 Good afternoon and welcome to town meeting televisions continuing coverage of town meeting 21. I'm so glad to be here today with Jack Hansen. He is a city counselor representing the East district that's words one and eight. Jack, thanks so much for joining us to talk about the charter change to implement ranked choice voting for city council seats. We're so glad you could join us today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on the program. Just just high level. How many ballot questions will Burlington voters be voting on today. I mean on March 2. Sure. Yeah, so there's going to be four charter change proposals and I can explain what a charter changes a bit later but there's four charter change proposals. There's two ballot advisory questions where the voters can advise the city council and mayor what to do on an issue. And then there is the school budget. You know the Burlington school district coming to the voters to ask for a budget increase for the Burlington school district. And unlike our neighboring communities that often vote on the municipal budgets, Burlington voters don't vote directly on the municipal budget do they. Correct, correct. Yeah, the mayor brings the, the mayor's administration brings their draft budget to the council in June and then the council is able to amend and adopt the city's annual budget. All right, well, thank you for taking the time to work on this issue and talk with us today about rank choice voting. Why don't we open your presentation and get an overview of what this particular ballot question is about this charter change. Great, great. So can you all see this presentation. Yes, we can. Great. So I took some materials from Fair vote, which is a non partisan organization that that works on these issues and so I just wanted to give them some credit because a lot of this, a lot of some of these slides are their materials. And that's their website if you want to look into that organization. So yeah, I can talk a little bit about the current electoral system that we have in Burlington and most places in the US have this winner take all system where, or some people call it first pass the post system but the candidate with the most votes. You choose one candidate and the candidate get that gets the most votes, typically wins the election, even if they don't cross a 50% threshold so here's an example of you have many, many candidates. So in a situation when you have many, many candidates, this means that a candidate can win with very with a relatively small percentage of the vote. So we'll give some examples of this and we'll talk about some of the issues with the current voting system and kind of why I brought forward rank choice voting to the city council. Limited voter choice, you know, this ties in with sort of the vote splitting and strategic voting, but the current system it discourages candidates from joining who feel that they don't have a good shot or they're not well known. So before it limits the choices that voters have it also forces voters to be strategic in their voting and think about the practicality of their vote versus voting for their favorite candidate so when there's multiple candidates in the race there's this calculation of oh well I might like it but they don't really have a shot so let me just choose my preference between candidate B and C. You know that's often what we see in these in these races, and then as I alluded to before non majority winners you could have a candidate winning with 30% of the vote just because there were so many options for that. So even if that candidate is really disliked by 70% of the voters they can still come away with it and in a scenario with many candidates. So here's an example from a presidential election from 1992, where you had Bill Clinton was elected with 43% of the vote. And part of the problem with our system is we don't really know people's true preferences for example, if more people thought that Ross Perot actually had a shot at winning, would they have perhaps voted for him or if they knew with 100% certainty that he wasn't going to win. And it was just between Clinton and Bush you know who would have taken that 18.9% of the vote that went to Ross Perot if they were just making a binary choice we really don't know. With instant runoff voting know people get to put that second preference and their vote does get to be redistributed and so you're able to get a fuller picture of what people actually want. The election of 2000 is very infamous for many reasons. One of the reasons that it's infamous is in Florida where Florida ultimately in many ways you know decided the election because it was such a narrow margin and it is a high number of electoral votes. And in Florida, the margin of victory was very tiny, and Ralph Nader who was the Green Party candidate received many more votes than the margin and the common knowledge or common assumption is that those Nader voters just given their politics and given Nader's form would have probably preferred gore over Bush, but Bush won Florida very narrowly and so many people come away from that and you know blame Nader for being the spoiler or blame those voters for basically swinging the election by voting for a candidate who didn't have a chance and I think a lot of people come away from that and they say, oh well clearly Nader just shouldn't have run and clearly these people just shouldn't have voted their conscious they should have voted strategically and all that is another way to look at this which is we don't have to have a system that discourages other candidates and other viewpoints. We can have a system where people are allowed to vote their first preference and still not have their vote thrown away so in this case you know those