 I'd like to thank everyone for coming out and especially folks who are on the call right now, but also the ones who are maybe catching this by recording. We are thinking about you guys too, hopefully everyone on here and their families are doing well. You know, if there was every time where we realized how important elections were, I think, in the middle of the pandemic, definitely underscores that. So today we're going to be talking about our chapters. So hopefully you are interested in activism because that is what this is about. Nice to meet you. This is who I am. I am the Director of Campaigns and Advocacy at the Center for Election Science. I live in Washington, D.C., right outside Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Virginia. Normally when we are allowed to go outside and go on buses and trains and go to restaurants, my girlfriend and I would go on trains and the Metro and go drink at bars and tell people about it. So we call it rail drinks. Hopefully this is a free plug for me. And I've been a campaign person since 2013. I've worked on federal, state, and local campaigns. So I've done my fair share of campaigning. What I learned on the campaign trail is a lot of times, even if I won, even if I got what I wanted, even if my candidate really did a great job and we got changed, I realized pretty quickly the system was, in general, was really broken. And that's why I'm here. I realized that even if I support this candidate or that candidate, that so many people are just not having their voice heard. And there's too much inertia towards changing things. So I will have, oops, sorry, Caitlin, help me out with the questions. I'll just ask her to raise her hand or just holler at me. But so yeah, I want to ask you guys, we're all lightning round. Why are you here? What makes you want to be involved in this at all? I'll start with Marco. I've been picking on Marco today. There we go, Marco, I've got you now. OK, sorry, can you hear me? You good? OK, so I guess I'm here because more or less a couple of years ago, it was funny. I was debating a friend of mine about just different government systems and whatnot. And he suggested, he's like, you know, maybe you ever thought about approval voting? And he was explaining it to me. And I was kind of like, oh, isn't that just a ranked ballot? No. And he explained it to me. And I said, you know, this actually makes a lot of sense. And it was funny because around the time we were talking, it was shortly after the federal government, we got a new federal government in place, Justin Trudeau, as I'm sure you're aware, he promised he was going to change the voting system. And he never did. So when I started, like I looked at the Center for Election Science and I'm like, well, wait a minute, this is really, this is awesome. Like this is just an incremental change. They could have at least done that and kind of seen, you know, what like, what could transpire from that? Because the thing with, you know, with Canadian politics is that Canadians are very like, they want change, but they're very like, they like to kind of hover around in the middle. And they, they like incremental baby steps, something. And well, yeah, you technically need to like amend the Constitution, which kind of sounds scary to some people, but it's really just a matter of looking at like what counts as a valid ballot, passing your ballot and looking at that kind of legislation. And again, if you, if you presented to people as, well, listen, you can still vote the same way. It's just opening up another door. That's probably like the best way that I've been able to describe it. So when I, when I see a presentation like this, how to start a chapter, this couldn't come at a better time because I've been trying to explain it to people. And I just, I don't know really like how to get started, you know what I mean? So basically, I don't want to take up too much time, but my, my whole thing is, I like it because it's, it's an incremental way to change and make a positive impact. That sounds kind of cliche, but. That's great. Marco, I couldn't, I couldn't have said it better myself. And I probably won't say it better than you. So, did anyone in the chat, anyone else wanted to maybe share? You all should be able to unmute yourself too if you want to chime in. Okay. Go ahead, Alan. I got you. I unmuted you. Hi, yeah, I'm Alan. I agree with everything Marco said. And would like to add a few things like I'm here. I think I originally got into voting reform because CGP Gray had some really good videos on YouTube that were explaining the problems with first pass the post. And it's such a fundamental thing in, in democracy to have a voting system that works well. I kind of grew up with this vision of democracy is this great like deliberative experiment where the people are, you govern with the consent of the governed and their participation and people decide how their government should look. And with such a broken voting system, that's not what we have now. And more recently, I've kind of gotten into the idea of the ideas of John Rawls and like, what does it mean for a system to be just? And for a system of government to be just, you need fairness and equality. And we don't have equality with the way our votes are tallied right now. So kind of along the same lines as Marco, this seemed like an incremental reform. It could be done with from the grassroots up. It doesn't need an act of Congress to move forward. We can test it at local levels and move up and it doesn't need, it doesn't need big support from the highest ranks of society. And building that grassroots effort kind of, I'm hoping can restore some faith in democracy as a whole where it's a little bit under attack worldwide where you see a lot of authoritarian regimes gaining power. So I want to combat that by giving power back to people and helping them participate in a way that they can see that their voice matters and they get results that they're happier with. That is great. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing that was really, that was really awesome. Amy, Amy said she wanted to share too. Thanks, Amy. Yeah, you bet. So I admittedly have never been that active in politics, but this last year I got involved in, so I moved to Iowa. We're first in the nation. And so I got involved with the Andrew Yang campaign and I observed so many people really liked his ideas and his thoughts, but there was a lot of strategic voting going on. And so even though they liked him, they weren't going to vote for him because they didn't think he had a chance to win. And so that surfaced for me. He's also a proponent of ranked choice voting, which I'd never heard of. I'd never really given any thought to voting systems before. And so after the campaign, I've been trying to figure out, I love, I'm a systems thinker and I like working on root cause issues. And I really feel like, just like what everybody else has said, like this is really, it's a fundamental place where we can all agree across party lines, make a difference, have our votes heard, and bring power back to the people where it belongs. Thank you so much, Amy. That's great. I had one, I will just keep this moving along. So to Marco and Alan and Amy's point, they said one way or another that this is fundamental, right? And I had a lot of techie guys and girls in our organization and I was talking to one of them and he put it in a great way where he said, it's like there was a bug in the code that now that there's a big problem now that we didn't even think about, right? Let's keep on with the next slide. And this is the bug in the code, right? That we wrote 240 years ago that we didn't think was going to really matter at all. Now it matters a bunch, right? And we talked about, and we all kind of know that the problem is just this first pass, the plurality system. And like you said, Amy, it forced people to vote strategically, right? So for example, we did a poll and I'll just bring it up because Amy brought up that her favorite candidate was Andrew Yang. And we did a poll in March and it was just to see what people, you know, who would do, how would things go if we had different voting methods? And, you know, Mr. Yang had 2, 3% in plurality in the plurality system. But in the approved voting system, we had about 40%, right? And what does that show you, people, more people obviously liked him as a candidate than they were allowed to say, right? And at least all kinds of bad things, not only for Mr. Yang but for candidates in St. Louis, in Fargo, formerly in Fargo, and now, but also across the United States. And again, Caitlin, if anything comes up in the chat, you just let me know. Yeah, I was just going to mention that Christine, whenever there's a good time, she was going to share as well about why she's here and why she likes approval voting. Absolutely. Sorry, I didn't see your hand up, Christine. Yeah, please. That's okay. I was late to put it up. What I was going to say is that I moved to this topic from working on climate change, and I thought this would be so much easier. Yes. People don't have a preconceived idea about it, and the negative feeling toward it, they're just a little more, haven't heard of it. Right. But unfortunately, in San Diego, the first thing I ran into is a group that used to be working on getting money out of campaigning, which I think is a wonderful idea, but they couldn't make any headway. And then they moved to working for ranked choice voting. And unfortunately, so I'm hoping that you can give me some hints of how to address that kind of problem where another good group is working for what I think is the wrong answer. Absolutely. Yeah, and actually, Christine, I remember meeting you in LA. Exactly. I'm glad to see you again. So to her point, and we'll get to that, I guess it's a good way to segue into this one is, at the Center for Election Science, we have looked at all the methods and believed that not only do we like approval voting, right? First and foremost, we like it because we know it's easy for people to vote for all the people they like. We know it has a lot less downsides and that there's a couple benefits that don't get talked about a lot. Every machine in America can do it because the dumbest machine in America can do approval voting. You can do it with pen and paper if you want it and understand the result and then want to take three days. And because you have machines that can already do it, the cost is basically little to none, right? So that is just a huge thing in our favor, besides the fact that we like this method on its academic grounds, right? And that's where I think we will really catch up, Christine. And I think things tend to get instituted faster when they don't cost a lot of money. That's just the fact. So that's one thing that we are going to keep pushing. And then I know a lot of times people want to be head to head about this method or this method. We push hard to tell people and to tell our supporters that we're an alternative. These are all alternative methods. And just because you've only heard of ranked choice doesn't mean it's the only one in the world. There's normally two types of folks who, when they support ranked choice, people who like it because it's the only one they've heard about and they really, really desperately want change. We love those people, too, because we can talk to them. And I think they'll like our method, too. And then the second group of people who like it on academic grounds, you're always going to have a harder time winning them over. But practicality, practicality, practicality. That's kind of what we keep pushing. I will move on, unless anything else is poignant. But thank you, Christine. That was a great point. And I saw that group, too. I think we're going to work on them, I think. So the path forward, what are we doing now? We had Fargo in 2018, St. Louis in 2020. But what next? So what our goal is, as activists and people who really care about this, we need to get as many people involved in this project as possible. As much as we know a ranked choice person or someone who's really pushing that. We know 100 other people that don't know any of it. They've never heard of the don't know a ranked choice from a whole and ground. That's what we're working on. And that's why we work all over the country. So you all are versed to know you get a sneak peek of a new program that we are building out called the Community Program, which enables regions of the United States to create this community and really start to build the chapters up. So as a group, we mostly focus on cities. Because, again, those are laboratories of democracy. And it's easier for us. We're not a huge organization, either. We've got to pick our bottles. But our goal is bigger and bigger. So the next step, and I hope you can all see this, I worked very hard on paint to make sure that you guys could kind of get a visual. So we are, like I said, is a sneak peek of our chapter community program. So what are the communities? So the communities are roughly based around the census regions, so four. Everyone, doesn't matter who you are. If you're interested in approval voting, you belong to the community. We want you to talk to people that are interested in this type of thing. Communities will meet each other, discuss wins, challenges have fun. And it's also just so it's good. It creates a little bit of a rivalry. It's like having a division in football or baseball or something, which is good. But it also is an open house at the same time. It lets new people see, hey, what's going on? And once three, four, five people from the same city join these communities or get started to get involved, then we