 Hi everybody, my name is Michael Rovinsky. I'm a board member with the Center for Elections Science. I read a book called Gaming the Vote about seven years ago by William Pownstone, and it changed my life. It, and only did it identify for me the frustrations that I've been having all my life with our political system. It pointed towards a real solution, and I came away from that book thinking, okay, it's approval voting. You need to do approval voting. Where can I find people who are doing approval voting? And I scoured the internet, and all I found was this tiny little nonprofit called the Center for Elections Science, which had no staff and very little funding, and so I started giving them a little bit of money and look at them now. Now they have a terrific staff. They've made some amazing progress, helping to educate people about approval voting and spread the approval voting. And now I'm on the board of directors, and now I give them lots of money, and I also try and convince other people to give them lots of money. To that end, I believe Katelyn is going to put a link in the chat. If you would like to donate to the Center for Elections Science today, we will send you a signed copy by William Pownstone of Gaming the Vote. Is that correct? Yes. All right. So there you go, and Katelyn will put that link in the chat, and maybe you'll put it again later for later people to show up. I'm going to read you William's Goodreads biography. William Pownstone is the author of more than 10 nonfiction books, including Fortune's Formula, which was the Amazon editor's pick for number one nonfiction book of 2005. Pownstone has written for The New York Times, Psychology Today, Esquire, Harper's, The Economist, and Harvard Business Review. He has appeared on The Today Show, The David Letterman Show, and hundreds of radio talk shows throughout the world. Pownstone studied physics at MIT, and many of his ideas concerned the social and financial impact of scientific ideas. His books have sold over half a million copies worldwide. William Pownstone, welcome to the show. Yes, good to be with you. How's your quarantine going? Pretty good. I mean, being a writer, you normally work at home, so I'm probably affected less than almost anyone in Los Angeles. Are you, are you, how many people are in your household at the moment? Just two. Just two, okay. Sam. It's manageable. Okay, good. Gaming the Vote was written in 2008. This was the book that started all this. For me, I'm not aware of any other books that are as clear and entertaining and accessible. Why do you think there aren't hundreds of people writing about this? Because it seems like sort of the most fundamental problem that I can think of with our country. No, I absolutely agree, and I think I'm as mystified as you are about that. I began in my reading hearing about the impossibility theorem of Kenneth Arrow, which is basically this mathematical result that says to give you a super simplified explanation that basically no voting system within a large class of voting systems is entirely fair. And when I agreed about that, I thought, well, gee, this is this is an incredible result. It's something that's very well known, of course, to certain scholars, but it's really something that the whole public should know about. And I looked for other books that went into this and there were some very technical ones, but there really wasn't a good, you know, accessible book about it. So that's how I realized that this is really something that people should be talking about. And I tried to start that conversation with Gaming the Vote. Did you have, did you notice anybody pick it up? Pick up the conversation? Yeah. Well, lots of people. I mean, I get lots of emails, letters from people who have read it and saying that this is, you know, as you say, some of them even say it changed their lives. So it's always kind of gratifying to hear that. Great. If you were to, if you were to, like, has anything changed in the last 12 years? If you were to write it again, is there anything you would add or leave out or change? Well, just that I think it's become even more relevant. If you look particularly at not just this year's primary campaign with the Democrats, but four years ago with the Republicans, you have these huge fields of candidates. And in a situation where you've got many candidates of overlapping support, that's really where our standard pick one voting system completely breaks down. For that, you really need a better, more informative voting system. And I kind of suspect that primaries like we're seeing have become the new normal. So we really do need to think about how we're going to deal with that going forward. Is this, are these, it's hard to say sort of year to year, but it seems like the Republican primary last in 2016 and the Democratic primary in 2020 were both unusually large fields. Do you, are you aware of many other examples of that and primaries in the past? Well, it has happened in the past, but just sporadically. I suspect we've entered an era where there's so many incentives for people to run for office. I mean, we've kind of got an intersection of celebrity and presidential politics. You've got people like Trump in 2016. And this year, Andrew Yang, Boody Edge, I mean, he had some political office experience, but not much. Marianne Williamson, Mike Bloomberg, you had a lot of people who were not standard politicians who figured I'm going to get into this race. And they weren't necessarily planning to win, but they kind of were planning to get famous and figured there's some way you can leverage that fame, maybe get attention to certain causes that are important to you. And I think that's a good thing in a way, but it is something that I think we're going to be seeing more of going forward for whatever party doesn't have an incumbent. So I think it's especially important for the parties even to have a sensible voting system that's able to deal with that. You have all these, as you say, sort of celebrity or non-politician people running and using plurality voting, our current system, we don't actually get a measure of how much support their ideas have. They're in it to sort of bring their ideas to the table as opposed to win. There's no way of knowing really how much influence they actually have because we don't actually have a measure of how many people support them because people aren't allowed to support more than one person. Yeah. Maybe I would like to show that graph from the CES straw poll of Democratic voters. Yeah, yeah. Let's see if we can figure this out. Okay, there I've got it. Is this the two polls that CES did during the primary this year? Yeah. Okay, can you see this? Yes. Yeah, this was a poll of likely Democratic primary voters. And it not only shows the appeal of the particular candidates at one snapshot in time, but the more interesting thing is that it compares three different ways of voting for those voters. And they are, the red bars represent choose one voting or the plurality vote that we use now. And of course, all our standard polls use just that. The blue bars represent ranked choice voting where you rank the candidates. And the green bars represent approval voting, where you can vote for as many candidates as you feel would justify your vote. And I found this really interesting for several reasons. One is that you find that Bernie Sanders actually did the best by all three voting systems, which is something that I think surprised a lot of people. And you also find that he got 60% approval among Democratic voters. That means a majority of likely Democratic primary voters were saying that, yeah, they could at least live with Bernie Sanders and were willing to give him a thumbs up. Whereas only 40% maybe would have picked him as their first choice. So he definitely does have an appeal beyond what you might call his base. The other thing that strikes me is that Elizabeth Warren did almost as good in approval voting, but much worse than Sanders if he used the choose one system. Now, there was definitely, yes, there was definitely a lot of vote splitting between Sanders and Warren because they were the two most progressive candidates. And that tends to hurt both of them, particularly in the plurality voting. But with approval voting, I mean, if you think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you know, both have good ideas and the others are corporate shills or whatever. I mean, you can indicate that very clearly on your ballot. And here we find that Warren has nearly as much approval as Sanders. And I think that's significant for one thing because again, this is just a snapshot at one moment in time. But in reality, we know that there is a bandwagon fact. And if a candidate seems to be viable as demonstrated by polls, that candidate gets a lot more media attention. And if you get more attention, you tend to get more people deciding