Learning Hour Writing & Placing Op-eds with Jean Paul Ciardullo

Well, we're just going to get started here. We know that some folks are going to continue to sort of trickle in. Um it's still pretty early. Um but we just wanted to say hi, welcome to the center for election sciences and as we call him JP um our training on um how to write and place opeds because writing is just one part of um the process here. We want to welcome everyone and please feel encouraged to um write your write an introduction in the chat. Um, we will have some time at the end of the training to have a little bit of a Q&A, but we will also be reading questions from the chat. So, for example, if you do have to drop early, let's say you find yourself like 10 minutes like, oh, I can't I'm not going to be able to make that, you can drop your question in the chat and I'll read it. Um, and then we make it a habit of sending around the recording um and the notes after each of these trainings. So you will see it answered in the chat or rather in the uh in the video that we'll send around after. So if you do have that burning question or just a any comment, we can um address it in the chat and um make sure yes, I'm very happy to see some folks already chiming in saying hello. Don't worry, we're a friendly community. Um and we are very happy that you are here. Uh I will pass it over to Nina Taylor. Hey everybody, I'm Nina Taylor. If we've not met, I serve as the chief executive officer for the Center for Election Science and I just very briefly would like to bring greetings and welcome to you all uh for our learning hour today on how to write a compelling op-ed. Um just thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us and um this is so important to us because as you all know how information um is consumed has radically transformed. So according to Pew Research, 86% of Americans get their news from their digital devices with social media and video platforms overtaking traditional TV as primary news sources for many demographics. This means our messaging has to be everywhere everywhere that the conversations are happening. Um the good thing about this new media landscape um is that how SEO uh has changed and how it works now is very different than how it worked before. And so now it's about highlighting the voices of the many um and driving a wider network of credible perspectives that add strength and legitimacy to a movement. And so um when when 10 different thoughtful people or in this case 15 different thoughtful people um write articles about approval voting that creates a powerful signal um that the movement is real and gaining momentum. And so today, while the examples will focus on approval voting because let's be honest, that is just our jam, um JP will remind you that the the tips and strategies um could be really adapted to anything that you're interested in, whether it's redistricting or uh voting reform or even what's happening in your communities. Um, as I always say with our virtual events, be curious, ask questions. Um, and let's just dive in and learn how we can amplify our messages to make sure that our collective voices are heard. Over to you, JP. >> Yeah, thanks Nita and Allison and everyone else who at the Center for Election Science. Um, my name is John Paul Trulo. Um, JP is easier. U very happy to be here today. I I I was honored to get the the invite. Um and in my my day job is I'm I'm an attorney. I'm a partner at a large law firm called Foley and Lardner. I do litigation in court arguing cases about breach of contract and patent infringement and that kind of thing. Um but about 15 years ago outside of work I became very interested in voting reform issues. Um my own angle on it was uh and this dovetailed a little bit with my litigation work. Um, is there some sort of almost game theory way of arriving at a best result in an election uh that makes the most people happy? Um, it seemed to me that uh the things in nature, this was also partly my training undergrad. I was an engineer before I went into law and it's sort of a merger of these concepts. So I was thinking, you know, most things in the natural world fall on a bell curve. And how do you maximize the ability to have the most people on that center of that bell curve represented in politics instead of it being polarized? And I sort of set on my own came into approval voting doing the spreadsheet simulations of different elections and then sort of reverse engineered it and looked it up and found it was hey that's a real thing people know about and have been advocating for for a long time. Um and I got hooked up with the center for election science some years ago and done some work work with them. Um and I also had started more recently to try to get into writing some op-eds. I have several different ones right now that are sort of in the works that kind of keep editing them and uh uh trying to improve them. Um I had one uh published on an online journal uh called the Fulcrum that maybe some of you know of uh and then uh after that one with the Salt Lake Tribune. Um and I'm working on getting another one out now. But in the course of looking into this, I feel like I kind of picked up a lot of sort of information and pointers, maybe some stuff people already know about, but I thought it kind of put it all in one place. Um, now, as Nina said, you know, I kind of have my own thing is approval voting. I put that that sort of angle on this. However, if you're just interested in voting reform issues generally, or frankly, almost anything, a lot of what I was going to say here, I think, is kind of generally applicable. if you're particularly interested in pool of voting, maybe I have some new ideas to share. Uh, and that kind of comes in more towards the end of the presentation. Um, so again, very happy to be here and why don't we start right now. I'll have to ask Nina or Allison to advance the slides if we can go to the first one. All right. So, just starting with the basics. Um, you know, I found that in in I've looked at placing opeds in a variety of different national and local publications um all around the country, different states, different places I thought might be kind of uh interesting to put an op-ed because maybe it's a state where I think that the, you know, the nature of the demographics there, people might be interested in that kind of thing. Um, and what I found across the board is that almost all the places that that would take an op-ed, they want it to be about 600 to 700 words. Um, I think you could get away with maybe more than that. If it's like an online publication that it's not like one of the major news outlets and you know they're more flexible with what they'll publish, they don't care as much. But if you're trying to go with what would otherwise be considered a traditional newspaper, even if most of their content at this point is online, you're going to have about a 600 to 700 word limit. I've actually found that quite tricky to stay with it because there's so much I want to say. Uh but it it actually is good for forcing you to focus. Um, and as I'll mention maybe in a few slides, it kind of is helpful rather than trying to sell the kitchen sink in in a single oped to maybe pick a certain subtopic that you're going to make the theme and focus on. Um, I I found it's hard to get published in the big national newspapers. I I've tried and failed with the New York Times and for a while I had a a dialogue with the editor at the New York Post. I was trying to get something published there, but he's like, "Well, you know, this isn't really the kind of thing that we we publish." Um, and my sense is that un I mean I think if I were a professor of politics or someone who just obviously, you know, was like an expert in the area as opposed to a litigator who for some reason is doing this as a high interest that might have had more panache that I might have had more luck. If any of you are able to, you know, pitch yourselves that way as a clear expert in the field who's credentialed, you know, you