votes would have been transferred from those Nader voters to their preferred candidate. And that's because second choice counts. Exactly. If Nader was eliminated as an option. Exactly because Nader would have been eliminated. And anyone who put Nader as their first choice, their votes would move to their second choice option. And we'd get a much clearer picture of who the actual preferred candidate was between Bush and Gore in Florida. So the presidential electoral system is flawed in ways well beyond what we're talking about here with the electoral college. You can see that Gore actually still got more votes overall even with Nader's presence in the race but that's not how we do presidential elections. So that's even more deeply flawed with the electoral college system on another level. So there's many pieces of election reform that I think are really critical and this is really just one of them. So, so rank choice voting yeah we started to get into a little bit of how it works but here's sort of a sample ballot say there's three candidates. You know this voter put Brown as their number one choice and Castro is their number two choice and Adams is their number three choice. You just to be clear though. And this has come up before you don't have to rank all the candidates say you really love Brown and you don't have any preference between Adams and Castro you don't like either of them. And equally, you could leave the ballot blank beyond that you could just put Brown as your number one and nothing, or say you know there's five candidates and there's one of, there's one or two of them you really don't like, you don't have to rank those two and your vote would never end up getting transferred to those two. So it doesn't require you to rank but it gives you that opportunity to rank and express your preference beyond just a single preference. So, here's an example of how an election could work under rank choice voting. This is number one so we're looking at everyone's number one preference and the furthest and on the left bar you can see the percent of the vote that each candidate got. So this this bar that's in the darker orange. This is the candidate that got the most first preference votes, and you can see they got slightly over 40% of the vote in Burlington and the way we do elections now and then most places. You can't immediately win, but under under rank choice voting, you now eliminate this bottom candidate that's highlighted in in white I'm not sure if you can see my mouse or not but this candidate got the least amount of first round votes that candidates now eliminated clearly that candidate is not the favorite of the voters. If you've eliminated anyone who chose that candidate as their first choice, their vote is now distributed to their second choice. So you can see some of those voters preferred the candidate on the left. Some of those voters preferred the candidate in the middle so you kind of see that represented by these boot the boost that these two candidates have now gotten in this second round. So you see the candidate that was doing well in the first round is now doing even better and is really close to achieving that 50% majority and really the 50% majority is what rank choice voting is all about is a candidate needs to have a majority of people that vote for them in order to be elected and so 4840% is required if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, in in Burlington and I'll yeah I'll get into that in future slides but some some systems do have a threshold that you have to hit, but they don't necessarily allow you to rank. What they do is if no one hits that threshold, there's a separate runoff election that's held. And so we'll talk I'll talk a little bit more about that. But in this case you don't need to hold that separate runoff you can instantly transfer the votes and that's why this system is also been called instant runoff voting because there's that instant runoff that takes place. So when we talk about rounds this is happening on the same night, you know you're tabulating the votes immediately after there's no lag time on this. So are you then proposing that in Burlington that 50% become the threshold for city council races. Correct. So under this proposed system 50% would be the threshold for victory. And so here's an example of this candidate after that redistribution, they're really close to 50% but they've not crossed it yet so we now need to go to the next round of voting and so at this point we eliminate the candidate with the least votes again. And now we're left with just these two remaining candidates. And once when those votes get distributed you see that this one candidate has now crossed that 50% threshold and has won the election. So that's an example of just the system playing out and we did. We did. You can see it on my social media page for my city council page. We did an example of this with music where we had a local singer songwriter that created a list of songs that she would be willing to perform and then we had people join live and we had people do rank choice voting on what song they wanted to hear. So we walked through the rounds and it actually did take three or four rounds to come away with the song, but ultimately we did have a song, you know that ended up winning after a few rounds. And she then performed that song live for everyone so people want to see a real example of the system being used and sort of the round by round. Feel free to watch that video. It was a lot of fun. I wanted to talk about some of the benefits of ranked choice voting so more choices it really allows you. Yeah, it allows for more diversity not only in terms of who you can vote for but also who can run for office. It allows people to run for