that, you know, I like that candidate, I'm going to vote for him. So if we had been using approval voting, it's possible that Elizabeth Warren would have done a lot better than she did. For me, what's really surprising in this one is Joe Biden. You'll notice that in approval, he actually comes in fourth behind Pete Buttigieg, in fact. So I think this says something that we all kind of feel in our bones, that there is a certain enthusiasm deficit for Joe Biden. Because in this case, two thirds are actually, I guess, yeah, about two thirds of these likely voters, we're essentially saying that, you know, if I could pick several candidates that I'd be happy with, I wouldn't make Joe Biden as one of them. And that's kind of amazing given that he has now become the presumptive front runner. So this tells us a lot we didn't necessarily know. Another thing that I think it's important to keep in mind about approval voting is that a voting system is not just about determining the winner. It's also a way of gauging the public temperature, the electorate's temperature, and what they feel about different candidates, different programs, different ideas. And you can do that very easily. And for instance, Amy Klobuchar got 28% approval, which is something you would never guess from the fact that she only got about 3% in the plurality vote. So I think that indicates that she really did strike a chord with a lot of people. And I think that says something about what she supports about maybe her future viability in coming elections. So we can learn a lot from approval voting that we don't learn from just the standard plurality voting. Have you heard of the, you know, you must know about the Fall River mayoral election last year in Fall River, Massachusetts, there was a recall election for the mayor who was arrested for fraud, I believe. And so they held an election to kick him out to recall him. And in the election, there were two questions. The first question was, should we recall the mayor? Should we kick him out? And the second question was, if we kick the mayor out, who do we replace him with? And in that race, there were five candidates running, one of whom inexplicably was the mayor. So what happened was, in the first question, should we recall the mayor? Two thirds of the citizens voted to kick the mayor out. One third voted to keep the mayor. So the mayor was recalled. In the second election, the one third that voted to keep the mayor voted for the mayor. And the other two thirds had their votes split amongst the other four candidates. So the mayor was simultaneously recalled and then reelected. This is currently my favorite example of vote splitting. I think it's a brilliant example. You have many in gaming the votes. Do you have a favorite either from giving the vote or more recent? Well, I think the one I also introduced people on this topic is the 2000 presidential election, where you had Al Gore versus George W. Bush. And it was a very close election. And Gore lost by, I think, 537 votes in the state of Florida. If he had gotten just 538 more votes in Florida, he would have been the 43rd president. But as it happens, there was this very progressive third party candidate, Ralph Nader. And he got, I think it was 97,000 votes just in the state of Florida. And it's natural to assume that a lot of those votes would have gone to Gore. Now, you can say that third party voters are a different breed. And a lot of those Nader voters, if they hadn't had a chance to vote for Nader, maybe they just would have stayed home. And I think that's true for some of them. But what's interesting is that they did do modern exit polls in that election. And they asked the Nader voters, you know, if you were not able to vote for Nader, it had to choose between Bush and Gore, which would you choose? And about 45% of them chose Gore. Only about 25% said that they would have stayed home. The others would have voted for Bush or for other third party candidates. But using that information, you can show that Gore would have won the state of Florida by 20,000 votes if the Nader voters had been allowed to indicate that, yeah, we like Nader, but we also prefer Gore. So that's a classic example of how a very recent election was switched because of this vote splitting effect. And in the book, I look at the history of elections since 1828, when they basically started using the modern rules and found that five of those elections were determined by a spoiler candidate and went to the less popular of the two major candidates. So that's a pretty catastrophic failure. The example I always give, I mean, you wouldn't get on an airplane if there was a 10% chance it was going to crash. But that's essentially what we have with our presidential voting system. So I think that should be good motivation for us to look into other alternatives. It's like there is a serious design for law with the fundamental mechanism of our democracy. And again, you can't blame the nation's founders. I mean, they did not have a science of voting back then. It's really a 20th century thing. So I think it's something where we want to improve our society. And this is a very obvious way to do it. And as you say, I really can't think of any simple change we could make in our society that would have a more positive effect for everyone, regardless of party, regardless of whatever, than to get a more sensible voting system such as approval voting. Well said. I used to work for a non-profit that tracked money and politics. And one of the things I often say when I'm talking to my wife about approval voting is that approval voting would reduce the power of money and politics. And she always says, how? And I always say, well, because you will have more candidates running and more alternative views and alternative people that aren't steeped in money and people will be able to show support for them, et cetera. And she says, yeah, well, but the people with the most money are still going to get the most support. And I'm like, no they won't. And she's like, yeah, I'm not convinced. And no matter what I say, I can't convince her. And my wife is very smart. She is a scientist. She has a PhD from Stanford. William Poundstone, you studied physics at MIT. What should I say to my wife? Well, actually, I hate to say it, but I kind of agree with your wife. I think we do need campaign finance laws that would change how much you can spend in that. This is actually another great interest of mine because when I was seven years old, I ran for president of the second grade. And this was in a small town in West Virginia. And the way we had these elections, everyone was given a jar and you were supposed to go around and collect pennies and nickels from the other kids. And basically every penny was a vote. And the one who collected the most pennies won the election. It worked so hard to collect those pennies. But the other guy who was running his father at the last moment put a $20 bill in his jar. And in a coal mining town in West Virginia in the 1960s, that was a lot of money. So obviously he won the election. And I think that was actually the first thing that set me on this train of thought about what does it mean to have a fair election and what can we do about it? Who got the money? Excuse me? Who got the money? It went to the school, I think. But I think, again, you really do need campaign finance reform if you want to take some of the power of money out of elections. Sure. Okay, fine. Okay, fine. Moving on. You'll have to make your own arguments to your wife. I'm stuck. You seem to be interested in how things work that people don't know about. I have a Goodreads list that I call Things You Should Know. And it's a very short list of books. And it's the books that sort of have really opened my eyes about something that I hadn't known about that I think that everybody probably doesn't know about and should know. And it would really change the way we think about the world. What would be on your Goodreads list of things that people mostly don't know and ought to know and would change the way that they look at them? That's a good question. Again, I wrote a book called Fortune's Formula about the whole idea of risk in investments and business and that there is this real trade-off where you have to realize that you can easily take too much risk. And even if you're making good gambles, even if you're a very smart business person, if you spend too much money on these various gambles, even if they're very favorable, you're eventually going to go broke. And this is something that's well known to gamblers, but it's not really known on Wall Street so much. It's not really known in the business world so much. So that's something, it actually goes by the name of the Kelly criterion. And it was devised by a Bell Labs scientist, John Kelly, who was very interested in gambling and in a lot of other interesting things. And it's become a very important thing in the financial industry, but it's still something that very few people know about. And I think it has a lot of implications in real life. You've really got to, I mean, people think we're so smart, we can predict what's going to happen, we can hedge our bets, but it's really a lot harder than you think for mathematical reasons, even if you are very good at predicting these things. So does that mean that there's too much confidence on Wall Street? Like in a sense that things can go wrong? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's been well established psychologically. There's a famous study where they asked people to rate their skills as a driver. And like 80% of the people said that they were better than average as a driver, which obviously is impossible. Another thing I'd mention is the Nunning Kruger effect, which I've written about several times, which is the idea that if you're really ignorant about some particular field of expertise, you think that it's much easier to have good opinions and make predictions in that field than it actually is. And it's easy to come up with many examples today when we've got all these people making dumb decisions. But I think the big message is, I mean, it's not just those stupid people, it's all of us really, because I may be smart in certain areas, but I'm dumb in most other areas. And if I don't realize that, I'm just as susceptible to it as anyone. Do you think that's sort of a constant down through history that people are always going to overestimate themselves? Or do you think that we can learn as a society and start teaching ourselves to be more cautious, let's say? Well, that's a good question. I mean, it is a well established, I mean, there have been many studies on this Nunning Kruger effect, and they found it in all sorts of fields. So I think it is part of human nature. But again, once you realize some effect exists, I mean, it probably is good to be forewarned and forearmed. So maybe we do have some power to make use of that information. We can learn that. Yeah. But again, I'm sure most people out there don't know about it and aren't trying to make this correction. So again, this should maybe be on your list of things that you should know about. Excellent. Your latest book is the Doomsday Calculation. Yeah. Does it have anything to do with a worldwide pandemic? Yeah, to a degree. Of course, the research was done before that. But it's basically on the I went and interviewed all these fantastically interesting scholars who are basically studying the end of the world, like what could cause it? It could be a pandemic. It could be artificial intelligence taking over. It could be a big nuclear war, whatever. And I met a lot of really interesting people there, one of which was Nick Boster, who's a really genius guy at Oxford, who spends his whole career basically studying the end of the world and what we can do to prevent human extinction. And I was told when I met him, he's not going to wash your hands or he's not going to shake your hand because he's crazy about germs. So don't be offended. Well, I met him and he did shake my hand. But then immediately after, he got one of the larger containers of hand sanitizer I've ever seen and put about half of it on his hands. And of course, washed them. At the time, I thought, Oh, perky geniuses are quirky. But now I realize how out of the curvy is. And one of the things that he and other scholars like that are dealing with is the whole idea of how can we even set a probability for a one time event like the end of the world? And you might think, Well, we've had pandemics before there was the Spanish flu. There are records of pandemics in ancient China, ancient Mesopotamia. And none of them killed us yet. So you might think since we have all this thousands of years of experience, that we should be in good shape. But there's another way of looking at that that's really kind of interesting and even chilling. And it's suppose we're trying to evaluate the bubonic plague in the 13th century. And of course, there weren't any statistics back then. So you have to go back and look at people's memoirs and letters explaining their own experiences with the plague. And what you find is that, you know, the bubonic plague hit you really quickly. It wasn't like the coronavirus. So basically, you wouldn't have a chance to write about your experience unless you survived it. So we've got accounts of people talking about their experience with it, and they all have happy endings because these are the people who survived it. If you died, you didn't write that memoir. Yes. So you really can't get any statistical account of the probability of dying from the plague from these first person accounts. And the concern is that when we look back at the human race itself, and all the, you know, the tragedies we've come through, it might seem that our history is a series of close calls. We didn't die from the bubonic plague. We didn't die from the Cuban missile crisis. An asteroid like the one that took out the dinosaurs didn't kill us. So you might think that's really good. But when you think about it, we wouldn't be here having this Zoom conversation in the 21st century if the human race had been killed off in the 13th century. So we're really not in statistical condition to evaluate that. You really have to use other, you know, theory or analysis to really even begin to put a probability on human extinction. So that's what people like Nick Bostrom and many, many others are trying to do. And I think that's a really fascinating thing. And it's probably really hard even to get people to be interested in actually knowing the real answer to the question, how likely are we to become extinct since we have a vested interest in survival and we would hope for the positive spin or whatever of the story. But I have found that it does get people's attention and they're often very surprised that you can't, you know, put these very simple probability estimates in there. I want to go back to the 2020 election for a minute and see if there's other stuff that we can talk about there. Do you, do you have any thoughts on what you think will happen in this year in the future for the, for the election going forward? Well, I think that it looks like it's going to be Biden versus Trump. And, you know, we can, we can look at the polls, but it's very hard to call at this point. And again, it's probably going to come down to a few states in the Electoral College. So I would be very hesitant to predict much of anything. It's sort of a, as usual, it's sort of a crapshoot. I mean, it doesn't look like there's going to be a big third party vote this year, but you know, you never know. One of the things that happened this year was, well, it happens every time there's a primary, which is that we vote sort of in sequence, certain states vote in the primary and others vote in the primary and others vote in the primary. And in California, we had a bit of a uproar from a lot of people when people cast their votes early and then a number of people dropped out right before the election. So the people that voted for those people felt that their vote got wasted. Yeah. What do you think? I had not quite that experience, but almost. This year, California had early voting. So you could vote, I think, three weeks or something before the election. They had actual polling places. You would go to them to cast your early vote. Well, I thought I was being so smart. I figured, you know, I'll be the crowds. I was even aware that there was this virus in China. So maybe you didn't want to be on all these crowds on Super Tuesday. So I voted early. Now, at the time I voted, though, it was believed that the race was down to Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg. There was even a narrative that maybe Mike Bloomberg was going to take it away. Now, I wasn't crazy about either. So reluctantly, I decided to vote for Elizabeth Warren. And I basically had two reasons. One is that I really thought she was the smartest, best prepared candidate, even though I disagreed with some of her policies and I respected that. And the other thing I thought it would be great to have a woman president. So I voted for that. But of course, by the time Super Tuesday actually came around, it was a whole new ballgame. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar had dropped out and endorsed Biden. So by that point, Bloomberg was basically irrelevant. He was down to Biden and Sanders. And if I'd been voting at that point, I mean, I'm not crazy about either of them. But I don't think Biden has some of the negatives that kind of annoyed me about Bloomberg. Because I didn't like the idea that he was kind of buying the election. So had I been voting on Super Tuesday, I probably would have gone with Bernie Sanders. So in that sense, I have made myself a memo to myself or my future self, not to vote early, at least not in a crowded primary. Do you really think that's the problem, though, that you voted early? It sort of seems like it's always going to be frustrating. Do you foresee a future where we can cast our votes and trust and feel happy about that we've actually expressed what we wanted to express without having to go through all these machinations of like, who's more likely to win? And I only have one vote to give, so I've got to vote strategically. Seems like a lot of effort. Yeah, with approval voting, I mean, you can indicate here are the set of candidates I'm happy with, here are the set that I aren't. So you don't have to strategize in the same way that you do with this series of primary vote contests. How did you get into writing? Well, even as a kid, I always wanted to be a writer. And I guess my parents didn't really know enough about the writing business to discourage me. So I went to college, started doing freelance work in magazines, actually, wrote for a lot of those airline and flight magazines and so forth. And I sold my first book in 1983 and it did pretty well and I've been writing books ever since. So I feel very fortunate and I get to work out of my home. So I'm not as stir crazy as most people these days. What, how do you know what your next book is going to be? What, what, how do you, how do you find the next thing that you want to write about? You know, I think it's, yeah, I think with almost any writer, you write what you're passionate about. But as you mentioned, I do tend to like stories about scientific ideas that have these very broad cultural implications. And I sort of have an informal rule that the best way to find a topic for a popular science book is to find a topic on which very smart people disagree. Because if they do disagree, first of all, you've got conflict, which you need to have much of a story. But secondly, smart people don't usually disagree on tribals. I mean, sometimes they do, but usually they don't. So usually there's a really interesting controversy there. And it's a good context for talking about something that's really very important. And certainly there's few things that illustrate that better than the science of voting, where you've got all this huge controversy among the scholars, among the public activists. So that's really why I wanted to write Game of the Vote to try to make sense of it, sort of tell the story of how I was learning about all this interesting stuff, talking to these different people, and basically coming to a conclusion. Fantastic. I think we could open it up for some questions. How would be the best way to do this? I have not been watching the chat. There's a whole lot of the chat. Yeah, there's a lot in the chat. Would you like to pick some things to read or people to call on? You can also raise your hand, I believe. People can raise their hand. I think you can raise your hand. If you click on the manage of the participants icon, you'll see a list of everybody. And I think you can, there's maybe a button to raise your hand next to your name. Yep, I see. First in line is Jane Silva. Okay. Jane, do you want to go ahead and ask your question? I have on me, did you? Hi. I found this Zoom meeting on Facebook. And my husband, we live in San Diego. And my husband and I, we went to a two-day conference for a ranked choice voting up in Berkeley area. And so, ranked choice voting was our first experience with different types of voting. And I'm seeing on the chat that this group is more for the approval voting. And so, if I was interested in trying to get local, our city that we live in to get started with like city council, school board meeting, school board member, races and things like that, I should pursue approval voting instead or something. Well, ranked choice voting is an approval voting. Both I think are better than the system we've got currently. And if you have an election like the type of presidential elections we're used to, where you've got two main parties, two main candidates who are the only credible winners, but maybe you've got a spoiler, a third party candidate like a Ralph Nader. In that particular situation, I think both approval voting and ranked choice voting are both about equally good. I think approval voting, though, is much better in a situation where you've got at least three major credible candidates or a situation like these crowded primaries we've been having, where you might have a dozen candidates. The advantage of approval voting is that it's really much simpler in terms of how you fill out the ballot and how you count the votes. You can vote for as many candidates as you basically think you want to help, as many as you think are worthy of that office. With ranked choice voting, of course, you rank them the first place choice, second, third and so forth. But there is one way in which that complication is really a disadvantage, I think, and that's when you're trying to tally the votes. Now in ranked choice voting, the way it works, you take the candidate who has the lowest number of first place votes and you eliminate that candidate. All of her votes are basically redistributed to whatever candidate was marked number two on the ballot. And usually there's several cycles of redistribution. For instance, in that straw pool I talked about with the Democratic challengers, I think it took seven cycles of redistribution to get Sanders as the winner, which is really a lot. And you have the situation where whether Sanders or Biden wins could literally depend on how Tulsi Gabbard's voters, who they rated number two on their ballot. So it is kind of counterintuitive there. Another concern I have, of course, with approval voting, you just count the votes and the one with the most votes wins. So it's very simple, you would be able to have the results on election night. But with approval voting, because it is with rather with ranked choice voting, which is chaotic in the mathematical sense, that a very small change can lead to a very small change in the number of votes can lead to a very big change in terms of who's the winner and by what margin. You would have a situation where you really couldn't do the algorithm for redistributing the votes until every last precinct had counted the votes, until every mailed in and absentee ballot was in. So you would have situations where you might not have a final call for weeks or for weeks, really. It could be like the Iowa caucuses were this year, which although they're not quite ranked choice voting, they're somewhat similar to that. So I'm just concerned with ranked choice voting, you would not generally be able to get the results as quickly as you might in other situations, at least when it's a complicated multi candidate election. Then I know there's other people with questions, but one advantage of the ranked choice is that the candidates wouldn't attack each other as much, because they could be, they want to be higher up on the ranking. Well, you say that you hear the same thing said for approval voting. It's more about building a constituency. If you're Elizabeth Warren, you're not going to attack Bernie Sanders in part because you want the Bernie Sanders people to also review. And I think with both systems, you get an element of that. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks, Jane. Who's next? Okay, it looks like we've got Roshan. It's the next one with raised hand. Roshan, you can go ahead. I think I unmuted you. Oh, maybe not. There we go. Yeah, so the the issue I've noticed is that that from that from when I watch independent media, they have shown how how these elections have been rigged in many states, where Bernie Sanders and not Joe Biden is the actual winner. And I just wonder how we're going to make sure that those votes get counted fairly in all these states so that we actually have a vote fully of the people and that Bernie is the Democratic nominee. And if he's not that that that I'll be able to vote Green Party and that the Green Party candidate can win. Well, I think it's important to have at least at the current state of the art, we really do need a paper trail. I mean, it's nice in principle to have, you know, voting by electronic or whatever. But I think unless you have those paper ballots and can do recounts, there's always going to be questions, particularly today, where we've got social media, and, you know, there's a lot of sore losers. There's a lot of people, you know, who have conspiracy theories, and you really want to make sure you can prove to everyone in a simple way that in this election, here's the ballots, and this is the candidate that should have won. One of the things I'm concerned about with right choice voting is because it is so complicated. I mean, you in a primary case, you would even have to have diagrams in the media showing the redistributions of ballots to convince them that