 Okay, welcome everyone. So my name is Eric Sanders and this program is called Voting Methods Fundamental Change to Create a Responsive Government. And just a little bit about who I am. I am on the board of the Center for Election Science. This is a 501c3 non-profit organization that researches voting systems and helps people make better, more informed, collective decisions. Now what does that all mean? We will get to that in a moment. I just want to give you a quick rundown of who our guests are. We have literally three of the world's foremost experts in voting systems. So whether you're watching this online or here in the room, this is, you can't get any more advanced and sophisticated than these guys. We've got Aaron Hamlin, who is an attorney and the executive director for the Center for Election Science, based out of Washington, D.C., expert on voting systems. Dr. Stephen Brams, a political science professor at NYU, just downtown, and a legend in the field. He is the co-father of approval voting, which he's going to be speaking about today, which was a game changer in the late 70s and early 80s in terms of how we thought about voting and democracy. He's going to speak all about that. And Dr. Jack Nagel, we are so honored to have. He is a professor emeritus of political science at University of Pennsylvania and a prolific author on politics and voting systems. So thank you so much for being here. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the structure for today. This is what I'm attempting to do right now, which is to set this all up for you and give you an introduction so it's coherent. We're going to have three 15-minute talks from each of our three expert panelists. I'm going to facilitate a brief but hopefully informative conversation between the panelists that hopefully ties together some of the disparate elements that they touched upon. And then we're going to open it up to questions from you. And I hope you have penetrating questions. If you don't, something's wrong. You weren't listening because this is a deep topic. To set this all up for you, to give you a sense of why we're here, what we're doing today, I want to touch on a concept that I think sort of clarifies what we're talking about. And I view problems in sort of two broad categories. There are symptomatic problems and there are systematic problems. And so much of our political discourse is focused on symptomatic problems. I'm so sick of the money influence and the corruption and the lobbying. I'm so tired of the two-party system. I don't feel like I'm represented. I don't trust the government anymore. And then you read polls and you read the news, 13% approval rating for Congress, a poll from last week from Rasmussen. 8% of people polled think that Congress members are reelected because they do a good job of representing their constituents. 8%. 70% of people polled last week said that most members of Congress get reelected, quote, because election rules are rigged to benefit members of Congress. 22% of voters in this poll from last week think their representative is the best person for the job. 42% of Americans, a record number, currently identify as independents, do not have a or feel a party affiliation. And again, from last week from CBS News, a record 45% of people polled say they now agree with the statement. It makes no real difference which party controls Congress, think go on just as they did before. This is a crisis of legitimacy that we face in our country right now. People have lost their faith in both representative democracy and the concept of democracy. But let's talk about systemic problems. Let's not get caught up in the symptoms. Let's be like a good doctor and focus on the cause. Why do we not believe in democracy anymore? Why do we not believe our government represents us? So we have to pull back for a second and think deeply about this. What is democracy? What is the goal of a representative democracy? What is representation? What is the goal here? The Greek word democracy means people rule, right? What does that mean? What does that mean? We have these phrases that we like to parrot in the United States. The will of the people, right? The Constitution literally starts with three famous words. We the people. Who? We? Who? How? Right? Who is we? How do we determine and quantify what we the people want? That's what we're talking about today. What the word we in the context of democracy actually means and how we can take advantage of and clarify this definition. So to kind of tie this together, one of the things I think we can all agree upon when we talk about this very nebulous concept of what is democracy? What is the point of a representative democracy? One thing I think everyone in this room and watching would agree upon is that a fundamental component of democracy is giving people the ability to register their opinions or preferences to some extent, what we call voting. Voting seems to be a fundamental aspect of democracy in some in some manner. I think we could agree on that. I hope you agree on that. But let's look at that word. What is voting mean? Right? Now I want to clarify something because you're going to probably hear a couple terms here. Hopefully you've heard them before. If not, I'll give you a quick primer. We talk about kind of two very broad parts of what democracy entails. The first part is who gets to vote, right? Voting rights. You hear a lot of conversation about this. Should people need an idea to vote? All this sort of stuff. We're not really going to talk about that too much today. That's a very essential conversation. Many people focus on that. But the second part and just as essential to any understanding of voting is how we vote. So who votes and how we vote? And that's what we're really going to focus on today. How does our voting method, which is the matter by which we vote and register our opinions or our preferences, how does that actually capture what we want, what we believe? Does it produce an outcome that represents us or that we feel represents us? So there's two key terms I want to introduce. The first one is voting method. Voting method and voting system are often used as synonyms. I'm not going to use them as synonyms, but if our other speakers do, please understand that they're often conflated. I consider the voting method the actual sort of mechanics of the voting, what the ballot says, how the votes are counted, what kind of options you have on the ballot in terms of can you pick only one candidate? Can you rate the candidates? Can you pick more than one candidate? That's the voting method. A larger consideration is the voting system in its entirety. The voting system is the entire process. That includes who gets to vote. That includes, you know, registration and all of the other stuff that we're not really going to talk about. So think of voting method as the sort of mechanical piece, the fundamental mechanics within the voting system as a whole. Does that make sense? Beautiful. So today our program is going to consist of Aaron Hamlin, who's going to speak first and identify the systematic problem that we face in our country, which he is going to speak about in depth, and this is our single selection voting method. What is often called plurality voting, where voters are forced by law to pick one candidate on the ballot. If they pick more than one, their vote is thrown away. It's called an overvote. It is illegal. Your vote will not be counted if you pick more than one candidate. Okay? That's what Aaron's going to talk about. Dr. Stephen Brahms is going to thankfully offer us a systematic solution to this problem. The systematic solution that Dr. Brahms pioneered is called Approval Voting. You could think of this as multi-selection voting, where voters are simply allowed to select more than one candidate on the ballot. That doesn't sound so radical. It also doesn't sound like it should be such a big deal, but Dr. Brahms is going to help us understand why that is a fundamental change that will radically transform democracy across the world. And Dr. Jack Nagel is going to tackle a third structural or systematic solution, sort of zooming out further and focusing on a restructuring of our government as a whole, and how we actually elect legislators in the context of what is often called proportional representation. If you have traveled abroad, many, if not most other countries that have anything approaching democratic bodies use a form of this. I believe only the U.S. and Canada don't? Is that right? There are a few that don't, but most do, right? More. Many, many other countries use this different system, this different form of government, called proportional representation. I will wrap this up and then we'll get started. My goals for you today, and I can see you looking at me attentively, I'm glad, is I'd love you to leave here with a new found or a deeper understanding of the central role that voting methods and voting systems play in our democratic problems and discourse. It's a criminally unfocused on topic that we're hoping to change. And there's a one quote I will leave you with. It's famous from the context of computer science. You may have heard it. Garbage in, garbage out. If you put garbage into a system, no matter how complex or sophisticated that system is, you will get garbage out the other side. We are currently putting garbage in and we are expecting results that represent us and that make us feel like we're part of this we. So let's figure out what the problem is and then let's figure out how to solve it. So with no further ado, Aaron Hamlin is a licensed attorney. He's the executive director of the Center for Election Science, the organization that I'm on the board of and honored to serve with him. He studies voting systems. All different types of voting systems around the world in order to help people make better collective decisions. He's published numerous articles and given talks across the country on voting methods, particularly on approval voting. In addition to being an attorney, he actually has two master's degrees in public health and education. This is a smart