Council members, we are going to welcome a presentation, and leading the conversation is going to be our own council member.

But before I turn it over to him, uh one of the benefits of having this new structure is, of course, that we get to broaden our reach and broaden our expertise.

And I was so excited when Councilmember Bram was assigned to our committee because I know that elections reform is something that he's very passionate about, and he uh correctly and rightly so identified this presentation very early on.

Um more importantly than that, though, it is also a very important day uh for our council, and that is his birthday.

So happy birthday, council member.

And with that, please uh take it away.

You're a rock star.

All right.

So what stays in council what goes on in council stays in council, right?

Thank you very much.

Uh so just as as a way of background and as uh Chair Nash noted, um, we're taking a look at a range of things pertaining to elections.

We've had a presentation already about ranked choice voting, and it was suggested then that we have a presentation on approval voting.

And so thank you, Ms.

Wagner and Miss Sardinas for coming and sharing this with us.

Um by way of background, a third speaker, Walter Olson, who was part of the charter group as well as an expert on elections because of the weather, will not be able to join us today, and so I will reschedule his his presentation and comments later on.

So more to come on that.

Uh so Ms.

Wagner, I understood you were going to lead for a few minutes and then turn over to Ms.

Sardinas, is that correct?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you both for joining us.

Thank you, and good afternoon, council members.

My name is Mary Kramer Wagner.

I'm with uh Pinnacle Strategies representing the Center for Election Science.

And I want to thank you for the opportunity to present to you the information on approval voting.

Just want to give a little bit of background about myself.

I spent 21 years in the wonderful world of elections, and that just never gets out of your bloodstream, I tell you what.

But um I also was a legislative liaison to the General Assembly during that time, and I just need to give a shout out to uh the former election director of Frederick, Stuart Harvey, who was my partner in crime during that whole time I was with elections because again, I'm state board.

I always used to say there wasn't enough love nor money for me to work at a local board because they do the yeoman's work, they do the heavy lifting, and I would come up with some really great ideas, and Stuart would look at me and say, No, go back to the drawing board.

So I always really welcomed his collaboration with me.

And a lot of questions, as you all can imagine.

What is the difference between ranked choice and approval voting?

And we go around and around, and the legislators were confused, and they didn't want to make that decision.

So after speaking to quite a few of the legislators, I said, how about a task force?

Uh and the task force would study the implementation of approval voting and ranked choice voting.

Let's get the best in the brightest in the room to hash this out, not showing favoritism from you know, for one or the other.

It would be give us your best.

And I present it to you all with the bill, and I'll be more than happy.

It's a bipartisan uh process between the House and the Senate.

Uh and um I can certainly get that back out to you.

Uh the hearing in both chambers is Wednesday at one o'clock.

So we will be dividing and conquering and testifying and whatnot.

There will be, I'm sure, amendments offered, which we welcome.

This is just a starting point to do that.

And so I'll keep you all posted about how we move forward with this these bills.

And with that, I would love to turn it over to Alison, who is the true person on approval voting.

Thank you so much, Mary.

Uh before I introduce myself, I'm so sorry, everyone.

I'm sick.

So if sometimes you see me like mute immediately, it's because I'm hacking a little bit.

Uh, but I promise it's not for any other reason.

I'm just, you know, a little stuffy.

Um my name is Alison Sardinas.

Um, I'm the director of public affairs for the Center for Election Science.

And the Center for Election Science is a national nonpartisan nonprofit uh focused on really broadly election innovation.

And one of the first election innovations that we decided we really should make some sort of decision on was which type of voting method we wanted to back in terms of support for implementation.

We were really agnostic about this process at first.

Um, and we looked at all of the methods.

That includes ranked choice, there's things like star voting, uh, there are uh things you've probably never heard of.

Uh, there's just so many methods out there actually.

Ranked choice is probably the best known, but there really are a bunch of different methods.

There's a new one on the block, uh Condor Say method, um, and they all do different things, and they're all asking different questions of what that vote can do and what that voter data is actually collected for.

So we landed on approval voting because one, we started out as a fully citizen-led advocacy org, and as a result, we wanted something, we wanted to back a reform that kind of had the path of least resistance to implementation.

