(bright music) - Welcome to Cutline in The Community, Connecticut Public's monthly deep dive into current issues, ideas and events.

From the serious to the sublime, Cutline convenes the state's leading thinkers, activists, and journalists to have thoughtful discussions about what affects our families, workplaces and communities.

And we hope tonight's discussion put together by the Greenwich League of Women Voters together with Voter Choice Connecticut will help us all think about the future of our democracy in ways large and small.

We have all grown up taking our democracy for granted.

We've had so much faith and pride in our elections over the decades that maybe we were a little overconfident or even smug for the mood has turned sour recently.

A recent NPR/Ipsos poll taken at the beginning of this year found that 64% of Americans believe US democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing.

There is no denying that it has taken some hard knocks recently.

Many American voters are disenchanted with the political parties, they are distrustful of whether their votes are properly counted.

They're often fed up with the way the issues are debated and the way candidates behave.

Perhaps most worryingly, they wonder how much they have in common with their fellow Americans across the political divide, which increasingly feels like a chasm.

Tonight's conversation is about one of the hottest trends in the way we run our elections ranked choice voting, something that would force voters, parties, candidates, and administrators to rethink the way we vote, if it were implemented in Connecticut.

Your ballot would never look the same, and the way we count the votes is not what you've been used to.

As of November 2021, 43 jurisdictions used ranked choice voting in their most recent elections, from states large or in cities from Maine to Utah, Michigan, to New Mexico, Alaska to Hawaii, and more than 50 jurisdictions are poised to use it in their next election.

Ranked Choice Voting has the wind in its sail, more than almost any other voting reform currently proposed or debated yet it is indisputably different, and it is currently hotly debated in Connecticut.

It's advocates think it holds tremendous promise to our democratic systems at precisely the moment that we need it most.

So we're gonna hear from some of them tonight, and we'll also have a chance to hear from the skeptics.

Let me introduce you to our panel.

Dave Daley is a senior fellow at FairVote and the author of "Unrigged", how Americans are battling back to save democracy.

Sean Dugar is the executive director of More Voice DC, and the former education campaign director for Rank The Vote in New York City.

Anna Kellar is the executive director of League of Women Voters of Maine and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections.

And Jonathan Perloe, is the co-founder of Voter Choice Connecticut and co-leader of the grassroots effort that got Connecticut to join the national popular vote compact in 2018.

And I'm gonna start with Jonathan.

So Jonathan, you may have noticed that in my introduction, I didn't explain exactly what Ranked Choice Voting is.

It's different, it's not what people are used to.

Is there any chance you might be able to explain it in three sentences or less?

- Well, first let me thank the League of Women Voters of Greenwich and all the panelists and you Victoria for being here tonight.

Before I explain how Ranked Choice Voting works, let me first explain why it's an improvement over the way we currently vote.

Ranked Choice Voting gives voters more choice by encouraging more candidates to run because they don't have to fear being a spoiler or splitting the vote, and it allows voters to express their true preferences without worrying about throwing away their vote on a candidate with little chance of winning and which may help elect the candidate they like least.

So the advantage of Rank Choice Voting is that the winning candidate is the one who has the broadest support among voters, the one who best represents them.

So I'm not sure I can do it in three sentences, so let's first watch this video from FairVote, which illustrates how rank choice voting works.

- [Video Narration] So what is Ranked Choice Voting?

In most parts of the United States, voters select a single candidate for each position on their ballot.

And the candidate with the most votes wins.

This is known as single choice winner take all, which can sometimes result in the election of candidate who earned only a small percentage of the vote, even when the majority of voters supported other candidates, but that's not the only way of electing our leaders.

Ranked Choice Voting is another voting method, which allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference.

In a ranked choice voting election, a candidate needs to earn more than half of the votes to win.

All first choices are counted and if a candidate has a majority, then they win just like any other election.

If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and voters who picked that candidate as number one will have their votes count for their next choice.

This process continues until a candidate earns a majority and is declared the winner.

Let's look an example.

Here you select orange as your first choice candidate, yellow as your second, pink as your third and green as your final choice.

The first choices are counted.

Yellow earned 35%, orange 21%, pink earned 28% and green earned 16% of the vote, because nobody won more than 50%, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and voters who picked him as their first choice, have their ballots count for their second choice.

This continues until a candidate receives more than half of the votes or 50% plus one.

So what are some of the benefits of ranked choice voting?