so and so is the proper winner here. With approval voting, it's a lot simpler because you just count the number of votes and the one who has the most votes win. But again, you make a very good point. With any sort of voting system, it's absolutely important that the people that the people are counting the votes are honest and you have checkers from all the various parties or candidates. Yeah, I think we do need that the counting should be public. Voting is a private thing, but the counting is public should be public. Well, I mean, they don't literally let everyone in, but they generally do have people from both parties or in the case of primaries, people who are supporters of the various candidates looking on. Yeah, and also the secretary, I would also say that the secretary of state should be someone independent of either party. Well, that's an interesting idea. Presently, I mean, he's appointed by the president. But no, what I mean is for the different states, like because if you look what happened with Georgia, he was running for governor and he was in charge of the elections. And even in California, he was in favor of a presidential candidate. And if someone's neutral, then we have the votes counted regardless of who, regardless. Yes, absolutely. You have to avoid that kind of blatant conflict of interest, I agree. All right. Sorry, Roshan. I know you've got lots of questions. Well, we have more participants with their hands raised. So let's go on to David Rosenberg. Let me just unmute you real quick. All right, you're on, David. Thanks. There's lots and lots to talk about voting. So I'll just make a few points. I hope one is that the ranked choice voting people are actually bundling together two separate ideas, a preferential ballot, which I think is a very reasonable idea. And instant runoff, which I think is a very bad way of determining the winner preferential ballots can be used to determine a winner by a number of other methods. Condorcet, for example, two things that I think are wrong with instant runoff are one that instant runoff can select the winner, even though a majority of the voters prefer a different candidate in that election. And secondly, that by voting for the person by ranking as first, the candidate that you actually prefer, you can be helping the candidate that you like least beat the candidate that you put in second place. I think those are major defects and I'd be interested in William talking about what he sees as the pros and cons of IRV versus approval and also of score versus approval. Thank you. Yes, we make some great points. This partly gets into errors and possibility theorem, which basically applies to any sort of ranked ballot. And it says that whatever sort of ranked ballot system you use, there are going to be paradoxes, situations where, as you say, you can rank someone, your number one choice, and that can actually make them decrease the chance that that person is going to win. So there are these extreme cases where you could really get into a very counterintuitive result. But I wouldn't place too much emphasis on that. I think the simplest way to explain my problem with rank choice voting is that basically it's chaotic. Again, I'm not making a value judgment. It's chaotic in the mathematical sense of chaos theory. Just a small change in your ballot, like ranking someone number one instead of number two, could in certain cases tip the election to the person that you didn't really want. So that's what you obviously want to avoid at all cost. And compared to that, approval voting is much more even keel. Now, you also make an interesting point that there are other ways of using a ranked ballot. There's a Condorcet ballot. There's what's called a board account. Both of those go back to the French Revolution or the French Enlightenment. And they were probably influential, or at least probably the nation's founders were aware of them because they were very into the French ideas on democracy. But Condorcet and Borda also have their problems too. And it really comes down to that impossibility theorem. Anytime you use a ranked ballot, as opposed to giving someone essentially a score, you do have these paradoxes. So I actually think that rank choice voting, as is now being promoted, is probably better than certainly the board account or the Condorcet ballot. But I don't think it's nearly as good as approval voting. You also mentioned another thing which is known as score or range voting. Now, this is a voting that's very closely related to the approval ballot, in which instead of just giving each candidate a thumbs up or a thumbs down, you essentially give them a grade, like it could be a report card and you could give them an A, B, C, D or E, depending on how much you like them. Now, this collects more information and you can use it in much the same way as you do with approval voting. But the thing is, it is a little more complicated. And at the time I vote gaming the vote, actually, at that point, you can make a mathematical case that range voting is probably the best way to vote with approval voting almost as good. But since then, I've pretty much come to the conclusion, and most people in the field have, too, that really the added complexity of range voting probably isn't worth the small advantage you get. It's a big selling point as far as I'm concerned, that you just, you know, mark the candidates you approve of and whoever gets the most votes wins. It's much easier to explain that to people. It's much easier to convince them that that is a fair system of voting. So I tend to prefer that now to range, even though in a mathematical sense, you can say that score or range voting really does have a lot to say for it. I guess I just want to comment quickly that controversy does not suffer from either of the two problems that I mentioned with IRV. That is, it doesn't have the problem that somebody can win, even though a majority of the voters prefer to different candidates. And it doesn't have the problem that ranking your most preferred candidate first will help your least preferred candidate beat your second choice. Yes, but it does have another disadvantage that there isn't always a condor-safe winner. You could have a situation where Bernie Sanders beats Joe Biden, Joe Biden beats Amy Klobuchar, and Amy Klobuchar beats Bernie Sanders. In that case, you wouldn't be able to say who's the winner is. So that's probably a rare thing, but that's one thing that's possible with the condor-safe system. Thanks so much, David. We've got some more people in line. It looks like next is star voting team. I just unmuted you. Hi, I'm Annie. I just have found that oftentimes when I'm talking with people who are in a third party or that are independent, that they're frustrated with the two-party dominance, and they're frustrated that their views aren't being heard. So I try to convince them that, you know, the majority voting is the reason for that, that other voices outside the two major parties can't be heard very well. And I just get a lot of pushback from people saying, no, the problem is just we need open primaries or we need this or that. I'm just wondering if you have any advice how do you talk to independents in third party people and convince them that this is the problem that's making it so we always have these two dominant parties? Yeah, well, I mean, there's even a term for that, duverger's law, which basically says when you do have a plurality vote, there's a strong incentive to have two major parties because you don't want to have this vote splitting. But if you had approval voting, you really wouldn't have to worry about that. And there would be much more encouragement for people to have third parties and also to measure the appeal of those third parties. Nowadays, if you run on the third party and even if you don't expect to win, no one's going to want to vote for you because they're going to figure they're taking votes away from the more acceptable of the two major parties. But if you had approval voting, you could vote for that third party, as well as for one of the more acceptable of the major party candidates. So I think that's a big case in favor of having approval voting, particularly for the people who support these third party candidates. And even for those who would like to see maybe our party system to be a little more fluid, to make it easier for someone to start a new party and maybe someday to replace one of the major parties. Thank you so much, star voting. Oh, your name was Annie, you said. All right. Next person in line is Mahindra. I just unmuted you, Mahindra. Are you there? He's not unmuted yet. There we go. Can we hear you, Mahindra? Maybe not. All right. Well, we'll come back to you if you raise your hand again. Um, actually, there was an interesting question in the chat earlier that I just want to point out real quick. Um, from Lorx this, he says