(soft music) - Hello, and welcome to Connecticut Public's CUTLINE in the Community.

I'm Bryce Perry, and on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Fairfield, I welcome you to Did You Know?

Voting Rights and Wrongs in Connecticut.

Leading our discussion today is Patricia Rossi, advocacy and public issue vice president of the League of Women Voters of Connecticut, and Jonathan Perloe, leader of Voter Choice Connecticut.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan organization of women and men, Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters that is dedicated to increasing information, education, and participation in our democratic process.

Thank you to Fairfield University for this venue, and for their continued partnership.

Our format this evening has each presenter speaking for about 20 minutes, and we'll follow that with a Q and A session.

Our first presenter is Patricia Rossi.

Patricia serves as the vice president for advocacy and public affairs for the state League of Women Voters.

She works with the advocacy team to educate the public and elected officials on the issues league members have designated as priorities, voting rights, open government, clean elections and reversing climate change.

From 2019 to 2021, she served as the league's people-powered fair maps champion for Connecticut, welcome Patricia.

- Thank you, Bryce.

- Patricia, before you get started, can I just ask as an active member of the Connecticut State League, can you tell us why the league cares so much about voting?

- Sure, I'd like to think that we all care about voting, because we care about our fellow citizens, we care about our democracy, and we care about creating society that's better for everyone.

But we've got a little history behind pushing us as well.

Women had to fight to get the right to vote.

They fought long and hard, the suffragist did and in 1919, the 19th amendment was passed.

There was a lot of energy behind that movement and that energy needed to go somewhere.

And in February of 1920, the suffragist started the League of Women Voters.

They were wonderful people with full of energy and determination and with great desire to support our democracy, but they weren't perfect.

We had to evolve.

We did not include women of color in our original struggle, although they were fighting for the same things we were, access to the ballot.

We've evolved and we now are working together to expand access to the ballot to everyone.

Black people, both men and women really had to wait until 1965 with the voting rights act to be fully enfranchised.

That was because states and municipalities had created poll taxes, literacy tests, and other impediments to get to the polls, over the years between 1870, with the 15th amendment in 1919 with the 19th.

The voting rights act created a tremendous change.

It forbade discriminatory laws, and it required pre-clearance for changes.

So for states and municipalities that had a history of suppressing the vote before that they could enact a new voting law it needed to get cleared by the attorney general of the United States.

We know that the voting rights act was tremendously effective because we have some statistics.

The AP found that in Mississippi, in 1964, 6% of eligible black voters voted, but in 1969, that percentage went up to 59%.

So something happened between those two years and we think it was the implementation of the voting rights act.

Unfortunately, the supreme court ruled in 2013 in Shelby County versus Holder that because 40 years had passed and because it was discriminatory to states that had suppressed the vote to require them to have pre-clearance, we no longer needed those protections.

So as soon as Shelby County versus Holder came down as a decision from the supreme court, states started enacting laws to suppress the vote, we need now the freedom to vote act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to correct this really the mistakes that the supreme court made in 2013.

We'd like to think that Connecticut is a beacon of voting rights and doesn't really need federal legislation to help it open the ballot to everyone.

But that's not true, in Connecticut for the past few years, legislation has been introduced into our state legislature that would restrict the vote.

Happily none of those bills have gotten out of committee, but that's not for lack of trying.

And we think part of the reason they have not is because good government groups have been vigilant in making sure these things don't move forward.

- Can I ask you, we all like to think of our state as pretty wonderful has Connecticut really been a leader in voting rights overall?

- Connecticut has made advances over the years, but Connecticut is surprisingly not progressive when it comes to access to the ballot.

The early days of Connecticut government was ruled by the fundamental orders and it's the institution and the agreement about using the fundamental orders in 1638 among a few of the colonies that makes us eligible to call ourselves the constitution state.

But we didn't actually have a real constitution until 1818, but between 1638, we picked up the rules from British common law, which were pretty restrictive and that wasn't unlike any other of the colonies.

It meant that only white men of property and good standing in the community could vote.

It also meant only men who were white men, of course, who were members of congregationalist church.

So if you were a Quaker or an atheist, you could not vote.

That situation continued until the early 1800s, when a few reforms were instituted or were attempted to be instituted.

People felt that veterans should be allowed to vote certainly, or everyone who paid taxes.

Up until that point, you had to own at least $7 worth of land, which was a fair amount of money then in order to be able to vote.

Historians have estimated that in 1814, those restrictions were so great that in many Connecticut towns and cities, only 10% of white men could vote.

So you can see that the vote was, while it was expanded from what was available in Europe, and it's better than living in a monarchy.

There was advancements to be made.

And the Connecticut constitution did institute some advancements.

You no longer had to be a congregationalist to vote, but unfortunately, if you were black, that constitution explicitly said, you could not vote.

In 1855, we took another step backwards and the state instituted literacy tests and one year residency requirements.