may have more luck. So, uh, by all means, I think you should try in the first instance to go with the biggest outlet you can go with, but just to be, you know, mindful going into this that you may ultimately have more luck with the local newspapers or um, uh, some of the online uh, journals that exist. Um, another thing that I run into as a practical issue is that uh, many of the uh, newspapers or traditional outlets will have a payw wall. So, if you want to then share your article after you've published it, people might say, "Hey, that's great you published something, but I can't access it unless I buy a subscription." Some of them, they'll let people view an article or two before they block them. Uh, so you may want to check to see if that's the kind of uh sort, you know, outlet that you're publishing through. Um, but it's just something to keep in mind whether you care about that. Um, as I note here, most of these places insist that whatever you're sending them be new and exclusive to them initially. Um, now most of them I think would then say after they've run it for some number of weeks or whatever, you can then republish it elsewhere. So that'll get around the payw wall problem eventually. Uh, you can, you know, put it out on on some uh other website or some other platform that doesn't have a payw wall afterwards. Um, and also again, make note here, no no anonymous submissions. They want to see who you are. They want to understand who's sending them an article. We can go to the next slide. Um, so what are they looking for? Uh, you know, I think probably for me the most important thing I took away from from this is the second bullet point. They want to make sure that whatever they're getting is something from a reputable source and uh they don't want to publish something that's going to come back to bite them that somebody's going to say, "Hey, wait a minute. You know, you put out this article, you let somebody put out this article, but it it's all wrong and you know, it sort of demonstrabably contains false information." Um, so, you know, here again, if you are an expert in the field and you're credentialed, they'll probably that'll maybe be enough for them. and they'll think, okay, this is somebody who, you know, clearly knows what they're talking about. If you don't have that credentiing, uh, then you got to make sure that you provide a lot of information to support what you're saying. Usually the way I've tried to do that is with hyperlinks, which is frankly what most of these places ask for. They want you to pepper your article with hyperlinks to what's the source information for that. Um, and actually something that that occurred to me, uh, maybe I can follow around with a supplement that could get distributed is I found a lot of nice places online that have interesting polling data and that kind of thing that is sort of objective factual information that's useful. Um, and I'll get to this a little bit later in more detail, but for example, there's an organization that does a lot of very uh high quality polling on trying to find uh what are the sort of uh common ground positions that you could get a supermajority support for across the electorate. So, issues that might otherwise seem to be contentious, you know, is there a uh sort of middle ground position that you would actually get most people to sign on to? and they found indeed there is. So, you know, for most issues like whether it's gun control or abortion or whatever, you can get a large supermajority uh approval on certain policy positions and it's just a matter of being able to articulate what those policy positions are and you get lot lot of support for them and there's polling around it which is quite useful and something in general I think that anyone interested in in voting reform and particularly approval voting uh that needs to be the kind of data that uh we ultimely ely get more of because one of the gating things I think in these sort of um presentations or discussions you have with somebody you're trying to explain what the value is you know how can you depolarize people is to show that in fact if you dig in on the data there is a supermajority consensus across most the electorate on a lot of issues and it's just that those that those formulations of what those policy positions are are not being made and we need people to be able to make them and to be able to get elected ed on them. Um, so say here also the the article should be written in a way that most people could understand it. Uh, not no technical jargon. Um, and it should have a a rational tone to it. You know, I think maybe goes goes without saying, but nobody wants to publish something that sounds like a rant or uses a lot of adjectives unnecessarily. Uh, this is a lesson I've learned from litigation. when uh you know we submit briefing and make arguments to a judge, the judges are a little bit like parents that have squabbling kids and you know they kind of don't want to hear all the nonsense. They want to just cut to the chase, just the facts. You know, they can make their own decision based on the facts and I think that's a generally a good policy for op-eds as well. Um if we to go to the next slide. Uh so each of these different outlets, you know, they'll have some website usually you can find and look up that has their policies or protocols for what they want. Please make sure you follow that, you know, they there's a very quick way that they could just reject you if you're over their word limit or you didn't include hyperlinks they wanted or whatever. Um you know, so you have to follow that the letter just to kind of get get in the door. Um, now usually what they want is for you to send them an email or they may have a submission app where you have to paste something in, but typically they just want to have uh the text pasted in. Um, and uh, so it's, you know, it's within an email as opposed to attaching a copy. Uh, part of that may be a cyber security issue. I don't think they want to be downloading or opening attachments, but you know, make sure that you're pasting it into the body of the email. Uh, what I've done is usually have a short leadin, just a few sentences that says, you know, well, who am I and why should they bother reading what I'm about to send them? Um and uh so I' I'd recommend that you have that uh as well because certainly you know I they get so many submissions um and probably a lot of them from people that you know right out of the gate they'll start reading something and if they sense that they don't think you know what you're talking about or you know why should they even bother listening to what you have to say they'll probably just put it aside before even reading it. So, if there's something you can do to capture their attention, to make them realize just in the first sentences of an introduction to an email that there's some reason why they should listen to you, um, and you you have something interesting to say, you know what you're talking about. Um, all right, let's go to the next slide. All right. So, what other things could you do that would attract attention? And this in the first instance is really as much just for the editors to get them to be interested in wanting to even publish. Uh and then after that it's to get people to read it. So it works on both levels. Um the title I think is tremendously important. And um this is something I've gone back and forth many times on and particularly in some of the drafts I'm working on as to what title to use. Uh you know, how do you convey in just a few words this concept? Um, and uh, it's it's tricky. I mean, it's definitely uh, something that requires a lot of thought and you know, honestly, I think I've probably spent as much time thinking about what to title the article as writing the article itself. Um, something that I'm trying to put myself in the mind of a myriad different potential readers and what they might take away from it. Does it sound too uh, too bold or too loud? uh or does it sound not compelling enough, you know? So, there's