And so what that means in terms of practicality, and then I will get into some of the real world uh examples of places that we are used.

Um, we are using a couple of municipalities in America.

But to give you uh an example of why, uh, it's very simple.

So approval voting is simply put, you get to choose all of the candidates on a ballot that you approve of, and none that you don't.

If you've ever used a doodle poll, you have used approval voting.

It's basically an aggregator that finds where we agree.

That is, it's a tool that finds where we agree.

That is uh it's a consensus building method and it looks for consensus.

That is the question of the method.

The the method is asking where do the most people agree.

And so in something like ranked choice, a lot of times the question that is asked of the method is where can we find 50%?

That is what that method is trying to solve for.

Um, as a result, we are different voting methods in terms of like umbrella terms.

We're a cardinal voting method.

Um so that means that we um basically just one of the one of the main differences is that we are simply counting.

Um as a result, uh we we are completely compliant with things like risk limiting audits, uh, hand counts, uh, we are precinct summable.

Um there are all of those kinds of um auditing methods, ballot cures, all of those kinds of concerns.

We try to be as transparent as possible, particularly in today's climate where um we know that transparency is really necessary.

You can do things also in the a lot of the same weight as you can with plurality.

So, for example, you can start counting immediately.

Um, you can get same-day results, some of those things that people are really um invested in in plurality, and some of the things that make people less or rather rather more reticent to change from plurality because they're used to those things and they're used to those methods of uh transparency that plurality does offer.

But we do find that plurality often splits the votes.

Um the Center for Election Science ran um a simulation study in 2022, and what it did is we tried to find the amount of places in America where a vote split, so by a vote split, I'm guessing since you already heard from RCV, maybe you heard from what a vote split is, but it's essentially when a minority candidate and by a minority, it's a candidate that would receive a minority of support, nothing else, um, gets to become elected through that minority support because the majority is splitting its support amongst more majoritarian candidates.

And so a good example of this, and a good example of where we've been able to see success, and it's a good case study, is in St.

Louis.

St.

Louis actually uses approval voting.

And um before St.

Louis used approval voting, there was a woman who was elected with about uh 30% of the vote.

Her name was Lyda Crusin.

And what happened there, because St.

Louis is a majority black city, is that a lot of the residents who uh were would then split their vote amongst the other black candidates.

Uh Lydo Crusin was a white woman who then was able to get into office with that 30 or so percent.

I think it was actually 32.

But that meant that the majority, the majority of folks didn't feel represented in that result.

And I think some of the like sort of trickle-down effects of not feeling represented in an election, and then those results is that people feel a lot more likely to say that things are rigged, that they don't feel honest or representative, that something happened in the process because their votes were actually reflected in the outcome.

You have someone who got to eek by without building any consensus.

And so they don't have to represent the majority of their constituents.

They get to find that niche, catered to that niche, and it builds hyperpartisanship.

And when we did that 2022 study, we found that about 25% of people at some point in their office uh tenor actually were elected via a vote split.

And that that just increases that um hyperpartisanship and increases the need to find niches that do not appeal to my jo a majority when you know that uh a certain number of people are running for office.

So to go back to that um that example with what happened in St.

Louis.

So St.

Louis finds that something has to change, right?

That this is happening too often in St.

Louis.

Um they're not getting the majority result that they really need, and that the city deserves.

And so they start uh a campaign, and this is a grassroots campaign.

Uh, it's called proposition D.

And we had a local partner there called Show Me Integrity, and we really just lent our educational support.

But we found that they through proposition D, um, show me Integrity was able to pass proposition D, which was approval voting by 68%.

Um, which was probably the first time that uh St.

Louis agreed on anything to the 68th percentile in a very long time.

So we're very happy to see that.

Um what happens from there is then we don't see a huge runway for implementation.

This is another thing that we really liked about approval voting.

We still like about approval voting.

You can essentially vote, and then the next election um you can implement approval voting.

We have on record one of the folks who was in charge at the election, he said that they uh they were able to run on, I think it's gems.

Uh, they ran on a very old system.