he or she, sorry, say, um, that they're curious to know as to just how bad Mr. Poundstone thinks the effects of voter suppression and gerrymandering are on taking the temperature of the electorate. What do you think of that, Bill? Well, obviously they're huge. I don't know that they make that much difference in polls, which do play a role in our system, but obviously in the actual vote itself, I mean gerrymandering and voter suppression are huge things. I mean, the voting system is an important thing that is the foundation of everything we're going to do. But if you have a gerrymandered system where a certain party can basically vote itself in so it's guaranteed to have certain seeds, you're going to have a problem there. So I think you have to look at approval voting in the context of many other things we'd like to do. I mean, personally, I wish we could get rid of the electoral college, but that's probably not going to happen since it would take a, you know, a constitutional amendment. You have to be approved by all these small states that actually, you know, do have a lot of power in the current system. One of the things I like about approval voting is that it's a reform that you really can do. It doesn't take a constitutional amendment. You can use the same voting machines in many cases that they're using right now. It's really a very legally doable thing. And I think it should be high on everyone's agenda. But again, definitely you don't want voter suppression. You don't want gerrymandering and all those other bad things. All right. Thank you. It looks like next we've got Vio Rocketer. Sorry if that's not the correct pronunciation, but I've unmuted you. Can you hear me? Yep, we hear you. Okay. Yeah. So one of my questions is about the partisan breakdown of approval voting. I'm an election official. And also an elected official. And when I sit there and when I talk about other forms of election reform, I see that there's, you know, a Republican leaning constituents are against it. So, and they don't want that is have y'all done these studies about how likely independence Republicans, Democrats, or Democrat leading people are going to be for against it. Is there a chance that I would be able to go ahead and convince people to do that? Or has it already been sullied in? Well, I'm in a red district. So has it already been sullied in their minds? Well, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer it. Maybe some of the other CAS people might know more about this than me. My impression is this, you tend to get a lot of young people interested in voting reform. And they probably tend to be a little more Democrat than older people. But again, this is really a totally nonpartisan report. And if people in a certain party think that it wouldn't be in their favor, I think that it's important to counter that. Because the whole point of the science of voting is to find something that really is fair, and can be demonstrated as fair to really everyone, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. So I think if people do believe that, that they're wrong, and you should definitely try to counter that. Now, I have noticed this effect, that I have spoken to people who have said it's hard to get politicians really fired up about this. And they suspect it's because if you've been elected to office under the present system, you figure, okay, I'm not going to rock the boat. It got me in. I don't know what the effect of this would be. So I'm going to be fine with the status quo. So I think there is that to a degree, at least with elected officials. But again, does anyone at CES have any statistics on partisan breakdown? Sure. So when we did the campaign in Fargo, we had done a poll leading up to it because we don't want to spend much money in a ballot initiative and have it lose. So one of the things we asked was a partisanship breakdown. And when we did that, we didn't notice anything significant between the groups, whether people identified as being more conservative or more liberal. But as a caveat, when we're taking these, we don't take enormous samples because we want to be cost efficient and just being able to ask the question of how likely this ballot issue is to pass. And so when we break it down into subgroups, we lose some of the power to be able to say, okay, well, this group really is different than this other group. But with the ability that we had with the sample that we had, we didn't see any major differences. And I think you're going to see this a lot in terms of whether a group is in favor of it or not. As long as you're going to be whether they see themselves being able to benefit from it. And we also tend to focus on say like someone from a libertarian perspective saying or on the green perspective and saying, well, you're maybe a bit out there in terms of what the mainstream is. But if by having approval voting, you're at least going to be able to get that much more accurate gauge of support. So your ideas get out there in a way that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. Another quick point to make is that we're currently working on a ballot initiative in St. Louis. And we did similar polling there in the fall in the fall. And we saw strong support for approval voting across all kinds of different demographics, including party affiliation. So Democrats, Republicans and independence. I can't think of the, I don't know the statistics off the top of my head. I could pull the link for you go and send that to you. And then she asked if there's another way to implement it without ballot initiatives. I can let Erin answer this, but I mean, the main reason that we're going for ballot initiatives is because of exactly what Bill said. We don't have to ask the elected officials who kind of already have a stake in in the way our election system is currently set up. So with ballot initiatives, you can take it to the people and get the support there. But if a city council or other legislature wants to pass it, they can go through their normal channels, the legislative channels. But yeah, Erin or Bill, if you guys have additional thoughts there. Yeah, well, I mean, as they say, politics is the art of the possible. And approval voting is something that is really possible right now. So that's why I think it's so exciting that you're doing this. Awesome. Thank you, Bill. Since Mahindra wasn't lined, and he wasn't able to get his audio to work, he's he's sent us a question in the chat. So he says, first, he'd like to thank Mr. Poundstone for his book, Flight Gaming the Vote, his book on saving money hacks that saved him a lot of money on Amazon. But he's a PhD candidate in political science at Berkeley, and most of his research is on approval voting. He says, if you look at the hypothetical, oh, at the political philosophy literature on majority rule, there are generally five arguments for majority rule on two alternatives. Maze theorem, Condorcet's jury theorem, and the Ray Taylor theorem, and Black's median voter theorem, and consent maximization. What most of the literature agrees on is that, sorry, Mahindra, I didn't realize how long your comment was. What most of the literature agrees on is that generalizing these arguments to multiple alternatives is difficult due to Condorcet's paradox. In Mahindra's research, he has taken each of these five arguments and generalized them to multiple alternatives with approval voting. Sorry, Mahindra, it looks like your comment kind of cuts off. I'm not sure if there's a question in here. Okay, he says, essentially, he's having a lot of difficulty conveying his ideas to everyday people because it's so complex, and he asks what suggestions you would have. Well, I think it helps to tell a story. If you can find an actual real-world election that illustrates some of the problems you're talking about, it's much easier to get people to relate to that. I think that's an excellent tip. Alright, let's move on to the next person is Dan, Dan Ekka. I just unmuted you. Can you hear me? Yep, we hear you. Okay, great. It seems to me that maybe there's not enough recognition of the party system, the value of diversifying the party system and having more competition. You used the word fluid earlier, and I think of it in terms also of entrepreneurialism, the idea that a new party can come along with some great ideas and get traction in the electorate in a more fluid sort of party system. For example, we were talking earlier about money in politics, and it seems to me that if you had an entrepreneurial party that refused to take any money or big money, say, that they could get a lot of traction because voters would like that. But when you have these two parties in a duopoly, they don't really have the opportunity because they're locked in an existential battle for dominance and they don't want to unilaterally disarm. I just wonder if you talk a lot about voting