some middle ground you want to hit in there. You don't want to make it sound too uh like like it's exaggerated because that's maybe off-putting. Um but on the other hand, you don't want to s make it sound too subdued and it sounds uninteresting. So, there's some sweet spot where you're able to quickly explain the gist of what you're about to say. I've seen this trend, you probably have too, in a lot of op-eds these days where um the the sort of the credentiing is in the title where the person will say, "I'm a doctor. This is what you should do." You know, something like that. Or, you know, I'm I'm a I'm a uh an ex- congressman. This is what I think of something. And it it has that sort of bio in the first two words. Um, if you have some compelling bio or whatever your position is, you may want to consider doing that and having that be right in the in the in the title since that seems to be a common type of styling of titles these days. Um, and then also the opening sentence, you know, something that very quickly explains where you're going. And this is another thing I've learned from litigation and brief writing. And you have to just get right to the point. like, you know, you sit down and write something and you think, well, I'll kind of get the I have to lay some foundation or exposition and and then I'll get to my point later. For something that's 600, 700 words that people are just scrolling on a screen and, you know, they're looking at it between lunch and responding to some other email, it needs to be something that immediately grabs the attention, quickly explains what the reason is for existence of this, whatever you're writing. Um, so don't save it for later. You're going to have a big revelation. Um, or at least hint at what the revelation is in the first sentence. Maybe that's the hook. So, you know, um, but, uh, something that's catchy, grabbing, uh, you know, right out of the gate. Um and uh you know I think what one of the articles that I had done I uh I think it it it started with something like you know what if there were a way that uh we could a we could make a simple change to the voting system that could uh you know uh help eliminate polarization or you know start start with a question something like that. I forget exactly how I worded it. Um, but you know that I think is kind of attention grabbing. You know, it's it's it's it's explains where you're going and then it kind of makes them want to stick around to hear the answer. Um, so, uh, let's go to the next slide. All right. And then in terms of this is the the concept of having a main point. You know, as I said, I I I started out when I thought about putting together op-eds with an idea of trying to explain, in my instance, all of approval voting kind of in one shot. Um, and it's taken me a while to realize that that's very hard to do. Um, there's just so many different angles. There's so many different sort of preemptive responses to the usual lines of questioning or critique that could be done. And I came around to the conclusion that it's sort of a disservice to try to do too much in one article. You you may whatever point you're trying to make may get lost in the shuffle and it may not be as compelling as if maybe you just focus on a particular angle. So uh you know it's going to approval voting. Let's say that you know it has multiple benefits. Maybe you pick one of those and that is the the what you're choosing to write about, you know. Um and uh and then I if you can pick a topic, a specific thing, then that can focus like a lens the rest and that kind of flows. Then what's the title going to be? All right. Well, now the title should address this particular topic you've chosen. Um and uh you know and then the first sentence whatever it is that you've picked as your particular topic that you want to emphasize or uh so forth. Um you know that should be exactly what you say in your first sentence or or at least hint at or you know lead in on. Um and then the article can be organized around that theme or or concept. Um there's a a draft for example of a article I'm working on now that I was trying to sort of uh marry up my background with litigation with approval voting and and sort of analogizing the solution that it offers to a settlement than a litigation which to me it felt sort of you know there was a certain um uh similar in spirit concept there. Uh, and uh, so I was titling the article, you know, uh, a litigator's proposal for harmonizing politics or, you know, I think I had a couple different working titles, but I, you know, sort of once I picked that concept and theme, that then goes to the title, it's the first sentence and then and then usually I try to tie it back in and then in the end you conclude on the same note. Um and that sort of bundles it together in a way that is coherent and and and more compelling I think. Um we can go to the uh the next slide. All right. So um what are some typical hurdles you know for any this is you know uh maybe applies more generally to any sort of voting reform topic that people might be interested in not just approval voting but you know for anybody I mean I'm assuming that folks who are on this call have some interest in voting reform to the extent that you you're you're into this you've been into this for a while you know the issues you're familiar with people that work in the space and you kind of you you're just in it in a way that the average citizen is not and that the average, more to the point, editor of one of these newspapers is not. Um, and so you have to be able to pull back and know your audience of, you know, who are you presenting this to? What's their level of knowledge going to be? What prejudices are they unknowingly bringing to the topic before you've even opened your mouth and told them anything? And the first thing to realize is I feel like I've learned this lesson is that the vast majority of people just don't know a thing about voting reform. That's just not something that's on the radar. You know, maybe in certain places they've like implemented rank choice and now they've heard of that. Um but even those people I think don't understand exactly what it is, frankly, most of them. Uh, and so my assumption going in, and you know, I might be wrong, but the assumption I start with is that who, whatever editor I am submitting this to is not going to really know what this is about. Um, and I think that's a safer place to start. And it also, I think, helps with the writing. Um, we have the same problem with brief writing and litigation. So we, let's say we have a case that concerns an area of law that is kind of specialized. So let's say we have a you know like a copyright case um and uh or a trade secret case or something. The first thing that we do as the litigators is look up once we get assigned the judge we look up the judge but who is this person what experience they have and if we see that they've had no prior experience with intellectual property cases or whatever it is that we're dealing with or I got a case now it's about gaming law dealing with like casinos and things like that. And if the judge doesn't have experience in that area, then it dramatically changes how we write the briefing and how we submit the argument because now we're in the role of like an educator where we have to explain from first principles what this topic even is. Um so uh certainly you want to this goes back to you know not using jargon etc. Assume you're you're starting with a blank slate. someone who their their notion of voting is that, you know, they get a ballot and they check a box and they that's it, you know, and so assume that that's the level of knowledge of whoever you're submitting to and write to that and with a with an eye towards being an educator and explaining. Um, those who are familiar with rank choice, I found that's that's the only other voting option they're aware of. They're not aware there's anything else. they just assume that it's either, you know, sort of first pass to post plurality voting or rank