office without fear of playing the spoiler role. We actually had a city council election in Burlington. Just was it last year or two years ago within the last two years we had an election. If it was two years ago in the new north end there was a three way race. And it was between a Democrat and independent who had progressive support and a Republican. And when the race went on, the Republican and Republican voters, you know, feared that their presence in the race would essentially result in the independent with progressive support getting elected because they would split the votes kind of more and Republican votes would be split between the Democrat and the Republican and so the Republican dropped out of the race essentially giving voters less options and less choices and ways to express themselves on the ballot and show their preference so that I think was a clear example of the problem in the current system is it forces people to drop out of races or just not even to enter a race because they don't want to be that spoiler candidate and they don't want to help their least favorite candidate get elected. And this this system has been shown with ranked choice voting to lead to an increase of candidates particularly among women and people of color running for office and the success of women and people of color running for office is shown to improve the choice voting choice voting. It does affect as well the dynamic of the race and you see this bullet point of civil campaigns. Because you have to think about the fact that if you're a candidate and you're out there just attacking and berating another candidate, well, people who like that candidate are probably not going to rank you second if you hate their candidate so there's a disincentive for you to be out there just trashing on other candidates because you actually now do care what other voters think. You don't just care about your own supporters you actually want supporters of other candidates to to somewhat support you as well because you want to get their second or third or fourth choice vote and so it. Only does it discourage negative campaigning it also really encourages candidates to reach out to everyone in every community and every constituency and try to gain some support and try to listen to those communities and and appeal to them so there's a lot of benefits from that perspective, and then majority winners we talked about that but it requires that you actually have a majority of voters that support you in order to win. Yeah, here's just another example case study from the same NFA mayoral election in 2018. So these are the different candidates represented in different colors, none of them got 50% in the first round. The candidate with the least is redistributed. And it was kind of a mixture of where, where those votes went where those second preferences were. There was another redistribution. And the final redistribution. So oftentimes you know it's the candidate that was ahead in the first round will ultimately end up winning, but not always. And even when they do there's a benefit to actually knowing that rather than having someone win with 40% and wondering if people actually support them. There's a map of where it's used it's it's really expanded a lot in recent years. A lot more states have used it in presidential primaries. New York City uses it for primary elections now. Maine uses it main and most recently Alaska adopted it for statewide elections mains already been using it for statewide and presidential elections. And there's examples throughout the country and you can see the color coding at the bottom of different types of uses. It's also been used internationally for for over 100 years. And these are some of the countries that use it. So I want to just give a recent example that's really interesting. So, the US Senate race in Georgia. We now know the outcome of that was the two Democrats, also often more knock or elected and the it flipped control of the US Senate. And that would not have happened if they use the system that we use in Burlington, because David Purdue would have won under the way that Burlington votes the way that Georgia votes is if no candidate reaches 50%. And there's a separate runoff election between the top two candidates and I believe that this is an that's an improvement over how we do it in Burlington to have that separate runoff. And, you know, some folks would argue for that over even ranked choice voting I think with ranked choice voting you get, you get similar benefits to the runoff, but it doesn't lead to, in many cases when you have that separate runoff. There's lower turnout and so you get a glass fuller picture of where people are at. Not that's not always true but that is often that's typically the case that the separate runoff will have lower voter turnout so that's kind of one of the biggest downsides, compared to ranked choice voting. The other is just the cost of holding a separate special election is relatively significant. Especially at the local level for a small town to take on that extra cost. But so anyway so the Georgia system I think is in incorporate some of the benefits of ranked choice voting where you don't just give it to the first round winner, you actually make someone has to actually get 50% and that might require runoff and ultimately that is the sum of this race, where Purdue would have won under Burlington system for example but also ended up winning the runoff. And what's that? Because of Burlington's 40% threshold right in Burlington it's there is potentially a runoff if no one hits 40%, which is good because in some electoral systems there's no runoff threshold and like I said someone could win with 20% if there's 12 candidates. Burlington we do have this