man. Aaron Hamlin. So today I'm going to talk to you about proudly voting. Voting are select one voting method, a very restrictive voting method as far as how much you're allowed to express. So we're going to take that method and basically throw it under the bus. So that's going to be my job today. And it's well-deserved because plurality fails on a couple levels which are really extreme. One is it doesn't do its job in the first place. A job with a good voting method is to select a good winner. Well, plurality doesn't even accomplish that. So secondly, plurality creates a huge barrier to entry. That is, it doesn't give new candidates, new political parties, independence, a very accurate reflection is supported, gives them a very low amount of support instead of creates a huge barrier to entry for new parties and new ideas. And because of these two main failures, we need to be considering alternative voting methods and alternative ways to go about this. And it's not that hard because really this is the bottom of the barrel as far as voting methods go. So we can do pretty much anything and make an improvement on this. So first off, how does priority voting just get it all wrong by selecting four winners? So to talk about that, I want to tell you a story about an election in Louisiana in 1991. And this is a rather crazy election. This was a three-way race. You had one candidate, Buddy Romer, who is mostly considered to be a moderate. He's the incumbent governor in the situation. He had policies looking at helping educators get higher pay. He had done work on environmental reform. And so he was mostly considered to be a moderate candidate. His two competitors, however, had a little bit more lively character. One of those was Edwin Edwards. Edwin Edwards had actually served twice before as governor, but he had a wild time while he was there. He was surrounded in corruption scandals and vesselment. And in fact, one foreign business person had testified against him in court confessing that he had given Edwin $100,000 for preferential business treatment. Now, Edwin, he was a weird character. And so in response to this, he had sort of a strange remark. And so when confronted with this, he said, well, it was illegal for this guy to give me all this money. It wasn't illegal for me to take the money. So Edwin has this cloud of corruption, this cloud surrounding him. So largely considered to be a crook in this race. And I'm going to refer to him as just that. And the other competitor in this race, also a lively character, was a man named David Duke. David Duke had a long history of white supremacy. So he was coming from, he was a Grand Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan. And he had left there, but even there he did leave on good terms. He was confronted by colleagues within the Klan of trying to seduce their wives. He had done fundraising for them, which was pretty nice. But he would take the money and use it to remodel his home. Which he said he had meetings there, so it made sense. So you have a crook, a wizard, and just a normal, moderate guy in this race. Now before I spoil that for you and tell you how this turned out, let me tell you a little bit about formality and how it operates in these types of situations with vote splitting. Now when we think about vote splitting, we think of support being divided among candidates. So you can only choose one candidate. And so if there are multiple people that represent what you're thinking as far as your ideology, we can't support all of them. So you've got some division that occurs there. And typically when we think about that, we think of this division occurring from the sides. So you've got some Democrat and maybe Nader's running this year from the Green Party or maybe Jill Stein. And you've got some splitting going on over in that sector. Or maybe you've got a Republican and a Libertarian maybe Gary Johnson is running and you have some splitting on the other end. So typically we think of this happening from the sides and we think of a spoiler coming. But that's just one way that vote splitting can occur. Vote splitting can occur in other ways. It can also happen from the middle. And when it happens from the middle, it happens in a way that's a bit more extreme. So what happens on the side is you just got one end of vote splitting occurring. But when you have a moderate candidate, you've got vote splitting coming in from both sides. So if you got someone in the middle, you've got someone from the right taking away votes and you've got someone from the left taking away votes. And it just squeezes that middle personnel. And unfortunately for a buddy rumor or a moderate candidate, that's exactly what happened to him. And he came in third in this three-way race behind our crook and our Grand Wizard. In this case, there was a run-off. And often we think about run-offs as a way to solve issues of a plurality voting. But it doesn't help in this situation. The damage is already done. So the run-off was between our crook and our wizard and our moderate candidate isn't even in the run-off. So it doesn't even have the opportunity to fix the situation. Plurality is already done at this time. Now, the major parties recognize that there's this issue with plurality, our select one method, when we have more than two people on the ballot. So here we saw this disaster where the three people were on the ballot. But they recognize that when more than two people are on the ballot, we have this vote splitting issue. And fortunately, they are people of solutions. And they came up with a solution for this one. Don't have more than two people on the ballot. Now, so what they did as a response is they made highly restricted ballot access laws. Now, and here I'm going to talk for a moment about these restricted ballot access laws. But I don't want you to think that fixing ballot access laws will give you the solution. When you get on the ballot, plurality is still not going to give you the support that you need. And as a consequence, being on the ballot is not going to be your saving grace. It is not the time to celebrate. You just got on the ballot and that doesn't give you anything else. So these the two parties, as far as how they create these restricted ballot access laws, they use signature requirements. So for instance, in Arkansas, Arkansas is a signature requirement. For this year, if you wanted to run as governor in Arkansas, you would need 10,000 signatures. And they're very specific about these. The name has to be in exactly the right way. Oftentimes you have to say specific things. The window that you have to get these signatures is often small. But 10,000 is a lot of signatures, especially for, say like Arkansas, with not a huge population. So with Arkansas, if you were really good at signature gathering and say you showed up, you had this great personality, 10,000 people line up right in front of you. This line just instantly appears. And you're really good at doing this. So you get these signatures at a rate of one minute. Well, at that rate, you would be there for an entire week if you didn't take any breaks. No sleep, no bathroom breaks. You're there the whole time. I hope you have a chair because you're going to be there for a while. So that's Arkansas. But this is the case all over the country. Arkansas is maybe sort of a normal example of this. Georgia, for example, if you want to be on ballot in Georgia, that's 58,000 of 48 signatures that you're going to need. If you're doing this at that same rate of one signature a minute, you're going to be out there for 40 days and 40 nights. That's not just a draconian ballot access law. That's a biblical one. I mean, that is serious, serious restriction. In Oklahoma, the ballot access requirement is 79,153 signatures. If you do that same ridiculous pace, you're out there for two months. So this is what they do to restrict the ballot access, to make sure that they don't have more than two candidates on the ballot. But people are persistent in their views. They're very passionate about having their ideas representative. Sometimes they get on the ballot despite these barriers. But the thing is with plurality voting, when your forces select only one, as a voter, you look at the ballot and you see the major parties on there, and perhaps you've been bothered to see other candidates. But when you're voting, you want to have a say in who wins this. I mean, you care about the outcome of this race. So you're looking among the front runners here and you have a preference of one of the two. And if you want to be able to have and say who wins, you vote for one of those two. If you vote for a third party or an independent, well, you're not having a say in the outcome and you're not having a say in the policy that's going to come about here. But it's even really worse than that because I think a lot of people, they don't even go through that calculation of throwing away their vote. They don't even really, it's so ingrained in us that these people are going to lose if they're not a Democrat or Republican. These candidates may as well be on the ballot in a visible way. I mean, they're just not getting any kind of any kind of representation at all. So what Proudly does is when we have this narration going on or recognizing that we can't vote for these people, what happens is they get an artificially low amount of support. If some of these people have bad ideas the two major parties don't have a monopoly on good ideas. There are plenty of other good ideas out there. But the issue is they get an artificially low amount of support because the measurement tool that we use to measure the amount of support they have is Proudly voting and it gives an artificially low support. And so when we do polling which polling is done using Proudly voting, you get this call during dinner time and they ask you, hey, who are you going to vote for? Who's the one person that you're going to vote for in election day? They're using the same voting method, the same measurement tool here and so we get this artificially low amount of support. And there's polls they come back