methods, but a little bit less it seems like about the value of the party system changing. I just wonder if you have any more ideas about how to convince our leaders to adopt a change like that? Well, as I say, it is believed that the two-party system is really an artifact of the plurality vote. So we would have many more options if we had something like approval voting. But as I said, the eternal problem with this is that if you go to the current leaders, people have been elected under the present system, they sort of say, what's in this approval voting for me. And if they don't see there's a clear advantage for them, they may not be for it. That's why I think the way you have to approach this is to go to the people themselves and say, here's a system that has disadvantages, that is fair, that does this, this, and the other thing, and get them to approve that by a ballot initiative. So I think really, I mean, is there's not much use in trying to go to politicians themselves? Maybe I'm a little cynical on that, but that's my take on it. Can I suggest one possibility, which is that people go into politics in order to fulfill their ideological vision for the country. And so it helps them to have a solid, coherent party ideology. But in this two-party system, they're so slippery. And we see this with Donald Trump coming along and hijacking the party, or some would say that Bernie Sanders is coming from the other direction to try to shift the Democratic Party. And there's not enough consistency there. So that in a multi-party system, you'd have more of that. Yes, definitely. I mean, if you look at it in 2016, the Republicans in 2020, the Democrats, you really had the same narrative in both. You had Sanders and Trump, who really were these these Mavericks, these outliers. And there was this narrative that there were never Trumpers and never Bernie people who were unable to coalesce around a candidate to take them on. And apparently Biden did do that, but the opponents of Trump didn't. My point is we shouldn't be playing these kinds of games. People should just decide who they think is acceptable and whoever convinces the most people that they've got a good system should win. So I would look forward to having a less strategic form of voting, where you could really express what you feel, who has the most interesting program. And if Andrew Yang wanted to start his own party, I mean, he could do that. It would not be as a spoiler. He would have the same chance in a certain way as any other. And if he had an ideologically consistent party, I mean, he could do that. You could be very entrepreneurial with political parties, which is something you really can't be now. Thanks, Bill. We've just got a couple more raised hands here. So I want to make sure we get to everyone. We've got Rudolph Givero. You should be unmuted. Okay. So I have, hello, can you hear me? Okay, cool. So I have, so two, like they're within voting systems there, but they're not necessarily related to each other. So the first thing is, so I picked up gaming the vote in high school, which for me, that was 2010, 2014, that time period. Anyway, and I also followed a lot of the election theory stuff around that time period also. And the big, so the first question is about like these impossibility theorems, because you mentioned Aero's impossibility. For me, it was very like, and to me, that's where maybe it's because I was looking from a mathematical perspective to put a ton of weight into that. And I know you mentioned earlier that Aero's, you don't need to put that much weight. And I'm just wondering, and I guess, so the sum is, I used to be a lot more like rejecting of rank choice voteings in terms of, and I guess, what's the, I guess, why have rank choice voting, or why should we still support rank choice voting, along with approval voting, if it's available. So that's my first question. And then the second question, because I've been seeing it in the chat, is the international, or sorry, international interstate compact. And how does, how would a state that switches to approval voting, or an alternative voting system affect something like that, a interstate compact? Are you talking about the interstate compact for, for essentially, yeah. I don't think it would really make a difference. Each state would, would use their own applicable voting system. And if you had a state that was using approval voting, whoever won for that state, they would agree to, to give their votes to the winner by the popular vote. I guess the popular vote at that point would have to be the plurality vote in the states using it, plus the approval vote in the states that weren't using it, maybe normalized by the population. That's a really good question. And I haven't really thought about it before. But, but I imagine that's how they do it. Okay. And then, sorry. And then the first question about why is it still important to support ranked choice and why are impossibility theorems not necessarily as important politically, I guess, is the question for the. Well, I'd say the impossibility theorem isn't important politically at all because very few voters or politicians have heard of it. But it certainly was a big paradigm shift in the 20th century, where you have these ideas that, that, you know, we have this democracy. And it obviously whoever gets the most votes should be the, the best candidate, the one who makes the most people the happiest. And Arrow showed that you could make some very sensible ideas about what you expect of a voting system and show that it's not possible for any ranked voting system to actually achieve that. So that really shocked a lot of people and it really jumpstarted the whole science of voting. So I think it has been hugely influential. And it's part of the reason that we're here today having this conversation. So in that sense, it has had a big influence as to as to rank choice voting. Well, what I'm saying is I think you should support approval voting rather than rank choice. If I were forced to choose between rank choice and plurality voting, I would go with rank choice because I think it does have some advantages. But I wish more and more people would learn about approval voting because I think there's a lot more to be said for it. Great. Thank you. Rudolph, that was a great question. All right, we've got two more raised hands here. The next person is Jason McLaren. There we go. You're unmuted. Thanks. I wonder if you could share your thoughts with us about voting in multi, for multi-member bodies like Congress or parliaments. And in particular, maybe share your thoughts about proportionality or other criteria that might be relevant. Yeah, there's a thing called proportional representation. You're talking about where the idea that each party or group of people should have proportional representation. In other words, if the Green Party had 1% of the vote, then they should be entitled to 1% of the Congress people. I think that's a very sensible plan, particularly in a country where parties are so important. So I would support that. But again, I think the bigger and much easier issue to actually make happen in the near future is to get something like approval voting first on the local level, and then hopefully on the national level. To get something like proportional representation, you're really talking about a big constitutional amendment, and that's a big ask. So I'm for it, but I think we're going to see approval voting or something like it a lot before we see that. All right. We've got two more questions now. We've got one from Kenita. She's been trying to raise her hand. Kenita, I just unmuted you. Hi. I'm... Hold on, Kenita. I think you may have muted yourself just a second. Let me get you unmuted. All right. Now we can hear you. All right. I wanted to find how approval voting might break us out of the two-party system into a more multi-party system. Somebody said it wouldn't be parliamentary and they mentioned something about Chile. I don't really know what other multi-party systems there might be, but this Democrat, Republican duopoly is definitely not ideal. And I would like to see approval voting get a side of that, but I'm not sure what we would end up with. Yeah. Well, I think one of the great things about approval voting is that it does make it easier for people to start new parties if they want to do that. I mean, nowadays you're afraid that you'd be a spoiler if you did that and no one would want to vote for your party because they'd be afraid they'd have to be taking votes away from one of the two parties that's actually going to win that election. But if you imagine that someone started their own party and had a real justification for it, they had new ideas that were not being addressed by the Democrats or the Republicans, then they could run on their own platform. They could get approval votes. And as in that chart I showed, you