threshold where if no one gets 40% the top to go to a runoff and we have had that happen. But in Georgia it's 50% and in some places it's 50% and under our CV it's a 50% threshold. And the consequences, I think this is the perfect example of your voting system are enormous in this case, control of the US Senate was shifted because of the voting system that Georgia uses. And most states don't use, don't use this voting system that Georgia uses so I think it's very interesting example. This is the Burlington mayoral election in 2018 so you see that Mero Weinberger didn't quite hit that 50% threshold. You know similarly in the last case Purdue was very close but didn't quite hit. Now it was different because the margin between the next candidate was much greater. But this upcoming mayoral election, and other examples we don't know what the margin is going to be we could see a situation this year where a candidate has 43%, another one has 41%. And do we really know who's preferred between the 43 and the 41. So this is, you can't know that unless you have that runoff. Go ahead Lauren. I just want to remind our viewers we have about seven or eight minutes left but that this proposal this charter change for rank choice voting would be for city council elections only. Yeah, correct. So let me. Yeah, let me shift into that and I, I didn't think I was going to use up the whole time but I guess that worked out okay that I did. So this is kind of the final side this is, there's an effort underway around specifically the Burlington proposal. And the two co chairs are former governor Howard Dean and current city counselors are I high tower and. But just to clarify. The Burlington ballot question, which I'll put right in front of you here. It's a charter change question so the city charter is basically the document that outlines the powers and authorities of the city of Burlington. And those powers and authority authorities flow through the state of Vermont. So ultimately the state of Vermont controls what Burlington Burlington can do. So when we pass a charter change, if this passes, for example in March, the issue then goes to the state legislature, and ultimately it's their decision. But typically, not always but typically the legislature will respect the will of the voters of that community. And they'll, they'll make the charter change for that community, but not always so the first step is the voters need to weigh in the voters don't want it, it's definitely not going to happen but if the voters do want it, then the legislature takes it up and this is the exact language that's on the ballot. And that's why we're here at Burlington further amend our charter to adopt ranked choice voting for the elections of the city's city counselors beginning with the March 22 election. And that's an important distinction. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Other than this being focused on the city council elections, how is this ballot question different than the one voters voted on. A few years ago. Right, so this, this system of voting was in place in Burlington between 2009 and 2010. And but it was in place for mayoral races. And the next two speakers I think I'm sure I'm going to speak to that history a bit and how in 2010, it was actually repealed by voters. So here we are, you know, 11 years later and taking another look at this issue. The council initially passed a charter change proposal that would have implemented ranked choice voting for mayoral and school commission and council elections, but the mayor actually vetoed and the council didn't override the veto. So the council then brought forward this different proposal that would just be to use it for city council races. And I just want to I'm sorry so is it essentially the same as the 2009 charter amendment. It is the same, the same voting system that was used in the 2006 and 2009 mayoral race in Burlington. Yeah, that's that's correct. And I do want to mention Councillor Hightower who's the co-chair of this effort that are ballot Burlington to promote this ballot item was in a three way race for her council race and she has said that if the two candidates that she ran against were already in the race, she probably would not have run at all. And I think this goes back to what we talked about earlier that it increases the number of candidates and particularly among women and people of color who even enter into a race in these multiway races and Councillor Hightower. When she entered the race, there was only one candidate, but a third candidate came in and again like she may not have even entered. If the two candidates were already in the race and so I think that's really important to keep in mind and Councillor Hightower is the first woman of color ever elected to the Burlington City Council and maybe that wouldn't have happened if if the timing had been different. Because I think a lot of people are hesitant to jump into a race where there's already a few candidates if they feel like they're going to be the spoiler or they feel like they don't have a shot you know all these calculations that discourage people from putting themselves out there in that way. Whereas this it's really with ranked choice voting, there's not that risk you can join the race and know that you're not going to disrupt it for somebody else you're not going to be told to drop out because you're a spoiler, you're able to be comfortable and be in that race. So Jack Hansen, who is the City Councilor from the East District in Burlington. Just a final question better ballot Burlington. Are there other recommendations that are on the table through that group. No, this this group was formed specific to this ballot item around ranked choice voting this is a newly formed group to promote that specific ballot item. All right, well I want to thank you very much for joining us and for your work on this we're going to be going to a couple other folks tree breaches is one of them who has experience with ranked choice voting from way back, and also Robert Bristav Johnson who has some alternative approaches to this question so I want to thank you very much for your time and advocacy for this, and certainly your service on the City Council of Burlington Jack Hansen. Great. The city from the East District. Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity I really appreciate it. And thanks for all you all do to keep our democracy accessible. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us again as part of our continuing coverage of town meeting 21 we're talking about a charter change in the city of Burlington, which has to do with ranked choice voting, which for some of you who've been around in politics for a long time know that this is not a new idea, but ranked choice voting would apply to the City Council positions only. We've had Jack Hansen doing some of that are doing the presentation but now we're going to be discussing in a little bit more detail. Robert Bristav Johnson is a word clerk in Ward seven is an inspector of election actually in Ward seven in Burlington, and also has a background in algorithms. So he's going to give us his perspective on this charter change that is coming before the Burlington voters on March 2. And Terry baritius is a longtime activist and elected official as a City Councilor in Burlington and a legislator from Burlington and also works with an organization called Fair vote. So thank you both for joining us so glad to see you. We're going to start with Robert having giving his presentation on a different view on this charter change question before the Burlington voters on ranked choice voting, and then we'll go to a discussion, the comments between the two of you. Robert welcome and why don't you share your screen and we'll get going on screen. Let me change that. So many tabs. So, there we go. All right, so, um, four is yours. The elections are about majorities majorities of what. So about a century ago the North Dakota Supreme Court. There was a ruling about Buckland ranked choice voting which is another form of ranked choice voting, not with that I recommend. And the part that's highlighted is important. They said, I need to minimize something here so I can even read my writing there we go. Our system of government is based upon the doctrine that the majority rules. This does not mean a majority of marks on ballots, but a majority of persons possessing the necessary qualifications. Voters having franchise and the number of such persons is ascertained by means of an election. Elections are about the majority of voters as people having equal rights, equal franchise and equally valued votes. That means one person one vote. That means majority rule. These two principles are sacrosanct about elections. If we violate them. We really are violating people's rights. So, um, Jack had some examples of elections and so I'm going to bring up an example of election. What if there was an election where 4,064 voters marked their ballots that they said candidate a was better than candidate B. 588 fewer voters. That means 3734 76 voters marked their ballots preferring candidate be over candidate a. You would say that candidate a is the majority candidate candidate B is the minority candidates, not a plurality. It's not a majority. It's a minority. If candidate B is elected, whose votes count for more. Those voters that were 4,000 night 4,064 are those voters that are 3476. If the, if the 3476 voters, if their candidate wins their votes counted more than the larger number of voters that voted for the candidate that lost. These candidates have names candidate a is Andy candidate B is Bob. In 2009 in Burlington in this very city, 4,064 of us voted for Andy over Bob we preferred Andy over Bob, fewer of us 3476 marked our ballots preferring Bob over Andy. If candidate B was elected, whose votes counted more. Well, the minority number of voters that voted for Bob their votes counted more than the votes for Andy, even though there were fewer of them. That means that their votes had more value than the other voters. It's not one person one vote. And it's not majority rule. And it's a failure of democracy. What happened in 2009 in Burlington, Vermont is a failure of democracy rank choice voting promises us that it'll elect a candidate that has some sense of majority supportive voters. Jack said that half an hour ago. But I RV failed to do that in Burlington 2009. We will get into that very shortly. Jack also talked about empowering voters to vote their hopes not to fear so that they don't have to vote strategically, so that they don't have to worry about who's the most likely candidate to win so they can just vote their hearts vote for the candidate that they want. Vote your hopes not your fears, but I RV failed to do that in 2009 in our very city. So let's talk about the spoiler effect. Consider the 2014 Vermont election for governor. It looked like this. It looked like this. Someone had 2400 more votes than Scott mill, but there was a third candidate Dan flee siano that had 8400 votes. Those 8400 votes had broken two to one in favor of the GOP candidate Scott mill would have been elected the governor changing the winner. So we can say that flee siano was or may have been a spoiler. We don't know because we don't know what the secondary choices of those voters were, but you know libertarians on taxes and on regulation they're more like the GOP. And it's perfectly plausible that they would have broken two to one in favor of Scott mill, but we