And these restrictions were aimed at Irish immigrants.

We have more than a little bit of a shameful thing in that those literacy tests and residency requirements were later picked up by Southern states as examples of how to restrict the vote during Jim Crow.

In 1862, there were a little bit of an expansion of voting rights, civil war soldiers were allowed absentee ballots.

What's sort of interesting about that is that, that was not a constitutional law.

The constitution wasn't amended to allow for that until 1864.

In 1870, Black Americans, their right to vote was explicitly protected.

And in 1919 women finally got the vote.

in 1932, there was another small expansion of the right to vote with limited access to a absentee ballots was allowed.

And in our new constitution of 1965.

So we had one in 1818, and then again, a new one in 1965, another couple of small adjustments were made to the absentee ballot options, including some exemptions for religious restrictions.

People like to say that the amendment is, excuse me, the constitution is sacred and we shouldn't go around amending it all the time.

But that constitution of 1865 has been amended 31 times.

And a few of those times were for voting rights.

In 1975, 18 year olds were given the right to vote.

And 17 year olds who would be 18 by election day were given the right to register.

I think importantly from a principal's point of view in 1974, becoming an elector was no longer defined as a privilege, but it is a right.

And I think that's the way the League of Women Voters looks at voting.

In 2022, we'd like to expand the franchise further and Connecticut needs to institute early voting.

Connecticut is one of six states with no early voting and we're not keeping good company here.

It's Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, and the outlier of New Hampshire, even South Carolina last month, excuse me, last week voted to institute early voting.

So we are not on the progressive end of this, we're pulling up the rear.

So tonight we're talking about very locally voting in Connecticut and a little bit of our history, and it might be helpful to learn just how do we vote in Connecticut?

So we have a very particular way of registering, casting your ballot and certifying the vote.

These set of slides that I'm showing you now were designed really as educational which is consistent with our mission, that the League of Women Voters to educate people on the vote.

But tonight I like to show them to you to show you just how secure our vote is and how many checks and balances there are to ensure that only eligible voters vote in Connecticut.

This is a registration form, you can fill it out online, you can mail it in, or you can go to your registrar or voter's office and fill it out.

And it requires you in those highlighted yellow sections to give proof that you are eligible to vote in Connecticut.

You're a citizen, you live where you say you do, and you have not been convicted of a felony that would remove your right to vote.

And at the bottom, you have to swear that those things that you've said on the form are true.

There are many, many checks and balances to make sure that people who register to vote and get on the voter rolls should be on the voter rolls.

And one way in which I think you can see that there are a lot of checks and balances is that the registrar of voters and in Connecticut, all of our 169 towns have a Republican registrar and a democratic registrar and they also have a town clerk.

All of these people swear once they're in office, to make sure that they serve all voters equally.

There are a lot of eyes on every registration form, on every voter role, on every ballot.

And just for an example, the registrar of voters is responsible to register voters, but the town clerk is responsible to approve those applications.

The registrar sets up the machines on election day, but the town clerk holds the keys to the voting machines.

So these responsibilities are widely distributed.

And I think that that's a way that we can feel pretty good, that there are plenty of eyes on every step of this process.

At the polls that bipartisan "many eyes" situation continues and in Connecticut, we have both a combination of very old school checks and balances.

We have people in every ward who are probably your neighbors who are checking you in to vote.

Those voter roles are checked to make sure that you haven't already submitted an absentee ballot.

If you show up at one ward, but you're not registered to vote there yet at another, there's a call made between the wards and your name is stricken off one set of voter roll and put onto another.

Absentee ballots have up until this point been a very small number of the ballots cast in Connecticut, but because of the pandemic, a special situation was adjusted to, by allowing people to use an absentee ballot for fear of COVID.

And we also got official ballot drop boxes, which made it easier for people to both put in their application for an absentee ballot, and also turn it in when it was filled out.

This just was a remarkable experiment that was one of the good things that happened to us.

One of the few from the pandemic, because we got an incredible, incredible result.

Over 79% of eligible voters voted in 2020, almost 80% of turnout during a pandemic, which is an extraordinary feat for us in Connecticut.

And we want to do that or better in elections to come.

Another way of showing you just how secure our ballots are in Connecticut and how seriously, very, very seriously we take voting.

This is an application for an absentee ballot.

And when the town clerk reads through this and approves it, it is given a number that will be matched to the returned and completed absentee ballot.

So when people say, "Oh, it was a terrible thing that all of these applications were mailed out."

Well, I don't know about you, but I get a few applications for credit cards every week, just because I get them doesn't mean I have the credit cards, this is just an application.

And you need to show on that application that you are qualified to be sent an absentee ballot.

This is what the ballot looks like.

And it's funny, we all kind of know this now, given our experiences in 2020, this is what the inner envelope looks like.

And it needs to be filled out in a particular way, the outer envelope.