Uh, this was uh in a matter of months in order to run the next election, and they only spent a thousand dollars, which I would not um suggest to only spend a thousand dollars, but a thousand dollars on voter education, and what that actually meant for them is they just uh printed on a magnet and they slapped it on the machines to show you can choose more than one, choose as many as you like, and that was their that was their entire like voter education budget.

I think it's insane.

Uh but it worked for them it seems, um, because the outcome of that election is that you know, we expected to see differences and the people who ended up rising to the top for a runoff.

But what ends up happening is two women, and this is the first time in the history of St.

Louis, rise to the top for that election, which uh, you know, historic and really neat to see.

Um, and they both rise to the top with over 50% approval.

And this is something that's different about approval voting, is that currently and in other methods as well, everyone kind of has uh one piece of the hundred percent pie in approval voting, everyone has their own pie.

So you get to everyone can reach technically 100% approval.

It's not gonna happen, right?

But it is really just trying to assess who has the most, who has the most consensus and the most support.

That is the most important voter data that we are trying to assess in order to best represent uh the community.

The answer to who has the most uh support in that St.

Louis example um is uh is the first black woman um to ever win office and she wins with uh about 60% approval.

Uh coming in second, very close is a white woman who uh almost gets there.

She's at 52 or so.

So we see that we're able to sort of immediately make history just changing the way that we think about who can win and how they can win.

Um the the results were immediate in terms of ballot counting.

Um they didn't actually have to do any software changes.

I asked them how they tabulated it because you can technically tabulate in a few different ways when you don't have a software upgrade or you have like old systems, or I'm not really sure um what software you all are using, but I know the way that they did it, they just turned off the tab that allowed over voting and they ran um for the race uh and then just were able to tabulate from there.

Um I know that some systems um in other jurisdictions, for example, uh it is also in Fargo, North Dakota, or wasn't Fargo North Dakota, got caught up ironically, in an RCB ban approval did, um which is really unfortunately happening more and more.

Um but the way they ran it was uh they had school board races that you could choose more than one already.

So their machines could already do this.

Uh they just didn't realize it could explicitly do this for other races as well.

We also find that in terms of cost, there's no additional cost because we know that um elections unfortunately aren't the best funded, even though obviously I think they should be, but um for ballot paper, for example, um there are no additional costs incurred.

Um it really is a pretty simple change that we believe can deliver exceptional results, um, a really good return on investment there, and um it also we believe has a very low burden for the voter themselves.

There doesn't really need to be there's not a really big change that they are engaging in.

We have done studies um, and if you all would like any of them, I can send them to you.

Uh after the fact, we have a few studies that show um that approval when implemented enjoys a broad majority support.

And uh even more than that, people really find it incredibly easy, very intuitive, uh, because they've all used like either a doodle poll or something like that.

Um and we also have found that um it does not take a lot of money to educate the public and to get them ready to vote in an approval voting election.

So we find that very efficient as well.

Um and so it's really a very simple method.

Um we have also worked with some election administrators, for example, in Utah, who are interested in looking at um a similar task force bill.

Uh, because we really uh Center for Election Science is very interested in the election science part of that.

Um we have tried to work with them to ensure that there would be no additional burden on the staff who actually administers the elections.

We are very aware of the fact that the less transparent something is, or even even if it's not, even if it looks like it, it can really increase threats to increasingly we're seeing threats to uh election administrators, their office, their staff, unfortunately.

Um and so that has also been something that has been top of mind in terms of us suggesting a method that we believe doesn't uh make anything less transparent and therefore puts them more at risk in any way uh shape or form.

Um so those are sort those are basically the top lines.

Did I miss anything there, Mary?

No, I don't I don't think so.

I don't think so.

So if you all have any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for sharing this information.

Uh Councilmember Atkins, any questions?

Um you sort of danced around it, but it is the effect that you have a uh primary and then the top two go to the general election, or do you eliminate the primary?

Or how does that work?

So that's completely up to you.

So for example, that is something that to answer the question really directly, there is no one way to implement approval voting.

So for example, if you want to create a more jungle primary situation, um, I will be completely transparent.

Approval work voting works well when you have more than two candidates.

I think that's probably this true for every single alternative uh method.

Uh because that's what plurality does best.