really will start to push it as a chapter. And we are also a few people have been to chapter meetings so far. It hasn't been a lot of people, but we are going to streamline the process just so, hey, it saves you time. It's fun, but also saves you time. But if you've never been to a meeting, you don't have to worry about it. Just know that you will have a great time in the future. So the number one question I get asked is, what do I do? What the hell do I do? How do I get from here to change? And the number one thing is, you have to start. So step one, you're already there. This is the kickoff party right here. We made this fire when we were able to run around the country and actually meet people in person. We can't do that anymore. So congratulations, you made it. The next thing to do is, again, just keep trying to find activists in your community. And we're going to try to connect you with activists in your community. You'd be surprised. You say, oh, no one's here that knows about approving. There's someone down the road. There's someone in my complex. I didn't know that sign up for our listserv. So there are people all over the place. Number three is research the laws. Improve voting, what we like about it is very flexible. It can work in most situations. And a lot of times, unfortunately, other methods can't always work in a legal framework of a state constitution or a city charter. Luckily for all of you, we have just instituted a research team of dedicated volunteers who help look into the laws of certain states. If you're interested in that, I will talk about that in a bit. And then finally, once you know the rules, it's just time to go talk to people, to talk to people. Start looking about how you get those ballot, how to get a ballot initiative in your city. Normally that it requires collecting signatures in a certain amount of time and making sure your language will fit in the charter. And then finally, and you can do this basically all the time, is build support and educate, educate, educate, educate. Why are some other methods popular? Because somebody talked about it at their party meeting, their local party meeting. Or someone talked about it at the local legal women and voters meeting, or their local Kiwanis meeting. People that didn't know that this was even a thing. That's how we're going to get there too, right? One group at a time. And that's how you're going to see that we kind of get up there. And if we do that grassroots work, we get up there. People know what we're trying to do. We're going to win. And we're going to get approval voting in certain places. And I see the chat lighting up. I wonder if we have any questions about this. Yeah, there's a couple of questions there, slash comments. Great. Emily was just asking, what's the quarantine safe version of step one? I don't know. This is it. Yeah, unfortunately, I know the people are getting tired of Zoom. But for the foreseeable future, that's probably going to be the main way that people are connecting and organizing, right? Right. And I think, and you don't replace, this is also a little bit of an older document, replace kickoff party with community meeting, right? So be on the lookout. Everyone belongs to the community, even our Canadian friends. And we will make sure that you get plugged in with people around you. And so we could just start talking about it. So that will be your kickoff party and the quarantine version. And then Chris Adam also had a comment about he's in Delaware and he doesn't know anybody in his state working on voting method reform. He knows some activists, but he doesn't have close relationships with any of them. And they're busy with the 2020 election campaigns. So he's thinking he should check out the website to see a full list of our chapters. Right now, Adam, we only actually have three chapters. And that's part of why we're doing this meeting is because we're hoping we can find more people who are willing to start chapters in their areas. Right. And to your point, I almost guarantee we have folks in Delaware. And if they're not in Delaware, they're probably very close by. Our folks tend to be spread across the country. We have a couple of thousand supporters spread all across the country. There's a lot of them. And I am surprised every day how many there are. One thing I want to point out is someone will always almost tell you, let's just get through this election and then we'll figure it out. Right. I don't know if you've noticed, and I've not noticed this in my life, every election for the last 25 years has been the most consequential election of my lifetime. Because elections are important. And people don't mess with the election. The good thing about what we're doing is that it's mostly at the local level right now. So I normally think of it as the big battleships they're going to keep fighting. We're going to sneak in a couple PT boats and make the change where we can until we can really get up to that scale. Any more? There's a question in the chat from Colin. And he says, how do you recommend approaching background slash foundational relationship building during the pandemic with the goal of laying ground work for a strong local chapter when the pandemic ends? Absolutely. That's a great question. So that's something I've been working with the chapters that we have started is it's pretty easy not to be diminutive of your question. It's pretty easy. Start with who's around you. It's not rocket science. The people around you know you trust you. Almost everyone on this call, I bet you, is a joiner. They're a part of this club or this group or even this Facebook group or this and that. Just ask, eventually we'll have meetings again. Colin, we will have meetings again. Just ask to talk at the meeting or ask to have coffee with some of the leaders. Even on Skype or even on Zoom, that goes a long way. Because again, especially high up types, I think that's kind of what you're talking about, Colin. People who are in government or who are in big groups, they have to act democratically. If they haven't heard of something and their people haven't heard of something, it's not right for them to act basically because we came out in the last minute and told them to make a change. We have to educate their members too. So part of it too is having those coffees with folks, making sure they get on board, but at the same time helping them work with their leadership. A congressman can love it, but if their elected people don't, if their constituents don't know, they're never gonna support it. Hopefully that answers your question. And some of that groundwork you couldn't do now. Just start making lists like you did the other day, Colin. We had an activity the other day where we just listed 20 people we know and 20 groups we know that don't know anything about it, but that's a great way to start