And then this is a list of all of the reasons that poor absentee ballot can be rejected.

So again, there are many, many checks to make sure that our absentee ballots are coming from eligible voters.

Once all the ballots have come in at the polls, there are many workers.

All of these people I talked to, have been talking about in our 169 towns, there are poll workers and they are recruited from both the Republican and the Democratic party.

Everybody watches everything.

There are lots of support personnel, everybody watching to make sure that everyone who is qualified to vote gets to vote, but no one who is not qualified to vote does not puts in a ballot.

When the polls close at 8:00 p.m. That's when all the hardest work begins, the checkers have to review the in-person voters to ensure that the number of ballots cast, the number of names checked off the list matches the number of votes that are on the tabulator.

And there are plenty of people standing around watching, I've done this before.

And what we all talk about is nobody leaves that room until every ballot is accounted for.

And that could either be at 9:00 p.m, or it could be at 2:00 a.m, but it's going to happen.

And then after 8:00 p.m, all of the information that's been collected from the various polling places goes to city hall where the registrars verify the results.

And during this time there are many, many people around, there are members of the two town committees of the Democrats and the Republicans.

There are all of these poll workers, and there are various other representatives from the different parties and from the towns.

That information gets put into the Connecticut election management system and through that system it is sent to the secretary of state where she certifies the vote.

And the vote is secure in Connecticut.

Of the 22 million ballots cast in Connecticut since 1990, between 1990 and 2020, there were 22 million ballots cast and there were problems with only fewer than 20 of them.

That is a problem rate of 0.0000875%, clearly not a number that could affect the results of any election.

We have a problem in Connecticut.

Unlike other states, all of our voting rules are written into our constitution, which means that unlike other problems we might have or adjustments we might make to modern life in Connecticut, we have to amend our constitution before we can change any voting rules.

So in order to make the change that we really need to expand the vote we have to amend the constitution.

So in November, when we all go to vote, there will be a referendum question.

And it will say very simply, "Shall the constitution of the state be amended to permit the general assembly, to provide for early voting."

80% of Americans support early voting, this is from a Gallup poll in 2020, 74% of Republicans, 80% of independents and 85% of Democrats.

So this is a very popular reform that will bring us up to not being in the embarrassing last six states that do not have early voting.

So I end with vote 411, this is the League of Women Voters service, where you can find out are you registered, where your voting plays out is, what's gonna be on the ballot, and we just encourage everyone to vote.

- Thank you, Patricia.

Our second presenter is Jonathan Perloe, Jonathan co-founded and leads Voter Choice Connecticut, the citizens group, working to bring ranked choice voting to Connecticut.

Since the 2016 election, he's been active in efforts to protect and expand voting rights and strengthen our democracy, including the successful grassroots effort to get Connecticut to join the National Popular Vote Compact.

Following a career in marketing communications strategy on both the client and agency side, in 2017 Jonathan moved into legislative advocacy where he now serves as director of communications for Connecticut Against Gun Violence.

Welcome, Jonathan.

- Thank you so much, Bryce, and thank you to the Fairfield League of Women Voters and Connecticut public for hosting this forum on something that's really important, democracy.

So I read a book recently about democracy and about how to improve it by Lawrence Lessig, he's a law professor at Harvard, and there was a quote that caught my eye, which I think really kind of sums up what we're talking about today.

And that quote is, "There is a single principle that stands behind every reform that our democracy needs.

That principle is representativeness."

And so a lot of things we're talking about in terms of how we vote and who can vote really is getting at how do we have a more representative democracy.

To have that discussion in terms of what are the things that have happened in Connecticut over the past year or two in passing new voting laws, it helps to have a framework.

And the framework we use has four pillars.

The first one is about making voting easy.

That's pretty straightforward.

What things can we do to sort of break down barriers to kind of provide more options so that people who are allowed to vote can actually vote easily.

The second pillar is about expanding the electorate.

And so this is really looking at how do we make sure as many US citizens as possible are allowed to vote.

And over the course of our country's history, there have been a number of constitutional amendments.

Patricia spoke about some of those that have expanded the electorate, and so first in the late 1800s, black men were given the franchise.

And then in 1919 women were given the franchise to vote.

And then as recently as the early 1970s, the 26th amendment was passed and that allowed anyone from 18 years and above to vote.

The third pillar is election integrity.

And this is, when we think of this we hear, we kind of think a lot of the discussion around voter fraud.

And frankly, voter fraud really is not an issue in the United States.

We have processes in place and checks and balances so that the people who are allowed to vote can vote and the people who should not be allowed to vote or are not allowed to vote can't vote.

But election integrity is very important in terms of confidence.

And there are things that we need to be concerned about.

One of them is election interference, cyber security.

Our secretary of the state, Denise Merrill has spent a lot of time making sure that our election systems are secure.

