Learning Hour : Proportional Representation and Approval Voting

All right. Hello folks. I think that we'll get started with just the intros. We know that people are going to continue to join. Um but we wanted to start um to respect everyone's time. Uh hi everyone. My name is Allison Sardinas. I am uh our director of public affairs at the Center for Election Science. We want to thank you so much for taking the time out of your afternoon. In some people's case, like Felix, your pretty late evening um to spend this hour with us. Um we wanted to really chat with folks about some of these emerging voting methods and voting reforms and how approval voting can really usher in some change that I think people don't really recognize that we can do, that we can be really good um leaping pad for people to actually get a more equitable and responsible democracy. Um with that said, uh I wanted to encourage folks. If you have questions, if you could please put them in the chat. You can also feel free to introduce yourself. Uh Nina and myself will be monitoring the chat. If I know anything about Felix and Clay, I'm sure they will as well. Um and so feel free as you as you think of a question or a comment or anything like that to just put that in the chat and we will be more than happy to um probably real time uh address it. And if you have a really specific question or request leave your email or contact information and we will also get back to you. If you needed like a pamphlet, um we will be recording this. This is recording and the slides uh Felix and Clay, are you guys comfortable with us sending those that out as well? So, you will have access to all of the things we have access to uh and we hope that you enjoy our presentation. Nina, did you want to just say a few uh words to welcome folks? >> Yeah, I I know people are still joining the line. Um but uh hi everybody. If we've not met, my name is Nina Taylor. I serve as the chief executive officer for the Center for Election Science. Um and this is uh another part of our our educational series that we host every fall um talking about some of the key issues that um and really uh initiatives that we see in our space. And so today we're going to focus in on proportional representation and approval voting. If you have questions, as Alison said, please drop them in the chat and I'll also include my email in the chat if you want to have a one-on-one meeting. Um I'm really interested in learning about each and every one of your organizations and the work that you are doing as we work together to uh build a more representative democracy. Um and so I will kick over to uh Clay and Felix to kick off their presentation. Thanks, everybody. >> All right, I'm just going to go ahead here and uh get the screen sharing going. >> And if there's any way that we can be either pinned by the host so that we'll have the the forum, I think will be best for everyone. Uh actually look at the slides. Don't need to see our talking heads. >> Right, excellent. >> That's that's perfect. All right, Clay's controlling the slides. So I'm sorry, we're going to be one of those like next slide folks. But I think Clay's going to see the natural transitions, which is this one. Okay, great. So explanation of who I am. Uh my name is Felix Sargent. I joined the Center for Election Science. Um I was literally invited to join the board at the like at the after-party of my wedding, I was very much a Godfather style situation where I was made an offer that I couldn't refuse. I think after 2016, I was very surprised about how the Republican 2016 elections went and I want to get involved. I want to understand why because it was strange seeing so many competitive candidates run and yet the least competitive candidate ended up winning in my personal and humble opinion. And after diving very deeply into voting methods, I thought well approval voting is clearly the best one and if you're not convinced, don't worry about that. But I wanted to get involved and was very grateful that the center for election science was already going strong. And served on the board for about 6 years and most recently after the most recent election, I I decided I didn't necessarily want to be in the United States anymore and I live in the United Kingdom but I spent 25 years in the United States and I'm an American citizen. But we'll also be able to offer a unique perspective on what's happening in the movement for proportional representation in the UK as well. You know, I can't can't help myself but get involved. And I work as a software engineering manager but it's it's written there. You You can tell. Bye. >> Yeah. I'm Clay Shentrup. I'm a co-founder and former board chair of the Center for Election Science and I've been involved in electoral reform since 2006. I'm currently working on an interesting thing called election by jury. I live up here in Portland, Oregon with my wife and two kids and like Felix, I also work in the software field. And my entry into this this subject matter was interesting. You know, I I did experience you know, public policy growing up basically in poverty by US standards in rural Kansas. And so I was always sort of attuned to public policy issues and how our democracy leads to human welfare outcomes. And uh in particular, thinking about our political situation at the time, you know, the Iraq war and things like this, um I had reflected a bit on the notorious 2000 US presidential election in which uh after all was said and done, um George Bush won Florida by 537 votes, but Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, won 97,488 votes in Florida. And so, a lot of people talked at the time of this idea of the spoiler effect, right? Or vote splitting when you have more than two candidates running in a choose one plurality voting system and what that can lead to. And I had remembered at some point reading in some college magazine or something, I can't even remember what it was, that someone had apparently proven that there's no perfect voting method. And being that I'm a you know, an engineering um you know, oriented person and I think about math and game theory and things like this, that always kind of stuck out in my mind. And so, that summer of 2006, I decided to sort of delve into this deeper. Like, what is that theorem? Who proved this? Why can't we have a perfect voting method? And I learned about Arrow's theorem. I discovered the website of Warren Smith, who is a Princeton math PhD who did a bunch of groundbreaking work on the math and the game theory of voting. Uh he ended up co-founding Center for Election Science with me and a lot of his groundbreaking um findings are chronicled in a book called Gaming the Vote by uh William uh Poundstone. And uh that's how I kind of found my way into other meeting other activists who were similar online. And in 2010, we started filing for incorporation as the Center for Election Science and that's kind of how we found ourselves here today. I'll hand it back to Felix. >> It Wait, so we're going to uh this is the overview of our talk. First, we're going to talk about what is proportional representation, why is it a good thing, um why can it sometimes not be a slam dunk? Why is there opposition to it at sometimes? And then uh if that's a goal that we want to achieve, which I think that it is, uh uh, how do we actually make it happen? What do we need to do, both here in the United States and also a perspective in the UK? And then talking about how approval voting can help with that. So, uh, let's first talk about what government's meant to be. Um, when we talk about proportional representation, it's not just that we want demographics to, you know, to for us to be able to see ourselves in our representatives. Although, that is very, very important. It's also that when there are people who are like us or hold policies or philosophies that are like us, that share either our background or our world view, it means when they sit down and design policy, that policy takes us into account. And even more importantly, when we when that's not the case, when you have distortions in the voting method and you don't have representation, then you get, uh, people who thinking our democracy doesn't work. You get inefficiencies. You don't have a real, uh, marketplace of ideas. And you you have what is measurably, uh, economic inefficiency, right? Um, when we figure out what when we have more people involved, the best ideas can arise to the top. And it's and even better, we can have the best candidates rise to the top when we have a competitive system that is also representative. So, um, the the hard part is you look at the systems today and I don't think I need I I I need to say it for the sake of the presentation, but I think everyone's on the same page that the system we have right now is not proportional. And first off, let's just look at the basic demographic case. The