Ranked Choice Voting provides more choices, allowing more than two candidates to compete without fear of splitting the vote among like-minded individuals.

Sometimes voters feel pressured to vote for the lesser of two evils.

Ranked Choice Voting allows people to vote for their favorite candidate, not just against the candidates they dislike.

With ranked choice voting we see more positive campaigns and less negative advertising.

Candidates are encouraged to reach out to as many voters as possible, including those supporting their opponents.

They can build a winning coalition with like-minded candidates to earn voters second and third choices.

It's time to fix our democracy and make our elections work better for everybody.

We can do that with ranked choice voting.

- So I'm now gonna ask a question to Dave Daley who has written really passionately about the problems that our democracy faces today.

And Dave, I'm just wondering, tell us why you think ranked choice voting holds out so much promise or I don't know if you think it's like a silver bullet to the problems we face, but if you do tell us, I also add just before I toss this to you, that we had a chance to ask a lot of our audience members in advance for their questions, and so we had a bunch of written questions submitted, one of our audience members put it this way, if you had to give your us your elevator pitch, your 30 second explanation of why rank choice voting should be adopted, what would that be?

So Dave, answer those many questions I just posed to you.

- Thank you, Victoria.

Thank you as well to the League to Connecticut, public television and pleasure to be with you all tonight.

I don't want to present ranked choice voting as some democracy saving silver bullet.

I wish we had a democracy saving silver bullet in this moment, we could really use one, but I want you to think of it as a tool that gives you as a voter, more say, more control and more power as you negotiate what are oftentimes really large candidate fields and those fields aren't going away anytime soon.

Let's say you were a Democrat in 2020, trying to work your way through a two dozen presidential candidates, six you really liked, four you didn't like that much a dozen in the middle you could take or leave, how are you supposed to cast that ballot for the candidate you like most, or are you engaged in some twisted electoral calculus about who you like the least and how is that vote going to work out?

Let's say you're a republican voter in Connecticut in 2018 and you're faced with five candidates, five strong candidates running for the gubernatorial nomination.

Well, what are you supposed to do?

There are fewer newspaper polls, you don't really have a sense of who's in the lead, how are you supposed to cast that ballot, for the person you like the most, for the person you like the most, who you think has the best chance of winning, you're forced into this really strategic calculus that simply isn't fair to you as a voter.

So what I love like about a ranked choice voting is that you get that power back, it encourages politicians to reach out to everyone, to talk to everyone, because even if you're not going to be their first choice, you might choose them as your second choice.

So they are more interested in engaging, more interested in reaching out, maybe a little bit less interested in negative campaigning.

- Anna, Maine is one of two states that have implemented ranked choice voting for statewide and federal elections.

Tell us a little bit about how and why Maine implemented it and how it performed in the real world.

Does Dave's predictions and hopes about, did they come through in Maine?

- What ranked choice voting does is it opens up the field so that there are more candidates who can run, they don't have to spend the entire time that they're running, justifying why they should be in the race and why they're not a spoiler.

And so what we've seen is that when we have these bigger fields, their candidates are also able to spend some time talking about the issues, as we have gone through primaries and general elections now, that there have been examples of candidates that have of endorsed each other and said vote for me first, vote for this person second, and then vice versa.

And we've seen a greater degree of not no negative campaigning, but when there is negative campaigning, it being much more civil, much more based on differences around policy and experience instead of personal attacks.

We initially passed the ranked choice law at a referendum in 2016, then after an attempt to repeal part of it through the state legislature, we passed it again at a referendum in 2018 with a stronger vote than the first time around.

We've since expanded it to presidential elections, and then in the last two years, two of Maine's larger cities have adopted it for municipal offices, again, passing it with larger shares of the vote than they had in their initial votes on it.

And so when you have a city, like my city of Portland, Maine that voted initially for ranked choice voting with a pretty strong majority, but then after more than four years of using it, chooses to expand it with 83% of the vote, that's a pretty strong vote of confidence from voters that it is serving the purposes that they want it to.

- And I'm just gonna ask you a quick follow up question because anytime our election laws change anyway, it usually is accompanied with a fair amount of suspicion that it's some sort of a partisan employee to benefit one party that's in power versus another party that's in power, really, whoever is proposing it, it's probably, or whatever party's proposing it, is the party that's seeking to benefit from it.