And so fundamentally what we're talking about is, when you go to cast a ballot, you wanna make sure that ballot is gonna be counted and counted for the candidate that you voted for.

The fourth pillar representative outcomes is a little different.

The first three things kind of focus on the process and making sure it's many people can vote and that it's easy to vote.

The last one, representative outcomes really looks after the fact what happens after people vote.

What do the election systems produce in terms of winners?

Are they actually representing the population, the voters, the electorate.

So what I'm gonna do now is talk about some of the laws that have been passed in Connecticut last year and this year, that have strengthened our democracy, strengthened the right to vote.

So in the column of making voting easy, a number of things happened last year, we expanded automatic voter registration beyond just the department of motor vehicles to other state agencies.

So if you go in and register for something in another agency, you can automatically be registered to vote.

So it becomes easier to get registered.

Patricia talked about the early voting resolution that will be on the ballot in November 8th when you cast your ballot.

In a similar event last year, the legislature voted on a ballot resolution to allow for no excuse absentee voting.

And that has to be voted on again by the legislature in 2023.

And if it passes by a majority, then it will go on to the ballot in 2024, again, removing the restriction in the state constitution that right now prevents anyone from voting by absentee ballot.

But just this year, a law has passed HB 62, it was signed by governor Lamont recently, and it does to some degree expand who can vote absentee.

So if you're a commuter and you're worried about getting home after eight o'clock when the polls close, you can now vote by absentee ballot.

Whereas before, because you were in your town for part of the day, technically you are not allowed to vote absentee.

And if you're a caretaker, somebody at home is sick or disabled and you have to be with them all day and you can't just get away to the polls before you are not allowed to vote by absentee ballot.

Now you are as a result of this law, that this bill that was passed.

In terms of expanding the electorate, incarcerated people are not allowed to vote in Connecticut, but it was also the case that once you were on parole, you were still not allowed to vote.

We changed that last year.

A law was passed that gave the franchise back to paroles.

So now we've expanded the electorate a bit.

In terms of election integrity, this isn't a big thing, but you may remember in 2020, when all of us were allowed to vote absentee, there were some concerns about mailing your absentee ballot back and would the postal service get it back to town hall on time, or would it get lost?

And so the secretary of the state bought every town in Connecticut, a ballot dropbox.

And last year, a law was passed to make those ballot dropboxes permanent.

And this falls into election integrity because it makes you more confident that when you return your ballot, it's gonna get counted and not lost in the mail somewhere.

There's two bills before the legislature right now, one bill is to ban foreign spending on ballot measures.

So for example, the ballot measure on early voting that will be on the ballot in November.

And given the history of what happened in the 2016 election with foreign interference, we feel this is an important protection to keep foreigners or other countries from meddling in our elections.

And another very important bill is the Connecticut voting rights bill, that Senate bill 471, we're hoping for a vote on that.

And the reason for that is to strengthen protections for voters, particularly voters of color, and a lot of what this bill does is make up for the fact that protections that existed at the federal level, in the voting in the 1965 voting rights act, which were stripped away or struck down by the supreme court and the Shelby decision, this for Connecticut will kind of put them back in place.

So protections against voter intimidation and particularly a pre-clearance program for municipalities that have a history of discriminating against some classes of voters.

And then in the last, the bucket, the last pillar of a strong democracy, our representative outcomes.

And as mentioned earlier, last year we ended prison gerrymandering.

And so now incarcerated people will be counted for the purposes of districting, where they live, not where they are incarcerated.

- Jonathan, you talked about legislation that strengthen democracy throughout this.

What about the opposite?

Is there something coming down the pipe that we need to be worried about?

- Well, Bryce, that's a great question.

Although I think we have a lot to be proud of in Connecticut in terms of what we've done in the last two years for strengthening protections and making it easier to vote.

There are things that we need to be concerned about, and these anti-democratic forces in Connecticut are frankly, very similar to what's happening in other states around the nation.

And they kind of fall into three buckets.

One is undermining voter confidence, litigation, and legislation.

I'll give you a few examples of each of those things.

So we've heard a lot of claims about voter fraud and how our election, particularly the 2020 presidential election was, you know, fraudulent and stolen.

These are baseless claims, they're not backed up by any evidence.

Lots of court cases have thrown out litigation to that effect, but even here in Connecticut, there were lawmakers making these claims.

So for example, in 2020, the House minority leader asserted that voter fraud was a huge issue.

She made this statement on Connecticut public radio.

The interviewer asked her, "Well, could you give us some examples of this voter fraud?"

And she wasn't able to.

After the 2020 election, the state senator claimed that absentee ballot fraud was occurring in his district.

The interesting thing is the state enforcement elections commission didn't receive a single complaint from anywhere in Connecticut about absentee ballot voter fraud.

And the reason for that is we had very strong protections against voter fraud by absentee ballot, as well as in person.