and the media sees these and they say, well, I mean if this person had good ideas, well they would be polling better. Their poll is not very good so they must not have good ideas they're not worth the time on the evening news. And the same thing with debate commissions. Debate commissions, they have to use some specific criteria in order to decide who gets on the debate panel. And often the specific criteria that they're using in the situation is polling, the same Proudly polls that are being done during your dinner time. And so they look at that and they say, well this person is not polling very well, they're not going to be on the debate panel. And so we have these artificially low amount of support here. And so as a consequence when people have new ideas and they're coming from new parties, they're automatically marginalized because they're dismissive not having that amount of support. Just because we're using a very poor measurement tool to measure that support. But again, there's plenty of room in the political spectrum here. Some 42% of us identify not with either a Democrat or a Republican. So it's not that the political arena has no room in it. It's just the Proudly voting has locked those doors. Now the, so Proudly voting it gives us this artificial amount of support and it doesn't give us new ideas. So we have to start to ask ourselves well what's the solution here? And the solution is to use a different voting method, a different measurement tool that allows us to figure out how much support people have. So we have Proudly voting it's failing on it doesn't give you the right outcome. It doesn't give you a good winner. So it doesn't even get its basic job right. And then secondly, it doesn't give an accurate reflection of support for all the candidates. So you don't know who has good ideas and who doesn't because your measurement tool is such important. So we recognize the Proudly voting are select one method. It's so poor. And so we have to do something about this. So I want you to think about that. Do you want to keep using the same voting method? If you want to keep on going on with things as they are, well you're going to get the same thing. You're going to get you're going to elect a crook for your governor. Who by the way Edwin Edwards he served nine years in federal prison for the corruption that he committed after getting elected in that 1991 election on 17th on eight counts. So these are the people that are going to get elected. Maybe you're going to get a grand wizard. Or maybe you get someone just like our Congress, maybe a normal congressperson or same congress that this past month got a nine percent approval rating. Which by the way is looking up because the month before it was six. So the method we have is an absolute theory. There are very easy ways to address this. Pretty much anything we do is a step in the right direction. So as you listen to Dr. Nagel and Dr. Brand please pay careful attention to what they say. They have excellent ideas to take us away from this hideous, hideous voting method. And so I hope at the end of this you ask yourself whether it's time to pull the plug on priority voting and I hope you say yes. Woo! All right. Thank you Aaron. So, you know what the problem is. I think Aaron set it up beautifully. Systemic failure. Cancer in the political arena. The patient is dying. The patient may be dead already. But there is hope. We are not going to leave you in this void. We will build up hopefully some solutions. Systematic solutions. And to introduce us to one very, very simple but brilliant solution is Dr. Stephen Brahms. He is a legendary and I mean truly legendary game theorist and political science professor at NYU. He is the modern pioneer and co-inventor many say of approval voting. Which is what he's going to speak about. Which is the solution to everything that Aaron just laid out for us. He wrote the first book on approval voting with his colleague Peter Fishburne. He has his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and his Bachelor of Science from MIT. It is my great honor to introduce a true legend as I said. Dr. Stephen Brahms. Thank you Eric. Welcome everybody to this session. So my challenge is to talk about approval voting. So let me begin by defining approval voting. Approval voting is a voting system in which you can vote for as many candidates as you like. You can approve as many as you like. The candidate with the most votes wins. So it's similar to plurality voting. But the difference is that you're not restricted to voting for only one person. It doesn't matter in a two candidate race because you presumably would vote for your preferred candidate for only your preferred candidate. But if there are three or more candidates in the kinds of situations that Aaron discussed, things become more complicated. So if there were five candidates for example in the race you would not be restricted to voting for one. You could vote for two or three or four or even all five if you wanted to support the system. But that wouldn't differentiate among the candidates. So presumably if you have a clear favorite one, but if two or more are acceptable, you approve of them, you could vote for these additional candidates. If you despise one candidate you could vote for everybody else, the other four. So it gives you much more flexibility in expressing yourself. Under approval voting there's no ranking. You either approve or don't approve a candidate or candidates. I'll make a brief comparison to the ranking systems later. And I'm going to be focusing on single winner systems. Jack Nagel will be talking about systems in which you might want elective legislature with different points of view and that's not what I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to be talking about elections for say mayor governor the president in which you elect only one winner. So you want a candidate who is most representative of the entire electorate. So I made the argument that approval voting allows you more flexible options and does plurality voting. I claim that it also elects the strongest candidate overall not the strongest minority candidate. So Aaron talked about a situation in Louisiana where ultimately the strongest minority candidate was elected. Could be a candidate on the right, it could be a candidate on the left. Often the candidate in the middle as this example can be squeezed out. But if you're a voter and you actually prefer the candidate on the right or the candidate on the left you're permitted to do so but if you're a candidate on the right for example if you support a candidate on the right you might be worried that the candidate on the left might win. So to protect yourself you also vote for the candidate in the middle. He or she is acceptable. And that means that voters will tend to support candidates who are in the middle to prevent the candidate on the other side of the spectrum from winning. And that means a candidate in the middle generally will benefit under approval voting. And the candidate in the middle the moderate, Buddy Romer in Louisiana would presumably have done so if there had been approval voting. I think a better example which might be more familiar to you this is a very good example but a more familiar example is the 2000 presidential election in the United States. And of course you'll remember that there were two major candidates Al Gore and George Bush the son. But there was a significant third party candidate Ralph Nader and many at the presumably would support Ralph Nader. But you know Ralph Nader had no chance of winning. So do you stick with Ralph Nader or do you switch to presumably Al Gore for most people in the left because that would help prevent George Bush from winning. But you weren't permitted to do so. And I'll just mention some statistics from that election. You remember that George Bush won Florida by 537 votes with a little help from the Supreme Court as well. Ralph Nader got 97,000 votes in Florida. So if the voters had been able the Nader voters in particular had been able to vote for a second candidate polls show that probably about two thirds would have voted for Gore some would not have voted. And in that particular case Gore instead of losing by a few hundred votes would have won by tens of thousands of votes with the support of many of these Nader voters. So that's a good example it seems to me that's familiar to many of you in which the election system screwed up. And in my opinion elected a long candidate in Florida. But if Gore had won Florida he would have won a national election and we would have had a different president in 2000. So there are many examples like this even at the presidential election double in which the long candidate won. Long in the sense that he or she is not most representative of the electorate as a whole. We actually have a name in voting theory for a candidate who can beat every other candidate in pair wise comparisons. We call this candidate a Condorcet winner after the Machito Condorcet of late 18th century France. And it's pretty clear that Gore in 2000 was a Condorcet winner. He certainly could have beat Nader in a one to one contest and he almost surely would have beaten Bush because he won by half a million popular votes lost to Nader electoral college of course. So approval voting I claim tends to elect the strongest candidate overall. Not the strongest minority candidate which some of these examples illustrate probably won. At the same time it gives minority candidates their proper due because in the case of the 2000 election if you were a Nader supporter you didn't have to take away your vote for Nader to give it to Gore. You can have your cake and eat it too. You can vote for both Nader and Gore. And that means that Nader as a popular vote overall probably from polls would have gotten 10 to 12 percent approval. So he's a significant third party candidate but he suffered what we call political science a wasted vote phenomenon. Why vote for a candidate who cannot win? But enough did so as to prevent the Condorcet winner Gore in 2000 from winning. So I think that's a good thing. I think