Executive Session. The Council will meet in executive session for the purpose of receiving legal advice that is attorney-client privileged.
be filed with the Council offices no later than Monday, August 16, 2018. I move. We are going to move into executive session here and I move that council, enter into executive executive session for the purposes to receive legal advice that is attorney client privilege. I second the motion. All right. It has been moved and seconded by Councilman Clark per section 234, Section eight of the revised municipal code. A two thirds affirmative vote is required to enter into executive session. So we need we need seven. Affirmative. Madam Secretary, roll call. Black High. Clerk. Hi, Espinosa. Hi, Flynn. I Cashman. Can eat. Lopez. All right. New Ortega assessment. Mr. President. I please those voting in US results. 11 eyes. All right. We have 11 eyes will now enter into executive session when council returns on the floor from executive session. Tonight's meeting will be adjourned. In the city of Minneapolis. We really have seen just, I think, increasing support for this system as opposed to more divided opinion about did we do the right thing. So that has been the tone in the tenor in the city of Minneapolis. Am I up there? Oh, yeah. Here I am. Sorry about that. Here's a couple of key findings to share from 2017. Again, this is our third time that we've used ranked choice voting, and this was one thing that was just super. We had this big surge. And so you saw the mayor elect in the video at the beginning. He talked about having 45%. Let's see, where do I get this? Oops. So this is just a little graph that shows how much we increased. Normally you would see in a general election, more like in the thirties, low thirties as a turnout in a general just municipal election. I don't know what in Denver it's sort of your general turnouts are in your more general election and then you can see the line down there about the primaries. So A, we had tremendously increased participation in this election, but also regardless of even with the lower participation, it was much different who you were playing to as a candidate if you did not have a primary. And we. Right. That was just. Let's go through that. Okay. So this is the next thing that happened in Minneapolis in our 2017 election. And now we have an example from the mayor's race and we have an example from a candidate's race that I want to share. But we just had tremendous participation in people ranking their ballots. So they didn't just show up and rank their favorite candidate. They ranked at least two and many ranked three candidates. And so here, if you're able to I think this is kind of small, but I will read out in the mayor's race, 87% of voters ranked at least two candidates. 73% of voters ranked at least three candidates. And I will say and again, when we look at the mayors example, you'll see this a little bit more. We had an interesting field in city elections in Minneapolis in 2017 where we probably had, I consider, five of those candidates for mayor to have visible and viable campaigns. And when we look at this election, I'll kind of tell you who raised the most money and who didn't. And you'll see it's kind of surprising, actually, when you look at who won. We had a valid ballot rate of almost 100%. And again, that was explained. This means that people filled out their ballot correctly. And also, we have a system in Minneapolis where you can feed your ballot into the machine and it will kind of spit it out if you haven't filled it out correctly. So we have a mechanism to automatically assist with that. What am I doing here? Let's. We had just a tremendously diverse slate of candidates. Again, I think this goes to this issue of. Who who is who is electing these candidates? So now you are as a candidate, you have won elections. It's more about turnout. It is about reaching as many voters as possible. It's about talking to everyone that you can. Even those who have said someone else is my first choice. And we heard candidates say that they felt more comfortable coming into the race even if they weren't sure how valuable they were in the beginning. So we ended up with, again, just a very diverse slate of candidates. These are people who were elected. The first two transgender council members were elected in the first Somali-American and Latina council members were reelected in this election. And for Minneapolis, this is a big change. And again, this is not fully reflecting the whole slate of candidates who are running. All right. Let's see. I'm going to skip that. Okay. So I wanted to get to this example from the mayor's race. So here we have let's see. One, two, three, four, five. So we have essentially what I talked about where these top five mayoral candidates and then this was other. So again, this was kind of an interesting race. We have an incumbent who was running for reelection and she did not win her race. Two years, four years ago when we had a mayoral election, we had what I think is is had been more traditional than what I had seen, which is that you had like a couple of candidates just sort of rise above the pack and kind of hold on to that. So it felt even though like there were more candidates, it felt like there were two main candidates. That was not the feel in Minneapolis this year. You, sir. I'm going to go through here. So here they first eliminated the other candidates. And we knew who won the mayor's race. We had an inclination of who might win the day of the election, and we had final confirmed results for the mayor's race by the early