And then where recently there was a state senator who said voting by mail is too extreme, and it reduces security at the ballot box.

Well, first of all, as I just said, there is no issue in terms of voter fraud of absentee voting, but he's really outta step with what Connecticut voters want.

There was a poll done in 2020 by Secure Democracy, and it found that 79% of Connecticut registered voters feel there should be alternatives to voting in person, which is essentially early voting or vote by mail.

In the area of litigation, there have been attempts to block ballot access.

So again, a few examples of how that's happened over the past year or two.

Again, back in 2020, when we were talking about whether COVID should be a reason to vote by absentee ballot, the senate minority leader came out and said fear of COVID as a reason to vote absentee was eviscerating the state constitution, and it begged for legal challenges.

In fact, there were legal challenges.

There were two lawmakers and others, including somebody who's running for secretary of state right now, sued the secretary of state to prevent this expansion, to prevent people, all people from voting absentee due to fear from COVID.

There was also another lawsuit against the state by four candidates running for Congress that sued to stop mailing absentee ballot applications.

And fortunately, both these suits failed to have their desired effect.

And then in terms of legislation, in the past two years, there have been a number of bills introduced that would reduce voting freedoms.

So things such as prohibiting the secretary of state or even registrars or town clerks from mailing absentee ballot applications.

And we want to be very clear, no ballots were sent unsolicited, it was just applications.

And if you didn't wanna fill it out, that's okay.

There was another measure introduced last year to eliminate election day registration.

And an interesting one, when you vote in person, you know, you fill out the circles, and you hand your ballot over to a poll worker and they stick it in the machine.

And if you made a mistake like you didn't fill in the circles clearly, the poll worker will say, "There's a problem, you need to fix it."

Of course, if you're voting absentee, you don't kind of have that luxury of having somebody right at the moment to tell you there's a problem.

In 19 states, there are requirements that when a registrar, or the town clerk election official gets an absentee ballot back that is invalid for some reason, maybe it wasn't signed or whatever, they actually have to reach out to the voter and give that voter an opportunity to cure that problem.

Last year in Connecticut, a lawmaker introduced a bill that would prohibit registrars from doing that.

And currently, there's no prohibition, but neither is there a mandate in Connecticut.

And interestingly in the same poll that was done in 2020, 73% of voters felt that this is something that voters should be afforded.

And there are other things, including something that upsets me a lot, which is, every year, since 2018, when Connecticut voted to join the National Popular Vote Compact, and if you're not familiar with that, that's a compact that once enough states join it, we will be electing the president by the national popular vote rather than the Electoral College vote that past Connecticut, Connecticut joined in 2018.

And every year, since a number of legislators have tried to take Connecticut out of that compact.

And then there's another area of legislation that is in some ways, even more concerning.

You will remember during the 2020 election, President Trump and his allies really made some great efforts to get election officials to overturn certified election results.

So much as asking the Georgia secretary of the state to find votes for him.

And fortunately, those election officials were are nonpartisan, so it didn't matter whether they were Republicans or Democrats, they withstood those requests.

And so what happened, what's been happening in 2021 and continuing into this year, is a lot of state legislatures are passing laws that take election tabulation and certification out of the hands of nonpartisan election officials, and put them into the hands of partisan legislators.

And a bill was introduced last year to drive, do the same thing in Connecticut.

Fortunately, that bill was not able to get voted out of committee.

So for right now, we are good stead, but it is something we need to be vigilant about.

And I think this quote, when I was doing research on what some of these voting wrongs are, I came across an op-ed written by one of our state representatives, Christine Palm, and she wrote, "The only reason to limit people's voting rights access is to stack the deck against your opponent by picking and choosing whose voice get heard.

That's the real voter fraud."

- I have another question for you.

And changing tax a little bit, I know Voter Choice Connecticut is promoting rank choice voting.

How does that fit into your four pillars of democracy?

- Great question, and thank you for asking that, because I am very passionate about rank choice voting.

So the last pillar I talked about was representative outcomes, and that's really what rank choice voting is all about.

So today's elections use plurality voting.

Sometimes it's called first pass, the post voting or elections.

And it's pretty simple, you get your ballot, you mark a candidate, you mark your ballot for one candidate, we tally up the votes.

And whoever gets the most votes, wins, even if a majority of voters preferred other candidates.

And as a result of that, we have some unintended consequences, and quite honestly, serious unintended consequences.

Three kind of rise to the top.

The first is spoiler candidates.

So you have a candidate running in a race who really has no chance of winning, but by being in that race, changes the outcome of the election versus what it would've been had that candidate not run.

The best sort of most kind of well known example of this is the 2000 presidential election in the state of Florida, where George Bush won by 537 votes, but Ralph Nader was a third party candidate, and he received almost a hundred thousand votes.

And exit interviews showed that clearly, he was drawing many more votes away from Al Gore than George Bush.

So had Ralph Nader not been in that election, the outcome would've been different.