Plurality does the head-to-head the best.

Um, but regardless, it is compatible and has been compatible uh with a few uh ways of implementation.

We have in St.

Louis where what they did was they did approval for a more jungle primary type um of uh just putting everyone in the same pot for that primary, and then they took the top two and did a plurality election in Fargo.

That is not what they did.

Um in Fargo, they uh kept their primaries.

Uh and it wasn't a jungle, it was uh, and this was at the behest of voters.

It was so basically we understand this is a tool that will make voters more comfortable and will lead to more equitable outcomes in any way that the electorate is comfortable, or that for example, you all if you just if you chose implementation, um it really works with whatever you want to do.

If you chose to get rid of primaries, this is my favorite.

I think that it saves money on a on that primary election.

And so you streamline it to just one election.

Um, but that is of course completely up to you all.

Great, thank you.

Councilmember uh Taylor.

Hi, thanks so much for your presentation.

Um two questions.

So how close can it be?

Like, is it you need to win by two percent?

You need to win by five.

Uh the only way that we've seen is just whoever gets the most.

Um yeah, it's like that's one of the ways where uh we see that people also uh accept the results best because it looks like plurality in terms of uh the way that that uh vote is counted.

You know, it looks very similar, but let's say you have more people over 50%, like we had in uh St.

Louis, you had two people who got more than 50% approval.

It was still just the person who won.

Uh and the person who got the most approval, which turned out to be a woman named Tashara Jones, and she got about 60% to the 52.

Right.

I I figure it'd be very unlikely that it would be exactly a tie, but you know, it is possible.

Um, and then you mentioned um St.

Louis and then Fargo, which isn't the case anymore.

Why isn't it anywhere else, don't you think?

We're actually pretty new.

Uh the Center for Election Science Um started out as that agnostic organization about 10 years ago, and only really about six years ago did it start pushing for approval voting.

So, and then within that time frame, we were able to get two.

But in general, um, I think for me, it's been frustrating because most people, I'm like, oh, you know, this is such a great method.

Most people don't know that we even have a voting method, you know, in general.

They don't even know like plurality exists.

And so for us, it's been about education, period.

Um, and so we are just we're kind of the newer kids on the block uh to try to get people to understand that there's lots of different ways.

Most people, uh, if they know of any alternative voting method, I think that they know about uh ranked choice voting.

Um which we really don't have any problem with.

It's just uh one, you're seeing an increasing number of bands, unfortunately.

Uh those look most mostly partisan.

Um but we are also just interested in uh presenting another method that we believe has uh the ability to be implemented basically right away with ease, and that's why we've we've chosen our route.

Okay.

So it sounds like you're saying that you were the first to come up with approval voting to create well, we're the first org to um support it sort of institutionally.

It's a fairly old method, but it existed in like these more nerdy circles.

But it was in mathematical societies for really long time because they liked that it was if you get into it with folks um who really talk about these things and talk about uh the theory of it, uh a lot of them land on approval voting, so a lot of our supporters are of like the math persuasion, and it's because for them it makes the most mathematical sense, and because it had that academic edge for so long, it took a really long time to sort of get out of the dolstroms of academia.

Um it is used in academia fairly widely, and it's also used by a lot of um third parties and some uh major parties uh for their own internal processes, but it's been used in that kind of realm for a really long time.

Yeah, I'm seeing that the history is quite old.

So with my question of why isn't this isn't this done elsewhere in the US, you know, that's it's must be for a reason.

You won't have to answer that.

I'm just just speaking out or thinking out loud.

Okay, I have no more questions.

Sure, sure person.

So let me just say thank you for your presentation and thank you for your work.

I think any time that we can instill additional confidence in our election cycle, no matter what, you know, having these conversations as a just proving that we're taking a look at these things.

I'm gonna come at this from a um a specific angle and I'm gonna tell you why.

So I'm a two-term, some in my second term, some a second term incumbent.

I'm also a former recovering political science student.

And so, like if I could go back and tell 18-year-old self that this is what I would be doing when I was 43, like I would say stay the course because it's really freaking cool.

Um but the reason I'm gonna ask these questions is not I'm I'm very open-minded about this.

