 Hello, and welcome to Reimagining Votes as a Community Resource. It's election time in the big city. Seven candidates are criss-crossing the city, knocking on doors, attending debates, all trying to become the next mayor. Among all that activity, you notice that none of the seven have visited your community this election. Actually, it's been a while since anyone came around. You vote and vote, and you still don't get any attention. How many more elections are going to go by before someone pays attention? That politicians pay attention to your community and its needs. What could you possibly do to stop being ignored? My name is Chris Crawley, and I've worked on these candidate campaigns for years. I'm a racist from County Board all the way to the United States House of Representatives. If it feels like politicians are ignoring you, I can tell you firsthand, it's because they are. We're going to discuss the most fundamental reason why they ignore you and your community, and it's the economics of your vote. Like water, oil, or human labor, a vote is a resource. Votes and an election are finite. There are only so many voters, and they can only vote for one candidate. This creates scarcity. Even if voters like multiple candidates, they don't have enough resources to say that. In this environment of scarcity, communities get skipped because they are seen as not having enough votes to attract politicians come election time. Each new candidate makes the situation worse as the limited number of votes get split among more candidates, sort of like slicing a pie into smaller and smaller pieces as more people come to the party. But it's not a party. This creates a lot of conflict among candidates, among communities, and voters about who should not and should not be running in these elections. Finally, the campaigns have to figure out how to be most efficient with their resources. They have to precisely target just the minimum number of voters needed to win and not one voter more. They have powerful databases to do this for them that give every voter a score. Those databases say you are either a one, worth the time, or a zero, not worth the time. If you are never going to vote for my candidate, you're a zero. If we already know we have your vote, you're also a zero. Why waste any more resources on you? And if we know that you are never going to vote, you're definitely going to be a zero. If they see your community and see too many zeros, they aren't coming by. And in office, if they do something your community doesn't like, who cares? You don't have enough power, enough ones, to threaten them. And to make things worse, they know your options. You could withhold your vote in protest, but that'll make your score worse, make you seem less trustworthy as a voter. It makes the community, the total community vote less powerful as you're not helping add to its power. And it leaves you vulnerable to a situation you hate. You can vote for a candidate you love, but that'll split the power of your community's vote as you're not doing it all together. Just risk throwing your vote away, and still you may get an outcome that you hate. Or you can vote for someone you don't like, but you think can win because of electability, only to avoid your most hated outcome. But by doing this, it makes it more likely that those databases, that those campaigns will see you more as a safe vote because you did exactly what they thought you would do. And it will continue to take advantage of you in the future. So how do we get out of this system, and get our community and your issues on the front burner of these campaigns? We have to challenge the original idea that this all depends on, that votes have to be a scarce resource. Or if we flipped it, and votes became an abundant resource. This happens when instead of being allowed to only vote for one, you're able to vote for all the candidates you like. This is called approval voting. Approval voting, you give a yes or a no to each candidate, and one with the broadest support wins. Simple addition. Voters get to finally have a say in all the candidates they like, no longer diminishing their power. They go from internally conflicted to empowered. Now they can vote for everyone they like, even similar ones, and don't have to worry about throwing their vote away or getting a bad outcome, or an outcome they don't like. The community now has real voting power. They represent a lot of votes combined. And if you talk to them, if you cater to them, if you listen to them, they may lend you some of their power as a politician. And finally, all kind of candidates can run, knowing that they could force their own path, knowing that they won't split the votes with similar people and make a situation worse. And the city gets a winner that most voters would be good with. Politicians now worried about keeping your community's votes are accountable to your community. Instead of catering to the small number of people they needed before, now they have to think holistically about the whole city, but every voter, since every voter, it can be a vote for them or against them. This is achievable today. Approval voting is free. It's easy to understand and can be implemented tomorrow, everywhere in America. St. Louis, Missouri, and Fargo, North Dakota do it, and dozens of communities throughout the country want to be next. Join us to discuss how you can reimagine votes as a resource and empower your whole community again. Thank you.