In fact, the presidential, not only in Florida, but overall.

And then in 1992, this is not something that kind of favors one party or another, in 1992, the presence of Ross Perot as an independent candidate, you can make a pretty good argument that that resulted in Bill Clinton being elected president.

Whereas if Perot had not been in that election, George Bush probably would've been elected president.

And then there's vote splitting, this happens, and let me be clear, when we talk about rank choice voting, these problems happen only when you have more than two candidates running, so three or more candidates.

Vote splitting happens when you have multiple candidates, and more typically in primaries where there are a lot of candidates, and you have a group of candidates that are sort of similar, and then you have one kind of, one candidate that's not similar to the rest of them.

And so people go into vote, and let's say, 75% of the people are voting for the moderates, but they split up the vote.

And what ends up happening, is the person, the sort of extreme or the fringe candidate wins, because the other votes, the majority of votes were split up among other other candidates.

And that's happened frequently in a variety for elections, particularly in primaries.

And the last problem with plurality voting is wasted votes.

And this doesn't happen in Connecticut, yet.

If we get early voting, it is a problem we'll need to worry about.

But when you vote early, you risk the problem that come the election day, the candidate you voted for has dropped out of the race.

An example of this, and so essentially, you had no say in the outcome of the election.

This happened in the 2020 Democratic primary, days before Super Tuesday, when a whole bunch of states vote in the primaries.

Three candidates dropped out, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer, and the reason they dropped out was this vote splitting problem.

They were all moderates.

They were worried that they were taking votes away from Joe Biden, and therefore might end up electing the progressive candidate.

And so they dropped out.

The problem was, a million voters had already cast early ballots, and they essentially had no say in the outcome.

What this really boils down to is an observation about human nature, and that is, preferences aren't all or nothing.

When we're given a choice of things to select among, we have degrees of preference.

So let's say I go into Baskin-Robbins and ask for chocolate ice cream cone.

And the server says, "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 care."

Of course not, I have a backup.

It's like, "You don't have chocolate?

I'll take coffee."

Well, the question that we're asking is why shouldn't that be the same with our voting systems?

If your first choice is no longer available, can't you have a backup choice?

And the answer is yes with rank choice voting.

So instead of picking just one candidate, rank choice vote voting allows you to rank multiple candidates in the order you prefer them.

I'm gonna give you a very quick explanation of how this works.

Glad to talk to people at further length some other time.

So the key elements of how a rank choice voting election works, is you have a ballot and you pick your first choice, your second choice, your third choice.

You don't have to, if you still wanna pick just one candidate, that's fine, pick your one candidate and leave the other circles empty.

And then in tallying up the votes, we look at all the first choice votes.

And if a candidate receives 50% plus one of first choice votes, they're the winner, just like in a plurality election.

However, if no candidate gets a majority of first choice votes, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated, and the voters who picked that candidate as their first choice, their second choices now come into play.

And you count up the votes again, and you keep doing that until a candidate receives 50% plus one or a majority of the votes cast.

What are the benefits of rank choice voting?

Well, first, it ensures that the winning candidate has majority support.

And for some people, it may not have been their first choice, but at least it was their second choice.

It was not their last choice.

And so rank choice voting does a better job of picking consensus candidates that really represent the will of the majority, which is what the late Senator McCain had to say about rank choice voting.

Secondly, it eliminates this problem of strategic voting of going into the polling place and saying, "I really, really like Ralph Nader, but I'm worried that if I vote for him, I might end up electing my least favorite candidate."

With rank choice voting, that doesn't matter, you go in, you vote for Ralph Nader, he turns out to nobody got a majority, he's eliminated, and your second choice, Al Gore in this case, potentially comes into play.

And so you go in and you vote what you really feel.

You don't have to strategize and worry about, "Well, I wonder what other voters are gonna be doing."

Third, because of these problems with our election system, with plurality elections, a lot of candidates sort of self-censor.

They don't run because they're worried about splitting the vote, or they worry about being a spoiler candidate, and so they don't run.

And that's taking choices away from voters.

So because ranked choice voting gets rid of these problems, it encourages more candidates to run, that brings in more diverse viewpoints and that's good.

And that is why we call it, you know, that's why we call ourselves Voter Choice Connecticut, is giving voters more choices.

And lastly, it reduces the negative campaigning that we are so familiar with.

If in a ranked choice voting election, I might not be the candidate's first choice, but that candidate will at least hope that maybe I'll vote for him as my second or her as my second choice.

And therefore, they don't have the incentive to go around trashing their opponents because hey, you know, somebody who feels that my opponent is their first choice, they might pick me.

And in fact, what candidates do, and we see this in municipalities and places where there are rank choice voting elections, candidates actually try to find common ground, and they say, "You know, I'm kind of similar to this person, so consider me as your second choice."