afternoon of the next day. So those ballots moved voters. Second choices. Round two. Round three. Nicky Levy LB is eliminated. She was the African American woman who was featured in the early video. She was a candidate. I'll just say in the last elections report I saw, she raised only $40,000. So I just want to say this is like an election where someone like that who I will say was someone who had a lot of popular following, was able to come out in the top five candidates in a competitive race. Oh, that's. Right. And she had a baby on the campaign trail. Yes. Tom Hook is eliminated. I'll just want to mention him, because he was the candidate who raised the most money. He spent a lot of his own personal fortune. He raised about $750,000 that he spent on the race. So he was gone next. I'll just flip to this because I will say on our elections website, which you can see at vote dot, Minneapolis, Amanda Jovi, they have a very interesting graphic that shows how people's votes went once they were eliminated. And so you might just want to take a look at that. Betsy Hodges is eliminated. She was the incumbent mayor, Herbert. And then we had whips, and then we had a winner with 57% of of counted ballots or continuing ballots. All right. This is one other race just to kind of take a look at, because there's this kind of shorter story to tell here. This was a race between a 20 year incumbent and she had two challengers. This was a race we we do do endorsing of candidates in Minneapolis. Nobody was endorsed in this race by the party, although the challenger, Phillipe Cunningham, was the closest. And what ended up happening here was so there's round one. There were two challengers, Stephanie Garcia and Phillipe Cunningham. And in Brown to Garcia and then another candidate, Hanson, were eliminated. Garcia and Cunningham clearly were aligned candidates. They and they ended up promoting a message towards the end of the campaign where they encouraged the other person's supporters to please rank them as their second choice. So there was an alignment that that happened there. And in the end, even though Barb Johnson was first in the early round, Phillip Cunningham received the lion's share of these other votes. This was a big story. He was a. He was a surprise candidate to win that race. And this is just another graphic of that. But she she was not successful. The incumbent, in attracting enough second choice votes to put her over the edge. And this is the winner. Phillip Cunningham. I think I've taken up quite a bit of time here, but I will just say that I feel sad that we weren't able to have our elections. Our city clerk here, Casey Karl, he had to deal with a recount in one of our races. And he's preparing for, you know, a new mayor and a bunch of new council members. But people should feel free to reach out to Casey Karl in the city of Minneapolis. He has been a great advocate of how to institute this elections method. Well, with integrity, our elections team has won some national awards. And also just to this point of engagement with voters, I feel like our whole elections team has continued just to be creative in how to engage with voters. Just like the work around ranked choice, voting has ushered in a whole new kind of way to do the work of the Elections Department, where they now perceive that part of the work is about continuously educating and engaging with voters, making sure they have good information about how to fill out their ballots and all this kind of thing. So it has ushered in also a lot of policy changes of the city of Minneapolis and how to make things work the best way that they can for voters. So thanks for letting me share a story. Thank you, Elizabeth. One more speaker and thanks. Thanks for sticking with us. And a terrific set of information being presented, I hope. I'll say the one part of the Minneapolis story that sort of jumps out to me from like looking at that Merrill result is that if it had been the old system in Minneapolis and those first choices that translate into votes, which you don't know for sure would have happened, but it would have been the two biggest spenders. Two white men would have advanced and been the only general election candidate when turnout was much higher. But they had this sort of richer debate with with with more people, which is analogous to what Denver where you don't have this sort of winnowing election, you have everyone run in the first round and someone can win in the first round, but some of the systems out there wouldn't allow that. And say Paul also use ranked choice voting and they sort of interesting example of it was a big open seat race for mayor. People thought it would have multiple rounds, ten candidates running and a candidate ultimately won 51% of first choices. So sort of drives are pushed forward in a we will be the first African-American mayor of Saint Paul. But part of the coverage of it that I really appreciated just following was that people, you know, felt that all these candidates contributed to the dialog about the city. So even if it sort of looked like a first round result where just it was normal, you had sort of people. Beep, beep, beep, beep. Part of the part of the dialog and part of what he as a successful candidate had to learn how to be people. Second choices. So our last speaker is going to be Connie Schmidt. And one of the great advances for us at FairVote is the rise of the ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, which is run by former election officials, all with some direct experience with ranked choice voting. But who can really get into how