and you'll be surprised how far that goes. And then just one more quick comment and we'll let you get onto the next slide. Adam says that he would love to help build a chapter and he's sure that he could network with his fellow volunteers, but he definitely need help organizing. And just to all of you, as I said to Adam, we're definitely here to provide that support. That's exactly why we're hosting these meetings so that we can give guidance and give support where needed. We obviously want the chapters to take off with things and become independent, but we're definitely here to help and infuse whatever energy or guidance you need. Caitlin said it great. I agree fully. That's why we're here, right? We know that we're acting as a little bit of a catalyst right now. We're trying to stir the pot a little bit. We understand that. But at the end of the day, it will work for you like it did in Fargo and it works in St. Louis because it's powered by people on the ground in their community who want it because they want change. Let's keep going. You guys are doing great. Great questions. So what is a chapter? A chapter is a volunteer led group of supporters. Their group is to do exactly what I just said, which is create that change and do that grassroots work. Not many people know this. CES is four people spread across three times zones. We can't know everything. We can't do everything. And every campaign I've ever worked on, I've always been amazed by how the terrain on the ground is different in every place, right? So you are the experts of where you live. I can't stress it enough. No one knows more about where you live than you, unless I live there. But that's not the case. And just like you asked, I think it was Adam. CES, that's why we're here. We're helped to organize. We're here to support the amount of worksheets that I have made in trainings that I've done the last few weeks has given me heartburn, but hopefully it makes you happy and makes your life easy. And what we want to do too is we want to put money where our mouth is. We would love, this is a fact, we would love to support a campaign in the communities that really get this going, right? That's what we're here for. And at the end of the day, there's a couple of different ways to say this, but every person is a chapter, every individual person, right? There might not be a hundred people in your neighborhood or in your community that like approval voting right now. But if you go out there and you tell people from your heart why you're supporting this and how you can make your community better, you're gonna have a group of people around you faster than you can think. So that's why I keep stressing. You might not be an official chapter yet, but everyone's a chapter and everyone's got a job to do to make sure that the outreach gets done. Again, that kickoff party, you're here. So I wish we could have done this in person with cocktails or beers by your house or milk if it was at Katelyn's house. But what does that mean? It's time to get it done. If you got a chapter, you got a bunch of folks that are ready to knock the walls down, right? So there's a couple of things you got to do. You got to do that research like we talked about. And God, are we prepared to help you do that research? We're ready. We, that's, you know, figuring out the laws of your state, the laws of your city, your county. Unfortunately, you would think it's pretty easy to know whether you can change the voting method or not. It is a whole, it is a disaster to find out. But how, and it's different city, city, state to state, county, county. So we know this process is not always the sexist process, but, you know, all the people who have changed to, you know, their community and the world, have had to do some unsexy parts. But trust me, it'll be super glamorous and great. You guys are gonna love it. And, you know, but we're there. We're there every step of the way, right? We're gonna help you do that research. And some of it's research in the law. And some of the research is just like a total column, just making lists of people to go talk to. Groups who might be interested. It's not rocket science. And that's where it really helps to get four or five people together. Because your web of people, I mean, it's awesome. Just writing it all down, mapping it all out. You'll be able to really get a full view of the community and get this really in front of the community through mostly the networks you're already a part of. And that's, you know, I made the legal research sound, you know, one way. The outreach is something, again, everybody can do, right? They just need to think about their own networks and really get out there. And again, starting is the hardest part. So again, you are here and largely the hardest part has been taken care of. Any questions so far? I'm gonna probably get them in a bit. But do we get any more questions? Yeah, there's a couple questions in the chat. One was sent accidentally privately to me, I think. So I'll read that one to you, but Colin asks, and this is a really good question right now. What traction does a campaign need to be considered for funding? 100 chapter members, 10,000 signatures, 50 local leaders, like what do we need in order to give people money for a campaign? That is an awesome question, Colin. Here's, there's a couple of criteria. We have an unofficial list and we've been talking about trying to make that more official. One is, you know, like you, and Colin keeps skipping ahead a bit. Like you, we wanna see big wins, right? We know that it matters. We want, you know, we know that when we swim for the fences, you're gonna get a couple of homeruns, right, and you saw on Fargo, we swung for it and man, do we get it, right? And I feel all my heart, you know, we're gonna go from Fargo to St. Louis and bam, we went from Fargo, 120,000 people to, you know, a city of almost 400,000 people and they have major league sports. That's normally my level for really jumping up there. So we're gonna get there. We wanna see big wins. And when you, and to that point, a big question, you'll come up whenever you do organizing is where, right? Where to go? Do I do it in my suburb or do I do it for the big city? One of the reasons we really like the big cities is they send a message to people, right? They send a message that this is serious. This is a, this is how, it's not a fluke, right? This isn't a gimmick. This is how a lot of people, a lot of people want their lives to go, to be governed by. And it fits that purpose of getting it actually in the hands of a couple of million people, which is what we're hoping to do soon, right? Getting it in the hands of people, that's how this is really gonna spread. And some of the other criteria we really look forward to are, so targeting a big city, not everyone has a big city with them, right? Well, we really