 Hi, I'm Roderick Silva, the communications manager at Coegi Patio. Welcome to the first episode of Let's Talk About Politics and Governance. Our guest today is Cynthia Ricci-Terrell from Represent Women, an organization based in the U.S. devoted to gender-balanced representation. Cynthia will talk with us today about ranked choice voting and women's representation. Their article, co-authored with Courtney Lamendola and Mora Riley, both from Represent Women as well, is called Election Reform and Women's Representation, Ranked Choice Voting in the U.S., and was published last year in our Open Access Journal, Politics and Governance. Cynthia, it's a pleasure to have you here with us. It's great to be here. Thank you. I will start to ask you to tell us a bit about ranked choice voting in the U.S., so a brief context before we jump to your article. Yes, that's a great question because I think that listeners may not appreciate how much of an anomaly the American electoral system is. We have primary elections, we're a presidential system, we have an electoral college which no other country in the world operates under, and we still use a winner-take-all system. We're first past the post, which we, like Canada and Australia and New Zealand, inherited from the U.K. 250 years ago, when that's what the system was that was used for designing governments. Since then, of course, the concept of proportional representation has really evolved, I think, in its many forms as the gold standard for voting and electoral methods, and it takes many forms we see around the world, every continent, actually, I guess not Antarctica, but every continent pretty much uses some form or another of proportional representation, but the United States, for a number of reasons, is still really, I would say, mired down in our winner-take-all zero-sum game politics. And I think the events of the last few years have illustrated in almost tragic ways the impact of having an electoral system that is almost designed to tamp down the role of voters and to de-incentivize the ability of elected officials to work together on policies that address the problems we all are facing. Thank you. And to bridge, so rank choice voting and women representation, so specifically in the case of women representation, has rank choice voting facilitated the process throughout the years? Yes. That's a great question. The United States has always been an outlier among its allies in terms of the representation of women. There was a time some years ago when the United States ranked, I think, 102nd for women's representation. Now we've crept up. We're in the 70s now and among OACD countries. I think we ranked maybe 37th or something like that. So the representation of women in the United States is low. And as a reminder, in this big year breakthrough year, 2022, midterm elections, redistricting happened, we've added one woman to the House of Representatives. So we now have 124 women in the House. We had 123 before the elections. We see a tiny bit more progress happening at the local or municipal level for women's representation, but it's still less than a third of all elected representatives and our seats are held by women. The the the exciting data point that we studied in this paper and is ongoing for us is looking at the jurisdictions that have moved on beyond the winner take all voting system and have embraced ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting in the United States. And there are some early adopters of this in the Bay Area, where we've done some in the United States. That's Northern California, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, in Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul, thanks to the great work of Jean Massey and her team at Fairvote Minnesota and then in jurisdictions now around the country, thanks to Fairvote and to Rank the Vote U.S. and other groups that are really focused on it. We've seen a big uptake in the number of women getting elected. And while this is consistent across all the jurisdictions with ranked choice voting, that the percentage of women is higher. I think the average is about 30 for both mayors and city councils that the jurisdictions with ranked choice voting, women hold 47 percent of the seats. We see in cities like New York City that adopted ranked choice voting or readopted it, I should say, after using it in the last century. Women now hold 61 percent of seats and New York is obviously such a huge case study. There are just so many millions of people who live in New York City. That's been a really great model to look at because we saw sort of in living an example of how the system enabled more women to run without splitting the vote. It meant that endorsing organizations endorsed more than one candidate at the same time, often more than one woman candidate, which engaged more voters in the process. It gave voters a better sense of power in the process to elect the candidate of choice. And because in a ranked choice voting system, candidates have an incentive to find common ground because they want to attract supporters of their opponents to rank them second or third. There's a built in incentive for civility and for issue focus, which really transforms the process of the election. So that was super exciting to see. And as I said, women hold 61 percent of seats in New York City. And I think the data shows that 80 percent of the women on the New York City Council are women of color under the age of 40. And so it transforms not only who is on the council descriptively, but I think we're seeing now how it transforms the lived experiences of the policymakers and thus the kinds of policy that is established from those councils. Of course, I was going to ask how could these results or could this background that you give us impact public policies or individual choice? But I think