choice and that's it. And like what else would there be? So the fact that there even is anything else is something that is like a new concept that needs to not just be assumed. Um, and then many I think just are kind of, you know, there's so much that's out there in the media that's been there for so long that has just insisted that the country is polarized, half the country hates the other half of the country, hand ringing about how there's no solution that many people just assume that well that must be true. You know, why would I read that everywhere if that weren't true? And they're going to start with that assumption. And so you you need to sort of write in a way that you're acknowledging that that may be the position they're starting from and you know explaining why you're offering something that actually really is a solution as opposed to just more hand ringing. Um and uh also I you know there's some I'm I've often encountered people who invoke the one person one vote as something that they think is proclusive of other voting systems and something that that may need to be addressed or explained in an oped to kind of preemptively address that issue. Um if we go to the next slide. Um, as much as I, you know, given what I said before about trying to reach people, the reality is you're not going to be able to reach everybody. And there's some people that be so ingrained on whatever their view is or, you know, whatever the preconceived notions of thing is that you're never going to be able to convince them. And so you you as much as you want to try to write to educate, write to try to persuade, you know, realize you're only going to be able to do so much. And um you know, you don't have to go so overboard because you know if if there's someone who's going to read it, who's going to be inclined to think, hey, there's something interesting about this. I want to learn more about it. You know, hopefully whatever you can put in there will capture their attention on its own merits without you having to try to jazz it up. Um and you know, I think maybe I make this point somewhere on another slide, too, about you know, not using too many adjectives and so forth. You know, again, this is something we do in litigation. I I tell all the jun junior associates, I handle training at the law firm for our junior associates, and I say, you know, if you have to use adjectives or bold and underline and all that, you know, it's you're doing yourself a disservice. Um, it's a little bit like uh I don't know if anyone's seen the movie Inception, but this was a famous Christopher Nolan movie. And and there's a premise in the movie that they're trying to persuade someone to do something that if they try to just tell him to do it, he'd never do it. They had to convince him that was his own idea. And so we do this with litigation briefing where we just present the facts and we present it in such a way that the reader should be compelled to say well I I know what the conclusion should be based on this you know without you having to bold underline and use adjectives too much. I usually go through briefs now and I cross out all the adjectives. Um and then uh in going back to this slide here, um you know, I my belief just from having existed in the United States and traveled around a lot for a long time and spoken to a lot of people is that there's a lot of people that want concrete solutions. There's a lot of people that do not want to feel that they have to be at war with people over politics. um that these things might generate clicks in mass media and I think in that sense we're sort of evolutionarily driven to the top of news feeds because they just people are sort of interested in in the same way they're interested to look at the cover of a tabloid interested in hearing about people fighting but they themselves I don't know are fighters or they not inclined to be at war with their neighbor and if you can present a message that is providing a concrete solution. And it I my hope is that people would read your articles and they think finally somebody else who actually wants to find an answer, get people to work together and this is what I've been waiting to hear, you know, kind of like an aha moment, a revelation, you know, um as opposed to just hearing all the usual banter about people are they can't get along and we're intractably in a two-party stalemate in the in the politics or worse that you know some of you may have seen this now trickle into media is is references to civil war which I I find to be a remarkably offensive angle to take in any news publication and very disrespectful of the past and what it took to get the country where it is. Um, so hopefully your message can be one of positivity and things that I my own belief is most people actually do want to hear. Uh, and they'll appreciate your article for it. We can go to the next slide. Um, okay. So, this now starts to get a little bit more into approval voting specifically, but you know, hopefully there's concepts in here that no matter what your uh interest is, uh, and maybe we've got some folks in the call that are rank choice people. That's fine, too. you know, some of this I think translates um so I'm doing it from the perspective I'm familiar with, but hopefully this is something that people may feel is, you know, generally applicable or they can take some um value out of this. Um so I mean I think that it's necessary going back to sort of educating you have to it has to say somewhere in the article what approval voting is. Um, I don't know that that should be probably not the first sentence because again, I think you want to organize around some kind of theme of, you know, what is the benefit of approval voting that you're advocating in the article and that's the first sentence. But shortly after that in the article, you'd want to get to what the hell are you even talking about because most people are not going to know what approval voting is. Um the uh this formulation here uh that I have on the slide I I've used before something succinct quick. I I always throw in that the votes accounted equally and not ranked because I find that the vast majority of people if they're not familiar with it will assume you're talking about ranking. Um which is just you know obviously this is this different than that. Um, and I in in the articles I've worked on so far, I've also then tied it back to something that people are familiar with. So, I think there's like a line in one of the articles that I have now is, you know, you you may not have heard of approval voting, but you already know how it works because, you know, and then I go into how this is in fact if you were with a group of friends, you're going to pick a restaurant together, you're going to pick a day of the week that was best to hold a meeting. This is what you do naturally without thinking about it. people volunteer a group of options that they find to be acceptable regardless of which one they think is their favorite and you find what's the one that has the most overlap in the group like a ven diagram and that's how groups of people from time and memorial have made decisions and so tying it back to something that look this isn't some strange foreign concept that we're introducing here we're just putting a name on something you've already done your whole life and just didn't realize it um and why not apply that to politics you know why not apply apply that to a system where people otherwise forced into this intractable two-party stalemate because they're only given one option to pick. Um, so, uh, you know, I think, you know, the the nonpartisan aspect again, you know, going back to people's preconceived notions, most people, you just mentioned something about politics, something clicks in the head and they go into sort of a fight orflight mode where they're trying to analyze, are you Republican, are you Democrat? What's your angle? Who you trying to, you know, who are you trying to help here? Which to the blue team or the red team? You know, and if there's something