The age of the of of senators is 64 years old. Representatives are uh, 57 years old. The average American is far far younger. And while it's not while you wouldn't necessarily expect 19-year-olds to to be in in the Senate or the or the House, you still want to have a better representation than than the average senator being 64 years old because it means there are very very few senators who are under 35. All right, let's keep going. Um the religious demographics, I think this is actually one of the best and weirdest um uh ways to to to to show the demographic shift that happens in what we in what we consider a acceptable representative in the United States in that it swings incredibly Christian. Um and there's a distortion with Protestants. The ratio is even wilder for Jewish representation. Um but the the the the worst one here is the religiously unaffiliated. Everyone in Congress is expected to be a religious representative in one way or another or else they're not considered electable anymore. And a lot of that has to do with party dynamics. Um but uh I think it's a very interesting um point when we talk about policy settings. Keep going. Um so the wealth disparity is also absolutely massive. Now, I think it makes an interesting component that uh you you would you need to be of some means in order to be able to run, right? Um there is way there are ways that wealth will affect um a person to be able to have candidacy or to even be able to run a campaign. But ultimately, when so many senators come from backgrounds where they fundamentally grew up with wealth, it makes it very difficult for people to have the same lived and shared experience, as well as the um ability to truly empathize with the experience of people who are poor within the United States. Um and so that's demographics, but it's a bit harder in the United States for us to say, well, where's the distortion? Mainly because the distortion in the United States is so big that there are no third parties at all. And so this is where I like to lean on the United Kingdom because it's very easy to see what other parties there are, but in first past the post, um there is a massive distortion between um how the individual districts are elected and then the number of seats that uh sorry, there's a big difference between the number of votes that are collected in total across the entire country and then the number of seats that are actually allocated. Because uh say for example, you have a seat where uh uh you have 51% Labour, right? So Labour just wins that seat, but then for sake of example, the Conservatives got 49%, right? Well, that 49% is not factored into how many seats the Conservative Party get. Basically, Labour could win all of the seats, but only have half the votes. And you know, that's kind of what we're seeing here. Even more interesting in the next election that's coming up, current polling suggests that uh the Reform Party, which is our far-right party led by Nigel Farage, uh is very likely to take an absolute sweep and get around 60% of the seats with around 30% of the vote, which is hugely distorting. The original advantages for uh this system of first past the post, which was created in the United Kingdom and inherited by America, was first that it would uh lead to one-party control, which would lead to stability. But, I think we're going to prove that that stability isn't exactly what this It certainly isn't guaranteed. Certainly is not something that's been happening in the United States in the Conservative Party most recently. And when we talk about what PR is and what PR does, it can achieve stability in a lot better fashion. All right. Let's go into the mechanics of PR, such as how does it work? It's fun. So, the the easiest form of PR to think about is called party-list PR. And the only choice that you get as a as a as a voter when you're actually in the ballot booth is voting for the party that you want. The easiest example here is Israel, where there are no divisions in in Israel whatsoever, right? There you just vote for your party, and then the whole Knesset is is made up of the vote share of those parties. Now, the way that individual members of the Congress will get picked is that each party then provides a list, and they say, "Well, you know, we won 20% of a 100-member body. So, we get 20 seats. So, the first 20 people on our list are now going to go get seats." The question is, how is that list ordered? So, in a closed-list system, the party just says, "We're going to deal with it." And if you're not a party insider, then you don't get to influence that. So, they might not have a They they might have like a not a census. What's the word? Ohio does this when um a canvas. Like a poll, right? Where they go and figure out exactly how many people they listed, but it's not something that every member of the party or or the general public can influence. In open-list systems, it's a lot more fair, and uh, this means that anyone who's a registered party member can influence how the election happens, and sometimes can actually do it in the ballot itself. So, when it's time to, uh, to vote, you can go in and say, "I'm voting for this party, and then this is the ordering that I want." And then, through whatever internal mechanics of the party, um, it will end up, uh, implementing that. So, the pros and the cons here, um, the the good thing is you do have that demographic representation, you do have the diversity of opinions, and it means that parties have a uh, the the the voters have a lot more choice. The bad part is is that very often you have to form constituents, Wait, what's the word I'm going for? Where you have multiple parties and you need to form them into one voting block. >> Oh, boy. A coalition. >> Coalitions, thank you. Uh, not constituencies, coalitions. And coalitions can be extraordinarily difficult. Um, France, for example, is having a nightmare of a time trying to form a stable coalition, um, because it's trying to pull effectively, you know, the the the moderate is very, very slim. You have a huge left and a huge right, and how do you find a way to to to make that happen? There's also we we haven't even talked about quotas in here, but the question is how do you stop having a proportional system that's filled with many different parties, and so it's very difficult to offer any kind of coordination without every single small party holding out for their specific issue, and uh, and and not actually, uh, focusing on governance as a whole. Um and then, you know, there's open list and closed list, and we talked about the advantages and disadvantages there. Um an interesting alternative here is candidate-based PR. And uh this is a classi- classification system where rather than voting for the party, you're only voting for candidates. Uh it tends to work a lot better in situations where there are um multi-member districts, and you're only voting in your district. And so, you know, the the the whole um assembly is divided up into different districts, and so you're not going to be able to vote for a representative on the other side of the world, but it does mean that you get a little bit of uh local representation. And ideally, you know, if you have uh the the the factionalism that can happen here is largely a question of how many members are in your local district, and then they will get together and go to the assembly or uh Congress. Um Clay, are there any things that I missed there with uh STV that you want to go into? >> I think you got the major points. >> Okay. All right, great. How are we doing for time? Excellent. Um so, as we said here before, um candidate-based PR uh leads to the the the best thing is is that it because it's candidate-based, it means that you have a lot more competition between candidates. And generally, um is very resistant to what we call clones, where um if there are multiple candidates that look the same, uh then they won't split the vote. They'll end up uh effectively, you'll you'll pick the the one that is the most popular out of all of those clones, but you'll still get to various different representations. So, people so you can have lots of different people running, um and and still kind of get the best of all worlds. Um it's uh it's it's been a relatively on-again, off-again system. Um I I I think that the uh the there there have been times where people have It's very difficult to understand how the results are formed. It is extraordinarily mathy because you have to have this um round-robin style ping-ponging in order to make sure you cover all various different bits on the the political compass when you elect candidates. Um we In Q&A, if you want to go into the math of how it makes sure that, let's say you elect a candidate in the first uh representative you elect is the uh you know, is is is it not relatively conservative, then it says, "Okay, well, now we should