that this contextualization that you did fairly responds to our question. So now jumping on to your article specifically. So what are the main findings? Well, in the article, we realized that there wasn't really a comprehensive history of proportional representation or ranked choice voting in the United States. And we we set out to offer sort of a thumbnail to that history to describe the use of ranked choice voting in the during the progressive era in the in the 1930s and 40s in the United States. And in many ways, that established the context for the we knew that it had had an impact on the election of women and of men of color in the 1930s and 40s in an era when it was even more unheard of for women or black men, for example, to get elected. So that was that was interesting for us to dive into that research and understand the history there. We also then look at the data that was true as of 2021 in terms of the jurisdictions which were using ranked choice voting and the impact on women both for executives, mayoral seats held by women and then on city councils. And so those were the the main the areas that we were looking at in terms of the data. So that was really exciting to, you know, as as you can imagine and and listeners can imagine it's important to chart and really track what the data is telling us. If we're advocating for policies, we want to make sure we're really understanding not only what the numbers tell us, but what the the qualitative experiences of candidates are in these systems. So I would say that research that we did was a really good way to establish a base point. And now as millions more Americans are using ranked choice voting and we see more data, we will add to that research. And I think that will be a really good record of what the impact of ranked choice voting has been. Very good. And before we look ahead into the future, the article you co-authored had dozens of thousands of views on our website only, not counting all the debates that came with it. The research was published in June 2021, so more than a year ago. And where do we stand now when it comes to ranked choice voting and women representation? So yeah, that's a great question. You know, I could talk for a long time about that, but I'll try to be short. I mean, I'll try to be brief. We saw a number of jurisdictions use ranked choice voting. Well, one, the primary in New York City was in June, we saw those women win in November. So that was exciting. So we now can focus and understand how that worked. I will say that one of the reasons for the success in New York City was that there's a terrific organization called New Majority New York City that specifically recruited women to run for those positions and helped them run an effective ranked choice voting campaign. And I think just anticipating a question you might ask me, which is how can we make sure that ranked choice voting is successfully implemented across the country? I would say the research that represent women has done is focused on how we can really take full advantage of that. And that involves an organization like New Majority exporting that model to other jurisdictions. So where it's used in a state like Maine or a state like Alaska, women are being recruited to run and supported when they run. Notwithstanding the fact that there is not a New Majority New York City in Alaska or anywhere else right now, yet women did quite well in Alaska and in Maine as well. And we saw, in fact, in contentious primaries in Alaska with some candidates who were backed by the former president of the United States that representative Mary Peltola was elected, who's a Democrat. No Democrat had ever held that seat and had been held by a Republican Don Young until his death. He held it for 50 years and a Republican, Lisa Murkowski won in the Senate in Alaska. So we see that those are really hopeful signs, not only because we think that they really reflect the views of Alaska voters who are pro-fish and pro-job and pro-choice. I think that was the motto of representative Peltola. But we see that as a really a way forward in this contentious era of American politics that a system like ranked choice voting really delivers the candidate whom the majority of voters want. And that seems to mean it be one of the most important underpinnings of a strong democracy is having representatives in office whom the majority of voters want. So we see good news for women on that front. Women now hold 47% of seats in jurisdictions with ranked choice voting, both for mayor and for city council. And that's about, that's almost 20% higher than non-RCV cities. So we see that's pretty remarkable in terms of what the data tells us. It's very interesting. It reflects how the research and the data that you collect have real impact on politics, on political action and campaigning. So that's very interesting. What I would ask you now is what's now left to research? So you mentioned before that there is research ongoing. You do this research on national level at the local level. You also mentioned before that New York is a good case study. So what's now ahead to research on the topic? Yeah, I think that there, I think more research is needed on the best model. I mentioned the New York City, the new majority idea. We want to track how many women are running for these seats because of course that impacts how many women win, is to really understand how many and what kinds of women are running and how they are supported. We also want to look at the jurisdictions that are using the multi-winner form of ranked choice voting, which has just been adopted in Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine, which is the same system that the Australian Senate uses, where you elect multiple representatives in a geographic area with a ranked system. One of the reasons that's particularly important