not only should an election system elect the most approved candidate Condorcet winner if there is one but it also should register residual support for other candidates like Nader in 2000. I also claim that approval voting probably would reduce negative campaigning as you all know. It's a serious issue today and the reason that I make this argument is let's say in a three candidate race if you trash your opponents then you're probably not going to get approval from them or their supporters but if you need their support to win then you're going to broaden your appeal and reach out to them which means you cannot win by just crashing the opposition and being and conducting an entirely negative campaign. So I think the implementation of approval voting would create much more civilized campaigns emphasizing the positive since a purely negative campaign could backfire. I think it also would increase voter turnout because one of the problems that people have is because they can vote for only one candidate they cannot express themselves well. So if there's a candidate you despise then as I said earlier you can vote for everybody else whereas if that if we had plurality voting you'd have to make an arbitrary choice of several acceptable candidates and now they divide the vote and maybe the candidate you despise can win but now you can vote for everybody else if you despise one candidate and support all of them so that increases the chances that somebody acceptable will actually win. Now because you can express yourself better you're more likely to go to the polls in the first place and I think this would tend to increase voter turnout. Voter turnout even in a presidential election has hovered around 50% of the voting age population even in recent elections. The recent high in presidential participation not so recent anymore was 1960 with about 63% of the voting age population voting. I think if there were approval voting then participation would go up by millions of voters maybe roughly from 50% to 60% so that would mean bringing tens of millions of new voters into the system because they can express themselves better. That's the primary reason people don't vote. It's the best we can determine why it's not the cost of voting. It's that they cannot express themselves well so why vote if you don't think you can make much of a difference. Finally approval voting is eminently practicable. It can be implemented in existing voting machines. We've checked the 50 state constitutions there's nothing to prohibit voting for more than one candidate. We've also checked most of the constitutions around the world and we find that there's no legal or constitutional restriction on casting more than one vote in most countries as well. Moreover the system is very simple you don't need as with ranking systems to have a complicated program to count votes especially some systems which eliminate candidates progressively I'll talk a little bit about that. So because it's not prohibited by any constitutions to enact approval voting would take only a statute passed by a state legislature most election law is state based so it's a matter of actually getting a bill through the senate house in most states to enact approval voting. So I've talked about what I think are some of the advantages of approval voting what are some of the disadvantages of course there are none but it's alleged that it might for example elect the most common denominator the planned inoffensive candidate who tries to be everything to everybody but I would argue that if you're trying to be everything to everybody then you're probably not going to be minimally acceptable to voters and a good example of that would be Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a relatively right wing candidate but polls show that he would have won under any system including approval voting so I think that illustrates that you don't need to try to broaden your appeal to be tweetily D and tweetily dumb you can have strong convictions like Ronald Reagan and still win the second charge made against approval voting is that it would undermine a two-party system in my view there's nothing sacrosanct about the two-party system most democracies in the world have multi-party systems using different voting systems which Jack will talk about moreover I think if the two parties are so derelict as to sponsor relatively extreme candidates there should be room in the middle for a candidate to run and win and as I said centrist candidates tend to be helped by approval voting finally let me refer to some technical features I wrote this book as Eric said with Peter Fishburne called Approval Voting if any of you are interested in more details and there's a newer book that I did this came out in 1983 but this is a revised edition Mathematics and Democracy talks about voting and the division systems that came out in 2008 so some of the technical features I discussed in these books it's more sincere in strategy proof than other non-ranked systems like plurality or plurality with a runoff that means it's much more difficult to manipulate there's a lot of strategic voting that you can do with plurality much less so with approval I've already said it better allows voters to express themselves and also express their intensities they draw the line between acceptable and that's probably the biggest gap between those you consider okay and those you don't it compares favorably with rank systems like the board account whereby you use points so you give the most points to your favorite next most points to your next favorite down to zero points to your least favorite that's a highly manipulable system I won't say why unless it's coming up in the discussion the other prominent system that uses ranking is a a single transferable vote that's called instant runoff the main problem with that system is it's a ranking system that you can actually benefit by not ranking sincerely by putting a first choice goer down and he or she may win goer down rather than higher up it's really perverse and approval voting does a good job number of studies have shown in conducting the so called ponder say winners finally let me talk a little bit about the practical side of things we tried to get approval voting used in a number of jurisdictions they've been bills that have been sponsored in several states I've testified in New Hampshire, New York and other states about bills that have been introduced in state legislatures but none have actually been enacted but we have been more successful in getting approval voting implemented in private associations the two major math societies each with over 30,000 members the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society now use approval voting to elect a president and other offices as does the Institute of Operations Research and Management Science the Game Theory Society several computer societies and it's very commonly used in colleges and universities to elect my department elects a chair using approval voting so we've had some use of approval voting and it does pretty much what it wants to do it tends to elect consensus candidates I can tell you more about some examples of this but we've been less successful in convincing legislators to enact it in public elections I think if one jurisdiction major jurisdiction does so like New York City or some state then it's likely to be widely copied but we have not gotten that first adoption so I think that remains a challenge to people who believe in this kind of system and we'll talk more about that in a couple seconds and my final point is we even have one vote for approval voting you've all grown up with the idea of one person, one vote and the fundamental idea behind this is that everybody's equal rich or poor, educated or uneducated everybody has one vote our alternative slogan is one candidate, one vote you make a judgment about each and every candidate is he or she acceptable if so you approve of them that seems to me more sensible than artificially restricting a person to one vote why shouldn't people be able to make judgments about each and every candidate I'll stop there thank you Dr. Brahms, thank you so much so we have a systemic problem, a systematic solution we're going to zoom out a little more in our third and final talk before we go into a little bit of conversation we are greatly honored to have Dr. Jack Nagel here, he is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania he studies democratic theory, voting systems politics across the board in the United States, New Zealand he's a prolific author as I think I mentioned he's published articles all across the world in peer-reviewed journals including some of the largest publications in American political science review journal politics, world politics the list goes on and on he serves on a couple of major editorial boards the British Journal of Political Science and Political Science and this year, I believe according to his bio he will be the president of the Penn Association of Senior Emeritus Faculty so he has an administrative background as well at his university Dr. Nagel is going to talk about restructuring our legislatures as an alternate systematic solution to the problem of not feeling represented so Dr. Nagel please to have you thank you Eric I had prepared a slideshow but none of us had the technical break into the John Jay system but if anyone wants to have this give me your email address and I can send it to you and that means you don't have to take notes right now also if you have any questions as I go along where you want something clarified on the spot don't hesitate to raise your hand bigger questions we can leave for the discussion so as Eric and Aaron have mentioned I'm going to talk about legislative elections most of the examples that Aaron and Steve gave were of executive elections the US is unusual and how frequent we directly elect executives such as president, governor and mayor we also have legislative elections of course for congress state legislature city councils and in those elections we have a dominant method which has three components there's a district