go and elect a um a more liberal candidate." And it will ping-pong back and forth in order to try to make sure that there's balance um of the people that voted. We can talk about that, um but I'll leave it for uh the the the the end. And uh then if you can't make up your mind, there are hybrid systems. Um and in hybrid systems, there are uh local districts where they are single-winner, and then there are election then on the same ballot, there's also the being able to vote for your party. Now, that party might also be open list or closed list, um so that um when you're actually voting, you can influence the party list of that party. But effectively, there it means there are two types of seats. And so, uh you means you still get that local representation, but let's say, for example, um that your local representative isn't a uh isn't part of the isn't of your party or or or like isn't someone that you like, you can always go to appeal to your national party representative and say, "Hey, I live in this constituency. I'm not being represented um by my local representative, but could you speak for me?" And it does a much better job at trying to be proportional in that situation. Although there are trade-offs and having that local representation with a single winner method does mean that it one it depends on the quality of single winner method that's chosen. Very often it's first past post, so it means there are distortions there. So it it has a little bit of watered down proportionality. >> So if we're trying to get to the conversation of PR versus non-PR, let me just say it's a very difficult and nuanced conversation. There are a lot of devils in the details. The the research that that we've done and the books that we've read have never had a complete slam dunk for PR versus non-PR. I think philosophically PR makes the most sense, but because of situations such as difficulties in forming coalitions, you can have situations where government doesn't work. And if government doesn't work, it doesn't matter that it's not representative. Ultimately, I think one of the things that is im- important for us to to mention, and we'll talk more about it at the end, is that ultimately you you can't just have representation of the edges. You also need representation of the middle of any any voting method. You need a certain level of centrism so that there's not just balance between opposing viewpoints who will never talk to each other and make policy. Instead, one in the middle saying, "Let's be reasonable. Let's come in. What if we trade this for that and end up coming to real policies?" So All right, Clay is moving the slides on, so obviously trying to get me to speed up. So let's talk about single winner non-proportional voting systems. Um the the good thing about single winner non-proportional voting systems is that uh uh if if it works well uh it can lead to very clear winners, right? And and it can it can give the appearance of a mandate, right? This is one thing that first-past-the-post does very well. It's one of the things that people who like ranked choice voting like to talk about and say "You're always winning with 50% of the votes." Although it does that by throwing away people's votes until they get to 50%. But um ultimately it leads to the perception of um uh of there being a very clear choice. Um it leads to what you know, a semi-stable situation. But then again, if you look at American politics recently, I don't think you would call that stable. Um and then with proportional representation leads to better representation of diverse views and minority groups, but again allows for instability, gridlock, and coalition governments. I'm going to slam through this so I don't just to repeat myself. Okay, over to Clay for how do we measure the performance? >> Right, right. Well, thank you Felix for giving that overview. So yeah, obviously there's a lot there and we're trying to summarize this down to some bullet points, but um once we've talked about, you know, the different ways you can do PR, right? All the different details there from open to closed list or candidate-based or party list, um then you get into this question of how do we measure performance? Like how do we know what system to go with? And this turns out to be a really challenging problem because let's suppose we look at different countries that use slightly different variations on all these systems and we try to correlate like well, which ones are doing the best? It's not always cut and dried. This is um a map from the 2024 publication of the Democracy Index, which is published by the The Economist magazine's intelligence unit. And they're basically asking a bunch of questions like what are the perceptions of accountability and corruption and these other factors that tie into our notions of what is democracy. And if you look at countries like here, you know, the Scandinavian countries, right? They're dark blue. They're like the best of the best when it comes to measuring democratic accountability and transparency and so forth. Uh and they're all proportional, right? No big surprise there. But then you see some weird outliers, right? Like you could look over here at the UK uh and they're doing pretty well. You can look at Canada. They're actually the 14th uh generally anywhere from like 10th to 14th on the list. So, they use first past the post. They're not proportional and yet they're doing very well. The United States, while it's had its challenges, is still generally in the top 20 and um you know, that's in spite of using first past the post. So, how do we know how much of that comes from the voting method itself versus, hey, maybe it's our really strong separation of powers and our strong court system that has sort of acted like this guardrail in the United States where even though our sort of steering wheel is broken, we're not going over the edge of the road into the ditch, right? So, uh you know, we can also look at Mexico, right? They are proportional, but really have had some struggles when it comes to how democratic and low corruption they are. Um so, that is really a challenge for political scientists to say like what really is the best system and what should we be pursuing as policy when we can't clearly point to a system and say, this is obviously performing the best, right? Now, that is at odds with the this really um this nice benefit we have when it comes to measuring single winner voting methods. These little dots here are the results of some computer simulations which were performed by the late uh Jameson Quinn, a Harvard stats PhD who was unfortunately no longer with us, but was formerly on the board of the Center for Election Science. And what he's doing with these computer simulations is he's imagining we have a set of voters and they have preferences for the different candidates, like how well off will this candidate make me with their policies if they are elected? And we can basically simulate hundreds of thousands of elections and average out their performance to get a sense of if we use this single winner voting method, how satisfied will voters be on average? Like, what will be the human welfare implications of using that voting method? Now, the top here, we have a bunch of the first several rows are these very complex systems, but then here on like the kind of right in the middle, we have ideal approval voting and bullet approval voting. These are different approval voting models, and we see that approval voting does almost as well as the very, very complex systems, but with none of the complexity, right? It just uses a regular first-past-the-post ballot like we're all familiar with, and the only rule change is that you can just vote for as many candidates as you want. Now, you look down here on something like the fifth line, and you see ranked choice voting, way behind the other leaders of the pack, despite being uh considerably complex. So, it's sort of the worst of both worlds. Approval voting's trying to be like the best of both worlds. And this is great, but it's very hard to extend this to a multi-winner system because we would have to simulate candidates working together to form policy, and that is just like trying to predict the weather more than a week out, right? It's It's very complicated. Some folks have tried to do it sort of with an approximation or modeling how a group of um elected representatives might come together and vote on policies, and then sort of doing a two-stage process where they model how happy would the voters be with those policies. So, these are some results that come from some computer simulations by a uh physics PhD in British Columbia named Keith Edmonds. He's done a lot of really great work in this field. Uh but this is still largely speculative, and we probably generally have to rely for these multi-winner proportional methods on international comparisons, right? Um and