And so is like ranked choice voting has it turned and Maine is a good example, because as you mentioned, it's a state got a lot of independence, a lot of Republicans who are elected to statewide office, Democrats who are elected to statewide office, yet people often point to Maine's experience in 2018 in its second congressional district, where in the race, the Republican won the most votes during the initial tally, and then after all of the ranked choice votes were counted, the Democrat won that 2018 election.

So they point to it as an example of how ranked choice voting is really a democratic ploy or a partisan effort to gain advantage.

How do you answer that sort of challenge?

- What will always happen is that the candidate that's elected represents the majority of the voters.

And so when we see in like in that congressional race, the people whose first choice were for the two independent candidates, their votes made the difference and swung the election, but those were votes that under a traditional system would have been more or less wasted or seen as votes for a spoiler.

In this case, that majority ended up electing the candidate, and where we've often discussed with candidates who might feel suspicious about ranked choice voting or see it as something that might be partisan, we wanna encourage them to put that aside and recognize that it is the rule of the game that they are currently playing, and if they wanna be successful, it makes sense for them to think about, well, how do I succeed in a ranked choice election and you succeed by not just appeal to your strongest supporters and the people who are definitely gonna rank you first, but making a case to people who might rank you second, that they should do that and what we've seen in that case, and in some subsequent elections is that when candidates don't bother to go after those second choice votes, it can really backfire, and the candidates that do try to expand their appeal more broadly, stand a better chance of being elected under the ranked choice system.

- So Sean, you have worked on ranked choice voting in, I think at least four cities at this point, and you've worked with multiple kind of participants in the election ecosystem, let's call it the candidates, the voters, the parties, and the election administrators.

I'm curious, tell us what you've seen happen with the way politicians run, the way candidates behave, is it something that they like?

Is it something that really voters respond well to?

Give us a little bit more about how ranked choice voting changes the candidate part of the election equation?

- Definitely, so under ranked choice voting, a candidate really has to rethink how they operate, because no longer can they get elected with just that small block or subset of voters that they would've in the past.

So when you're thinking about running in an election that has ranked choice voting, there are really two methods in which you, or two campaign strategies you can use.

One is what we call the front runner strategy, which is where you will see candidates who are in the lead, or have a commanding lead just simply say to voters, if I'm not your first choice, rank me somewhere on your ballot.

Similarly, second, we'll see candidates work together, and this is usually the more well known approach, and we call it the underdog strategy.

So it's candidates who share community, who share values, who share interests coming together and saying to their universal base of voters rank us together on your ballot.

There's a great example of that from Oakland, California, my hometown, where three female candidates teamed up together to do just that.

I think we have a short video from them.

- Hi, I'm Pam Harris.

- I'm Nayeli Maxson.

- I'm Sheng Thao.

- [All] We're running for open city council district for.

- For the past 16 years this seat has been held by dynamic women.

- We are three well qualified candidates for city council.

- We are mothers, public servants and community leaders.

- Pam has 20 years of nonprofit finance experience.

She can manage any budget.

- Nayeli has worked in the district for office.

She knows the district's issues inside and out.

- Sheng has worked for the city council for five years.

She has the experience to get results.

- We're asking for your support on November 6th.

- This is a ranked choice election vote for us one, two or three.

- You can learn more about us on our websites.

- Vote for positive leadership.

- Collaborative leadership.

- Women's leadership.

- Now isn't that different from the politics and campaigning that you're used to?

Under ranked choice voting, it doesn't pay for a campaign to go negative, because you risk alienating the voters of that candidate.

When in reality, a candidate in order to win, needs second, third, fourth, and fifth choice votes.

So in New York City, we conducted over 200 campaign workshops, boot camps, a two day event for the 500 plus candidates that were running for office in that one election alone.

And we saw a number of them utilize one of those two strategies, including mayor Eric Adams, who used the front runner strategy and simply told voters if he wasn't their first choice, to rank him number one or number two.

- So as we were putting together this forum, we had the opportunity to reach out to some people who are in the audience and ask them to submit questions.

We have one now from Andy Duus.

- Good evening my name is Andy Duus, I live in Riverside, Connecticut, and I've recently completed four years of service on the Greenwich board of estimate and taxation.

Ranked choice voting has many supporters, including Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School.

They believe, in essence, that especially during periods of political extremism, ranked choice voting may lead to the voter's selection of a candidate that has the broadest support.