don't know because we did not have a ranked ballot. So we do need a ranked ballot to learn from voters who they would have voted for. That's what we would have needed in 2014. But that was a softball, because the spoiler, the potential spoiler flee siano was nowhere close to winning. What would happen if you had a close three way race. And that is what we had in 2009. That is the asset test a close three way race, where all three candidates are plausible winners. And on top of that we had the ranked balance so we know what person what people's contingency votes were we know what their second choice votes were, and we know that there was a spoiler candidate. That candidate was Kurt right. Kurt right was a loser, whose presence in the race actually changed who the winner was not saying that Kurt right ran as a spoiler. He ran as his total turn totally legitimate candidate, but he ended up being a loser. And his presence in the race changed to the winner is because of Kurt right hadn't run. And the same Burlington voters came to the polls and voted their same preference with the remaining three candidates that would have been Andy Montrell and Bob kiss and Dan Smith. And it turns out that Andy Montrell would have met Bob kiss in the final round, and he would have defeated Bob kiss in the final round by margin of 588 votes, and that is more than 7% is about 7.8% margin. That's not a small margin. Andy Montrell was clearly preferred over Bob kiss in 2009, yet Bob kiss was elected. He was not the majority candidate that caused a spoiler to happen because the spoiler is always the loser in the final round. If, if IRV does not elect the majority candidate, whoever loses in the final round is the spoiler, because if he's not in the race, then the true winner will go into the final round and defeat the candidate that was the beneficiary of the spoil election. And Bob kiss was that beneficiary of the spoiled election. Vote your hopes not your fears. What about those voters that voted for Kurt right, the spoiler. What does that look like. Here's what the breakdown is this is the semi final round. This is just before Andy Montrell was eliminated from the race because his total there of 2554 was smaller than that of Bob kiss or Kurt right. The majority winner, which would, which is easily shown later, but let's see what happens with these look at the right voters, their largest group is 1510 right voters that preferred right the most, but they would have settled for Montrell and they certainly did not want his to be elected. Now, they were promised that if they, if they didn't get their first choice right that their second choice would count, but it didn't. If they had anticipated that their candidate would have, would not win. All it would have taken was one out of four of those voters, less than one out of four, if 371 of those voters or more had voted tactically, or voted strategically, worried about that their candidate wasn't going to win and worried about who might win. And they didn't want kiss to win. All they would have had to do is insincerely bump Montrell up bump, you know, forsake their favorite candidate, and that would have changed the election, then instead of right and kiss going into the final round. Montrell and kiss would have gone into the final and Montrell would have defeated kiss by 588 votes in the final round. So simply by marking their first choice as number one, they caused the election of the candidate that they lost. They caused the election of Bob kiss whom they really didn't want to see elected. And they caused that election simply by marking Kurt right as their favorite voter. If your hopes not your fears, they would have been better off voting their fears in the IRV election in 2009. In this liberal town I got to choose between liberal or more liberal because if I vote for the guy really like more liberal gets elected. That's how conservative voters that preferred Kurt right as their first choice. That's how they feel about what IRV did to their vote. Does not make them happy. Simply by marking their favorite candidate as number one, they caused the election of their least favorite candidate. Why did that happen. Well let's look down again at these 1500 and 10 voters that marked right as their first choice Montrell is their second choice and kiss last. They were promised that if they did not. If they're, they were promised you can vote for your favorite candidate, but if your favorite candidate doesn't win, then your second choice vote counts, but their second choice vote didn't count. That's because IRV is opaque to the second choice. If your first choice is still in the running and Kurt right went all the way to the final round where he lost. But if your first choice is still running IRV doesn't look at your second choice at all. But it did for say the Montrell voters, some voters had their second choice was visible to the to the algorithm other voters, the second choice was not. And that is not fair. That is not treating voters equally. Those voters that those 1500 and 10 voters that voted for Kurt right and had a contingency vote for Andy Montrell, they were screwed because they are the promise that they were given that they could vote for right and if right wasn't going to get elected then their vote would be gone for Montrell that promise was not delivered. That's nice jump in here for a second. Yes, how long is how long is this presentation going on because I have more minutes. Okay. So I basically said that when when this kind of thing happens to voters. It causes tactical voting in the future. They're going to have to worry about, well, gee, you know I really like to vote for the candidate I really like, but if I vote for the candidate I really like the worst