component where we use single member districts we carve up our jurisdictions so that each area is represented by one and only one legislature the second component is a balloting method and the balloting method is the one that's been discussed where you vote for only one candidate instead of approval where you could do more or preferential ballot where you could rank quarter and then finally there is a decision rule and the decision rule is a simple plurality rule whoever gets the most votes wins even if that candidate has fewer than a majority now most of us don't even think of giving this a name it's just the natural way to conduct elections for Americans but political scientists often call it single member plurality or SMP and the British countries it's often called first pass the post on a horse racing analogy it could be a bit of an overview of the ecology of single member plurality where it exists it is the simplest possible system for electing legislatures and because it's so simple it's the method that tended to be adopted early on when democracy started so it's dominant in the countries where elections have been going on the longest time such as the U.S. and Britain and in the countries today mostly Britain influenced through imperialism colonial rule such as India Canada and Caribbean countries so those all tend to use single member plurality but there are quite a number of countries where Britain influenced that have renounced single member plurality and moved on to other systems including Australia, Ireland New Zealand and South Africa the trend is away from single member plurality across the world why is that so? well SMP has a lot of representational failures some of which have been alluded to already it's a winner take all system so it means that the votes in any district cast for losers have no effect the losing voters are unrepresented at least in the district it promotes two party dominance because the small parties tend to have no representation their votes are wasted people strategically move away from them and those parties tend to wither in the U.S. that two party dominance is reinforced even further because we have a winner take all system for electing the president which is so afford single member plurality usually performs poorly in representing women and minorities unless the minority group is geographically concentrated in certain districts it's likely not to elect candidates and women tend to fare less well in the extremely adversarial all out struggle in a winner take all system in districts and the drawing of district lines is crucial so there is a huge incentive for gerrymandering manipulating those lines to benefit in one party or group that gerrymandering goes farther in the U.S. and anywhere else in nearly all our states we allow the politicians to draw the districts that's not necessary to do unless primitive democracies all move beyond that and have nonpartisan neutral representation or district and boundary commissions to draw the lines but we still let the politicians choose the voters there are some other failures of SMP besides the representational failures it fails from the fundamental kind of view of majority rule very frequently the party that dominates in a legislature under a single member plurality elections does not have the support of a majority of voters for some of the reasons Steve and Aaron have mentioned it will only have the support of a plurality so the majority indeed might be very unhappy with that ruling party but their votes have been split or divided among several parties or spoilers then in this particular setting a very important bias of SMP systems is that they are biased against the parties of the left in many places the reason for that is in most countries including many areas of the U.S. the party of the left tends to be dominant in densely populated in urban areas so even if you do not have deliberate verymandering natural drawing of district lines so that they're compact contiguous political boundaries and so forth will result in overwhelming majorities for the left or left center party in a place like New York City or Philadelphia where Democrats typically will rack up 80-90% Majorities parties to the right generally have more diverse constituencies suburban or rural areas in which there are some smaller cities so they're going to win 60-65% of majorities in many of those areas the result is that if you add up the votes the whole system the party of the left will get more votes but fewer seats for those votes their votes are allocated by sufficiently that's true right now for the U.S. House of Representatives where the Democrats got a million more votes across the U.S. last time than the Republicans and yet the Republicans have the majority of the House it's true in many state legislatures particularly in our largest and most urbanized states if you wonder why the Republicans control the legislature in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Wisconsin and yet the Democrats win the presidential elections it has a lot to do with the district team not only deliberately deliver a gerrymandering which has been carried to a high art in Pennsylvania in my own state but also this natural gerrymandering that results from unpacking districts so that is an inherent problem of single member plurality now what is the solution the solution that's been adopted in many countries around the world is proportional representation the concept of proportional representation is very simple in concept that it aims at an ideal in which each party will receive seats proportional to the number of votes it gets so a party that wins a plurality say 45 percent of the vote will not get a majority of seats but will get 45 percent of the seats and a smaller party say a green party that only gets 10 percent will not be shut out entirely but will get 10 percent of the seats there's someone under the independent and yes let's say how do you see it to reject proportional representation in most varied versions requires parties so an independent would have a problem but there are two versions where an independent could be elected and I'll describe them shortly now all actual PR systems the usual abbreviation for proportional representation only approximate that ideal sometimes only crudely so so I would warn you to beware the bait and switch that people may argue for a PR system but then either out of political necessity or whatever have to water it down so much that it doesn't really deliver a lot of what PR should deliver in its best forms the key factor in determining whether a PR system really works well or not is what political scientists call district magnitude and that is how many members are elected from a district PR systems require multi-member districts so you have to move away from the American system of single member districts and you have to have multiple members elected the extreme version of this would be when you have a nationwide the whole nation is one district and say Israel or the Netherlands operates that way both I believe with 120 members of their legislature you can achieve a high degree of proportionality even very small parties can be elected when you're dividing up the seats among 120 but in many countries there's a desire to have regional representation so to guarantee that members are chosen from particular areas so you might have district with 3 or 4 or 5 members then a very small party is unlikely to win seats so you get 10% of the vote in a 3-member district you're not going to get a seat unless there are great many parties that really fragment the vote excuse me, would you repeat what you said about Israel now there's one one district I don't understand instead of I'm not sure if I caught your question what they do in Israel different from us there are members of Knesset across the entire country of Israel so there's one district which is all of Israel has 120 members and the seats are divided proportionally more or less to the votes across the whole country obviously in a very large country geographically large country you probably would want to have regions rather than do that but in smaller countries there's also minimum threshold sometimes I was going to mention that besides district magnitude affects how fine the proportionality is whether there's an explicit threshold so in Germany or New Zealand there's a 5% threshold so a party that only got 4% of the votes will be shut out to prevent too much fracturing of the party system but a party that gets 6% will get 6% of the seats there are some other factors that affect the fineness of proportionality such as the particular formula or decision rule that's used sorry where there is 5% loss like several parties may have below that is the division then made on 100 minus whatever actually I misspoke there if you have a lot of votes wasted for sub-threshold parties then a party that had 6% of the vote would actually get more than 6% of the seats because those you're divided among the parties that reach the threshold now PR is not just one system it's a set of families of electoral systems and I'll give you a quick primer on them just to reference party list PR mixed member proportional PR known as MMP and then the single transfer will vote known as STV I'll just give you a quick overview the most common form of PR in the classic form is party list PR candidate in Europe and Latin America and in party list systems you the party puts up a list of candidates typically rank ordered from the number one candidate who would be the candidate for prime minister on down and the voters just vote for a party you choose one party and the proportion of votes that a party receives determines how far down its list candidates are elected candidate should get 40% of the vote you get to choose your candidates one through 40 get into the legislature now there is a variant on this which that's what's called a close list system where the party determines the ranking entirely some countries have open list systems where individual voters can single out certain candidates and say we want to move them on the list there are arguments