to those things and provide the infrastructure to say that's being addressed we're working on that this is a movement that is working together it may not inoculate that person they may still stay opposed but it does disprove a lot of what they're saying I think also delicious democracy yeah I know I was just like some case like what is the opposite tell us more later when we're done I just I mean I feel like this is what the last couple of questions open up some of the areas really for research and further thinking that Lee's gonna be leading so we're looking you know we don't know all the answers either but it's worth digging into some of these questions about what makes it possible for voters to fully engage with that I think I want to first thank Marisa Strano from the political reform team for pulling this panel together and Elena Soros from the program and Angela Spinalett from New America and hope you'll join us for the other New America 20th anniversary events that are coming up I want to thank all the panelists and thank you all for joining us we'll have a little bit of a reception here for those of you on C-SPAN you're on your own but for those of you in the room there's some food and beverage and again thank you all very much for coming to New America thank you good job everyone