like to see and what most organizations like to see is organization, right? You don't have to have 100 volunteers or this and that, but are you able, have you made those conversations in the community? Can you show some of your work? Can you show that you're organized? Can you show that people are ready to do the work, right? Work, unfortunately, that's the word that keeps coming up, but work, that's the best way for us to really see if that's viable. And then there's a question from Adam, which is kind of similar, but more related to chapters. So he says, what do I need to do first before determining whether it's appropriate to kickstart a chapter? I don't know anything about the level of support, knowledge of and where best to focus efforts in my state. It's hard for me to do outreach if I don't know specifically how it would change my local politics. Yeah, I think, so I think there's two things there. One, where do you personally start, right? And if I get that right, maybe I can see Adam, but where do you personally start and where do you, how do you know it's gonna make an impact? Did I get the right, do you think I got that right, Kellen, Adam, you guys said it. Yeah, if you want, you could just unmute Adam. He might want to clarify, but I think he's basically saying he doesn't know how much support there is in his state. He doesn't know if there are people that would be interested in this and he's not sure what impact it would have on his local politics. So how does he know if he should even try to start a chapter? Yeah, that was good, concise summary of my question. I do know in my state, we did just, they did just buy like a whole bunch of voting machines. So I'm wondering how that like changes anything. Adam, can I ask where you live? Delaware. Delaware, okay, great, love Delaware, great beaches. Yeah, so basically, what is the support network? Adam, I really hope, I hope you join the community meeting that we're gonna have. So in the community meetings, this is how it's gonna go. We're gonna go, you're gonna meet people in your area. It might be rough at first, but then we're gonna keep trying to narrow it down. And you're gonna meet people around you who are interested in this. At the same time, what is the support, right? That's what you guys, this is my job. That's what I'm supposed to do. Caitlyn, this is what we're supposed to do. As much as we love getting, doing other parts of our job, we know the bread and butter is, our job doesn't end at 5.30, right? We're saying up late to do this. So I really hope, Adam, you just joined some of our meetings, you kind of get to know people and hopefully we're gonna find people around you. And again, you are one of the best evangelists that we have, right? And again, just, we have a couple of exercises and basically worksheets, literally worksheets to help you start thinking through all of that. And again, our job is to take the fear and put it away, right? You guys can do this. If anyone's gonna get in the community, it is you. And just the fact that you're on this call and you wanna do this, shows that you have the leadership and commitment to really get this started. And it's okay if you don't know everything. I don't know everything, but we're gonna do it together. I will keep going. So what do we do next? Again, you guys are all jumping ahead of me. Attend the meetings. There will not. We will do a lot. We're gonna do a lot. We've noticed from Zoom and doing what we've done. We're gonna limit the meetings to as much, to as few as possible and to as streamlined as possible. We've heard that loud and clear. I think you're gonna like them. Join, see if it's for you. See if you like the vibe, see if you like what we're talking about. You obviously like the message. You feel passionate about changing community. But it's much easier if you don't have to do it alone. I think that's what Adam is also getting at, right? You're not alone, but we also wanna grow the group of people around you. And that was also incumbent on you, right? Recruiting other people. That's why we like this community approach because all of us have been a part of groups that started really hot and fast and then petered out in two months, three months, right? We want to keep it exciting and fun and making sure that there's an opportunity for new people to join. Again, working on the state laws. One of the funner things to do is to take a step back and say, okay, how can my community, if approval voting was presented to them, how would they react, right? And I think our natural instinct is to be like, they will react badly. But you'd be surprised. Go back through your elections in your city or ever in your county. See how many elections where they had a winner with less than 50% or less than 40% or less than 30%. St. Louis had 20 elections in five years where the winner didn't get it, did not get 50%. Eight of those, the winner had gotten 37% or less. Eight really important elections, right? And five of those, the winner had less than 30%. That's not fair to them. And it's not compared to the constituents. During that research, you'll see that type of thing goes a long way when you tell people like, people know that it's broken, but like, almost Amy said before, that's the root cause, right? We're not really making decisions by a group if 20, 30, 35% of people are the ones making the decisions on who gets elected. Again, start that outreach. This part of this exercise is to perfectly empower you to go and spread the message about approval voting, however you see fit. I like to talk about the practicality. I know a lot of people like to hear about the practicality and we have resources to help you, what to say? We have FAQ documents, outreach planning documents and worksheets and joining a team. I'm gonna talk about teams right here. So we have created, there are many, many, many exciting things you can do. So you can be a part of your community and just kind of float and absorb and learn and enjoy the company of people and see how you may be able to do it in your community. We also have, you know, cross-country communities that we're doing to help us with the work that we need to do. There are four of us and 350 Americans, including, again, not including Canadians. We have a lot of things that we need help with that we hope that spark interest. So we're gonna be, this is just a funny list of some of the things we need. People want them right grants. People are interested in reaching out to corporate funders, helping us find freebies, helping us welcome new people so they wanna stay, helping us come with super dank beams, right, working out, you know, getting the word out, a legal team. People wanna do op-eds and people who wanna help us find those broken election so we can kind of swoop in and be proactive. And we have, I have one, I have two slides left and