Another Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, the longtime professor of political philosophy there, however has been critical of ranked choice voting, in a column last year, appearing in the Wall Street Journal, he argued that ranked choice voting would subvert the efforts of the two political parties.

To select candidates or try to find a compromise in selecting their candidates before the elections.

In his words, ranked choice voting quote "rewards extremism".

I would appreciate your thoughts, thank you very much.

- Just to give people a little bit more of a flavor of what Harvey Mansfield wrote in that Wall Street Journal editorial.

He wrote ranked choice voting rewards extremism in the electorate.

Voters who make extreme choices should be punished via exclusion from the majority, ranked choice voting rescues them from the penalty they deserve for throwing away their ballot on extreme first choice.

One suspects that progressives like ranked choice voting, because it would allow them to vote twice, once for Bernie Sanders and once for Joe Biden.

So I'm gonna throw this question to see how you respond to it.

Why don't we start with Dave?

- It's a good question.

I would say that it's our current system that is rewarding extremism.

I think we all understand that our current system is broken, that we're not getting the choices that we want, and often that is because parties are nominating candidates from really large fields and they are incentivized and rewarded for playing to the base, winning an election with 22, 23% of the vote, and then when that's the case on both the democratic and Republican sides, we get a choice in the fall that we throw our hands up in the air with, and I would suggest that it's our current system that is confusing and weighted toward the extremes and we need a new way of looking at it.

- Jonathan.

- And if you think about our current system, it sort of forces you to pick somebody and if there are, you know, more than two other more than one other candidate, you're treating all the other candidates as equally undesirable, but that's not really how we approach choices.

And when I'm talking to people about ranked choice voting, I'd like to use this analogy, if I go into basket and Robins and say, I'd like a chocolate ice cream cone, and they say, I'm sorry, Jonathan, we're out of chocolate ice cream, I don't turn around and say, well, gimme any one of those other 30 flavors, I don't really care which one.

Of course not, I'll say, you know, I prefer coffee, if you don't have chocolate and if you've run out of coffee too, I'll take vanilla.

Well ranked choice voting improves on our current election system by recognizing that people have degrees of preference.

And so if your choice can't win, then you have a backup choice that comes into play.

So again, your first choice, let's say they are the candidate with the fewest votes, so they're eliminated, and then your second choice counts.

And so we feel that ranked choice voting actually reduces extremism because it more accurately represents how voters feel about all candidates.

- So Sean, you know, in the last year's mayor primary in New York City, the Democrats had 13 candidates on the ballots.

Now on the one hand, you could look at that and think, well, that's great, it really encouraged a diversity of viewpoint and a lot of people who stuck with the, you know, their campaign until the end, rather than kind of dropping out.

But on the other hand, as a voter, it was possibly confusing, it was difficult to sort through, it really put a heavy burden on the voter to figure out all of the candidates and to think, you know, strategically about how they were going to cast their ballot.

What do you make of the criticism that some people think is really quite valid, that ranked choice voting actually lowers turnout because confused voters or uncertain voters just decide not to turn up and try to sort through all 13 or eight or 10 candidates on the ballot.

- So what we found in New York was that just simply wasn't true.

There were also in addition to the mayoral race or council races that would have anywhere up to two dozen candidates in one single race.

Again what ranked choice voting does is it forces candidates a campaign differently, and it forces them to reach out to everyone.

And what we saw was candidates who were able to reach broadly and build coalitions, won, which is what we see everywhere under ranked choice voting.

We know that 84, 85% of voters ranked their ballot in the mayoral primary and of that 15% that did not rank their ballot, meaning did not vote for two or more candidates, that over 80% of them said there was only one candidate on the ballot that they liked.

So we know voters get it, they understand the ranking process.

In New York, 95% of voters said they found the ballot easy to understand and complete.

So it's not a process that's really confusing to voters, it is something that they get and is natural because we rank, as was just given an example of, every single day.

- Sean, let me push back on that though, the turnout for the New York primary last year, which was probably one of the largest jurisdictions that had held a rank choice voting election in America since ranked choice voting really began to get steam was abysmally low.

And there are some people who think that one of the reasons it was abysmally low was because as I said, you know, voters who were confused or just didn't, you know, feel like they could sort through all 13 of the candidates were depressed and just decided not to show up.

Is that a valid criticism for the voters, not the candidates?

- I would say no, it was actually the highest turnout we've seen in a mayoral race in over 30 years in New York.

