 In September of 2012, the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, San Francisco's largest Democratic Club, used an innovative new voting system for their endorsement process for the city election in November. Rather than voting for a single candidate per race, members were allowed to rate each candidate on a 0-5 scale, the same way people commonly critique movies or restaurants on popular websites like Yelp, Amazon, and the Internet Movie Database. The process began with what the club refers to as a PAC election, in which more active members make endorsements, which inform the club in a subsequent full membership election. The following clips give us a peek at how the process went. Okay, I'm Clay Shentrop. I'm with the Center for Election Science, and we're here today at the 2012 Harvey Milk Club PAC elections in San Francisco. I'm talking today with Nate Albee, who had an instrumental role in bringing score voting to the endorsement process here at the Harvey Milk Club. Nate, can I just first have you tell me a little bit about your relationship with the Milk Club and also any other local political activism that you're involved in? Sure, so I've been on the board of the Harvey Milk Club for three years now. Originally, I was the events and fundraising chair. I was briefly president of the club before I sat down to work on Leland Youth's campaign for mayor. This year, again, I'm events and fundraising. I also have done electoral politics for the last three years as a campaign manager, as a campaign coordinator, another campaign manager for David Campos, and then I currently just started working as David Campos's legislative leader. Okay, great. Can you tell me when you were deciding how to change your electoral process and you were looking at different voting systems, what problems were you trying to solve and how did score voting in your mind solve those problems? So one of the issues I think that are different from normal elections with Democratic clubs is we have a lot of people who are trying to influence the election. So candidates will be running. When you have ranked-choice voting, you'll have multiple candidates who are all trying to get an endorsement from the club. Most clubs have been struggling since San Francisco, put in ranked-choice voting on how to fairly endorse as many candidates as possible, but also not just hand over a ranked one, the first, second, and third endorsement without having candidates match the values of the club. So the Mel Club, and I know almost every other Democratic club has been struggling with this. Us particularly, the Mel Club is known for having a high threshold for endorsement, which is 60%. With that high endorsement, it kind of gives, it kind of leads to candidates sometimes teaming up or staffing the club. So we really wanted to come up with a system that would actually give our members more of a voice rather than just yes and no. So we started doing a little research. We went through many different variations of having to deal with ranked-choice voting. We were very instrumental in passing ranked-choice voting in San Francisco, so it's something that we wanted to make sure we were acknowledging our history of activism around and within the club, but also not be at the whim of club staffing from our candidates. So we did research and score voting seems like one of the best options for us. Even if the club is staffed, it gives more of a voice to the people who we would call and real members who are with us for the rest of the year versus just during election time. And the ability to say, okay, you know, even though, even if you are somebody who has been staffed into the club, we think it makes it a little more difficult to give someone an absolute zero who you may know or like when you have more options to be able to rank them. Okay, great. And finally, when all is said and done and you're looking back on how this election has gone, what will be your definition of success? How will you know whether score voting was a success for a no-club? For me, it's that, especially with this year, we have a lot of different candidates. There's a broad system of support for many different people. So it's not as cut and dry. I'm interested to see a diversity in our ranking. I'd like to see us get to a first, second, and third. I'm hoping that this will lead us to that. I'd also like to see no obvious staffing happen. It seems like one of the better courses this year is to avoid that. But the diversity actually evolves. Here, having more of these voices heard is kind of what we think would be a success. Okay, awesome. Thanks so much for your time today. Yeah, thank you. So let me just say that I'm a strong supporter of public transit, improving the transit system. The bus rapid transit systems of BANES and Geary are really a key way to make major improvements with it. We're actually able now to guarantee, you know, every single graduate of SF Unified first priority in going to city college classes. And I think that's huge, but 60%. I've heard Harvey Milk's nephew to be the whole of fame in California. Sam Rodriguez did that. And lastly, we spent over $125,000. I was raised in the Central Valley. I was the daughter of farm workers. I lived in a farm labor capital until I was 15 years old. And as a result of that... The need for San Francisco should always be a city of opportunity and a place where people had second chances and could make a new start. And that it had been a city that gave me incredible opportunity and I thought that it should be that. Let's get this new generation of riders on and let's not use Muni as the second class form of transportation. Let's push people from cars over to bikes over to... That I voted against it. And by the way, I do think it's shameful that only three supervisors on this board voted against that. That should be one of those things that it should be. Three days later, on September 18th, the Milk Club held their general membership election where the campaign showed up to make their pitch. It's called score voting, which allows you to actually score each candidate listed. You're not ranking one, two, three. You're able to weigh in on every candidate. If I see this, it's called score voting now. So you actually be able to rank a candidate from zero to five. So if you absolutely hate somebody, you'll mark this as zero. If you like somebody or don't like a lot, you'll be ranking by five. We're going to talk about two things. One, score voting is working as far as we can tell in that it has diversified the vote. It has opened the field and we had a little in-town packing at the PAC meeting and it really sort of worked for packing as well. So a lot of the concerns that we had for our voting system and what happened in the mayor's race has been addressed through score voting. And I think it's really important that we look at it like that. We are the first club to go with score voting and it's really important that we rally together to keep this progressive form of voting at its highest level and really understand how this is going to influence politics going forward. And I think we need to really remember that we are a forward-thinking group and we are changing the pace of politics for this election tonight so I hope we can band together and sort of get a little better understanding where we're going. Score voting is not ranked choice voting. You do not rank everyone. You give them a score. If someone has done fantastic for you in the last few years and you like their style, give them a five. You can give a five to several people. A zero is a vote of no confidence. Does that make sense?