you can do to unring that bell and say, look, this is this is a nonpartisan thing. This is not about red team, blue team. This is about how to achieve supermajority consensus. Um this is something everyone from all well anybody who's in the 80% of people who are in the middle of the bell curve should be interested in. If you're one of the the people that are extreme on the far ends of the bell curve, then you're going to hate this because this is going to disenfranchise you. So those people can leave the room, you know, like that's that you know, you want to be able to convey that uh you know um you're not you don't have any angle on this. It's not a political party thing. Uh this is just a neutral way of trying to achieve supermajority consensus. And then I give some concrete examples because that's the next thing people always say is, "Well, who's ever done this before?" And in addition to St. Louis and Fargo, which I, you know, usually work in reference to, and you can include a hyperlink there, by the way, to, you know, information about that, I know that we just had some success in Utah. Uh, so there there's some new news there to to maybe uh report on. And in fact, for anybody who's got time to do something quickly while the iron is hot, you know, talk about something to kind of focus and organize an article around, there's something that was just a development in Utah like, you know, last week. So, you know, there could be an article on that and then tie into, you know, the past success in St. Louis and Fargo and so forth. Um, and then with rank choice, you know, I I don't always necessarily address it specifically in detail, but uh something that um I think implicitly if someone who's only familiar with rank choice read your article, they should come away at least understanding what's different about approval voting, even if you don't specifically compare and contrast in detail. Um, let's go to the next uh slide. positivity. Um, yeah, I think you know so much out there is negative. To me, the whole underlying thematic of approval voting and voting reform generally is something as a positive message is people who believe that there is a way of bringing people together. Um, and that I think should should come out in the tone of any article. um you know having it be uh you know what I found is that a lot of times a given sentence you write could be framed in the negative or the positive. It could be something that is critiquing something or being critical of something and saying oh you know this system doesn't work and it's never worked so we have to change it. Well you know maybe that's true but maybe there's a positive way to say that. say, "What if there was a way to actually bring people together?" You know, well, now you're saying the same thing conceptually, but you've put a positive spin on it instead of a negative critical thing. And and I think that this is a little bit like, you know, people say, you know, they may not always um remember everything about a person, but they'll remember the way that person made them feel. I think it may work a little bit with like that with articles that you know they might not remember ultimately a lot of the detail of what you wrote but they'll remember hey that was that really positive upbeat thing that I read that was you know presenting a solution to this problem and it sticks with me because of that and now I want to go back and learn more about it. So I I think it ultimately has greater staying power and it's you know it's a difference between a positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. Um, and I made the point here again about the uh minimizing the adjectives, the the inception point. Um, you know, so hopefully the uh the the reader will be able to come to their own conclusion of this being a a positive hopeful uh concept. Um, we go to the next slide. So uh what I tried to do here was give some examples. Now in the next few slides as to you know I was saying before about maybe pick an angle you know pick a particular topic you know some perspective on it. Um and uh you know so angle one here is the concept of uniting people again something positive. Um, and uh, so, um, like I one of the op-eds that I did in the fulcrum, I I tried to put the word unite in the title and and I I think I titled it a one-word ballot change to unite our democracy, you know, and I was trying to cram some different concepts there into into one succinct title, but using that word unite was, which is a positive word. Um and it it kind of you know you can organize an article around that concept of uniting people. So what are some of the concepts that you know flow from a con the angle of uniting? Um the polling on supermajority and I saw somebody I noticed somebody put something in the in the comments about maybe having some um uh nice polling uh information which is fantastic. I think we got to everybody's got to kind of get together and put that all together somewhere because I think it's just gold to have the polling on that. You know, I I found that a polling that that tries to prove the opposite that tries to prove that people are polarized. Usually the polling is prejudiced in the way it is done because it'll frame it in terms of you know x% of Democrats say this or x% of Republicans say that. they already from the inception of the the poll already segregated it. Um and it wasn't or it was done in a way where it was polling people in a way they didn't have much like mirroring the voting system itself. It didn't give them options like they could either pick that they liked one extreme or the other extreme and there wasn't any middle ground presented as to well would you would you support a middle ground position? Um, so, uh, that kind of polling is very important and I think is necessary for an article like this to back it up with a with with real, uh, information. I I I saw somebody, it was on a t-shirt or something somewhere and it said, um, a person without data is just a person, another person who has an opinion, you know, and so you really need data to back this up. I think to me it went without saying from my own experience you know and I I had this picture of a bell curve here which is another concept about uniting to me everything in nature falls in a bell curve the same thing with political views and you know so there's not two humps like a camel there's there's clearly a large hump in the middle and the question becomes well how do you get the 80% of the people that are clustered around the the hump of the bell curve to be able to form a united voting block instead of getting artificially split off into two camps um so that they could unite and really you know there's a concept of a you know a common enemy in a way that I think is powerful that always brings people together is a notion of a common enemy to me and I haven't quite been able to figure out a way to articulate this yet in the form of an article but it's something that I'd like to work on is the common enemy in a way has been the very concept that we're divided like that that this messaging that's put out there of, you know, you should be at war with your neighbor. You know, we can't get along and the best you could hope for is half the country hating the other half of the country. To me, that's the common enemy. That's that messaging is preventing us from being able to move forward together and do things and accomplish things. It presents to me a national security risk. I mean, if we're so disorganized that, you know, half of Congress can't agree with the other half of Congress, then we're not going to be able to rise to the challenges we need to for the future. So that the very division itself, uh, I find to be a sort of a common enemy for the 80% of reasonable people that would like to be able to find a way to work together. Um, the um, uh, this this I make a mention here of this apple pie analogy. This was something that that that I'd come up with. I think other people have used similar formulations. I think somebody used