New York generally has very low turnout rates compared to other places in the country, but it was a much higher turnout rate than we've seen in local elections in New York City in quite some time.

And the same could be said for most of the other places that have implemented ranked choice voting, all those implementations have come with additional reforms that have boosted turnout, whether that's getting rid of a primary and moving, aligning the election with a larger presidential or gubernatorial election, but across the board, we've largely seen an increase in voter turnout in ranked choice elections.

- So Anna, let me turn to you about how voters in Maine have done it.

One of the criticisms that you often hear about ranked choice voting is that it requires voters to practically have a strategic consultant for figuring out how they're gonna rank one through five, their potential candidates, and it encourages sort of either manipulative or kind of a cringe worthy strategic behavior on the part of voters, is that something that you've seen in Maine?

- So what we've seen in Maine is that voters do what they want to do.

Who feel like they only have one candidate that they support or that they don't wanna learn about the other candidates, just go vote for one.

Voters that are really interested in a couple of candidates, really appreciate that they can rank their choices.

What we have seen in terms of strategy is that it has also empowered community groups, and organizations that might make endorsements during an election, to also think about how to rank or how to say actually all three of these candidates really represent our values, vote for any, you know, rank any of the three of them in whatever order you want, you'll get a good choice either way, and that's gone a long way to reducing in-fighting among people who hold similar values.

- So I think as I mentioned, ranked choice voting has an impact not only on voters and candidates, but it also has an impact on administrators and the people who run elections.

We have this question from Janet McGuigan, which I think will address at least part of what the concerns are for people who run elections.

- My name is Janet Stone McGuigan.

I live in Old Greenwich and I serve on the Greenwich board of selectmen.

I'm very interested in ranked choice voting.

My question is how much will it cost to do this right?

- So, you know, as I mentioned, we also had some written questions that were submitted and the cost was something that was raised by a lot of the people who were participating in tonight's panel, who were watching tonight's panel, they were concerned that ranked choice voting and the tabulation system might cost more money, that election administrators would have to completely rethink the way they run and administer elections.

Jonathan, I'm wondering how can you can answer Janet's question and what you can say about the cost and the difficulty of administering ranked choice voting?

- Thanks, that is a question that comes up frequently when we talk to people about adopting ranked choice voting.

So it's certainly true that the introduction of a new voting method requires voter education, and actually, I think that's one of the important areas where we need to invest, but I also think that that is an investment that's worthwhile in terms of strengthening our democracy, if you think about what Connecticut did over the past two years or back in 2020, when we expanded no excuse absentee ballot voting to all voters during the pandemic, there was a large education effort taken because most people had never voted by absentee ballot.

But it was understood by voters and well received, and they appreciated the opportunity to be able to vote that way.

And I know Sean, who should certainly chime in after this can talk about the effort that they undertook in New York City.

I don't have the exact cost of what it would cost to implement ranked choice voting in Connecticut, but that's one of the reasons that Voter Choice Connecticut has been advocating for the legislature to create a task force to study the implementation.

There are costs, there are changes and processes, there are probably some statutory changes that will be required, and these things require study and the due diligence to make sure if we do at some point adopt ranked choice voting, which we are very hopeful about that we do it right.

But ranked choice voting is, has been said earlier as being used in about 45 or so jurisdictions around the country and they're doing it successfully.

There's actually a lot of resources to help states and municipalities work through these things, including the ranked choice voting resource center, which is actually done in assessment of what it would taken Connecticut to implement ranked choice voting.

And then the last point I'd like to mention is that last December, the US House for the very first time voted on a bill about ranked choice voting.

And that bill was to authorize $40 million in federal grants to states and municipalities to implement, to help them implement ranked choice voting, and I was quite happy to see that all five of our US Representatives voted for that bill.

- As I mentioned, Sean, you've worked in four different cities on the implementation of ranked choice voting, including New York City and I think Oakland, San Francisco and Washington, DC.

I think you've probably got some experience about the cost issues regarding ranked choice voting.

I imagine it was not cost free to do in New York City, it's not usually a kind of a cheap city to operate in.

So tell us a little bit about how you did that in New York and what the cost impact was.

- Are you ready for the total amount that was spent on implementation in New York City?

$30,000.

That is what it costs for the city of New York to be able to fully utilize the tabulation software, which is available universally and free, it just took a little bit of adaptation.

Now, when we talk about education, that's a whole other thing, and New York was very serious about ensuring that all of their communities were able to fully understand the ranked choice process.