So that's the beauty of rank choice voting, and I'd be happy to answer questions about what we're doing here in Connecticut to bring rank choice voting to Connecticut.

- Thank you, Jonathan.

We're now gonna open our Q and A section.

If you have a question for us, please come up to the microphone, state your name, and ask your question.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

My name's Molly Landola, I'm a senior here at Fairfield University.

My question is regarding that, like, as a young voter myself, I know engaging with my generation and the younger voter population is incredibly difficult.

So I was wondering both what you guys do to engage with my generation of voters, and then also what we can do to better help all of the things you discussed today about bettering our, the access to voting.

- Well, Molly, I'm really glad that you had that part of your question where we said, "What can we do?"

Because I do think it's a we thing.

And you are right, we are working hard to engage younger voters.

We're trying to use different methods like using Instagram.

Facebook is I guess, not so much for your generation anymore, but so we're trying to do outreach of that kind.

We're making sure that we make available, for instance, registration by QR code and in other ways that are more, that young people are more likely to use.

But of course, what's behind that is no one's gonna bother registering if they don't think that there's an issue that touches them.

And I'll tell you one reason why we've really embraced climate change this year is because we want to engage younger voters.

It's also 'cause it's an incredibly important problem, but we recognize that it's very important to younger voters.

We're also trying to work with allied organizations.

You know, the League of Women Voters has a lot of strengths, but we recognize a lot of other nonprofits out there have other strengths, and we are trying very hard to work together to make sure some of our, their ability to get to a younger audience we can play back up on.

So that's one of the things we can do, and we would love to have your help.

Join your local league.

- I guess just thinking of some of the things that I do for the organization I work for during the day, we have a youth council, and we're always just trying to find young people, students to get involved.

And I think the most important thing is helping you appreciate that you can actually make a difference.

And when I got involved in advocacy and activism, which I did much later in life, it was because I realized that you get a group of people together, you work on an issue.

My first issue was national popular vote, and it was just a grassroots movement, and we got the state legislature to vote for something.

And so I think that the thing that I really wanna leave young people with and young voters is your voice matters.

And it doesn't take a whole lot of commitment, you know, it could be an hour or two every now and then, you can really have an impact on our democracy.

- Do we have another question?

Oh, thank you.

- Hi there, Laura Smitz, I have a question.

Where do we stand with no excuse absentee ballot voting?

- So the reason we don't have no excuse absentee voting in Connecticut is because the constitution forbids it.

It has some very explicit list of what you can vote by absentee ballot.

And so we have to amend the state constitution, and that's a process.

And the way the process works is, first, the legislature has to vote on a resolution to put on the ballot.

And if 75% of both the House and Senate vote for that resolution.

And so for example, the resolution should be, shall we amend the state constitution to allow for no excuse absentee ballot voting?

If a 75% majority in both chambers vote for that, then at the next statewide election, that question would go onto the ballot.

But if only a majority of the legislators vote for it, then it has to be voted on by a subsequent legislature.

And in Connecticut, we have a two-year legislative session.

So last year, they voted for the no excuse absentee ballot resolution, but now we're in the second years, they can't, if they voted on it, it wouldn't make any difference.

So we have to wait until 2023 for the legislature, a new legislature to come back, vote for the same resolution, if it passes by a majority, it will then go on to the ballot.

In 2024, voters will have a chance to say, "Yes or no, we should amend the constitution."

If they say "Yes, we want to amend the constitution, then we have to go back to the legislature and they actually have to pass a law that allows us to do it.

So that's why the process of opening up our election, allowing more people to vote, whether it's early voting or no excuse absentee voting is such a long process.

And changing the constitution is, you know, should be done carefully and with thought.

And so that, you know, there are built in safeguards.

Unfortunately, at this point, it's kind of working against us.

- I have one (chuckles).

- [Jonathan] Great.

- And this has always bothered me, too many people feel like that only the national elections are important, and that's when they kind of rally and come out.

How do we convince people that local and midterm elections are just critical to the democratic process?

- I would direct people in Connecticut, since we're talking about Connecticut, to some local issues that have come up recently that have been quite important.

For instance, in Killingly, it's been in the newspapers that the board of educations had a real conflict over allowing for a mental health clinic within the schools.

And I think people feel very strongly on either side of it.

It seems like the majority of people in Killingly, certainly the majority of the students, want a mental health clinic.

But because of who's on the school board, that was not allowed to happen.

School board elections are won and lost by very small margins.

People need to vote in school board elections.

And it really matters, it matters what your kids are gonna be taught, what services are available to them, and things like that.

Sort of similarly, I live in New Haven.

We have some real issues in town about traffic and traffic accidents.

And the Board of Alders is considering traffic quieting strategies.

And if you wanna get them in your neighborhood, you need to have somebody who represents your point of view, and you need to be able to call them up and say, "Hey, can you help us get this passed?"

So very local issues that affect you every day, you need to vote so that you can affect those decisions.