candidate gets elected as a result. And then they'll end up having to compromise and vote for the Democrat candidate, which is what they have to do now to, but, but the IRV of 2009 did not solve that problem for these voters. It was a bad thing. So in Burlington 2009 IRV failed to value every voters vote equally. It did not accomplish one person one vote. It did not accomplish majority rule. Hey what's wrong with minority rule, let's have the minority rule. It did not protect us from the spoiler effect. It did not allow some voters to vote their hopes not their fears. They voted their hopes, and the worst thing resulted as a result. One last topic and I'll be quick. It's about precinct some ability and as an election official this is important. The end of every election day at our wards wards seven Ward four wards three all the wards. We have a ticker tape that prints out from the, from the ballot machine that we post on the wall for people to look at a sub totals of the voters. And what, whether it's campaigns or whether it's the media, they can total up the sub totals from each one of the wards and see who wins the whole race for mayor or for possibly the district counselor which takes two wards, you know, or in the fall it would be the legislative districts that that trans that transcends wards that that exists in more than one word, they can total those numbers and see who wins the race for all of the wards, but you can't do that with IRV. We can do it with first pass the post this method that both of us oppose, which is the current method has precinct some ability, but IRV does not have it and so then it doesn't allow us to verify the election results in a transparent manner. It doesn't allow people to audit the elections in a transparent matter manner. This helps keeps elections honest if we can have precinct some ability and transparency. So, as I said the old fashioned first pass the post is precinct summable, but IRV is not precinct summable. The ballot data must opaquely be transported from the ward polling locations to City Hall. Everybody's going to have to go to City Hall to find out who wins, but reformed ranked choice voting it's a term I'm going to use now, a form of rank choice that consistently elects the majority candidate that is precinct summable, because we can add up the pair wise defeat totals from each ward and see what they are for the whole city. That's real voter reform, it's transparent, and it's less vulnerable to sophisticated electronic election fraud. So these are what those pair wise totals look like. If you look down here in the corner here, you'll see kiss and write. That was what came out of the IRV final round, because only considered kissing right, but kiss did not have the majority of the vote, because there's more candidates in there than just him and and Kurt right. There's Andy Montrell, and against Andy Montrell kiss had a minority of the votes against Andy Montrell right had a minority of the votes, only Andy Montrell had the majority of the votes only Andy Montrell was the majority candidate. Bob kiss was not the majority candidate, he did not get 50% of the vote to say that he did get 50% of the vote to say that IRV always guarantees that the a candidate gets 50% of the vote is a falsehood. It is a lie from fair vote, and it is a lie on this question. It does not guarantee 50% vote, it actually fail to do that. Thank you. We have about 10 minutes so I just want to open the floor here for Terry to ask you a couple questions stop sharing a screen. Well, asking questions is really nonsensical is, there's a lot of misinformation there I can't there's so many things you said that are not true. No, everything I said was exactly please let me have my turn, let me have my turn, everything I said was exact choice of voting with the condorses is not precinct summable you need to create a matrix for every ballot, and none of the software no voting machine sold in the United States create will put an output like you want. Here's the key fact, the system that that you have designed is a laudable fine voting method. No government in the world has ever used a system like that. Please let me finish please stop interrupting. No voting machine company makes a machine that can tally that vote. You cannot do a hand count because there's you with an instant runoff vote. It's just like a runoff election, it uses the exact same dynamic that we're all familiar with if no can he gets a majority in the first round. You create the bottom candidate and you have a runoff between the top to that can be done as a hand count your system with matrices cannot be easily done as a hand count candidates cannot. Here's a key thing you and I both agree that the current system use in Burlington is probably the least democratic of all voting methods, because it allows a candidate that the majority of voters think is the worst choice to be declared the winner. It's absolutely unacceptable. What your argument is that your system is superior to the instant runoff voting rank choice voting, because your system will assure that the candidate that is the compromise that would defeat anybody else and I had to head and that's a laudable goal, but there are negatives to that as well, because it changes the nature of the campaign in a system like what you're proposing a condor say system is what it's referred to. It encourages candidates to avoid taking controversial stands on any issue it changes the nature of the campaign, because if a candidate has avoided making any enemies. They will be the second choice of all the voters. So a candidate can win under your system, even if not a single voter thought that they were the best candidate they could win because they're the compromise who just