certain game theory analysis. But given that we agree that directionally, broadly, uh that proportional representation seems to be better than not having proportional representation, then there's the really challenging question of like, how do we get there? Because as we know, there are a lot of impediments, so we need a strategy to get from point A to point B. The first question we have to tackle is legality. This is Cynthia McKinney, who was a Democratic Congressman back in 1996, and she later ran under the Green Party. And she really fought the good fight for proportional representation. You can see why because she was involved with the Green Party, that would matter to her. Now, in 1967, there was a law passed that outlawed proportional representation for Congress. The way it did this is that it mandated that districts be single winner, so only one winner per congressional district. And that means that proportional representation is effectively illegal. Now, she tried to pass a bill called HR 2545, which would have overridden that 1967 law that had outlawed multi-member districts, and it failed, of course. A two-party dominated Congress does not want to see proportional representation. She reintroduced legislation, a similar bill called HR 1189 in 2001. Of course, it also failed. And she tried yet a third time with HR 2690 in 2005, and it failed yet again. So, as we see, there's a really big um hill to climb here. Um getting out of the two-party system when the laws are controlled by the two-party system is a is a really um chicken and egg problem, right? So, let's talk about FairVote strategy. They've been one of the major players. They've been the 800-lb gorilla working on voting reform in the United States for many decades now. Um they convened back in 1992 in Cincinnati, Ohio. That's appropriate because uh Cincinnati was one of the nearly two dozen US cities that had used proportional representation in the early 1900s. So, in 1992, a bunch of folks got together, they convened, and they formed uh a group called Citizens for Voting and Democracy. Um oh, sorry, Citizens for Proportional Representation. But like a year later, they changed to Citizens for Voting and Democracy. And then later, in 2004, they finally changed their name to FairVote. Now, we don't know exactly what their strategy was or what conversations took place there. I have read some accounts from people who were present at the time about some of the things that went on. But, you can see when they're thinking about strategy, it's very plausible that they realized that just saying, "Hey, we're for proportional representation." might have been just a bit too provocative. If you announce that we are here to destroy the two-party system, obviously, you're going to have the knives coming out for you from the two-party system. So, something like Citizens for Voting and Democracy sounds a lot more benign. It sounds a lot more incremental and less threatening. But, in any case, when we look deeper at what their strategy may have been and how it unfolded, in 1996, they had their first real chance here to get proportional representation with San Francisco Proposition H, which would have created a single transferable vote proportional system like Ireland and Australia. And, as you can see here, the result was it lost by over 10% points, right? A pretty decisive loss. At the same time, they had a competing initiative that took them from multi-winner at-large districts to single-winner districts. So, now San Francisco has sort of a proportional representation, but it's only based on geography. They have 11 districts. So, you're going you're going to get some representation for your particular location in the city, but that may not align well with your demographics, your socioeconomic status, your ethnic identity, and things of that nature that proportional representation really can solve for. Um, so this, I think, was instructive for them. And they realized that thinking about strategy, we have to figure out how we're going to get from here to there. And it seems like, in general, their strategy was, "We're going to introduce the ranked ballot. We're going to get people more comfortable with that. We're going to try to expand that one city by city by city." And thankfully, in the United States, we have the ballot initiative process. That's very rare. Most countries don't have that. You can't just go, you know, get signatures and put something on the ballot to get a new innovative voting method used in your city. Maybe you can do something at like the provincial level or the national level, but that is a really heavy lift, right? So, um so they have this this ability to use the ballot initiative. And so they generally seem to have gone with the strategy of like, "Hey, let's just go one city at a time and and try to push forward this rank choice voting idea, right?" And they did have some success, but um as we see here, the spread of proportional representation has been pretty limited, even after all these decades of work. So, Delaware um uh sorry, Arden, Delaware, and Cambridge, Massachusetts are two cities that have been using single transferable vote since the early 1900s, as we said before, at one point nearly two dozen US cities used proportional representation, and it was repealed in almost all of them, except for these two, right? And it was repealed in some some people would argue that it was repealed because it worked, right? It elected members of the Communist Party. Um more black candidates won with this system, right? So, to people who were the the dominant establishment power, that was threatening, and they fought to repeal it, and they were largely successful. Uh in recent years, there have been a few notable successes. We got proportional representation here in Portland. This is our first year uh using it, having those new candidates seated under that system. The city of Eureka, California has used it. Albany, California, the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board has used it. So, a handful of successes. Uh also Portland, Maine. But there have been some notable um you know, uh obstacles as well. So, in the 2024 election cycle, there were seven statewide initiatives concerning rank choice voting, not even in the proportional form, just single-winner, non-proportional rank choice voting, and it basically failed in all of them. The The lone exception would be that in Alaska, they tried to repeal rank choice there, and that repeal effort did fail, but it only failed by about 200 votes. And there's reason to believe that those same people will reintroduce that same type of initiative in the near future, and you know, all you need is 200 more votes, and they may succeed next time. But even here like in Oregon, I we're a very progressive state. Um the legislature was basically a majority basically supported this RCV initiative, and it still lost quite decisively. Um and we even saw that like Massachusetts, a very blue state, seemingly very progressive, that's where Elizabeth Warren hails from. They also did not see success there with uh ranked choice voting statewide, right? So, that whole plan of like scaling this thing out, getting people more acquainted with a ranked ballot, that's going to get them sort of more open to the idea, does not seem to necessarily be panning out. We have almost 60 US cities that are now using ranked choice voting, uh but we're just still not getting there when it comes to those higher levels. And it's even failed in a couple of county-level initiatives recently in the state of Washington, also a fairly progressive state. So, um and you can see here like look, we're we're seeing lots of success at the city level, but that's just not translating into larger victories. And at a certain point, one would think that even the city victories become more challenging because you've sort of got all the low-hanging fruit. You've got all those cities where there would be openness to this idea, and you start to kind of run out. And if you don't scale up to counties and state level, or even congressional-level elections, you kind of the the reform kind of loses steam. So, here's a maybe a provocative theory. And it's one that I would offer for your consideration, is that maybe we're putting the cart before the horse. Instead of thinking that we want to use proportional representation as a pathway to escaping duopoly and having a multi-party democracy, maybe what we've got to do is escape duopoly so that we can erode those laws that make proportional representation effectively impossible. I go the other direction, and we think that approval voting can be a part of that. Now, there is a myth out there that you will hear about. There's this guy, Maurice Duverger. He was a French political scientist, and people will often cite Duverger's law. And they believe that what this means is that you