for both of those systems in the most pure party list systems as I mentioned in the Netherlands the whole country might be a district that achieves higher proportionality if you have regional lists then the proportionality both be less unless you add additional tiers in order to compensate so you establish a nationwide finer proportionality that's typically the case in Scandinavia for instance where they have regions but they also have higher level adjustment tiers to achieve finer proportionality now the second system mixed member proportional is the system used in Germany, New Zealand Venezuela and a few other places it has two tiers but the first tier is a single member district system where the elections might be conducted just as we conduct them now you vote for one you could use approval voting with it but there is the second tier which is a party list and you typically cast two votes one for a district representative and the other for a party list the party's overall delegations in the legislature are determined by the list vote which is adjusted for the districts they win at the single member district level so that there's overall proportionality in this system an independent could win in a district and then you would cast a separate vote for a party to determine the party delegations this system many people think of as the best of both worlds because there is an attraction to having people who represent particular geographic areas but it establishes the overall virtues of proportional representation as a result it has great appeal in countries that have a single member district tradition such as the Anglo-American countries although it was pioneered in Germany it was adopted in New Zealand in 1993 and subsequently for the new assemblies in Scotland, Wales and London there's been serious consideration in Canadian provinces but no adoption so far the final system is the rarest STV is used in Ireland for the Australian senate and also in the little island country of Malta it's a fairly complicated system but instead of voting for parties individuals so there could be an independent that you vote for it has multi-member districts you rank order the candidates one, two, three, four, five candidates are elected by achieving a quota of votes and then votes are transferred so if they're, I said this is complicated and I'll do a lot of hand-waving about it if a candidate achieves much more than a quota say the quota is 25% and you've got 35% of the votes the system is not to waste any votes so the surplus votes that you receive will be transferred to your voters second or possibly third choices conversely candidates who are eliminated early because they get so few votes maybe only 5% or 10% their votes are also transferred to the voters second or third choice the ideal is to have everybody's vote count at some point maybe not for a first reference but later on and it is also an individualistic system it doesn't have to have parties to work it does though to work require rather small magnitude districts say from three to five otherwise the cognitive task of rank ordering all those candidates gets too much for voters and they're likely to follow the cues of parties and it becomes like a party of the system okay I'll try to wrap up real quickly then how about the US are these possible let me stick to the agenda first and give you the virtues of proportional representation in relatively pure form where there's pretty high degree of proportionality first of all you get fairness to parties whether they're big or small they'll give representation roughly proportional to the vote that typically results in the representation of smaller parties and legislatures and you get multi-party legislatures so you have a wider range of opinion represented from left, right, center greens, so forth to pass any legislation you will need a coalition whether it's a permanent coalition government or ad hoc coalition on a ground of a particular bill means there has to be cooperation across party lines for the system to work in many cases this works out to less adversarial process politics, more tradition of cooperation people recognize typically PR systems have better representation for women and minority groups and they result in majority rule that is that the median legislature where the majority tipping point is in the legislature will roughly correspond to the median voter and not get that skewing to the right that exists in single member districts now are there any possibilities for this in the US it's not possible for executive elections you would talk to another reform like approval voting or other options it's not possible for the US Senate it's not possible for the US House in small states that only have one or two members therefore the effects of PR on the party system in the US would be limited they would have a less dramatic effect in other countries that have PR nevertheless it could be used it could be used for the House provided a 1967 statute that mandates single member districts were repealed it's not a constitutional requirement Congress could repeal it that would then make a single transferable vote a sensible option for smaller states with three to five members for someone larger states you could have STV with two or three districts or you might have a version of mixed member proportional and for the large states and the mega states MMP would make sense in a country with a single member district tradition in state legislatures they're well suited either to this PR or more likely mixed member proportional given our tradition there is a dilemma of expansion of legislatures which I can talk about later but there is a possible solution to that as well and finally for local councils many of our local councils are non-partisan so the only PR system that works with them is STV and in fact some cities have STV already Cambridge, Massachusetts has had it for a long time and it's been adopted in a number of cities in California and Minnesota as well there are some cities where other forms of PR might be feasible larger cities such as Philadelphia now the question is how can we get there from here and that is a topic for discussion or for another day I have written given a recent talk on that subject and if anybody would like to see that I'd be happy to send a paper to you again if you give me your email great thank you thank you Dr. Jack Engel so I'm going to just start us off with one question and then I'm hoping that you all have some questions and we're just going to kind of go here the discussion can go within the four of us the three of them out here we'll do this for about 10 15 minutes if we run out of stuff after five we'll do it for five if you want to stick around for a few minutes after we'll try to get out of here a little bit early and we'll have a little time to stick around and we can chat one on one if you want to come up to any of us so my question I just want to kind of tie this together thank you Aaron and Steven Jack for helping us make sense of some of the possible solutions to this disaster that Aaron has laid out for us we got size of sympathy here if I wake up tomorrow morning I'm a busy guy you're all busy we all want a more just democratic world or country or city or whatever state I wake up tomorrow morning I have limited time and energy but I want to help make I want to feel represented I don't feel represented should I get on board with approval voting and is that the best bang for my buck in terms of as an activist or as Jack said it might be tricky but should I spend my time and energy pushing for some sort of proportional representation maybe in New York City you know could you guys maybe touch on that what's my best approach as an activist tomorrow morning I would say the method that's closest to what we currently have has to be approved we're used to doing things within the single member framework not that there's anything wrong with using proportional methods that has a ton of advantages but what we're used to right now is working within a single member framework and using a choose one method all you have to do to switch to approval voting you can use a priority ballot but just change the directions instead of saying choose one candidate to say choose one or more that's literally all you're doing so as far as transitioning to a better method this one has the least amount of distance at younger level Steve do you agree with that? Yeah can I say one argument you can use is all the time in our personal decisions when you go out with people that want to choose a movie, want to choose a restaurant what's acceptable to the most people you might find acceptable to a more restaurants and to a more movies why should we be able to express that so I think that's a good argument to make in claiming that we can make this work at the electoral level and Jack how do you feel I wake up tomorrow what's your advice? Approval voting or any other reform of single winter elections won't solve the district problem by itself it doesn't reduce the incentive to gerrymandering and it doesn't reduce the natural gerrymandering that skews the results of district elections so if you're looking at an executive election that is currently single winter then approval voting is a reform to consider the so-called instant runoff voting is also being pushed in many areas and there's an esoteric debate about those I've been on both sides of that debate I've been involved with Steven experiments on approval voting and I supported some of the efforts of Fairvote which one organization on this to runoff I would like to see more experiments adoptions of approval voting I'd like to see more adoptions of instant runoff voting and see what could work now the change legislatures which would be toward PR is a bigger change to do and therefore probably a harder change to do will happen less frequently but it can happen that's why I spent so much time studying New Zealand many of us that seemed a miracle because we have a view that there's an iron law of legislative electoral change that is why would the people who are elected under the current system ever