could demonstrate that this party really has power. If you said, we got 28% approval last time and we're going to go for more this time, the media would start taking that party very seriously. And once you get more media, you get a bandwagon effect, at least if what you're saying really has appeal. So I think it would be, as I say, much more fluid. It would be easier to enter the political party game. And I think that could be a very productive thing. And you wouldn't be doing it in a way that you're a spoiler. You would just be able to get your ideas out there. And maybe it would take several election cycles for you to get to the point where you could really start winning elections. But I think that's a very plausible thing. So again, that's one reason why I think approval voting is a good idea. Thanks so much, Bill. All right, before I go to the last question, which is Mahindra, I just wanted to give a last call for anybody else who might have questions. Either make sure you raise your hand or you can send your question in the chat and then I can read it out or unmute you from there. All right, Mahindra, I'll let you explain in your own words and voice your question here. Okay, can people hear me? Yep, we hear you. Okay, that's good. I was trying to figure that out for a long time. All right, well, so I do a lot of technical research on approval voting. I think this is actually kind of from that a lot of people have in that they're trying to explain these technical things to everyday people and like people who do technical research generally understand what I'm doing. I mean, I've given this to talk I was talking about before on that research at Future of Humanity Institute and at EA Global. But I have a real difficulty conveying a lot of the basic ideas to like say, for example, political philosophy, right? And I mean, it would take up too much time to disguise it here, but if could I email you because I really like how you simplify things. I really like getting vulnerable. If I emailed you like a talk, could you take a look at it? If you have done something like 15 minutes? Yeah, sure. Okay, I greatly appreciate it. I'll send it to your info at William Poundstone, whatever it is. Yes, that's fine. Okay, well, thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, as I say, a very important thing with any voting system is making sure it's easy to explain to the average voter and to explain why the person who won won. With approval voting, it's the person who got the most votes. So I think that's a good way to explain it to people. And before I go off, I just want to thank everybody at CES who's organized this event before everybody else. Thanks, everybody. Thank you so much, Mahendra. We appreciate you and your support so much. All right, I think Brian Schenk has a question. Just a second, Brian, let me find you here. Okay, you're unmuted. All right, thank you. I like the comment that you had made about how in the year 2000 that the American people just didn't figure out that we should have done this. It seems like we're about 20 years late getting this going. And I was wondering, first of all, I was very happy to see the state of Maine implement a different voting method, even though I don't really like ranked choice voting. I was pretty excited. And I have the sense that this is about to roll across the whole nation. Just this idea is about to just take off. And I wondered what you thought about that idea. Are you talking about ranked choice voting? No, I'm saying any type of voting method reform at all. I prefer it be approval voting and range voting. But it seems to me that the public has finally figured it out. If you felt the same way, I don't know why it took them 20 years. The internal problem, which I go into in the book, is that whenever we do have an election like 2000, everyone thinks like this is unprecedented. This is a rare event. So it's too bad it happened, but it'll never happen again. And then 20 years later or something, it does happen again. As I say, it happened about five times, but they were spread out over almost 200 years. So no one really connects the dots and realizes that this is really an ongoing pattern. And of course, it's not just in presidential elections. It's happening in all these down-deckate elections, but we don't really get much attention to that. So I think the biggest thing is getting people's awareness. And I'm really excited that we do have organizations like CES that really are getting the word out there. Thank you. Thanks so much. Any other questions? Give everybody a minute. Oh, I think we do have one here from Amy. Amy Brown is just asking about the Center for Election Science and what resources we have available. So we are a nonpartisan nonprofit and we study and advocate for better voting methods. And from our research, the best voting method, best bang for your buck, according to us, is approval voting. And so that's the method that we advocate for the most. In 2018, we helped Fargo, North Dakota become the first city in the U.S. to get approval voting implemented for their citywide elections. And now we are working with activists in St. Louis to do the same there just yesterday. They made a big announcement that they've collected enough signatures to get an initiative on the ballot. So we're really excited about that. It'll be on the ballot here in 2020 in St. Louis. And we're seeking out more cities to help get this implemented in. We have a chapter program that our awesome new director of campaigns has launched. So we're trying to get grassroots chapters and advocates to do research and, you know, really start raising awareness about approval voting in their areas. So we will definitely send a link in the chat box about chapters for you, if you're interested in that. We do have tons of resources, lots of information on our website that you can check out. And we're always happy to answer questions if you send us an email or if there's something specific you're looking for, or even giving presentations if you have any, you know, if you belong to a club or a League of Women Voters or something along those lines and you'd like us to give a presentation, we can even do it virtually right now during the pandemic. So just give us a shout. I'm not sure if anyone else on the call would like to chime in. Michael, I've been kind of taking over your duty. So I'll lend it back to you as the MC. Oh, thanks. Well, it sounds like we're about done. Yeah? Yeah, I didn't see any other raised hands or questions come in. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much, Bill. Yes, it's been fun. Something to do in the quarantine. Yeah. Don't forget everybody. You can always donate to the Center for Election Science. That's another thing you can do to help get approval voting spread around the country. And there's the link. No, that's not the link. That's a different link. Caitlin, maybe you could put the, there's a, is there a donation link? I never saw it actually earlier. Yeah, I did, but I definitely want to put it in there again. And if you donate today. Oh, don't do that one, Erin. Sorry guys, just so the we can track that you, that the donation is coming from this so that you can, you can get, get entered into the giveaway. We have a different, a different link. There we go. It's easier for tracking that way if we, if we make a new link, that way we know who to, who to give the, give the signed copy of the book to. Oh, sorry about that, Amy. I did that link from memory. So it might be wrong. I'll go find the chapter link for you guys. Fantastic. Well, thanks everybody. Okay. Yep. Thank you, Erin. All right. Thank you all so much. Thank you especially to Bill for giving us this time, spending an hour and a half just chatting with us about voting methods. What else am I going to do? Yeah, we're so glad to have you here. And thank you so much to everyone else who attended and asked questions. And again, don't forget that you can, you can donate at least $20 and you'll get entered to win a signed copy of Bill's book, Gaming the Vote. But thank you all so much. And we, we also have lots more of these events coming up. So if you're interested, yeah, I'm putting another link. There we go. Check out, check out our events page for more of our upcoming events. Caitlin, it's also worth mentioning that with the CARES Act passing, everyone now who doesn't itemize can make a $300 donation to their favorite nonprofit. And it's an automatic tax deduction, which is something that is not normally the case. So great. Great point. Thanks so much, Erin. All right, well, we're going to head out here. I'm going to put the the correct donation link in there one more time in case anybody wants to take advantage of it. But thank you to everybody who participated and we hope you all stay safe and healthy out there. You too. Bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.