smiled and kissed the babies. And that is not a neutral. It's important point is that Kenneth arrow who won the Nobel Prize for his proof that it is impossible to develop a voting method when you have more than three candidates that does not violate some definition of fairness in some situations. The voting system has defects under some scenarios, including the system you're proposing the system that you are proposing has not been used anywhere in the world cannot be implemented on any voting machines currently being manufactured, and is an experiment of yours, it is not the system that is in Burlington is being proposed has been used for over a century by millions and millions of voters all over the world it is a proven system there will fail in Burlington Vermont. Well, that's that your argument is that Kurt right was the spoiler. Kurt right voters say that he was a loser who changed through the winner is he was the winner in the in a plurality election as we have right now, he would have been declared the winner because he got far more votes and he didn't get 40% you're arguing that that he was the spoiler where as most people was he was a loser who changed. All right, so you went on to a spoiler. Please let me finish. It's your your redefinition of the word spoiler. Nobody uses the spoiler other than you to me. A spoiler is a candidate who loses your definition is in the election. The winner is that's what I conclude. I guess we're just about out of time but that's every voting system has flaws, but most political scientists who study voting methods agree that the plurality voting system used in Burlington and most of the United States, which is unusual in the world because most countries don't use this system. We use here is probably the least democratic as I said because it allows the candidate that a majority voters think is the worst choice to be declared the winner because of the spoiler scenario or other scenarios. But he does not allow that candidate to win the candidate that is the condors say loser cannot win under an instant runoff voting system. The important thing is that Terry with with. I'm sorry we had a time. I just I need Robert to be able to respond to you and we only have so thank you I think we I understand the gist of your position rubber if you'd like to respond. Well, the fact is is that everything that I said was factually true. The numbers were factually true. The fact is that I in 2009 in Burlington. We asked the city of Burlington who do you prefer better. Do you want Andy or do you want Bob, and the city said we'd rather have Andy yet Bob. Right, right. Well, the election that caused the spoiled election in which Kurt right was a spoiler, a spoiler is a loser in a race whose presence in the race changes who the winner was had Kurt right not want run in that race. Andy and Bob would have met each other in the final round, and Andy would have defeated Bob by 7.8% margin unlikely true because if. The numbers come from the public. The numbers ignore the fact you're you're imagining it Kurt right wasn't running, which means thousands of but that's not a turnout to vote. The vote of Dan please he didn't run in the 2014 election and the governor election, perhaps Scott mill would have one, but we don't know because we don't know who those voters that voted for Dan please siano, who they would have voted for between and Peter Shumlin, but we know who we would have voted for in 2009, and we know for sure that more of us preferred Andy Montrell over Bob kiss than the number of us that preferred Bob kiss over Andy Montrell, yet Bob kiss was elected. And the only reason that Bob kiss was elected because we won the run off spoiler candidate that happened to be Kurt right. Kurt right not run, Andy Montrell would in the run off would have met Bob kiss and had, would have defeated him. Are the candidate who got no preference votes no first preferences. He had over 200 of them. He was not, he was not a weak candidate, but your, your system would allow us preferences from over 2500 voters. So much on one election, the system, the logic of your system is focusing on the city round should be an opportunity election. Can I show one last screen. No, you can't. I would like you to sum up Robert if you don't mind by telling us your position on this ballot question just succinctly. We believe that this is going to be called question for in the upcoming election. And I'm encouraging people to vote no on question for, because sometimes vote, voting reform itself needs reform. And reformers are sometimes so self righteous that they can't recognize that their own reform itself needs reform and instant run off voting needs reform. So we have election scholars in 2009. Terry and I had dinner over by uncommon grounds and we talked about this for the first time. He turned us on the to a meeting group of election scholars which he was a part of, and Terry you're in the vast minority, less than 10% of voters think that IRV is better than Congress say less than 10% there are other organizations election sciences.org that compete against fair vote for the hearts and minds of voters. They got Fargo north Dakota to adopt approval voting, and they point to Burlington Vermont as an example of the failure of ranked choice voting that fair vote sells to us. Okay, well I want to thank you both for joining us today. This is obviously a very heated discussion and 2009 election is still alive and well so thank you Terry britches, and thank you Robert Brista Johnson for discussing the charter change that's being proposed in the city of Burlington on ranked choice voting for city counselors. Thanks so much for watching and stay tuned here to town meeting TV for more town meeting election coverage. Thank you.