something about pizza. um but to to explain where approval voting had an advantage in terms of bringing people together that you know instead of sort of forcing people to polarize around two first choice picks which often would happen I think in in in many rank choice elections where you kind of you know most of the votes end up going to the people that are on you know one side or the other and the people in the middle there's their purpose is often it's like a center squeeze effect it's called where they they get split off to support one of the other two people on the other side. Um, rather than the people in the middle being the ones that get the most votes. And the analogy I was using was uh, and feel free anybody wants to use this analogy that you know if there were pe two people going into a pie store to buy pie, let's say they're shopping for the family for Thanksgiving and they have to pick a pie and the first person says, "Well, my favorite pie is blueberry. I want blueberry pie." The second person says, "Well, my favorite pie is cherry pie. I want cherry pie. Now, you know, in our existing voting system, first pass the post, there's going to be election between blueberry and cherry, and somebody's going to come out unhappy, you know, let's say with more more than two people. Um, but what do most people do in that situation? They say, "Hey, what's your second favorite pie?" And the first person might say, "Well, I like apple. Apple's pretty good. I like that." And the other person, "Oh, I like apple, too. That's my second favorite." So, what pie are they going to buy? They buy apple pie. Now, in a rank choice election, apple pie would have got ranked out because it was everybody's second choice, and you would have had a runoff between blueberry and cherry, and somebody's gonna be unhappy. Um, so I've used that analogy to kind of get across the power of approval voting to unite people around the common choice that would the way they would naturally do in most settings and group decision-m. Um, I mentioned here this Nash equilibrium. If anybody's tied into finance, I'm I'd be fascinated to do a deep dive with anybody in economics on this. Some people may know uh professor Nash uh he was famous uh for coming up with this Nash equilibrium concept in economics. There was a movie made out of about him called the beautiful mind. He'd suffered from some mental disturbances. Um but the the it's this concept of the Nash equilibrium in economics was that it's a it's a game theory concept that you know if everybody was trying to get their maximum benefit from a certain game or circumstance they may end up canceling each other out. But if they coordinate around a a certain sort of uh you know um uh mutually beneficial option, they actually end up maximizing the result they'll get out of the system. And it's directly analogous to approval voting in my view and something I'd love to see an econ economist talk about as like a game theory concept. We can go to the next slide and I know that we're maybe running up on time here because I wanted to leave some room for discussion or questions as I'll try to run through these. Another angle uh might focus on the simplicity of approval voting. Um you know our current election system can get a little complicated. Um and uh a lot of the other voting systems that are that are advocated can you know also themselves be a little complicated. rank choice, you know, requires most instances having a computer program that runs the the instant runoffs and calculates, you know, what the results are. My own belief, I think, is most people don't really understand how that works. They think they know how it works. Most people I've spoken to that have some threshold knowledge of rank choice voting assume it's a scoring system where all the votes are counted, which is not true. That's not accurate. a lot of so and I think the data show is most rank choice elections the two people that got the most first choice votes one of those is going to be the winner for the people who voted for those as their first choice whoever they picked as a second and third choice is just discarded and never counted so it like going back to my apple pie analogy the fact that those two pie shoppers both would have liked getting apple pie is never appreciated because that vote is rejected from the system it's not counted Um and uh so that's something I think is not quite understood. Um and uh this played out in um a similar scenario as this played out in the Alaska election between it was Pilah and um Sarah Palin and Nick Begich. And the um if you actually look at the data, Nick Begich, who was kind of like a centrist Republican, if you put him head-to-head with either uh either of the other two, he would have won. But under the ranking system, it was it ended up being a little bit like my pie analogy where because he was kind of, you know, more of the second choice for everybody, he got kicked out. Um so there's a certain simplicity to approval voting of just uh you just add up the votes whoever gets the most vote wins. Uh and this concept of aams razor which is you know if that's a philosophical principle maybe people have heard that the simplest answer is often the right one. Um some people ask me about what I think about um you know having an actual scoring system like a star voting and um my own view on it I I I appreciate it. I I like it maybe second best to approval voting, but I think it's not accomplishing the robust compromise that approval voting does and it adds another layer of some complexity. Whereas there's a certain sort of simplicity of just, you know, we don't even have to change the ballot system. I mean, think about that how much money is saved. We can just use our existing ballot counting machines and all we have to do is just change the criteria so they can accept more than one vote on the same uh form. Um, and a lot of, you know, we I looked into the legal side of a lot of this. A lot of the the the state and local regulation around voting and so forth is already set up to accommodate the concept of approval voting. In fact, a lot of places don't really have anything that mandates that it has to be first best to post. Although there there's um I think you know more laws that would have to change to allow something other than that or approval voting. uh is so just there's some extra you know baggage that needs to be uh dealt with uh on some other voting methods whereas approval voting is very simple to implement very simple to understand everyone will get it at the end the person got the most votes they won okay next topic um incentives this actually if I were to leave you guys with nothing else substantively is to me the heart of the value of approval voting and a concept that I've now shifted towards in terms of what I lead with as the most important thing. And it took me a while to articulate it. It was it was something that was staring me in the face in the beginning. In other voting systems, all you need is 51% to win. So the incentive for any including rank choice, you just need 51%. In fact, if you get 51% in round one, you don't even have to do the rest of the instant runoff. Whoever got 51% will win. In any district where you know you're shoe in with 51% no incentive to reach to the other side of the spectrum. You know maybe you might care about putting a little extra effort to capture just enough extra votes you make sure you get 51%. But why do you not want to go further than that? Because if you go too much further into the other camp then your base or whoever you have as you think is your locked in support for your half is going to start feeling alienated. Hey, why are you talking to the people on the other side of the aisle? you know, um, so the incentive structure for the politicians in a game theory sense is to try to get to 51% and really no more than that so you don't alienate any of the people that are on your camp. The power of approval voting to me is that because it counts all the votes in the same round of voting instead