Like I'm a Republican turned Democrat.

I'm really pretty convinced that we should have open primaries as a base.

Like, I'm not set at all.

So I'm very open-minded.

So, but I do want to understand when we talk about approval voting, I want to understand how we're not just how is this any different than our current structure, which arguably relies heavily on name recognition, right?

So if we're gonna make a switch and and arguably like our current system, name recognition, funding, all that good stuff.

But tell me how approval voting isn't the same.

Like, you know, we all we we often get told, well, you know, they're just really well known, they might not be the best candidate.

So and if you don't, if you want to take some time and think about it, like you, that's fine.

But that's something that comes to mind is like how do we how do we answer that question when inevitably we get asked.

So that's something that we've actually thought about a lot.

Uh another thing that we thought a lot uh about a lot is uh turnout as well.

You know, these are all kinds of questions that we try to uh kind of assess for.

Um in that project that we I talked about earlier, which was an America misrepresented, um one of the biases that we found that was the most common bias was that name ID bias.

However, we find that name ID bias becomes the most pronounced once someone is already in office.

It does exist um before they're in office, but we found that it didn't have the same poll as a pure incumbency bias.

And we found that there was like kind of a separation there.

Um so in terms of the name ID thing, um, I will say that in Fargo, North Dakota and in um St.

Louis and Missouri, what we found was that there were a lot of firsts and first time uh rather people who were able to surpass that encompass eva incumbency bias and were able to get in for the first time.

This is in both places.

Um and so I can give you some of that data.

Um I can't tell you the exact signs of like why that happens, but we did find that people were able to be ousted for kind of the first time.

Um my theory about that is that if you're able to create a method that gives a more equitable playing field, you can defeat some of the incumbency bias specifically.

Um which I think propels the name ID uh bias in in that way.

We found that if they are able to not get in in the first place under some sort of either name ID or whatever it is that you can sort of defeat that moving forward.

And so we were able to basically thwart that on a first pass for like open elections and things like that.

But we did find, for example, um in uh Fargo in particular, they were able to replace several people.

So I think that there's a little bit of an art to why that is, but um I think creating that more equitable playing field.

I think RCV would tell you something similar.

We also work with like star uh store voting.

It's that the name ID part is sort of impossible to defeat on its own, but you know, there are ways to help it.

If I could follow up.

Um actually I I appreciate that perspective because I I think you hit something there that I wasn't thinking about, but I think just by the nature of being entitled approval voting, if you're an incumbent who's seeking another term, you are seeking, you know, do you approve of that person having a second term or a third term?

I I actually I I think the way that's phrased could very well lead to, well, I've you know already had eight years of making good decisions or bad decisions, depending on your perspective.

So that's a very interesting, you know.

I'll just I'll just add that I think RCV when and I had the benefit of being here when those presentations had, I do think it's a more complicated, again, open.

I think it's a more complicated system to discuss versus what you've presented today, and I think that alone is an interesting like selling point.

I mean, for lack of a better term, but um I really appreciate it.

I I appreciate the I appreciate the unbiased way that you presented the information, and I appreciate that you know, are kind of you understand where we're at in sort of this discovery phase of figuring figuring things out.

So um very much appreciated.

And any studies that you have, I think we would we would benefit from.

Thank you.

Oh, I we can give you we can give you several.

And we like to say that you know, we are approval voting, so we think that you can like more than one thing.

Uh we are we don't dislike uh RCD or really any other method.

Um it's just about we found that because we were citizen-led for so long that there were ballot initiatives that got these folks um and that's one of the reasons why it was difficult for people to get things on the ballot because it was valid initiatives and it was completely citizen-led, they just didn't really have the money for a while.

And so we sort of changed course to getting to actually talking to you folks directly.

Um but because of that, we've tried to be as practical as possible because no offense to you lovely folks who are sitting there, but uh sometimes people do not want to change the method by which they were voted in.

And so we tried to make it as streamlined as possible so that folks would consider alternatives.

Uh hey, thank you very much.

Uh you had mentioned uh impacts on turnout.

Are based upon your analyses, is there any difference with a small turnout as opposed to a big turnout?

So this might be really interesting.