So we're talking about translating every material, every ad, every billboard in 15 different languages, and so the mayor put in $15 million for education.

We understand not every jurisdiction is as large and diverse as New York City.

So it is not gonna cost $15 million everywhere, you know, in New York or I'm sorry, in DC, we believe it'll be about a million dollars to conduct a multi-year public education campaign for again, a very large jurisdiction.

- Sean, I mean, the implementation of ranked choice voting in the mayoral primary was not glitch free though, it took a week to get the election results, there were also some problems with the tabulation.

Anna, as I mentioned in the second congressional district in Maine in 2018, there was a lot of conflict and also some kind of lawsuits about that, you know, highly contested election.

Tell me about there, and there have been some cities who've decided to turn away from ranked choice voting or maybe I'm wrong.

Sean, why don't you start off telling us a little bit about that glitch in New York City and why it took a week and why people should, you know, kind of accept a form of voting that takes so long to get results?

- Definitely.

So what happened in New York City actually had nothing to do with ranked choice voting.

New York had largely not really utilized vote by mail or absentee ballots, at the scale that they did in the mayoral primary.

As an example, in the previous competitive mayoral primary, they had a total of 3000 absentee ballots turned in citywide.

In this mayor election, they had 130,000 absentee ballots turned in citywide.

And so it took a while to count them all and to verify them and to give people a chance to make corrections if there was a mistake on that ballot.

Now there was a glitch that took place, it was human error, the board of elections always runs tests on their programs, they simply forgot to hear the clear button in one of the jurisdictions.

So on the unofficial ballots, it was not an official count, the error was made and quickly reversed that same night within a couple of hours.

- Anna let's go back to 2018 to that second congressional district election, there was a lot of debate, there was a lot of conflict about it, there were a lot of lawsuits.

Did you begin to lose faith in ranked choice voting when all of that was going on?

- Not at all and I think that if you actually look at those lawsuits, what you'll see is a candidate who like candidates do, did not at first wanna admit that he had lost a close race and was kind of throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick.

Those lawsuits all came back in support of ranked choice voting and when they did, and when the recount that candidate was authorized to ask for came back, showing that the results were the same, he conceded and we went forward.

And so this might be new, but the people who are doing it are doing it very carefully, very methodically and if anything goes wrong, they explain it in real time and they fix it in real time.

- Let's go to this question from Ryan Fazio.

- Hello my name is Ryan Fazio.

I'm a Greenwich resident, and I also represent Greenwich, Stamford and New Canaan in the state Senate.

I appreciate the League of Women Voters putting on this interesting discussion about such an interesting topic.

I'm a ranked choice voting skeptic, so I wanted to ask three quick questions of the proponents.

First, the cornerstone of our democracy is one person one vote, straightforward, it's fair.

Do you think this complicates this paradigm by giving some voters depending on outcomes and iterations more say over the outcome of elections than others?

Second, do you think it overly complicates elections and risk depressing turnout among, shall we say less, slightly less, engaged voters?

And third, doesn't our first pass the post system of elections already elevate the median voter and promote a more moderate outcome as is without the need to significantly reform how we do elections?

Thanks for doing this again, I look forward to hearing your answers.

- Dave, I'm gonna to toss that question to you, see what you say to those three questions, I think Sean may have to a certain degree addressed question number two, which was about whether or not it depresses or discourages less engaged voters, but take it away.

- I absolutely agree with you on one person one vote, absolute cornerstone of our democracy, and there's nothing incompatible with ranked choice voting and one person one vote.

Let me go back really quick to Jonathan's ice cream metaphor.

If he goes into Baskin Robbins and he knows the three flavors he wants if something is not available, he's not leaving with three cones, he's only leaving with one chocolate cone, unless if Jonathan's up to something with the ice cream that I don't know about.

You only have one vote, you simply have a more powerful and precise vote that is able to more completely and fully capture your preferences, which comes in really handy in today's really large field of candidates.

Ranked choice voting is absolutely compatible with one person one vote.

What it does is it gives you a fuller and more accurate reflection of the public will.

And as far as extremism, I mean, I keep coming back to the sense that it's our current system that is really incentivizing extremism, and so much of this comes from the fact that we have such gerrymandered congressional districts, in which really the only election that might matter is a party primary.

So you are almost always going to have candidates looking over their shoulder, thinking about the base.