of all these runoffs. If you have 51%, you can lose to somebody who got 61%. who in turn could lose to somebody who got 71%. And it creates a race for the politicians. They say, "Wait, wait a minute. I can't just, you know, try to only get 51% because if somebody else can appeal to more of that bell curve than me, then they're going to capture a larger number of votes and I'm going to lose. I'll get 51% and I'll lose." Um, so it just fundamentally rewrites the incentive structure in a way that the our existing voting systems and rank choice do not do. Um, and this is something that I don't think has been emphasized enough. I think that this is one of the most powerful messages if you get people to understand it. It it it kind of self-organizes the incentives of the politicians around wanting to capture that 80% of the bell curve just organically. They have to otherwise they'll lose. And and uh as soon as they realize that, they're going to start figuring out, well, what are the things that I could get a supermaajority of people across the political spectrum to come together on? And I have to make that my platform, otherwise I'm going to lose to somebody else who does a better job of that. Go to the next slide. Um this I think I've kind of already covered here, so we can we can move ahead. Um and here, you know, I think these slides will get circulated. I don't want to take too much more time. We're we're kind of right towards the end. I I put in these last two slides here some thoughts on preemptive responses to the usual critiques. Uh you know, oh, people only vote for the first choice. I I don't think so. I think if people understand the system, then as if they realize that if they don't vote a certain way that they're gonna somebody they dislike is going to win, uh then they're going to be incentivized to to vote for more than one. So they they're not putting all the eggs in a losing basket. And also once the politicians change their stance and you bring in more political parties and people to you know get more other parties in the system trying to achieve this 80% or more consensus uh I think you just change the landscape and so this sort of concern uh doesn't apply. Um I I'll skip some of the rest here. We'll go to the next slide there. I think this is the last slide actually. Um the establishment won't allow it. That's maybe a common sort of concern and certainly we've seen that happen where you know this got voted down in North Dakota and so forth which I think is remarkably shortsighted on the part of the politicians. My own belief is that most of the politicians wish they had this system of approval voting because they feel constrained that they have to go with the party even on some position they think is ridiculous. um and they would love it if they had a platform to appeal to a supermajority of the public on some rational policy position. Um so my own belief is that as soon as this was something that people got it, it would catch on and a lot of the Republicans and Democrats who are more reasonable-minded would say, "Hey, wait a minute. Now we have a way of actually coming together." And I think if you could if there's an article that could kind of make that apparent and and maybe even an article directed to politicians, there's an idea. Say, "Hey politicians, are you tired of being at odds with each other? Here's a way you could come together." You know, and then finally, this concept of, "Oh, we haven't tested approval voting enough." This is sort of a chicken and egg problem. I mean, as I say here, approval voting could be the miracle solution we've all been waiting for, but if you applied this logic, it would never be adopted. Um, I think in any kind of uh healthy democracy, you got to be able to try different things. Um, and uh it's I think it's bad policy to try to put all your eggs in only one basket. There's more than enough different forms and um uh jurisdictions in our very large country in which uh we could uh try this out and see how it works. Um and uh my own belief is that I think most people are looking for a solution like this. I think that's the last of the slides. I'll try to stop there. I know we're kind of coming up on time, but I don't if you know Alison, should we open it up for questions or >> Yeah. So, if we have um any questions um we can open it up. Um and also if you think of questions, you can email me as well. Oh, but we have Alan. You can go ahead Alan. >> Uh thank you. Uh thanks JP. This was a great presentation. Uh, I really feel like I learned a lot and it helps me organize my thinking in in writing an op-ed a lot. So, I appreciate it very very much. Um, one of the things you brought up was that you think most people uh think they understand or at least who have even heard of RCV think they understand it but maybe don't. I I think I agree with that, but I haven't actually seen any hard data that uh points to that. I'm curious if if anybody here uh has that kind of data because I would love to have that in my pocket. >> Well, I'll just say my sort of uh the first thing I think of with that was that Alaska election because I think that um a lot of people, you know, it's interesting because the data on it that was released was not complete. Like if you went to like the Alaska elections website, what was actually published, it didn't show all of the rankings that people did. it just kind of cut to the end. And I think a lot of people looked at especially if you were someone who wanted a Democrat to win, you wanted PTOA to win, it was just immediately hailed as, oh, this system's great because it got Democrat to win. >> Yeah. >> It it made sure that that Sarah Palin didn't win. And there there wasn't enough of peeking behind the curtain and looking at the actual numbers to realize, wait a minute, if you'd put Begage up against Pollah in a one-on-one election, he according to the data on on how people ranked, he would have won. Uh, and the fact that that was not publicized and that the media hadn't picked it up, I did see there was one Harvard politics professor who' picked up on it and wrote an article and said, "Yeah, this didn't really quite come out right." and and he kind of explained why and he was proposing some very convoluted solution to it. And as I was reading it, it was like he was sort of trying to reinvent approval voting in like a weird way. Uh and I I was thinking, gee, I got to talk to this guy and tell him there's already a system that does this very efficiently and would in an AAMS razor way quite simply. Um but that that's an example that I have where I thought that that you know it was just not understood really what those results really were. >> Great. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? And um Alan, we dropped some other stuff in the chat. I can also email you some of those resources and top ones that we have as well. Um any other questions, folks? And if you do have questions that you think about uh after, you can feel free to email me. I'll drop my email in the chat. Um that's actually a really good question. Um I think that's Adam. Um that is what is the value of opeds as opposed to blog posts or other written works? It's a good question. >> It's it's excellent question. I was actually going to put a bit of disclaimer in this that you know I I'm I'm not really addressing ways of you know going viral and social media and so forth. My own sense of it is that if you can get a um a nice opeted out there that especially if it's something where you're kind of in forced into the succinctness of something that's you know 600 words or less um that it could be something that then gets circulated that maybe enough people would find that and say hey you know this is this interesting article it's a quick read and then that can get forwarded around another social media as like a blog post and it has I think maybe perhaps some more authority to it because you've had to go through the ringer of, you know, uh, making it get get past an editorial board. And so it has a certain aura of