 I'm Greg Dennis from Precinct 1 presenting Article 13 on behalf of the Election Modernization Committee. The recommended vote of the Select Board proposes home rule legislation that would have the town adopt ranked choice voting for elections to all town offices except for town meeting member. The committee identified some deficiencies with the voting system we use in town today called plurality voting. To illustrate a key defect, let's look at a fictional election in the town of Owlington, a town comprised mostly of owls. Owlington has an upcoming election for an open seat. Roughly 60% of the voters would like to see an owl win and 40% would like to see a sparrow. And there are two candidates in the race, one owl and one sparrow. And so we're likely to see the owl win with 60% of the vote. However, a third candidate decides to enter the race, another owl. And on election day, the owl vote is split and the sparrow wins. This is an example of the common problem of vote splitting that can happen at a plurality voting, which has the effect of denying the will of the majority. While vote splitting itself doesn't happen in every election, the threat that it might happen is ever present, and that has a number of downstream negative effects. In particular, once two candidates enter a race, other prospective candidates are often discouraged from running because they might split the vote. I personally know prospective candidates in town that have experienced this. That means we see a less diverse candidate pool, fewer campaigns driving voter turnout, and the campaigns are often head-to-head matches that perpetuate an unhealthy us versus them mentality. Here are the kinds of ballots we see in Arlington elections today. Depending on the number of seats we're filling, we may be asked to vote for up to one, or up to two, or up to three, and our proposal would replace them all with this ranked ballot where voters can pick just one, or if they want mark a second choice in the second column, a third choice in the third column, as many or as few choices as they like, and it doesn't matter how many seats we are electing, one, two, or three, the ballot and the instructions are the same. To see how the votes are counted, let's return to Arlington. It's still true that there is a 60-40 split between Arlington and Sparrows, but because they now have ranked choice in place, more candidates are running. Here, five candidates are running for one seat, three Arlington and two Sparrows. We start by counting just the first choices. In a plurality election, the Sparrows would have won here, but in ranked choice, we require the winner to reach a 50% majority to win. If no one reaches 50%, the lowest vote getter is eliminated, and everyone that voted for that candidate has their vote counted towards their next choice instead. In our simple example, we'll assume that everyone who voted for one Sparrow first voted for the other Sparrow second. In this process of eliminating the last place, candidate continues until someone has crossed the 50% mark to win. What are for electing three candidates at a time? We similarly start by counting all the first choices. To allow multiple candidates to win, we have to lower the threshold, not to some arbitrary number, but to the percentage at which a candidate is mathematically guaranteed a seat. In a three-seat race, that's 25%. Any candidate over that amount wins, and the votes are similarly counted in rounds until we have three winners. As you can see, we have elected two Owls in one Sparrow, which closely reflects what the voters wanted. A majority of voters wanted Owls, so a majority of the seats were won by Owls, and 40% wanted a Sparrow, so they pick up only one seat. There are more details on the mechanics of the count in our report, but regardless of those mechanics, the voter's task remains straightforward, which is to fill out this ballot. And we know from experience around the country and the world that voters can handle this and end up liking and preferring it. The way it is counted ensures that, one, voters can vote sincerely without regard to the viability of the candidates, and two, that the result closely reflects what the voters wanted. The committee identified six key benefits of moving to rank-choice voting. One, it ensures majority rule. Two, by eliminating vote splitting, we expect it will encourage a larger and more diverse set of candidates to run, and there's evidence that this particularly benefits women and people of color candidates in particular. Three, it promotes fair representation, although it is very much a majoritarian system, it still allows a significant minority to occasionally win a seat. Four, we expected to boost voter turnout. More candidates means more campaigns, pulling voters to the polls. Five, it ends bullet voting games where voters strategize over whether to vote for fewer candidates than there are seats. There's no incentive to do that under rank-choice. And finally, it helps foster civil campaigns because candidates have an incentive to talk to supporters of their opponents to pick up second and third choices.