When you have a large primary, let's go back to Connecticut's gubernatorial primary for Republicans for governor in 2018, there are 480,000 registered Republicans in the state of Connecticut, but that race was won by a candidate with 42,000 votes, which is less than 10% of all registered Republicans.

When you can win a race with that small number of people, the easiest way to do that in American politics, whether you're running in a democratic primary or whether you're running in a Republican primary is to activate the base and to run to the extreme.

If we want to have a different kind of politics, if we want a politics that's more meaningful with better to choices, a ranked choice voting is a genuine step forward.

- What does, I just wanna open this up to everyone on the panel, what does ranked choice voting do to the power of parties?

Do parties begin to behave differently?

Are there incentives altered as a result of ranked choice voting?

- When it comes to parties, I would argue that ranked choice voting can actually strengthen parties.

What you also have then is an incentive for the major political parties to really appeal strongly to their voters and to make a case to those voters, why they should be voting for those candidates and why they should be a part of that party, because what they won't have is the sort of captive audience of voters that they have right now.

And this is something I hear a lot when I talk to younger people in particular, this sense of I don't really like either of the parties, I feel like I have to vote for this candidate because the other candidate is so terrible.

And so that's not a healthy way for a political party system to be if people feel unhappy with their political parties, and it's a very different thing that in a world with more choices and more valid options in your election, I think you would see people be more proud to be members of those parties that really stood for the issues that they believed in.

- It's an interesting thing that you said, Anna, because I'm not sure that most people would think that strengthening parties is a good thing.

Dave, I'm wondering if you've got a kind of a take on what Anna said.

- Right now when there is a third party candidate in the race, say there's a libertarian in the race, that can all often times tip the race to a Democrat.

If, you know, 4% of the vote goes to the libertarian, the Republican candidate might end up losing that race.

And so the parties right now are set up to fear a third party candidate or to encourage voters, you know, to view that as a spoiler, whereas they don't necessarily have to do that.

I mean, if you had ranked choice voting in Georgia right now, you likely would not have had the runoff in January of 2021, and the libertarian candidate might not have cost the Republican the election.

If you had ranked choice voting in 2016, perhaps there would be a fewer Democrats who blame Jill Stein in the green party for tipping the election in some state towards Donald Trump.

So we can get rid of the spoiler effect and that's good for political parties.

- Definitely, so I would just add that it also depends on how the political parties interact with ranked choice voting.

So we've seen some political parties fully embrace ranked choice voting and be able to get members of their party elected to office, whether it's the green party or others.

We've also seen some of the more traditional heavy handed party players, not conduct their endorsements or candidate support in a method that falls in line with ranked choice voting, and we've seen them be defeated at the ballot box.

So it really does depend also largely on how the party apparatus interacts and adapts.

- So we have another video question right now, and it is from Bilal Sekou.

- Hi, my name is Bilal Sekou, and I have a question.

There are longstanding inequities in representation of people of color.

What evidence is there that ranked choice voting gives more representation to black and brown voters?

Thank you.

- Anna, let me start with you, what is your answer to that?

- I'll speak to our experience in Portland, Maine, which is a city that has approximately 30% of its population are people of color.

And over the last 10 years that Portland has used ranked choice voting more than 10 years now, since we instituted it for our mayor, we have seen Portland go from having one or two of the nine member city council, be people of color to now having it be a majority of our city council.

And there is less of a feeling that you couldn't have more than one black or indigenous candidate running in the same seat, because that would be dividing the vote, that would be making it less likely for them to run, instead, what we've seen and for example, we had a school board election two years ago, where there were two candidates running both from African immigrant communities running for school board seats both very strong candidates.

In another year the young woman who is a recent graduate from school might have been told don't run right now, wait your turn, so there'll be another election later, let the man who's a more well known, respected, elder in the community, get the seat now.

Instead they both ran ranking each other, having their supporters rank each other second, the man with more experience was ultimately elected, but the next year the woman ran again and was herself then elected having built a lot of support and experience through her first campaign.

And so when we talk about ranked choice voting, not just sort of uniting us across the political spectrum, but also allowing for communities that might be particularly concerned about having any representation at all, to see having more candidates running, not as a problem where you might lose out on scarce resources, scarce seat, but a real benefit to having more of those voices in the campaign and ultimately greater representation.

- Sean, in the New York City mayoral primary and the mayor election for the first time ever, the city council has a majority female representation on it.

