We have quorum, so thank you, Council members, for joining me.

We'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance.

One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

And we owe thanks to Walter Olson for joining us today to give us a briefing and general discussion on voting methods.

So yes, please go ahead and take a seat.

Just by way of background, the government operations committee has been talking about different aspects of voting, rank choice voting, approval voting.

If we haven't had the open primaries discussion, we will.

But Walter is an expert on many of these topics, and so we've asked him to come and share his thoughts on all of this.

So Mr.

Olson, if you could take it away.

Thank you.

Is the microphone?

Sounds like it.

Good.

One has to pull the microphone super close in order for it to be heard.

Oh okay, that's better.

Well, uh thank you, uh, Councilman Brahm and uh to all of you for coming out.

Uh I've been asked to talk first about approval voting, which I believe you have heard about already from a strong advocate, and uh I'm going to give a different view.

And also to uh uh begin at least a discussion on uh open primaries versus closed and other primaries.

So I'll try to give about 10 minutes to each.

Approval voting for those of you who may not have been at the earlier meeting, is a system uh in which uh voters are presented with a list of candidates just as now, uh, but are given an instruction like vote for all that you approve of, so they can vote for one, two, three, or however many uh that they say they approve of.

And it has uh been used in Fargo, North Dakota, at least until the State government uh banned it in the last uh uh round, which I think is very uh uh unfortunate, and it has uh been adopted recently in the City of St.

Louis, where it was used for the most recent mayoral race.

Uh and the arguments for approval voting, which you probably heard from my API colleague who visited you last time, are uh it is uh a system that makes it simple to vote, about as simple as currently, simple to tabulate.

Uh those are important advantages.

And it might also do some important things, such as fit the results of an election more closely to voters' actual sentiments.

Uh we can talk about that in a moment.

It might uh encourage more candidates to run for reasons that we'll also get to.

So those are serious advantages, and I'm uh going to uh venture that possibly it is a better system than the one that we have now, so-called first past the post, in which you vote for one candidate only, and whoever gets the most votes uh wins the primary or the general, as the case may be.

At the same time, uh I did not come here as a second advocate for approval voting, but rather to share criticisms that uh weigh on the minds of a lot of people and which may help explain why it is not a widely adopted system, uh, compared with ranked choice voting, which has been adopted in two states and dozens and dozens and dozens of cities, and and for quite a while.

Uh ranked choice voting or the approval voting doesn't have too much beyond uh the two cities that I mentioned.

And uh why would this be?

Well, one of the things that you look for uh in evaluating a voting system is to what extent it encourages strategic voting, sometimes called tactical voting, as opposed to what I call my own terminology, sincere voting.

Now, in sincere voting, you are voting uh exactly as your heart tells you about which candidates uh you approve of in this case, or which candidates you prefer to others in the case of rank choice voting uh, or which is your favorite candidate in the case of vote for only one systems.

And unfortunately, uh just as it's a problem with the current system, that people don't vote for their favorite candidate if they think the candidates not got a chance to win.

They will cross over and vote for which of the people at the very top uh uh that they prefer.

So with approval voting, uh there is plenty of evidence, including polls taken of Far Fargo North Dakota voters, that uh strategic voting runs rampant, something like nearly a third of voters in Fargo said that they had not, in fact, listed all of the candidates that they uh approved of.

And uh I'm getting it secondhand from people like the mayor of Fargo, but uh it's very one reason is very clear, which is that the candidates themselves urge you not to use approval voting.

Uh that the mayor said everyone it starts off their campaign by saying vote for one only.

You know, do not use this approval voting feature because you are undercutting your chance for me, the obvious best candidate to win uh by putting in others.

So in uh St.

Louis, uh there was some multiple voting.

I think it was like 1.4 votes per person in the mayoral race, which was not close, and which I suspect everyone knew was not going to be close.

And people used uh those extra votes to signal that they liked one of the other candidates, but not uh it wasn't very effective in deciding the race, where one mayor, one uh person was running away with it.

Uh likewise in Fargo, uh, most people don't use that approval method once they get the word from anyone's campaign that uh it is preferred for you to bullet vote.

So accordingly, the question is what do we evaluate?

The ideal in which there are lots and lots of votes cast in or under approval voting, or the actuality in which it may come out an awful lot like exactly what we've got now, except that we had to invest in a change.

And I I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that the problem was not the actual thing, but the ideal one.

It was the ideal to which he objected.

And I think there's a good reason to object to the ideal uh approval voting in that it rewards what you might call the tall glass of water, the thing that is unobjectionable to absolutely anyone, however uh good their uh uh coalition building skills, however good their managerial skills may be.

Uh you know, maybe it rewards uh uh name recognition.

Maybe the local newscaster who has been smiling at the people of the city uh for the last 10 years is the one who can get the most approval.

Is that a good way?

Uh I call it the triumph of the tepid.

But I'm not very confident in that opinion because again, there's been so little experience with approval voting that we just don't know that much about how it works.

Um a couple more items.

Um you might hope in theory that approval voting leads to uh more civility in campaigning and more reaching out.

That has certainly been an argument for ranked choice voting, and I think a correct argument for ranked choice voting, that it uh changes the nature of campaigning in a way that builds bridges.

It causes uh candidates to go out to constituencies where they know they're not the favorite, and nonetheless try to become better known and liked uh in order to pick up some of those second place and third place votes.

Uh well, approval voting uh might do that too, is just I don't see any evidence from the accounts of uh Fargo and St.