inherently will have a two-party system if you have single-winner electoral districts. That is not true, and that's not what he said. This is a verbatim translation from his own three laws of political development. And he did note that the plurality voting system, sorry, uh tended to lead to a two-party system. So, when you can only vote for one candidate, and you only have one winner per district, you do tend to get a two-party system. And yes, proportional representation tends to escape that system. But also, he noted that even the top-two runoff system, like they use in France, right? You have a plurality voting first round and a top-two, that system has tended to escape a strict two-party domination in most countries that have used it. Even though instant runoff voting has not. For instance, we look at Australia, where they use single-winner non-proportional uh rank-choice voting for their house, and it has not escaped duopoly. It's a little bit less two-party dominated than US Congress, but not much. And that's in spite of the fact that their Senate, which uses proportional representation, um it it has many thriving parties, right? So, it does seem that the voting method matters, and so that even in a single-winner district, you can break duopoly under the right conditions. We think that approval voting actually can do that, that it can erode the duopoly. And here are two key reasons why. They're a little esoteric, so I'm going to distill them down to two key concepts I want you to remember. The first is safety, and the second is visibility, and with that, viability. Okay, so let's talk about what safety means. Favorite betrayal. Can you safely vote for the person that you really believe in or candidates you really believe in without fear because you like them regardless of whether they're electable. A lot of people think that instant runoff voting or single winner ranked choice voting, not the proportional variety, will solve this problem, but that is not correct. What I'm going to show you here is a simplification. These numbers aren't exactly accurate, but they make it easier to follow what happened in the 2020, oh sorry, 2022 uh House special election in Alaska. There were three main candidates. There's Mary Peltola, the Democrat, Nick Begich, a Republican, and also Sarah Palin, a Republican. And um Mary Peltola ended up winning this. But what basically happened is that in the first round, Nick Begich came in third of these folks in terms of his first-place votes, right? Well, let's let's say he had 32% first-place votes, which is less than what Palin has with 33% or Peltola has with 35%, so he got eliminated. And then in the next round, Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin. That's not surprising because Sarah Palin was a very controversial, some somewhat divisive candidate, and so she couldn't get enough of the center to win head-to-head against Mary Peltola. But here's what's crazy about this, right? Nick Begich, if you look at the head-to-head rankings, had a sizable lead head-to-head against both Mary Peltola and against Sarah Palin. In other words, he clearly seems to have been the most overall popular candidate, but he lost because he didn't have enough first-place votes. And what ended up happening as a result of that is these Palin voters were essentially punished for voting for their sincere favorite candidate. They voted for Palin and they got Peltola, a Democrat. But if just some of them had insincerely pushed Begich up to first place, then it would have been Palin getting eliminated. Begich would have survived to the next round, and he would have crushed Mary Peltola, right? So in retrospect, they realized that it wasn't safe to support their actual favorite. So, this means that ranked-choice voting fails what we call the favorite betrayal criterion. That's a little bit of esoteric math, but it's very important in thinking about the game theory of electoral politics. So, you can also see the same dynamic in our current system when you think about how the primary leads to a general election. Here was a headline from the New York Times in the run-up to the 2020 election. And it said, "One year from election, Trump trails but Biden leads uh uh uh in in battlegrounds." Right? So, what's happening here is that head-to-head against Trump, many polls show Biden winning. He looks more electable. Whereas, Warren is losing substantially in many of those polls. So, imagine you're somebody who's a a Democratic voter and you're in the primary and you think, "Well, Biden's okay. I really prefer Elizabeth Warren, but what happens if Elizabeth Warren wins and then uh uh she goes up against Trump and then Trump beats her because he's more viable in the general. That's a scary thought." So, a lot of people with that strategic thinking, even if they preferred the more progressive Elizabeth Warren, cast that strategic vote for Joe Biden. Now, you can imagine that same dynamic at play if this was a ranked-choice voting election. You think to yourself, "Well, if I rank Elizabeth Warren in first place and then Joe Biden gets eliminated and then in the next round Trump beats Warren, I may feel a sense of regret. Whereas, if I strategically rank Biden in first place, then he will hopefully outlast Warren. He'll go head-to-head against Trump and then he'll be more likely to win and at least I get my second favorite instead of my least favorite in that election, right?" So, that same kind of, you know, being safe to vote for your favorite dynamic is at play in ranked-choice voting even if it's mitigated. But, approval voting completely eliminates it. It's mathematically proven. And so, now I want to get to the other issue, not just the safety to vote for your favorite, but the visibility and the viability that creates. This is an exit poll result from a 2012 study that was done by Occupy Wall Street. So, in New York City, in Manhattan, they did this exit poll and they gave the voters four different kinds of ballots. They gave them a plurality voting or first past the post ballot ballot, just pick one, approval voting, you can vote for as many as you want, score voting, you can score the candidates on a zero to five scale like a Yelp review, and then also rank choice voting, order 1 2 3 and so forth. And so, these are the results for plurality voting, approval voting, and score voting. You can see something really amazing here. Now, it's no surprise that Barack Obama is, you know, miles ahead of everyone else because this is New York City after all. Mitt Romney is way down here. But, what's funny is that with plurality voting, Mitt Romney still beat all of the third party candidates. And it makes sense because people are afraid to vote for their sincere favorite if they only have one vote and they don't want to waste it. So, Jill Stein gets fewer votes than Romney even with an electorate that hugely preferred Obama to Romney. But, then you look at these orange bars. That's approval voting. And all of a sudden, every third party candidate is doing better than Mitt Romney the Republican. So, Jill Stein goes from this little tiny blue bar here to this, you know, this orange bar which now is about 60% as many votes as Obama. So, that change from plurality voting to approval voting at the exact same time with the exact same voters caused Jill Stein to have a 27-times increase in her support relative to Barack Obama as compared to before with plurality voting. And with score voting, it was even a little better, but not hugely so. And, you know, approval voting has that simplicity advantage, right? Where you only just change one tiny rule, you use the same ballot. But, now let's compare to rank choice voting. This is really staggering. The blue bar here is plurality voting. The red bar is instant runoff voting first round results. They look almost identical. All these third party candidates get virtually none of the vote. So, why does this happen, right? Well, probably every or most of the Obama voters had someone like Jill Stein as their second choice, right? And many of the Romney voters might have had the Libertarian candidate uh Gary Johnson as their second choice, right? But, you don't see those second choice votes because rank choice voting, the way it works, is that it won't count your second or third choice until your first has been eliminated. And now, some advocates of rank choice voting held that as a benefit because it makes people feel safe voting for additional candidates. But, the downside is that it's not going to look at those additional rankings unless your favorite has already been eliminated, right? And so, you're not going to see all that support, and it continues to make the third-party candidates look like they are a complete lost cause. They don't have a sense of viability. Why would you invite them to a debate stage, right? If you think about a primary election, or