We have been working with folks out of Utah, and we have found that the voting method doesn't really have the biggest impact, um, unless it gets really complicated for folks and then they end up staying home.

We have found actually that uh things like in some places this is getting a little the things like open primaries can depress turnout, uh which is bizarre.

Uh there are some of our partners, so we were agnostic about that.

Um but we have found that the things that actually uh increase turnout, uh one of the things are strong parties increase turnout because a lot of the times uh what actually increases turnout isn't the method, it is the uh GOTV efforts and when parties feel responsible for GOTV efforts, they do the most to bring people to the polls, and that is the most directly correlated thing that we could find.

Uh I didn't mean to mislead you there and say, oh, we're gonna have to do that.

Yeah, my question actually was if if only 17% of the electorate turns out to vote and we're using approval voting, does that have you found or does your analysis show the outcome would be different than if 82% of the electorate came out to vote?

So that's what I'm saying is it is that not it's not necessarily like the method that we have found that makes a huge difference difference there.

That trends um are sort of irrespective of the method.

Uh it and that includes sort of any method that we have survey.

All right.

Um again, in and if we used approval voting, you would not anticipate any different outcome if only say 17% of the population of the voter database came out to vote.

Well, I we would the I mean I I don't know what the outcome the outcomes often change, but we don't know if there would be a turn usually like turnout, it looks like it increases moderately, uh like one or two.

I I mean does the uh does the turnout?

Does the turnout affect the outcome?

Not does the not does the method of voting increase turnout.

Um if you know, I um that's a I yeah, I I guess that to me is such a hype we haven't seen that.

I mean, the we've seen that the method does change the outcomes.

Um and that does look like the method changes the outcome no matter if it's a low turnout election.

So I mean, two part of your point there is that uh it has changed the historic election outcomes in low turnout elections or historically low turnout elections.

So in Fargo, a lot of city council races, for example.

Um and by change, it just looks like uh it increased the percentage by which people were actually elected.

So that's what we are assessing when we're looking at change.

Uh it looks like people get a lot closer to uh sort of 50% approval threshold than they did previously, where they were getting in by like 12%, 13%.

Okay.

Even in low turnout.

And a specific question: how many candidates were in the St.

Louis race that there were where it ended up two people had over 50% of the vote using approval voting.

So those are that was eight candidates.

Eight candidates.

Great.

Thank you.

Uh and then I this is a hypothetical, but is it is it even plausible that you would find that everybody would vote for everybody?

That would be a really nice word uh world that we would live in.

Uh I find that I we haven't seen it.

We haven't seen anything even uh close.

What we we've actually found that uh the percentage of ties is incredibly rare in approval.

Um we haven't seen one.

Uh and it looks like um, you know, you get close, uh people get uh close to each other, but we haven't seen that yet.

We haven't we we've seen pretty definitive actually um differences in candidates as people are allowed to choose more than one.

It looks like they vote less strategically uh and they uh and that ends up m making big differences for the outcomes, or at least the way that the outcomes read.

Okay.

And related to that, uh have you done an analysis about people who do shotgun votes?

In other words, they vote for one candidate.

Yeah, the bullet voting.

Right.

Um we find that the majority uh does not.

So uh we to be clear there, um in the first the the first time that folks use um approval voting, and this goes for other methods as well.

Uh we find that people about 30 percent of the time use do not bullet vote or do not shotgun vote.

Uh they will choose more than one candidate.

As they get more familiar with the method, that increases over time.

So I think um if you were to adopt approval, but I think this is probably true of RCD, and it's probably true of like STAR or anything else that you're talking about.

About the first time there's kind of a learning curve where people are going to feel safer bullet voting.

We do see that that changes over time as voter behavior is sort of incentivized towards other uh directions and voting uh a little bit more confidently uh and becoming more confident in that voting uh system and method.

So again, at the start, most people shotgun, but then as people gain comfort with approval voting, they vote for more than one candidate.

That's right.

So about uh about 33% will choose more than one candidate at first.

Great, thank you.

Uh a couple more.

One is what if any impacts does approval voting have if we changed our primary process to be open primaries?

You touched on open primaries, but just to ask that specific question.