then there'll be questions, final questions. Again, we want to support chapters to become campaigns. We, that's one of the things we help people really get across. And we are gonna start working on our end more abilities for chapters or even regions to ask for money, right? Hey, we want some lit. We wanna pass out some stuff at the meeting, you know, eventually, you know, we wanna get an advertisement. We wanna do this in this parade. That's what we want, just like you, right? And just like you were looking for big wins. So, you know, whether it's a small city, I've worked in small cities and I've worked in states, you know, district's the size of states. The work is exactly, the amount of work and pain you'll go through is very similar. So, you might as well go for the big one and it also attracts, it tends to attract more people, right? You just, you get more people who are involved in the process and cities, unfortunately, have often have very broken elections. That is it. Questions, what are the questions for you? There's a question in the chat from Christine. She says, we have a lot of retired military in our area and older people. Do you have suggestions specific to talking to those groups? Yeah, so my suggestion always is talk about why it's important to you, right? Sometimes you need a star, you know, some conversation starters, not always great, easy to just knock on someone's door and say, you know, have you heard about approval? And again, I recommend doing it in the circles that you're already in. So for example, if you're in a club or a legal and voter state, ask your leadership, ask your group, hey, can I talk about this for five minutes? Right, can I, right at the beginning? That's one way, you know, and use that kind of shared, you know, we're in this group and maybe our group, you know, voting can change, right? Groups and especially political parties, they have votes every day. I bet there's a political party right now in America that is voting right now, I bet you, 100%. That's a great way to talk about, you know, you know, cities are where, you know, a lot of this laboratory, you know, it's a laboratory of democracy, but parties are too. And I know, you know, a lot of places have multiple parties, a lot of third parties throughout the country use approval voting already at the highest levels. So use a tie-in, just use, I like to use like, you know, one little thing we have in common. And hopefully, you know, that type of thing helps it. Again, start small, right? Make a list of 20 people and groups that you're a part of, that goes 100 times easier than trying to go to the mayor immediately, right? The mayor's got to think about all kinds of things. So, and if it hasn't been brought to their attention yet, they're not gonna do it. So again, start small, it's a long process, but it grows really fast. There's also a question from Adam, and I like this question. He says, is there anything I can do directly after this meeting, training or documents I should read and send for outreach purposes? That is great. Yes, we have one document we will share in the chat. I will ask. Caitlyn doesn't know which one I'm gonna tell her, but we have a very great primer for newbies, approval voting FAQs, right? One of the best things you can do is we have a video with Mayor Blueberry, you'll like that one a lot. That is a fantastic way to teach people about approval voting. One thing we did the other day, and I think we're still doing this competition, right? That was Caitlyn, the one we started the other day, which is whoever reaches out to the most people and then what, the week, gets a prize. We actually, I realized today that we didn't put a time limit on it, which we probably should have done that. But yeah, we had a postcards and pints event on Tuesday where we kind of talked about, okay, who are some people that we can reach out to via email, Facebook message, text, whatever, and introduce them to approval voting. And so if you do that, send an email to our director of philanthropy, Kirsten, and whoever has reached out to the most people will win a free t-shirt. I'm still working on finding the FAQ document for you. I can find it and maybe we can even email it out afterwards. And also we have, we can also put up the link. Caitlyn, it's very similar, is the approval voting 101 page. Maybe that might be easier. That basically does the same thing. Yeah, we can include the link to the FAQs in the email tomorrow. Great. Yeah, that's a great document to start. We will also share, there's basically a couple trainings, right, how to make an outreach plan. One of my favorite ones that I wrote a long time ago is it shows, basically outlines everything I just spoke about, right? Which is getting how to start with you and have it grow out. We also have a couple of exercises that if you're interested in doing, let me know because I have to make it specific for where you live. But we call them power mapping exercises, which is where you find the connections between you and the most powerful people where you live or the connections you have around you and how you can start. And that's, a lot of people need that visualization, right? They need to know, they need to see, wow, we can talk to way more people than we thought. So there are a bunch of documents that we will share, a bunch of templates. If you would like to do that exercise, let me know. And I will make sure that gets out to you but I need to make it specific to where you live. There's also a question, there's a couple questions here, one from David. He says, is there a version of presenting approval voting that doesn't conflict so much with the rank choice option? I'm a little troubled that both organizations, fair vote and us, set things out that there's a seemingly the only solution. Well, yeah, you know, I hear that. Definitely we have, most of the resources on our site apply are mostly pretty agnostic to rank choice, right? What we, and I believe this and I won't say this, we are alternatives to each other, right? We are both alternatives to the status quo. We know and we are both much better alternatives to the status quo, right? The number one question I get is why don't we just pack up shop and just join the bandwagon because they're much farther ahead. You know, we believe A, there are reasons to believe and be okay with alternatives, right? The whole point of this movement is about more choices, not less choices, right? And, you know, we're a choice. For perfect example is in St. Louis, one of the things that really impacted whether you did approval voting or rank choice voting was the price and the machines, right? And, you know, and if you follow that logic that we should just pack up and go home. St. Louis gets nothing, right? Because we're not around. We are not opposites of each other, right? I think a lot of people think