sorry, an election where the early polling before the election used approval voting, how could you deny someone like Jill Stein a seat at the table in a debate, or Gary Johnson, when they're polling this well compared to the major parties, right? So, we think that would give them a much greater ability to grow in terms of viability, bring more significant, real, viable candidates into the the fold and and sort of run in in third parties as well, and help break out of the duopoly. And you can see also in real elections what happens here, right? So, here's rank choice voting. Here's Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian. Uh this is from the 2020 main presidential primary or election. And Howie Hawkins of the Green Party, right? We're talking like 1%, 1.7% compared to the major two parties, right? I think there's two parts to this. One is you can't see those second choice votes. You can't see that many Joe Biden voters maybe had the Green Party candidate as their second choice, cuz that never gets counted here. And also, maybe a lot of people tactically said, "I'm not going to rank my favorite. I'm going to actually put my favorite sort of lesser evil in the first position tactically, right? And so then you take a comparison of that and you look at approval voting. Now, unfortunately for comparison's sake, the cities of Fargo and St. Louis which used these uh approval voting, they uh they're non-partisan. So, we can't see how this would affect party dynamics, but we do see that there's this nice smooth trail of support for the candidates who did not win in these elections. Because there's not that vote splitting effect, you see a candidate winning with like 42.7% approval and the other winner in that two-winner election got 38.7% approval. But look, the third choice finisher got 32%. They're not that far behind and a whole bunch of other candidates at least had a that visibility and that viability as a result of that. Maybe if they run in the next cycle, they'll have a chance, right? People have heard about them in the prior election and they don't look like such a a hopeless kind of lost cause. So, another way I can imagine that we break out of the two-party system, right, is not even that these other parties suddenly become more viable. The Green Party, the Libertarians, they are where they are because in a system where, you know, it's it's basically hopeless to run as a third party, only people who are willing to do that are going to run in a third party. And so, you may get a lot of candidates who are a little more extreme um and and maybe not as pragmatic. But what would happen if tomorrow we had approval voting and this big tent political party, the Democrats, was actually able to run as a more pure version of what they really believe in? You can imagine a party with people like uh Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley running and being like the progressive Democrats. You could imagine a party of these sort of centrist establishment Democrats, the Amy Klobuchar, the Pete Buttigieg, Hakeem Jeffries, Gavin Newsom, and so forth. And you could also imagine a traditional Republican conservative party with people like Murkowski and Romney, or a MAGA party with people like Trump and Kristi Noem, right? And and then you'd have these more um clear decisive choices, but you'd also have maybe a smooth gradient where it wouldn't just be like one side versus the other, and that could actually ease political tensions as well. So, there's a couple of different sort of theories of change for how approval voting could sort of break down that two-party system relatively quickly. Uh also, when it comes to how would we involve approval voting with a proportional system, there's a thing called sequential proportional approval voting. And it's very similar to proportional ranked choice voting, except it's much simpler. It just uses a regular uh approval voting ballot, and this is getting a little into the mathematical weeds here, but this is to kind of show you how it works, right? This would be like in the third round of an election with SPV. And so, let's just say you have uh a candidate or so a voter voters here where they voted for one of the winners, right? Their ballot would now be half as powerful as it started with, because you're just going to divide by one plus the number of winners you've supported. If you had supported two of the winners from the prior rounds, your vote would have 1/3 as much power. So, rather than doing what single transferable vote does where you take every ballot and you put a proportional waiting on it that it carries round by round, which is quite complex, you can instead just group the voters into how many winners have they selected, and then you weight the individual voters as they proceed through the rounds. So, it's mathematically much simpler, and it still gives you a mathematical proof of proportional representation. Um so, that's kind of the way that you could get that same sort of two-part strategy of with ranked choice voting you have single winner ranked choice voting and proportional, and you can have a a simple one-winner approval voting and a proportional uh multi-winner approval voting using the same ballot and the same general counting procedure with a waiting rule applied. So, a summary here, uh you don't necessarily get PR to escape duopoly. Maybe instead what you have to do is escape duopoly to get PR. Single winner non-proportional RCV cannot break the duopoly. We have decades of evidence on this, really more like hundreds of years of of evidence on this or over 100 years. Approval voting we believe there's good evidence to show that it can break the duopoly and it can scale. It is the only voting method where overnight you can spread it statewide and you wouldn't have to change any voting machines, you wouldn't have to fundamentally change the counting procedures. And it's the only voting method that sort of puts the onus on the status quo, rather than asking the question that most alternative voting methods ask is, "Why should we have this new ranked ballot? Why should we add all this complexity to our process? Is it really worth it?" Instead it says, "Why do we need this rule that if you vote for more than one candidate, we throw your vote away?" Right? Cuz it doesn't change anything else, it doesn't add any complexity. So it's very easy to scale and you can sum all the results from different precincts easily. Um so that is a different way of looking at strategy of how we get to what we have now to a system where proportional representation is both legal and viable. So with that we're going to take questions. >> And if you have questions, folks, you can feel free to either raise your hand or just unmute yourself. Um I'm sure that you can also leave them in the chat, whichever you prefer. >> Hey Clay. Uh it's Keith here. Thanks for the shout-out and uh showing my plot. Um quick question, are you looking beyond the Teal type system, so other than SP AV into something like like a Monroe type system or or something like that? >> You know, I mean, I think anything's possible. I think what we're sort of looking at is what is the simplest thing you can do, right? And especially when you think about even like not having to upgrade voting machines, just doing like hand counting. Uh one nice thing about the SPV system is that you can basically just put the ballots in piles as you go, right? Like here's everyone who's approved one of the winners, two of the winners, three, and so forth. And then you can just run them through a traditional voting machine and take the sum of all those votes and then just divide it by two or divide it by three, and the math is very simple. Um I I have no objections to other I mean there's even the there's the you know, if you if you do that rule where you add one to the number of winners they've approved, that's like Jefferson or D'Hondt waiting, right? And instead you can make it one half, and that makes it like a Webster or Saint-Laguë waiting, which some people think is more fair to like smaller parties. It's less biased toward bigger parties. And those are all options that are on the table. Um you know, that kind of gets in the mathematical weeds, but you know, that's that's kind of how I look at it that I think um at least SPV gives us this very simple minimal change that doesn't add any real major complexity. >> Yeah, thank thank you very much. Good answer. So you So SPV is like the CES endorsed one, or do you have an official He is just shaking his head. >> There's there's no uh So CES is an organization that studies voting methods. We advocate for voting methods, um but we're really focused on single winner because of the problems of getting PR implemented in the United States at a wide level, it we we're a we're an organization of limited resources. Hopefully not for long, but we are, which