So we have worked with open primaries in the past, the org and also the method.

Uh that's what we used in St.

Louis.

So we are very used to uh working with an open primary method.

Uh and so what they had done is they had worked uh uh to consolidate the primaries or the party primaries into a nonpartisan um open primary, and then they used us as a top two.

We have seen proposed in other places, which has never been used, but these are options just that are on the table.

That there are top four method, or rather, that sort of jungle or open primary, and then people choose anywhere from a top four or a top three, something like that, and then they move on from there.

And then they use approval if they have a top four.

Again, I uh I'm less inclined to something like that just personally, but I have seen that proposed.

I know that like, for example, Nevada has uh proposed and supported um a sort of more jungle to top four um method.

So it is something that's out there, but that's not what we have used in the past.

Okay, thank you.

Uh uh just out of curiosity, has anyone said that approval voting is uh discriminatory, racist, or anything like that.

So we have had that leveled at us.

Uh so we did the research to see if that was true.

Um and actually we found the reverse uh to be true among minority populations in particular, um, they have found uh approval voting to be um the easiest of the methods.

That's this is actually a study that we are in the process of uh peer review, like publishing in a peer-reviewed journal.

It is in the final final uh processes, the final final steps.

Um and we did a meta-analysis and ran simulations for I mean, just several methods.

It wasn't just us, and it wasn't just RCV, it was star as well.

I'm more than happy to share that with you as soon as we are published uh and and we have that.

And essentially we had what we call the voter experience survey to be able to test to see uh quantifiably where we stood in terms of uh othering any minority group or or really any constituency at all, because it's really uh antithetical to what we want to do here.

We want to ensure that um the process is democratic, that people understand what it is, and that it is open and that everyone understands where their vote went, how it was counted.

Um, you know, we want it to be as transparent a process as possible.

That's why I'm personally in this line of work.

And so we do have that data.

Um we found the opposite to be true, actually.

Um people found us really intuitive.

Um, and we ranked really high.

And so I can I can share that with you as soon as it's published.

It's just not that that would be great when it's published.

So hey, last one is uh I uh the Center for Election Science sounds like a great organization.

You're doing great work, um, but nobody works for free.

Who's who's funding it?

Who's promoting your organization in order to promote approval voting?

So we actually don't have that many funders.

Uh we are very small org.

I mean, really a little thing.

And uh currently a lot of the people that we have have been individual donors, really, and they come from that like mathematical community.

So we have um a lot of folks, uh there's uh Dr.

Stephen Brahms who did a lot of this work in the university level.

Um we have uh man who just recently for political reasons uh left Tesla, but he was uh one of the original um engineers who was looking at um some of the like cognitive models going to MIT, you know.

So we have folks like that who um from a really technical world.

We have a lot of engineers and a lot of mathematicians who fund us, and they fund us um individually on an individual um contribution basis.

We're trying now for grants and moving more into that realm.

Um, but we are also uh completely transparent, all of the data or rather data, all of the donor information is on our org.

Uh our EIN's there, all of it's there.

We we believe in transparency.

Great, thank you.

That's it for me.

Uh colleagues, any other questions?

Yes, sir.

Councilmember.

Thanks.

Really fascinating stuff.

Following up on uh Peter's question about the number how people vote multiple times, you know.

Um I would see that if we had a huge mail-in ballots, and I would imagine that I'm gonna say senior because I'm in that group, I'm afraid, but the senior population, when you get a mail-in ballot, you're just gonna go with muscle memory and fill out one vote.

Do you and I I don't know if you can quantify that because I don't know if they differentiate between paper and in-person ballots.

Do you have any information on that?

So I find that one, it's that's hard for us to quantify one just because that is not a ballot error, right?

So for example, under RCV, that's more more easily uh quantified because they have that exhausted ballot um issue, right?

Where it's you know, you can at least maybe count how many ballots were exhausted.

So like maybe how many people didn't uh reach um whatever um layer of counting rate.

Um for us, it's not a ballot error, right?

We count it either way.

So that is one of the things I will say that at the very least, if if someone also truly decides, right?

There is also there are lots of people who only like one person.