want to change it and the answer is they usually don't and therefore systems don't change but once in a while events come together in a certain way and it's not easy the paper I mentioned this 11 ingredients that were necessary to the triumph of reform in New Zealand so it's not easy to get but it can happen and of course people on the left know radical changes are not easy so I want to open it up to questions right here sir Joseph sure thank you very much the question that I have is somewhat cynical in terms of America we're a civil book we can't even balance our own chapbooks very easily and one of the you know system that we have as flawed as it is is one that is under understandable that's certainly an argument pick one pick one that's pretty much it you go you go out to eat and you look at the menu to longer takes you to longer takes you to pick maybe we call it amiibo voting so my question is reflective of the complexity of the voting system in terms of the value how does one understanding that might get a better choice and not the extremes because I'm not a big fan of the extremes in either party that come out of a I love the example of David Duke and you know I remember back then the posters say you vote for the pro or the races those are your choices in Louisiana and sometimes in places like New York or New Jersey so that question is in what manner do we persuade those who are in power to choose a system that seems very much more complex than that I think that's a great question and just a paraphrase so how can a simple folk, a simple Americans how can we understand these complicated reforms I don't think approval voting is complicated I think it's actually easier for some people to go through or accept the vote rather than choose one perhaps arbitrarily and I gave you the analogy to choosing a restaurant, choosing a movie I think that's understandable to people and I gave you a slogan, one candidate, one vote but when you argue Steve that it's intuitive you sort of know what you approve of do you think it requires a lot of cognitive effort to decide I think it's actually easier than making an arbitrary choice of one so Dr. Stephen Brown's argues are simpler for the Amoebas in the United States I would my counter to that it is your proposal is that the idea that I go into the voting booth and I vote for let's say Ralph Nader Al Gore and some other candidate all equally when I don't really feel that they are all equal that's a good point so I think you have to draw the line between acceptable and not so maybe Ralph Nader and somebody also on the left is acceptable but Al Gore is too much in the middle you have to draw the line so I'm giving you that responsibility and I think you should accept that responsibility now you can express yourself better you are drawing the line you're saying there's too big a gap here only these are acceptable and these are not thereby you express intensity and this is a big gap and I can only live with only those two and not others I think we have to give voters responsibility in making those choices that's my problem with some of the ranking systems like the board account you give an arbitrary number of points three candidates two of your favorite, one of your middle candidate and zero to your third candidate I don't think this should be dictated an approval voting doesn't dictate that simplicity is virtue but it's about the only virtue of the existing system in looking at reforms we don't want to make things too complicated although in outside of politics we in the US tend to make things terribly complicated I was just helping my daughter sign up under Affordable Care Act and you know that's an example of going way too far if Jack Nagel can't figure it out we're screwed but in looking at an electoral system you have to distinguish what the voters has to do on the ballot from the mechanics behind the scenes, the counting rules so for example party list PR is a very simple ballot you vote for a party it's a bit easier for most of us to vote for a party than to distinguish individuals because parties have more of a during meaning the counting rule the formula by which the sausage is turned into seeds is esoteric but the voters don't need to worry too much about that they can understand the concept of proportionality and how it actually works out in the algorithm to leave that out of the counting one of my concerns about STV is that it does have extreme complications or complicated decisions that have to be made in deciding how to do the transfers and that could be a problem with it, nevertheless in some situations it may be a better system the best one we could use so I think we all agree that simplicity is a major consideration and it's a great question thank you Joe so a question back there I would think in New York City I think we're due for another charter look at the borough of Queens which I think is the most diverse borough in the country I think there's about 12 or 13 city council members in the district sort of carved up and I think wow if you could have just identified elected city council members voted with proportional representation that would be such a great demonstration project but New York City has had past history of using STV and I'm not up on the details of it certainly for 12 or 13 member council I would not want to use STV because it's too complicated a job that you carved up the borough into several 3, 4, 5 member districts maybe so could be suitable for an MMP style election in fact in Philadelphia we have 16 member council 10 members are already elected from single member districts and 6 are elected at large using another form of voting called a limited vote so it would be very easy in Philadelphia to adopt MMP keeping the 10 councilmen districts and having the 6 allocated on a compensatory way to achieve proportionality across the parties because in Queens you've got a very sizable number of South Asians there was a system where they would be virtually guaranteed at at least one or two members elected to the city council there actually is a system we haven't talked about called giving it a voting whereby you're given a fixed stock of votes say if there are 5 council members you're given 5 votes and you can concentrate them any way you want people with similar mindcasts do that you can assure that election if you have that proportion in the society that's actually used in a number of small cities now in the United States and it works if the minority is relatively scattered and therefore you can't have a district for minority so I think that's an alternative for that kind of situation and the goal there you want a legislature that sort of looks and feels more like the voting body as a whole I think is something all the panelists that I could say believe in is that fair the STV can also work in a similar fashion to if you were devoting the minority can concentrate their preferences and elect one member without having any racial quota but just by their strategy of voting but any party list system whether it's MMP or party lists parties if they have any sense in their lists will have a balanced ticket so if there's a sizable minority ethnic group they will make sure to have some people on electable positions in New Zealand before MMP the Maori minority or about 15% of the population were terribly underrepresented just as African Americans are here and after MMP they represented almost immediately went up to around 15% and stayed there mainly because of the parties were putting Maori on their list Sir, did you have a question? Yeah, a couple I just wondered if you had is there a kind of analysis of optimal size for districting just thinking and also I wanted to say about time-spaced elections for me like a crucial issue is the availability of information and the time that people have as being underpinning of democracy it doesn't help when there's elections which people do not have enough time to process or to see the candidates up close and so on and I just wondered if you felt like in terms of having different rounds such as in France or having smaller as opposed to larger districts if you're going to have them in terms of cognitive impact is an issue So what can we do to help voters have more time well to mix this choice issue with the information, consciousness know who they're voting for Any thoughts on that? Well, there's a couple of scholars there's Deborah Saini and David Farrell they recommend district sizes of at least five when they're doing multi-winner systems using the proportional method when you have a larger amount of people using a proportional method you're able to lower the threshold so minorities are going to be able to get a better shot at representation it also makes it that much harder to gerrymander the district itself it's difficult to try to fix the election for yourself when you're using a proportional method when you have a healthy district size as far as information that's all of the voters what were you asking? how did the voters understand the candidates so they could know the candidates what are their philosophy or whatever I think that's more of a question of getting independent organizations like leaders getting that information out and making that available it may be a little more of a separate issue that the voting method itself Steve, I'm curious that you had mentioned that you strongly believe that approval voting would significantly increase turnout and engagement do you think that would also increase our level of discourse in our depth of our research into candidates as well I don't think people do research into candidates research there's more than enough information on the internet which most people have access to I think if anything the presidential election process is too elongated with primaries going over several months now to be sure things have decided for six weeks in most cases but not all consider the Clinton Obama race that went to June from the early primaries in January so I think people are there's a surfeited information too much so that people become bored and cynical so I think it's a double-edged sword so tighten