the city of sarasota and we're going to talk about rank choice of voting or instant runoff voting today i am joined by diane desson berg and caitlin bach meyer both part of the rank choice voting group and also unfortunately john's have a really couldn't join us and he is also a leader of the rank choice voting group diane is a retired software developer and blogger and for the last couple of years diane has been active with local rank choice voting group prodding to get rank choice voting up and running in the city of sarasota and caitlin was disappointed by the lack of opportunity for rd party candidates in most recent elections and in about two thousand and sixteen she became involved also with the rank choice voting group particular points of interest are right choice voting reducing negative campaigning partisan politics and minimizing the effects of big money on politics we can unfortunately not be joined today by john severino who is a one of the leaders of the group and he has thirty years as an information technology profession professional founded and ran proven technology inc and data management company for twenty years and he started to work with rank choice voting s r q also in two thousand and sixteen as he was embarrassed by the lack of civility dividing us as a nation he finds that rank choice voting is nonpartisan easy to use and will generate a consensus winner giving voters more choice more voice and is a greater improvement on the current system than what we have today and i would also like to note that all three of you are involved in information technology is that correct so before we jump into our discussion about rank choice voting i wanted to have show a little video a short video that will help explain exactly what it is so we can play that  now pick your favorite color the ranked choice voting way instead of voting for just one color you get to rank your top three purple is the best but if i can't have purple i want blue and i neither of those wins i guess i can live with now let's count up everybody's votes under rank choice voting rules it's not enough just to get the most food you need a majority more than fifty percent of the votes purple's ahead but it has only seven needs at least eleven to win so we eliminate the color in the last place sorry orange fans we're going to your nd choice two more for green one for purple but no color has eleven votes  right well thank you i think johns supplied us with that video and it really shows really easily how rank choice voting is simple and what a great benefit it is i think what a lot of people in the city of sarasota don't know is that there was an election in two thousand and six and it was our seventy seven percent of the citizens voted to add it to our charter so that when we have the software and hardware capable of implementing rank choice voting that is the kind of system that we should be using here in the city of sarasota so it's already been voted on and it's already in our charter and so it is something that you as a group as rank choice voting for s r q would like to see implemented since it was twelve years ago that the vote took place we do have the hardware and the software exists and so this is an effort that you know you guys have been working on diane can you just tell me a little bit about how and why you got involved so i was watching the elections in two thousand and sixteen and i saw the primary process which i thought kind of shocked me i thought that in a democracy we have this nominating process and people get the vote or caucus so that it is more democratic in fact that wasn't really what we saw we saw the media having a huge effect we saw superdelegates rules run amok basically and it just seemed to me something about our voting system was off and when i researched it it turned out that the way we vote plurality vote in winner take all tends to engender this kind of system it brings about the two party system that we have today and it's basically impossible to get out of it based on the voting method that we use and so i looked at some of the other voting methods they were out there and voting instant runoff voting was one of them and i did remember that i actually voted for that in the in two thousand and seven i voted to have rank choice voting and we have we already have a runoff system so we have two elections one where we pare down how many candidates are running for city commission as you know since you've been through the process and then the final election for the remaining candidates and we already have a runoff why not have an instant runoff well we voted for that and when i looked into it that it solves some of the problems that we do see in our overall voting system and one of the things it does is it allows other parties to come up and have a say other candidates who might not normally have a say because they're not in the party system in sarasota we don't we have nonpartisan elections so it's not as critical but we still want a nice wide array of candidates to show up and share their viewpoints and vote so one of the benefits of it is that it will save money because there's just dollar election but i think there are other benefits that as a candidate particularly appeal to me like that negative campaigning which is particularly poignant in small elections just like our city election kalen can you talk a little bit about how that works with negative campaigning and how rank choice voting well hopefully aims at eliminating that and why that happens yeah sure so the way that the whole rejoice voting is set up is that you are vying as a candidate to win the mage already vote so fifty percent or more what we have a tendency to see in our choice voting elections is that when you're trying to go for fifty percent or more you're trying to buy for the the people's backing you want the you want their favor you won you're not just saying hey you know like this guy is the worst me this guy's the worst or i'm better than that that woman or or this or that you're not you're not spending a lot of your time sort of focused on the negative impacts of the other candidates around you but more so on making yourself the most preventable best foot forward and strongest candidate available among the selection i would i would add that if  wants my vote and i am inclined to vote for another candidate they're not going to go bad mouth that other candidate if i'm inclined to vote for them so that's another way that it kind of minimizes the negative campaigning right and i like the feeling of as a of let's say five candidates and there are two of them that are really strong and you really like them you pick one over the other but you pick the nd candidate used you think to yourself well if this one is not elected well this one was a really good one too that was my nd choice and i would be really happy with that person as a as if they were elected as well and i find that one of the endearing parts of the system and also as a candidate i would think that  i ran my campaign i did not negative campaign and i find it distracts from the actual issues that the people want to hear about and if frank choice voting encourages talking about issues and talking about your strengths you know i think it's just another one of the benefits so i'll just take off on one your point since i love to you people to vote for the candidate that i like the best that has appealed to me since day one my st election that i ever voted in i  been hit over the head any number of times told not to do that because it's it's impractical i end up electing people who i really don't want because i voted for the candidate i really wanted and that rank choice voting is really nice that way i can vote for the candidate i really want in every election where there's around choice voting option and then i can vote for somebody else and nd choice rd choice or whatever you know you don't lose your vote there's never throwing away your vote or anything like that everybody gets a say in how they'd like to see their their candidates lined up so it's a really great opportunity for the voters as well as the candidate yeah so here we have this it's in our charter we want to go forward with it as a city who else is doing this are we blazing the trail across the world or can you just