I mean, there are lots of people who like none uh who would rather who would rather vote for no one uh and they just decide on one of them.

Um and one of our promises that we make is that really no matter how you vote, your vote will be counted.

Um and it will show up in the final tally.

Uh we find that some people get very uncomfortable with this idea that their vote will not uh exist really in the final tally.

And that was that's one of the pieces of feedback that we've gotten a lot.

Um so we are we're confident that no matter how you vote, it will be reflected.

But also uh we find that when people do that, it is not an error.

So um it is that they've absolutely chosen uh to uh bullet vote or shotgun vote.

And three, we have also found that um the method.

The people who are most politically attuned are the people who are going to choose the most people or are going to rank the most people or going to like star ballot the most people, whatever it is.

Um I will say for uh an older demo, they tend to be more politically informed and they tend to vote for more people as a result.

Um that's the correlation that we have found.

Okay.

Two and one other one other thing I wanted to bring up.

With approval voting, you don't have spoiled ballots.

Whereas now unless you like completely mess it up, right?

Like you put.

Well, yeah.

Okay, two really easy questions.

Um you don't need 50% of the vote to win.

It's whoever gets the most votes.

So I mean, theoretically, you know, you could have somebody with you know a low number 31%, and they still would would win, which is fine.

Um then my last question which municipality, county, state has used this the longest.

In modern history.

Uh uh that would be at least in in the uh Fargo had used it the longest.

They were the first implementers.

They also have a lot of good data.

Um and they have a lot of good data in terms of the council races, because to your point, uh there was one year where everyone didn't like anyone.

And so the person who ended up winning, I believe won with something like 40 something percent approval.

And you know, like I talked about, they were able to get up to 100% approval.

It's just I guess no one was feeling it that year.

Um I will say though, one of the one of the other uh one of the other things uh that is something to consider in terms of approval voting, is that it does also a pretty good job of measuring where the electorate is on other issues as well, because it isn't only it isn't only uh figuring out um where like 50 percent or whatever it is, it's really just trying to find approval.

So for example, if you have a sort of niche issue, uh let's say we we did a poll and it showed uh uh Andrew, it was the I think it was the 2016 presidential uh primary, um, and it we put everyone on a ballot.

And for example, um under methods that are more interested in only calculating a winner and not necessarily getting a survey of voter data or voter approval, um we found that under approval, Andrew Yang actually got 30%.

Uh Liz uh Elizabeth Warren got the most, actually.

She she was the most approved, uh followed by uh Bernie Sanders and then everyone else.

Um but we found that um Andrew Yang actually got 30 percent.

When we did the same under plurality, we know how much he got.

He got something like 2%.

And we were really interested and kind of shocked to see that under RCB, he only received something like 5%.

So it wasn't uh it didn't extend.

And so, like, you know, our question was why did that happen?

And we found that when you shift the question to be what do you approve of, you start to see a fuller picture of where the electorate lies on various issues.

And so we were able to sort of extrapolate that about 30% of that population did support something like UBI.

And so for a winning pot uh a winning politician who actually wins that race, they can see that there is a still a sizable amount of the constituency that supports things that may not have been recorded under a different method.

So just something to consider as well.

Thanks.

Any other good follow-up questions?

All right, well, Ms.

Kramer Wagner and Ms.

Sardinas, thank you again for sharing your time and knowledge with us.

And Ms.

Ardenas, we will look forward to getting the additional documentation that you said that you would be able to share with us.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks for having us.

Good evening.

Bye-bye.

Council members, it's back up here for any additional comments and any public comment.

Doesn't look like we have much public comment today.

Maybe next week.

Just briefly, I will start the our work plan status.

I sent out for just the public's awareness.

I sent out a status update for my group.

We also have started to report on these for my committee.

We also started to report on these at hearings.

So if you're interested in learning more about the status of our work plans and what we're working on, that information will be shared at hearings.

Noteworthy, next week we're going to be talking budget monitoring, which is going to be super exciting.

So everybody clue in, tune in.

Councilmember?

Nothing.

Thank you.

Councilmember?

No, ma'am.

Councilmember.

No comments.

All right.

Thank you very much.

We're right at an hour and uh have a good day.

Bye.