to us is that in Australia, in the Senate, women hold 57% of the seats in that body. And so that seems like a particularly auspicious thing for us to understand. It also happens to be the model that we're pushing for Congress of the Fair Representation Act. So we really want to understand how to, not only how to advocate for that, why it is that more women are getting elected in these multi-seat elections in the United States. I'm in Maryland right now in a multi-seat election with winner-take-all voting, but we want to understand how ranked choice voting and multi-winner seats or districts strengthen the opportunities for women and others who are marginalized from the political process. We're also interested in looking at the use of ranked choice voting in other contexts, like what would be the impact on using ranked choice voting to select presidential nominees, because that's upcoming in 2024. We're going to have a big presidential election in the United States. So how can we use ranked choice voting to make sure there are fair and representative outcomes? We're also intrigued by the role of money. We know that we did a study, well, we first did it when we were still a project of Fair Vote in 2015 on the extent to which our current voting system requires candidates to spend a lot of money. The preliminary research that we've done is that women can win in a place like New York City without spending as much money, but given that money plays such a major role in American politics, we want to understand the intersection of money and voting systems as well. Of course, there's still a lot of paths forward to be explored. Yes. Very, very interesting. Can you provide, so in this sense, some additional resources about the topics that we are discussing today, articles or webinars, podcasts, so can you recommend more materials for people to explore this topic? Absolutely. In this context, by the way, let me tell you some self-promotion is allowed to talk about represent women. Well, if you go to the represent women YouTube account, you'll find some good sessions that we did with New York officials. One featuring the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, and some of the newly elected city counselors that's on our YouTube channel, where they delve into the experience of running with Ranked Choice Voting. So I would push that forward. We also had a great Democracy Solutions Summit in March of 2022. We're going to do that every year where we bring together women leaders in the democracy reform work. And there are some good sessions there on Ranked Choice Voting with some good new voices. You can find that on the represent women YouTube channel as well. We've also just refreshed our website, making it easier to search by our content. We have a lot of content now on Ranked Choice Voting. We're still in the process of transitioning everything over, but I hope people will find that filtering system there useful. You can look for Ranked Choice Voting and filter by multi-seat districts and filter by other kinds of outcomes. So I think I hope that will be useful. We also are continuing our focus on international women's representation to understand what the best practices are. So you can find that international dashboard on our website. We'll be releasing a report on Pacific nations like Australia and New Zealand, where I think there's some really great information on how voting systems have changed the dynamic for women in both those countries, which as a reminder also inherited the winner take all first pass the post system from the UK. But I think both would say both those countries are glad that they departed from that and adopted proportional and semi-proportional systems of government. There are also great other websites. Fair vote does a great job. Ranked to vote USA. United America is now much more of a spokesperson. Spokes group, I guess you would say, on Ranked Choice Voting and there's just so many more Ranked Choice Voting advocates out there now. It's pretty exciting to type into Twitter. If people still use Twitter, type in Ranked Choice Voting and you'll see some of the conversations that are happening about the reform in the United States. Of course, a very, very interesting talk, Cynthia. And we have gone in this episode through the background on Ranked Choice Voting in the United States. Its impact on women's representation, how it translates really into political action with more or less success. And of course, some paths forward when it comes to research. And I would ask to like to ask you as a closing statement. We always do in the end of our episodes. If there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk. So if all the discussion that we did, the punchline that you want people to go home with in their heads, what would it be? I would say that the pressing problems of the world, whether it's climate or economics or militarism or social security, justice issues, all of them require the best and the brightest involved in the decision making table. And we just, we see data that shows that more women's voices and lived experiences are a requirement for better policy outcomes and better process in government. And I think the United States has such an outsized role in the world. I think it's incumbent upon us in the United States to be as innovative as we can in pushing for gender balance and pushing forward all women into more leadership so that we can help solve these pressing problems. Thank you, Cynthia, for being with us today. The article is available on the journal's website. And this episode is available on the Let's Talk About Politics and Governance website, as well as on Koji.tu's YouTube channel and podcast directories. Thank you, Cynthia, for being here with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you. See you on our next episode. Sounds great.