I think it's also fair to say that there were a fair number of really young people who ran and won as a result of the ranked choice voting system that New York implemented.

Is that fair, are there any other things you'd like to add and answer to Bilal's question?

- Definitely, so I think New York is probably the most extreme example we've seen, of how ranked choice voting can change the diversity of a council in just one election.

So in one election, New York City went from never having elected more than 15 women to its 51 person city council, at any given time to electing a 31 woman majority council, where the majority of those were women of color, where the majority of those were under age 40 and where we saw a series of firsts, whether it was the first Southeast, South Asian woman elected to the council, whether it was the first two black queer women, out black queer women elected to the council, we saw a number of firsts, but New York is not the only place where we've seen this, Las Crus, New Mexico, when they implemented ranked choice voting, the average age of their council dropped by 30 years, and this election they saw for the first time, their entire city council and their mayor all be women.

In Minneapolis, we saw for the first time in their history, them elect an entirely person of color council.

In Utah, we saw women and queer people elected to local office all because of ranked choice voting.

- Before we finish up, I wanna turn to each of our panelists and ask you if there's something that you feel hasn't been covered and that you wanna say about ranked choice voting, why don't I start with Dave?

- One thing that I would add quickly is that we are doing more early voting, more male voting than we ever have before, and if you look at the 2020 presidential election, one of the really, I think disturbing trends, we didn't talk about very much because it was happening right before the COVID pandemic struck, is that there were millions of votes cast early by Democratic primary voters for candidates who dropped out of the race before the primary was officially held.

So in many states, if you voted for a Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar, your vote simply didn't count at all.

And so if we were to use ranked choice voting in a system like this, if folks had been able, when they were marking an early ballot to go, one, two, three, and vote for other candidates, they would have still kept a voice in one of the most important things we do as a voter, which is help select a presidential candidate.

Those voters lost that voice through no fault of their own, they didn't do anything wrong, their first choice simply dropped out after they cast a ballot, they deserve the chance to have their voice count, ranked choice voting gives it to them.

- So if you either started listening to this program as a supporter of ranked choice voting, or if we have convinced you maybe came in as a skeptic, and we've convinced you that this is an election reform worth studying, I would definitely encourage you to take action that is the way things get done when citizens speak up and talk to their legislators.

I mean, in particular, reach out to the two co-chairs of the government administration and elections committee asking them to raise the ranked choice voting study bill.

Again, we're not asking to implement ranked choice voting, we're just asking for the state to set up a task force to really study it well, to understand what the implications are.

If you can go to the Voter Choice Connecticut Facebook page, and you'll see instructions on how to contact the co-chairs, and if you signed up for this webinar forum, I believe you will be getting a follow up email and that may have a link to subscribe to Voter Choice Connecticut emails, and I would certainly encourage you to do that, and I thank everybody for the opportunity to talk about this very important election reform.

- Sean.

- I wanna thank the League of Women Voters, my co-panelists for a great session this evening, and everyone for being here with us.

- And Anna, any last words?

- The League of Women Voters of Maine, decided all the way back in 2008, that we would endorse ranked choice voting as a concept that Maine might wanna use for its elections, and throughout the decade that we've had since of having a referendum, having multiple referendums, implementing it and now using it for a series of elections, we really feel that that early theoretical endorsement has paid off and has started to show benefits for our politics, for our voters, for our community, and so very excited to think that Connecticut might join us, and be second state in New England to take this on and we are ready to help in any way we can.

- Thanks Anna and thanks to all of our panelists and League of Women Voters Connecticut, and Voter Choice Connecticut, and to Cutline and we'll be concluding now, I just wanna add one last thing, which is that American democracy has always been contested and vibrant and innovative, we've gone from no parties to multiple parties, to two parties, to everyone angry at two parties, to everyone becoming independent, we've gone from voting out loud to handwriting things on slips of paper that you brought to the polling station yourself, to pre-printed ballots to pull lever machines, to touch screens and back to paper again, and maybe ranked choice voting is next.

I wanna leave everyone with my favorite quotation about American democracy, which is from E. B.

White, it was written during World War II.

He said, "Democracy is the line that forms on the right, it's the don't and don't shove, it is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the saw dust slowly trickles, it is the dent in the high hat.

Democracy is the current suspicion and then more than half of the people are right more than half of the time".

This has been a production of Connecticut Public's Cutline in The Community, thanks for joining us.

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