means we need a focused strategy and we need to, you know, like like focus our energy just in one place. Um it's been something that the organization has considered for years, but ultimately just like the strategy here, we knew that uh getting proportional representation is is a really really hard sell if it's just on the ballot because people do not understand the math. Right? And and the nice thing about approval voting is you can give someone the explanation and they'll go, "Oh, that makes sense. Yeah." Right? They'll just like sign their name on the petition. And when and when you look at how we've implemented approval voting when it's actually been on the ballot of, you know, do you want to switch the voting method? It's been overwhelmingly popular. And even better, when you do exit polling, it's overwhelmingly popular. And when you pull the candidates who've run through approval voting, they say, "We want to keep the system." And they've gone to bat when in St. Louis when Missouri wanted to outlaw um approval voting, they managed to get a like like either prevent it or get a special carve out for St. Louis to make sure that they could keep it. That is not the history that you've seen with things like STV. Um and I Yeah, and I I I'm going to derail this a little bit. Um and I'm sorry uh for that, but I think from the UK case, one of the things I'm very interested in is not necessarily a candidate-based proportional system, but a party-based proportional system, right? Because when as we when you go back uh to to to one of the the original slides, when you have a um a party PR system, then you're just counting, okay, of the party votes, how is it proportional? Right? And that proportionality is dead simple, right? What proportion of the overall votes did they get? Okay, this is how many seats they get. Now, the question of how do you like like how do you make sure that there's proportionality within the party? It's up to the party, right? If the party wants to use approval voting and just be very centrist, that's great. If it wants to make sure that there's some spread, it can use whatever voting method it chooses, but ultimately, you get the proportional representation by using um a party list system in overall and then defer the question of proportionality within the party to to the parties. >> And it's worth noting real quick that even like like in Latvia, they have an open list system where the way you choose the party list order is that you get to approve or disapprove the candidates on the list and they are ordered based on that approval ratio. So you can incorporate approval voting into a party list system to pick the the order and it works quite nicely. >> Neil, you had your hand >> me that tangent. >> Yeah, thanks. Um so one of my focuses is is auditing and I just want to point out um first of all, one of the benefits of approval style systems versus rank style systems is that you don't have or at least um STV and IRV for that matter is you don't have the sequential elimination which means you don't have a factorial number of possible eliminations. And single transferable vote is uh the best minds have tried for many years to try to come up with a way to audit it uh efficiently that is to even figure out what the margin of victory is, how many votes you would have to switch. And that's actually an NP-complete problem. It it can't be solved for very large elections. So that's um one of the reasons against it and one of the great options we have in the uh approval voting realm is proportional approval voting which is different than sequential proportional approval voting. And the way it works turns out to be beautifully linear in certain interesting ways and it's easy to figure out the margin of victory and it's easy to figure out uh how well your audit did and how to audit it. As far as I know, no one has proposed a method for how to audit SPV or do a a margin calculation. >> We're we're really not here to debate SPV versus PV. Um, and that's not the conversation that we're here to have. The Look, if we if we are having that conversation, we've done great. We we've nailed it, right? The the nuances between the actual outcomes of those systems is absolutely marginal. Um, you know, I'd much rather, uh, you know, focus on the question of strategy of if we're going to get a proportional system implemented, any proportional system, because really any like as if STV were to happen right now, I would love it. If if if approval voting helped us go for proportional and the proportional system they picked was a ranked choice voting ballot, I wouldn't have anything against it. And I don't think anyone anyone else at CES would, either. It's just that ranked choice voting and literally ranked ballots confuse the living crap out of people. And I think that that's the major problem we've had with voting reform in the United States for so long. Um, the when when you look at how STV got implemented in in every other country, it was decided by bureaucrats, right? It wasn't a popular movement. It didn't require educating everyone. The systems just simply weren't that democratic to begin with and someone in the back room said, "Okay, well, we probably should do this the right way." What's the right way? The only method they had available at that time on that research was STV and that's how they got there. Like if I could just >> Yeah. To dovetail with that, you know, kind of tying in the strategy aspect that I brought up, um, you know, when I make the argument to folks that maybe you actually want to first help sort of weaken the duopoly and that will help you do things like, you know, eliminate that 1967 law. If you had a lot more independents or third-party members in Congress, they might sort of say, "Okay, I see your point there, but then if you've got approval voting, what if I want to really get to proportional representation, then how am I going to do that? Like we're going to get approval voting and then somehow we're going to get STV?" And it's like, "Well, no, there are ways to do something like STV, but with approval voting, I don't care too much about which there are. I just want to show people that approval voting is compatible with your long-term goal of PR, but if you want to get there long-term goal, you've got to find an intermediate place and you've got to weaken the two-party system and that's what approval voting can help do very quickly. >> Well, forgive me, but it really is important, especially when you're making exactly that argument, to not only have a viable method for doing proportional with approval voting, but a method of auditing it because one of the biggest things that we've discussed for a while in Colorado and elsewhere is how to audit STV. So, please, you know, I I appreciate you might think that, "Wow, if we if we're talking about that, we've won." The distinctions are really important. Auditing is critical. We see that uh in the US, uh trust in elections is very low and we were, you know, I I also would be happy in some sense to have STV if it got us PR, but way better for all those reasons is proportional approval voting and as PAV is uh is problematic and we would end up shooting ourselves in the foot. >> Yeah, absolutely. Uh I I couldn't agree more with that, Neil. But I think uh one of the one of the things that came up in the chat that I think was very interesting. Oh, and uh you Allison did say we're wrapping up here, but please I'll stay around. >> Yeah, if you guys want to stay, feel free. You know, but if people have to drop, if people have to drop, you know, if you if you do have to drop and you do have a question, you can just drop it in the chat and we can get you an answer. But um if Felix is willing to stay, very very happy to have that. >> I'm around. It's 9:00 at night here. Um it's uh um very happy to I I think one thing that I want to say that's a bit um we we need to think about what the policy outcomes are. And ultimately, you know, in the worldview that we have of any electoral system, the the you know, if you have a if you pick just from the centrist, there you're going to ignore some policies that that are are some people like far out on the spectrum. Um so, you might not take into account like the needs of people who are communist or whatever. Um or or or or or maybe just like underrepresented. I do think like proportional representation is very very important. But ultimately, um if you just have straight approval voting, you will still be relatively proportional because you're always going to be centri- cent- centroid? Is that the word you use, Clay? Like it's it's not that you're going to be centrist as in the political center. It's going to be that you're you're choosing the center of the the right >> Like you you look at St. Louis. They have an approval voting system. That is a city that is dominated by it is very democratic. So, of