of us as brothers that don't get along. I disagree with that. I think for the most part, we get along with each other, especially at the high level. You know, some of our supporters tend to clash, but, you know, but our way, they seem very similar, but in reality, they are different and they offer much more pros and cons. And our biggest pro is that it's easy to understand, it's easy to do, and it doesn't cost that much money. And personally, as someone, I think Alan said something to this effect earlier, democracy doesn't have the best image right now, right? And just part of just the mechanics of rank choices, votes go in a box and they come out. And it's not always the most transparent way however that happened. And do I believe that it happens correctly? Yeah, but I think people aren't at a place where I think people are ready to accept that personally. That's my total opinion, not CES, but that's my own words is, I think it's a bad idea to put votes in a box, spit it out and say, trust us, right? I think transparency is one of the best things we have in approval voting. And that's one of the main reasons I'm here and not anywhere else. Yeah, I think that was a great question from you, David. And one thing that I'll say as well is that usually when people ask us, how come you don't advocate for RCV or what about RCV? Usually the very first thing I say is, hey, we think that RCV is definitely much better than what we have, just like Chris said. But our research has led us to a different conclusion and it's convinced us that approval voting is the best way forward. But I think also important to consider is that different communities have different needs. And so if for some reason, RCV is the best solution for a particular community and that's what they want, that's what they should do, right? So we also don't wanna come in and try to act like there's only one perfect solution and that we can just provide a panacea with approval voting. Everybody has different needs. So hopefully we can kind of move forward and people can just start to learn more about us as well, about approval voting and other methods because for most people, RCV is the only one they've ever heard of if they've heard of an alternative method. So yeah, we're just trying to work on getting our message out there as much as we can. Absolutely, that's a great question. And then I think there was another question in here. Oh yeah, Marco, he says, do you have any advice for outreach if you don't have fancy credentials? Luckily for you, Marco, I don't have fancy credentials either. So I think you don't need it. I really believe it. I think the credentials you need and I firmly believe this is that you care about your community and you're willing to talk about, you're willing to go out there and go talk about it. That's the credentials you need. Let us worry about whether it's mathematically this or that. Let us do that. We have plenty of folks who are happy to help out with that. And we'll connect you with those. But go out there and it's the first thing I learned when I was an organizer. Tell people why you're there and why you're supporting this and what you think can happen for your community. And that's all you need, right? So not to beat a dead horse, but in St. Louis, and I hope you guys get to read this, Rasheen is one of the main organizers at the St. Louis campaign. He's talking about approval. He wants approval about him because he's not getting the accountability in his city which has the number one murder rate in the country. There's nothing more powerful than that and that it's a beautiful way to... He says it in a beautiful way and to highlight a problem that's really bad, but sometimes you have to spell it out for people but I personally find that I tend to accept things more when it's not necessarily someone with a PhD. It helps, sure. But you're the expert and you're the expert in your community and just let people know that you believe that this can help. Now, again, I'll go so fast in the chat. I think it's mostly comments in the chat. Does anybody else have any questions for Chris? There's a new one. If you just want to read it, Chris. Well, I'll read it aloud for the recording. So David asks, he has one idea that he can immediately get started on. There's a small national organization. He's a member of that he just mailed out a ballot for. He happens to be good friends with the president and he'd love to call her tomorrow and pitch this idea. Aside from reading materials, how could or what else could he cite? How does he formally join this organization? That's great. Thank you, David. So the best way, I'm sure there's some sort of voting in your organization. I think that's what you were trying to say. I would approach it more as a conversation, right? I find, unless there is a problem, people aren't really interested in fixing, you know. But point out, my best advice to you again is try to find some of the other elections and see, I don't know if you knew this man, but the last five of our elections have had a winner with less than 30% of the vote, right? And maybe that's why she's having a hard time, you know, getting things accepted by the group, right? That's really, that's powerful. Show what you know about the organization and how approval voting legitimately can help. Now again, a lot of times it helps, especially within groups, like even a party, right? So again, I've spent most of my life in parties so I'll speak to that. Sometimes there's wings of the party, right? And sometimes they take from each other and it's a battle to the death, you know, to have their wing win. And it's trying to kneecap people and make sure they get out. Approval voting helps people who are similar not penalize themselves, right? That's exactly what we're seeing in St. Louis. We're seeing that where folks coming from the same community that were hurting their community by making it harder for someone in the community to get in because it was with the vote. That's the opposite of what we want as a democracy period. So again, show what you know, try to highlight any problems and try to focus on how you think more accountability, more expressiveness. That's the other great thing about approval voting. If you have many options, right? I think it breaks it all the time. They had like that. There's only options, right? They could have done approval voting and find and found what was most acceptable to all of them, right? That breaks it to a whole other thing. It didn't mean to get into that. But just know that when there are multiple options in there, they seem to be mutually exclusive. One of the best ways I think I've seen is to use approval voting to let people vote on what they would be able to live with. And then we'll take, how about two more questions. Wondering how important, I'll say this for the recording. So