talk about either one of you who else is doing this so there are any number of cities in the us that are doing it i don't have my list with me but i know offhand that oakland california and san francisco implemented it cambridge massachusetts  minneapolis now just so we have a number of cities who are already using it internationally there are whole countries that use it there are countries where every person gets to participate in a choice such as australia and new zealand ireland uses it and there are also private organizations that use it the academy awards i believe use it with their nominations so people are familiar with it and universities universities and there are a lot of universities use it so there are a lot of young people who come out of university already really well familiar with it and the entire state of maine the national it within the state of maine they just passed that state wide so that was a hot topic and a point of controversy but for a little while  but everything went really smoothly with their election and they just recently had their st choice voting election which was a huge you know hugely popular thing for us in our t v s r q so we were very excited about about that it is exciting  so for the state of florida though we would be the st to implement it and use this is a system is that correct there's nobody else in florida yet which is part of the challenge that is this point and there are a lot of cities around the state of florida that are also interested in in having this and seeing this kind of election reformation implemented in their in their own citywide elections so we feel even more empowered and obligated to see to see choice voting implemented in sarasota as we have already made the effort and past choice voting in our city charter so we would like to kind of feel little bit of a trailblazer here in the state of florida and hopes that we could see something like this nationally so ideally the secretary of state would come out and say we'd like to support rank choice voting we have this equipment we'd love to test it and certify it and therefore the city is here so i would be able to use it and conduct their voting election however they haven't quite come out and said that yet so we're working on that we have to take it one step at a time and i mean it has been twelve years but i think part of the problem of it taking so long up to this point is that we didn't have the hardware but now that we have the hardware the next step and final step would be the software and getting it certified by the state so i know that you all have been at this since two thousand and sixteen is that correct so can you explain to me because there are so many benefits that i see about rank choice party and that rd party candidate is basically distracting a bunch of votes from one of the two other candidates that could potentially run that are  your in the united states your democrat or republican right so if you have a rd party candidate who is popular enough to take votes away from either one of those votes you might end up with a candidate that may or may not have been elected by the popular pop popular vote excuse me i think you could probably speak a little bit more clearly on the subject i'd like to apply to sarasota to cities you know so we don't have parties here but we still could have the spoiler  so you could have if you had six candidates who all felt the same way on one issue and one candidate who felt the opposite way and then most of the people in sarasota felt the same way as the six candidates they could accidentally elect the person that felt the opposite way only because there are so many candidates that dilutes the effect of that position so they all hold the same position when you have any choice voting they could rank all the people that they like in order and that  the person holding opposing point of view that would be at the bottom of their ranking and it would it would play out then orders were given they want having more candidates who share the same values will not then detract from their ability to me in the elections so that's what happens with while or you have two competing sides theoretically there are very divergent and you have somebody come in who's more similar on one side takes some of the votes from that one side and then the other side wins even if really the majority of people don't support that point right so that is another thing that you brought up is we are nonpartizan in the city of sarasota but i did want to underscore the fact that this is supported by both of our parties at the moment it i bipartisan effort it is not a democratic effort effort or republican effort and it is supported by both parties so that is one other sort of uniting factor in rank choice yes because the spoiler effect and hit either party money in elections how does rank choice voting in the city of sarasota in a small election deter against big money having in moments well i would say that that is somewhat theoretical but from a theoretical point of view it would be harder to influence somebody on how they're going to vote on many candidates versus one it's if i had a lot of money and i was supporting one candidate i could throw all my money toward that candidate all my money against all the other candidates and i'd be done but in iran twice election it has to be much more nuanced than that you can have your st choice your nd choice you're there and all of those are going to influence things and you can't necessarily say throwing your money around in a certain direction is going to have the desired effect that you want it it would be much harder and the same thing goes for when you vote you have to be in a winner take all plurality system you have to be strategic in your vote so that a spoiler doesn't affect you by the same token when you go to vote it's much harder to play and be used to teach it to know how that's going to come out so you don't have to be strategic partially because you may not even be effective doing it same thing with big money and somebody throws a lot of money at the election you don't know that you're throwing in the right place because they have a lot of choices inexpressibly with their right and it makes a lot of sense so i just want to wrap up really quickly so some of the key points for rank choice voting is that it's easy to use we have a sample ballot here we can show it promotes fairness the winner is selected by majority it reduces costs it increases turnout it fosters civil elections and it's supported by a bipartisan effort it's currently used around this country and around the world and institutions and the voters of this city voted for it to be implemented by seventy seven percent so what's the next step what can people do to get involved to help make this effort to move forward while you can call your local commissioners you are state representatives and say that you are in full support of ring choice voting you can volunteer with us   yeah that's it's a point of contact and i'm going to ask a question which you know i was going to ask i hope somewhere on the website there is an e mail for the legislators that people can contact to help us with this i believe that there is  e i'm just thinking about now our email is r c v s r q at g mail dot com so if you like to send us an email or have anything any any questions we'd be happy to get in touch with you one for any closing comments anything we forgot to mention about how wonderful right choice voting i just want to say how easy it is some yeah there are some arguments that it's more complicated and people are going to figure out how to do it and they'll mess up their ballots and that's not in fact that it doesn't play out that way in places where they've done it some places don't even have education they just go in and say rank your choices and they have instead of saying pick one you rank your choices and it's pretty straightforward i think we do it every day in our regular lives we figure out which coffee we like best and and you get to offer all your opinions out on your vote and you're not kind of stuck between twenty two candidates you get you get to choose and the order that you prefer and it's really empowering and it's a great thing for both candidates and your voters and we voted for and i