course, the top two candidates that they will tend to elect there in the primary will be people who would be considered like near Elizabeth Warren territory by a lot of people. But that is the center of of the, you know, opinion of that electorate. And it's really nice because before the system, when they had a partisan system, you would get this Democratic nominee and they'd go head-to-head against in the general election a Republican nominee. And the Republican would get trounced. Now, you like in the recent election they just had for mayor, you have sort of a centrist Democrat and a progressive Democrat. And you might think that's worse for conservatives cuz they don't have a conservative choice. But guess what? They were able to help, you know, shift the balance of power from the progressive who won last time to the more conservative one or more centrist one this time. So, I would say that's much more effective in terms of them exercising influence and sort of tugging the center closer to them than having this candidate who, "Hey, you're a Republican like me, but there's no hope that you're going to win." >> I'm still in a cold room. Is this Is this my daughter? Eloise Hello, African. >> She's like, "It's bedtime, Dad." Like, we're going to bed. >> I I wish No, what she's saying is, "Daddy, I'm not tired." >> Uh-oh. >> Yeah. >> Hi. >> That's okay if you have to if you have to jump and take care of the I'm not tired. We understand. We We recognize and thank you for your time, Felix. >> Thank you very much. Take care, everyone. >> Uh sorry to cut you off there, Clay. If you And I think we'll probably wrap up after you finish that question. Um if you don't mind. >> Sure, what was the other question here? >> I think Well, Keith had the question. He said Fair Vote Canada says, "No." I don't remember what he was responding to. Uh >> That was to Felix's response about the um uh whether or not uh approval single member approval is more proportional than single member uh plurality. Uh I I think it's true. I just don't have evidence of that. I I still regularly say it should be. >> I don't. I Clay, do you have >> Are Are you You're saying You're asking if single winner approval is more proportional than single winner plurality? >> Yes. >> Um I I I would say it's more >> Right. >> Well, the way I the way I look at it look is that you you can actually get something that feels more uh diverse, more proportional through sort of random happenstance. Like plurality voting will elect um in many cases very random people because of the vote splitting effect. So, you could have a district that is like in Washington, right? It's a uh there there was a case where they have cuz they have like a top two system, but they use plurality in the in the in the primary. And they had a case some years back where it was a Democratic stronghold, but because of all the vote splitting, there were so many Democrats who ran, the top two were both Republicans. Right? So, it's like well, you may be getting more diversity of thought, but you're getting it by means of not necessarily selecting the person who is actually representative of that district. And so, if you use approval voting, you're going to tend to find like the consensus winner of every district. But, and so that would maybe look very sort of monotone in terms of getting like what feels like a fairly centrist overall legislature, but you have to remember that all those people when they're running for office have this very strong incentive to look for votes wherever they can get them. If I can go court this little faction over here, and they can help, you know, get me that two percentage point difference I need to beat out the other rival, then that helps me. And so, you can't just appeal to your base. So, you might even say that's less proportional, but it's more accountable to like all voters, which I think is probably more effective at getting policy that's going to look out for my minority interests. >> Mhm. Okay, but like proportional doesn't mean diversity or something like that. It means that the uh house elected represent is the same distribution as the population in some high-dimensional space of politics. >> Sure. Sure. Right, but like >> What are What are the two reasons why that wouldn't happen? One is that you're not in the in the current system, you're not sending information between different districts, and the other one is vote splitting. So, if you eliminate one of those two problems, you would expect that it would be more proportional. >> Yeah, if if you if if you eliminate vote splitting, I mean, it's you're going to get the opposite of proportionality, right? You like to the extent that districts aren't wildly different, you're getting you're you're finding the centroid of every position. So, you're going to get uh something like you you can just look at places that have had approval voting and like St. Louis, you're going to tend to get the centroid position. You're not really electing the far left or the far right. But I would take I would take issue with what you said there about the the the demographic aspect of PR because there's a factor that we're not considering, which is outright like competence and integrity. Like you could say that in terms of ideology, people were elected you have like Republicans and and Democrats or old and young roughly in proportion to the population, but you could still have elected like the least competent person from a bunch of districts because of that being so skewed by vote splitting. So, even if it looks proportional, you can have a bunch of very like corrupt um you know, incompetent people elected, and maybe it statistically it looks more proportional, but it actually serves the people worse, right? I think that's something that the PR argument hides. I mean, you could in theory turn that issue of competence into a vector that you consider as part of what constitutes PR. But I don't I don't I don't know that you are. So, I I don't know. I'm I'm just saying that I think even if you didn't get proportionality, you'd still probably get something that's more accountable. >> I will have Sorry, Keith. I think that this is a good debate, frankly. Um but also it's those are to Nina's point earlier, one of the things that we would like to fund, and if you could donate we would very much appreciate it, because a lot of these questions are things we can study. To your point, Keith, earlier. That if do we have any data on what this would look like? And some of those simulations we would really like to do. We would like we we have a data a director of data and research on staff. You know, we we are very interested in doing these kinds of this kind of science, and we just need kind of some of those opportunities. So, if you would like to fund them, we would be more than happy to accept that donation and accept some of those questions to try to answer them, because we really do believe that this this space needs a lot of good research to help find the answers to these questions, because we find that there really should be more answers to those questions. So, if that's possible, I'll leave the little donation link here, but if you all have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the chat. I'll be here for like a a minute more to collect some of that. We thank you all for joining us. We know that some people had to drop off, but we really do appreciate folks who stayed on later. Thank you so much, Clay. You all you've been a resource for us since the very very beginning. Before CES was born, Clay is one of our OGs, and he has he has really helped shape our organization. You can find him online. You have a couple of handles there if you want to drop them, Clay. Um He has he's he's a huge resource to us, and I'm sure if you have questions he will be a resource to you as well. Um We thank you all for your time today. We hope you learned something. We will be coming back around in about 3 weeks time to do an op-ed training to learn how best to place an op-ed, how best to write an op-ed, having some considerations like well, should I really submit this op-ed to a paywalled publication? You know, these kinds of practical questions that a lot of folks who are first writing their op-eds to be seen by the public might want to consider. So that will be coming up. We should be sending out that announcement this Thursday. Thank you so much for joining us. There's the Discord chat. Clay is in the Discord as well and so is Felix. Um And if you have any more questions, I will be staying on for about a another minute. I'll collect them and I will send them to our presenters. So if you have them for us, I will make sure to answer those as well. Again, thank you so much. And have a great I think it's afternoon, evening for some and uh No, it should be morning. Uh and evening for everyone. I I really appreciate your time.