authority to it that just a random post might not. Um, that that's what I think perhaps a benefit could be. But I would say that if you have a way of getting yourself to go viral from just a a blog posting, um, then by all means, you know, I think whatever gets the message out there, uh, it's not it's something that I would claim to be as much of an expert in. And not that I'm an expert in anything. I'm just sharing my own personal experience and advice. >> And Allan, I think we'll just if he has another followup, we could take that and then kind of wrap it up. >> Do you have another question? >> I I I do have um a couple more hopefully quick ones. Um, uh, one is, uh, sort of related to this last one of like could we have another similar meeting to this where we talk about like emailing or contacting your representatives? Um because I feel like that a lot of the information is the same of what you want to get across, but there might be subtly different things that maybe some people who have more experience in reaching out to their representatives and have had success, I'm thinking like Nate Allen or someone like that, um could share with us about what works, how long do you make it, who do you reach out to, how do you find the people to reach out to? Oh, okay. And there's probably a thing I should already have watched. Um, and then the other question I had is um, yeah, in terms of finding the newspaper or the the outlet to reach out to, do you have any more advice in that direction of do you kind of like do a broad search of what are all the outlets in my area and then and then rate them in terms of how how far their reach is and how much I like how how do you do that search to begin with to get started? >> I I'll speak to to that one. Your first question, I might pass that to to Nina or Allison, but on that question, I've looked at a lot of different news outlets across the country over the past few years. Um, and while I do think that you may have more luck with something that's local to the extent that they see that you may be a reader or you're someone from the community, um, I don't think you need to be constrained to that. Um, you know, you know, like I got something published in the Salt Lake Tribune and I don't I live in Los Angeles, not Salt Lake City. Um, and that that wasn't an impediment. Um, but uh, you know, Alan, you know, somebody like you, I mean, you're kind of in this your whole job description seems to be around, you know, voting reform. I my guess is that you'd have a bit more luck maybe with um, uh, almost any publication because, you know, you you present as an expert in the field. uh for someone like me who you know my job title is litigator and it's not im immediately apparent what I have to do with voting reform um you know what I've tried to do is pick jurisdictions that I thought might have some interest in this like maybe it's a place that might be kind of a purple city and you know that that they might have a leaning towards wanting to hear about a solution that brings people together. I also looked for where the editorial boards for certain newspapers had already released their own op-eds that were advocating in favor of uh not necessarily even voting reform but you know trying to bring people together. Uh there was I think it was like the one of the newspapers in Dallas or something. They'd had a very compelling article about this whole notion of uniting people around supermajority consensus positions and they had included a lot of nice polling and pie charts and it was from the editorial board. They took the time to put it together and I thought okay well here's some people that already have prepackaged interest in this. Now I haven't reached out to them yet but that they're kind of on my list. I kind of you know made note of that. Um, so you may look to see if they, you know, uh, sometimes editorial boards will have some mission statement or mission purpose and they may say explicitly in that that they're looking for, uh, they like to advance, uh, you know, nonpartisan, fact-driven positions or, you know, something that signals that they might be receptive to, um, you know, this this kind of thing. >> Cool. Okay, great. So that actually gives me one more follow-up question if I can. Sorry everyone. Uh and it it gets back to this idea of kind of the biography in the title and and my experience because I I have had two careers. one as a software engineer um where I was a senior software engineer at Google and I can kind of attack things from that perspective and in fact that's where like the majority of my training is or I can come out as the person who's leading this organization that's advocating for approval reform at the risk which makes me maybe seem like more of an expert in the area but also maybe seems more like I'm just uh like pandering or or trying to to um push my own agenda rather than like propose an honest solution. And I'm I'm curious what your take on that is. >> I I would say that if you had a way of framing your article as something that was building off of your experience as a software engineer, like you know, like I was giving that example of I've got a draft article I'm working on where it's like a litigator's perspective. Like that's literally yeah that angle on the article then I think that there's value to presenting yourself that way and saying you know I'm looking at this from the perspective of a software engineer maybe trying to optimize a system or you know if you had to write code to you know optimize a complex system you know how would you do it and analogizing that to sort of the organizing principles around approval voting then that's it's valuable to come at it from that perspective I would think that if it was more of a straightup discussion of policy politics ethics and uh you know, voting reform, you're better served highlighting the fact that you're in the field. Um because I I think that that most editorial boards would be inclined to accept that as threshold evidence that you know, you have some idea what you're talking about. Um >> yeah, that's my that's my own, you know, my own sense of it from from my own experience. >> Thank you. And like I said, Alan, if you have more questions or you just kind of like want to chat further, I'm sure we can facilitate that as well. Um because there's just a lot that's going on recently. So, uh we're more than happy to facilitate this conversations. Um but I just wanted to wrap up here. Thanks everyone for who has stayed a little later. Thank you so much JP. This was really helpful. We will be sending out the slides, the um it's not a transcript. There's like a little notes app that ends up um getting some notes from the meeting. And then we also send out the video as well. So you should have all of um the uh all of the things here that you need. And hopefully if you have any more questions, don't feel free to um email us. We like to have um continuous conversations with folks. Uh we also have a discord community that you can go and ask lots of questions. We have lots of expertise in the discord if you have any questions whatsoever. Uh we know that you can get uh an answer there. And um yeah, thank you so much for joining and we um hope to see you in future trainings because we continue to have these conversations uh in this sort of political climate so that you all have the tools that you need to advocate for the things that you care about. Uh thank you so much and I hope you all have a nice what is this Wednesday? Have a nice Wednesday evening afternoon. >> I just want to also take thanks everybody for attending and you know I I'll ask Allison Nina to include my contact information whatever gets circulated and anybody who might want to reach out. I you know unfortunately I don't know most of you but I'd love to meet you talk to you um regardless of whatever you want to talk about I I it would be nice to to to meet you. I appreciate you attending and hopefully there was something interesting about it. Um, and uh, have a great day. Thank you so much.