- [Bryce] Anything to add?

- So I think at the very local level, it really matters.

And it also matters at the state level.

I know when I first got involved in sort of advocacy and thinking about laws and stuff, I kind of thought it's all down in Washington, you know, only the federal level matters.

And the fact is a lot of what affects our lives, and whether it's how we vote or our options for healthcare or regulations controlling who can own firearms, those are set at the state level.

And so it's really important to be involved in state politics, as well as municipal politics to affect the things that are affecting you.

And I think that's even more important now that we see Congress essentially, is, it just can't get much done because of the filibuster.

So even when you have a majority of senators in support of something, you can't get it passed.

And I think that's very true the Voting Rights Act, things like that.

Since the federal government is essentially, its hands are tied, what happens at the state level is even more important.

And so I would definitely say, keep your eyes on what's happening in Connecticut, because it can make a real difference.

- Thank you.

Any other questions?

(indistinct) - We do?

- Yeah, am I allowed?

My name is John Warberg, I live here in Fairfield, and I have a question about rank choice voting.

It seems to make so much sense on so many levels, and it's getting adopted across the country.

I've heard many prominent voices calling for it, including right here in Connecticut, Congressman Jim Himes.

Why do we not have it yet in Connecticut?

- Would you like me to try answer that?

- [Bryce] That yours.

- Okay, thank you, John, for that question.

So I think there's a couple reasons.

One, it really is a change to how our elections run, and so it bears some looking at what those implications are, and that's why Voter Choice Connecticut has been advocating since 2019 for what we call the Rank Choice Voting Study Bill.

We're asking the legislature to set up a task force with the right types of people who have experience in elections and running elections locally.

So registrars, town clerks, people with experience in election law, to really look at the implications in terms of what statutory changes we might need to make.

And there probably will be, there's almost certainly gonna be statutory changes.

How it would affect the process of just counting up votes.

And you know, what if somebody doesn't win on the first round, you know, how does that work?

So that bears studying.

In terms of, so we've been working at this since 2019, the first year we started a bill was passed by the House, but it was not called in the Senate.

For those familiar with the legislative process, it's kind of like a log jam at the end of the session.

And so you're competing with lots of other bills to try to get called.

So it wasn't called in the Senate.

We came back in 2020, and the bill was raised by the Government Administration and Elections Committee.

There was a public hearing, overwhelmingly the people, the citizens who testified on that bill were testifying in favor of it, I'd say probably by account of like, 10 to one.

And then literally, the week after the public hearing is when the pandemic shut down the legislature, so nothing happened in 2020.

We came back last year in 2021, and as I talked about earlier, there were lots of bills being considered in the Government Administration and Elections Committee, really important legislation, the early voting resolution, the no excuse absentee voting, ending prison gerrymandering, which was a once in a decade opportunity.

So we kind of recognized that, you know, there were some real priorities and there's, you know, there's only so many things that these committees can do and that the legislatures can pass.

So we sort of stepped back.

We came back again this year, and there are hundreds of voters around Connecticut who have been writing legislators saying, "Hey, we think this is something worth studying."

Unfortunately, it hasn't gotten through.

We're quite honestly, you know, some people have some concerns, and they're valid concerns over the impact of rank choice voting on voters of color, or whether it's gonna cost a lot.

And these are all good questions that that's why we are suggesting and advocating for a study.

So we can actually answer these questions and put people's concerns at ease.

So we're gonna keep trying, and we certainly encourage you if you're interested in this election reform, to look up Voter Choice Connecticut and join us.

And because this really is about citizens saying, "Hey, there's things that we wanna do to strengthen our democracy, and this is one of them."

- Any other questions?

Oh, great.

- I'm Jean Galanali, and I've always wondered with people owning homes in two different states, for example, and what happens, do they vote?

Can they vote in say, Connecticut when we are having an election and then in their other state where they have a home?

Is that how it works?

And it's, I don't know.

- No, that would be illegal, you can't do that.

I mean, you could vote, you could choose to vote in Connecticut in 2021, and then change your voter registration to Massachusetts in 2022 to vote in that election, but then you can't vote in Connecticut in 2022.

- And the consequences for voting illegally, like, voting twice in a situation like that, they are steep, and you mentioned five years in Connecticut, right?

Five years in prison.

It's not something to be taken lightly.

- So you have to make up your mind?

- You have to make up your mind where you choose.

- Where you're going to be.

- Yeah.

- Thank you very much for your insightful answers.

Thank you very much for your interesting questions.

We're pleased to have you tonight.

This has been a production of Connecticut Public's CUTLINE in the Community.

The League of Women Voters of Fairfield thanks all of you for being here.

Thanks to Fairfield University for the venue, and a special thank you to our insightful presenters.

For Patricia Rossi, Jonathan Perloe, I'm Bryce Perry, thank you for watching.

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