it but focus it that's what I'm hearing question right there ma'am what's the progressive election aspect such as in France how do you feel about that some states do have runoffs like France and that's particularly true in one party state South for example where two democrats often competed in the primaries and that decides the election now it's more dominant but it used not to be I think runoffs are a poor solution by and large they may pit the left against the right and you lose the middle in between so I think approval voting does a better job of finding that candidate in the middle thank you yes none of you mentioned getting rid of the electrical system and I think it was by four votes that Bush won over Gore and it's outmoded why are we still dealing with that electoral college that kind of comes back to my first question I wake up tomorrow morning is that my number one priority maybe forget about approval and proportional representation let's get rid of the electoral college that sounds really important that is something Steve and I think very much agree with and this is the one of electoral reform that is most likely to succeed in the reasonably near future there is a movement called the national popular vote an extremely ingenious plan that would basically circumvent the current electoral college it depends on passage in state legislatures it was recently passed in the U.S. in New York now 61% of the 278 electoral votes needed in brief do you want to go into this one 30 seconds and we can talk more about it after I want to get one or two more questions the constitution as you probably know gives each state legislature the power to decide how its electoral vote will be cast so this plan would have states pass identical bills in which they commit to deliver their own electoral votes to whoever wins the vote nationally not within the state but nationally and the plan takes a form of an interstate compact a legally binding agreement among states so that it will only go into effect when enough states have passed it together the states that have committed to this plan control a majority of the electoral college so it doesn't abolish the electoral college but once they reach the 270 it basically negates the electoral college as we know it and substitutes the national popular vote winner this has been gradually working its way through the long states and it's now got 51% of what it needs California and New York have passed it New Jersey, Maryland a number of other states so if that speaks to us that's called the national popular vote plan national popular vote plan okay awesome on that the electoral college doesn't make any sense anymore it's obvious to I think most people that it's a terrible way to go it doesn't make any sense but one thing to recognize with that is say you get this this national popular vote plan to go through it would be an improvement over what we have now with the electoral college but the issue is at the end of the day you're still using plurality voting you're still using that same choose one method it depends on the party's they're still not going to give an accurate reflection of support when they run and you still have a squeeze in the middle so you still are not going to get your moderate candidate and you still have issues with vote splitting and spoilers so even if you get the national popular vote plan it's not going to solve any of those issues right so we're going to do one more question so you have to promise me whoever I call on that it's a really good one and then we'll have about 10 minutes to hang out so if you're willing to save your question for that that would be awesome I think this man right here who was the first one in and he's going to be the last one out so Akash was there go ahead so these all sound like good ideas and certainly better than the existing system what is the biggest criticism or the list of national federal level do these changes let me just paraphrase what are the the largest criticisms or what are the largest barriers to getting these that's what you mean okay that's a great way to end thank you because I was going to say what can we do so that's sort of the same question what's stopping us from having let's start with approval and maybe we'll end on proportional representation why don't we have approval voting anywhere in the United States Aaron do you study this I think the big thing is we're used to doing the same thing and really we don't even think about this when people mention the voting method they think choose one most people don't even appreciate that there are different ways to go about doing this and so we have this sort of status quo bias where it's difficult for us to shift to something different even if that is monstrously better so when we're stuck in this situation I think we have to ask ourselves right now the way that we did elections when we're doing executive offices you're able to choose as many candidates as you want in those first weeks like that's the way it is right now we'll say we're in this pretend we're over that's the way it is right now would you go out of your way to make a reform to limit your vote so that you can only choose one that's really the way that we have to frame this to get out of the status quo bias of making this hard leap to switching to something else would you go and make a concerted effort to limit yourself in the way that you're able to give an expression and avoid and go back to having all these terrible vote spending issues so from Aaron I'm hearing ignorance and inertia that's what I'm hearing there Steve what do you think well speaking very practically I think the key is to find a person in the state legislature because most election law comes out of state legislatures um sometimes city councils who is willing to get behind this and I've tried to do that in the states in which I've been an activist um because you as an outsider cannot exert the same kind of influence that somebody inside can do but you as an outsider can also do your part so I've ripped off dead pieces on television and radio so I've tried to do publicity but I think the key is to convince a legislator or a set of legislatures that there's a big problem and they're not going to be heard if they're moderates and they get behind this and usually what helps is there's a crisis we have an election like that in Louisiana I remember when at the end of the 2000 election I was told by a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Harvard saying we've got to do something about this and I heard about approval voting what can we do? This is a great teaching moment well the teaching moment passed we said in our book this will be the election for the 20th century well we're in the 21st century and it hasn't happened we just have to keep plugging so um Dr. Prams I think that makes a lot of sense what's stopping proportional representation why don't we have it? well for changing the way a whole legislature is elected you have a whole legislature full of opponents that's a problem there are two ways of getting around that one is if there is availability of a referendum initiative which there is in some states and not in others so electoral reform has a better path there MMP was adopted by a referendum although the legislature had to put the question to the people and the other element is if one of the major parties feels it's disadvantaged the two major parties both generally oppose PR because they have a duop with it so why would they want other parties to be able to enter but if in a duopolistic competition it doesn't mean that it's fair between the two parties and as I've suggested the current system in many states and nationally is currently unfair to the democrats so whether they appreciate that and having control of some juncture decides to launch a reform process that's basically what happened in New Zealand and the process ran away from the Labour Party and what became much more radical than what I don't know if the democrat would launch a process or if they lose control of it one could always hope as Dr. Nagel is if you can find someone or some people within the existing system who you can get on board get inside and work your way out and expand outwards on that point I mean Dr. Nagel he mentioned a ballot initiative's referendum and he also had mentioned before that New York City had used a proportional method well that's how they got that in a referendum in order to use that and they had done that in a number of other cities through the 20s and the 50s and we have Cambers, Massachusetts as a residual as a city that still uses a proportional method but that's how that was implemented it was implemented by using referendum and it was only after decades of resistance from major parties that used rhetoric to try to have the referendum overturned and send it to the polls again but it took a long time to do that because there was a lot of resistance but that's a way to get around elected officials worried, well this is the election method that got me into office I don't want to switch it because that might jeopardize my chances or my friend's chances as a teacher so if you use a referendum you get around that issue actually the reason I got defeated in New York was I elected a couple communists in 1946 and that was not people's idea of good proportional representation whose democracy worked the people were represented so there is hope and the 21st century offers us not only a clean slate but there are already many campaigns in the work I will give a quick shout out last thing I'll say there is a referendum there's a ballot measure in process right now in Oregon this would be the Oregon unified primary this would be a use of approval voting in an open primary in the state of Oregon this has a lot of buzz there's news stories about it this would be the first official use of approval voting in the United States so what's happening there is energy here so there is hope and I hope that you will continue to be interested in these matters so I want to thank so much our panel here Aaron Hamlin, Steve Brams, and Jack Nagel thank you all for coming