I'm wondering how important state's new voting machines would be in determining what could be pushed for, right? So that's a great question. Voting machines, almost all new machines in transparency can do rank choice, right? That just seems to be what the case. It is rare, so I think this person in their state, the state all got new voting machines at one time, right? So that means they're to have rank choice and I'll only speak about that because that's what I know. You need a lot more of the machines and the system to be the same, to do really big election. With approval vote, and in most states, it's a hodge podge of machines, right? It's a hodge podge, it's, you know, Arlington County does this, Fairfax does this, and the last thing, a state government or a city government wants to pay for a county government is elections. Almost always, it's the last thing that gets paid for. So, how's that good for us? We could, you know, the dumbest machines in America can do this. There's also growing movement to have much more pen, basically paper trail, right? Approved voting is very easy to audit because you don't have those rounds, you don't have the transfers, it's just the facts, right? And it's much easier. You can do great choice. And other ones with paper, I just happen to think you do approval easier with paper. You do it, show it hands if you want it, but we're not gonna move for that. So, one more, do we have any more? Yep, there's one more question from Marco. So, we'll take this and then I think we'll wrap up. So, Marco presents a scenario. Someone says basically, all you're proposing is just first pass the post plus, it's not proportional. Do you suggest going into an elevator pitch or explaining the proportional variations of approval voting? I will also let Caitlin help me on this one. But, so, in, there's a couple of parts to that. First part is the approved voting as we pitch it, more most generally, right? Not always, but most of the time. Is it, with the idea of a single winner, it's called single winner election. We do that as well because most many, many, many, many, many elections in America are single winner, right? All your mayors, all your councils. And if they're not single winner, they're blocked, right? So, in Fargo right now, if it wasn't for approval voting, they have seven candidates and you don't only be allowed to vote for two, right? I think the proportional part is above my paper. Proportional in any situation and any method, it's sticky, super fast, right? And that's just what I can tell and I'm gonna do this for a while. I think there's also a growing movement for that. Just know that, hey, we pitch for this because we know it's better than first pass the post. I'm sure, I mean, I'd be happy to hear more, Marko. I'm sure there's elections in Canada where it's just not always proportional, right? There has to be a mayor, right? There has to be a single winners sometimes, right? And so, I think most people, it happens in America too. They jump to Congress and they jump to president, right? That's the first thing people think about. I'm like, wow, let's be great if we had a president. Let's start lower first. There's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of elections throughout North America that have single winners. And there is a future of a pro-voting with proportional. I know again, Matt is sticky with everything and with a pro-voting and proportional, it's still better than plurality and proportional. Did I get that mostly right? Yeah, I think I would basically say the same thing that you said. Again, neither of us are the technical voting methods experts. If Aaron, our executive director was on here, he could talk a little bit more about the technical side of things. But as far as talking to people and messaging, I agree with Chris. I think my first response would be, yeah, a proportional system would be great and I would love to see that. But it's gonna take a lot longer to get to that type of a system. It's gonna overhaul, it requires a huge overhaul. Whereas if you're talking about approval voting for a single winner election, we can hopefully get that in place a lot more quickly and have immediate impact. And then maybe from there, we start advocating for proportional methods. There is a group in Canada, I know Marco, you know them, but just in case others don't, they're not affiliated with fair vote in the US. It's kind of confusing, but they're called Fair Vote Canada. And their main thing is advocating for proportional representation in Canada. And so maybe you suggest like, hey, this is what I wanna work on for these single winner elections. But if you're interested in proportional stuff, you can check out these people. Because as David said, we don't wanna have things be contentious. There's lots of organizations who are pushing a lot of important reforms. So we can all work together. And to one last piece of it is proportional from what I could tell, tends to need big changes, constitutional or legal changes. One of the reasons we push for approval voting is that for the many situations, I won't say all, but in a lot of situations, there is a way that approval voting can be used. So for example, sometimes they say it can only be two. So I'll use Missouri as an example. In Missouri, they say, the constitution says there has to be two people in the general election, right? So you can't just do it and they have to have over 50%. So what do we do? We went to the primary and we just made it an open primary where we, you know, St. Louis proves in an open primary, we were helping them. But we focus on an open primary where there's a top two go to the general. And we're looking at it for other states and the states to maybe hopefully help them save some of these runoff elections, which again, saves, people have to hear that, saves them money. So, and again, to what Marcus point is, we don't just focus on the states, we focus on, we do work with a lot of folks in Canada. The, you know, the United States territories, right? Puerto Rico, Guam, like we are into the Virgin Islands. Many people can use this reform. So, and, you know, don't be limited in your imagination. We can, we'll figure it out together. Well, I will put up my email again. I'll put it in the chat and I will share it with you all. This is my email. Oops, Chris, it's pretty, oh, Katelyn already did it. Chris at electionscience.org and Katelyn, please reach out to us if you have any questions. The next steps is you'll get something from our, from us about this event. If you're interested in some of those worksheets I talked to, please email me. Be on the lookout for your community meeting. And that's where we're gonna start to work on, on getting approval voting where you live. Sound good? All right, you guys have a good night. You guys have a good weekend. Stay safe. Bye-bye.