to make this work and how it's working and be a resource to communities and states as as they look at ranked choice voting and Connie is an example of what a great asset they have. She was election commissioner for Johnson County, Kansas, for nine years. City clerk for Merriam, Kansas. For 20 years. Has been doing a lot of consulting, has done some work with the Election Assistance Commission and direct consulting to KC Coral and some work in Minneapolis. So Connie. Thank you, Rob, and thank you, Amber, and your group for hosting this event. It's a very nice turnout and we're very happy to be here. As Rob said, my background is totally in local government and service to the public, and the last nine years were spent with the best job on earth, which was managing elections in the large county in Kansas, in the Kansas City metro area. Since then, it's been a lot of my privilege to work around the country with a lot of initiatives in various states and jurisdictions. In 2011, 2013, 2017, in Minneapolis, where I learned for the first time about ranked choice voting the last couple of years, it's been another privilege for me to be associated with the team of people that developed the ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. And I'm really excited about it because it is basically a place where any election administrator, voter, public official, any want candidate. If you have any questions about ranked choice voting, you can go to this website ranked choice voting dot org and you will find all of the information that we have been able to find anywhere across the country. And so the group that I'm working with, as Rob said, are retired and former election administrators. We're very big believers in elections and sharing best practices so that no one has to reinvent the wheel. And so we're very proud of everything that we have there. It's from all the jurisdictions across the country who have implemented ranked choice voting from legislation to any other kind of ideas that are there. Part of the things that it includes is a compilation of really what is ranked choice voting. And so you can click on various tabs on the website if you're a voter or you're a candidate or you're an election administrator and go to various places of information that would help you understand what it is. For example, there's information on how to mark your ballot. And so you if you were a voter or if you were running for office, there's information there from other places across the country, including samples. We have information on single winner, ranked choice voter and multi winner ranked choice voting races. The election tool kit is probably one of my favorite places we have started this year, a webinar series that we've been doing online, and I'll talk a little about that in a moment. We have a lot of reports and presentations that we have done across the country and various reports that I talk about. We've been working with the Center for Civic Design on usability tool kits and education tool kits. So the first thing, the webinar series and those webinars are posted on that website. So if you're interested in any one of them or all of them, you can go on your own and view those. The first one we did was to introduce everybody to really what the ranked choice Voting Resource Center is and how we can help you. And I need to add that our services are provided free of charge to any jurisdiction, including travel. So we are here as a resource and to help in any way we can. One webinar was basically the ABCs of ranked choice voting, and that was kind of a introduction to what is ranked choice voting and what does it mean? Where is it being used? And then we've done one on the history, going back to the beginning when ranked choice voting was first started in the United States and then the usability studies on how to design a ballot voting systems capabilities, including statewide. How do you do this for a whole state? And designing the most important, which is voter education and how to present election results to the voters. We're going to be doing more webinars in 2018. And again, those are all going to be posted on our website as we go along. The tool kit has a variety of reports and presentations that our team has put together. The first one we did, we called it the Ranked Choice Voting compilation. And you can print it out there. It has active hyperlinks throughout the document that will take you to other best practices across the country. But it's basically just that it's where has this been done before? How can I see what was done before? How can I get an example of how someone else that managed elections did this? And so that's where we'll find that. The other report that I think is really good is implementation of ranked choice voting with multiple voting systems. You're fortunate in Colorado, you have all one voting system statewide. Not every state has that convenience. There are many states that have various voting vendors throughout the jurisdictions, and the model RCP implementation plan is one that we've just finished in September and it basically takes it's a road map that we put together for any jurisdiction that was thinking about going to a ranked choice, voting as a model for managing elections from how do you pass legislation? What are some examples of model legislation that you can take a look at and print off to? How do you do voter education all the way through? How do you build the ballot and how do you actually provide election results on election night? So there's a lot of really good information in these reports and presentations. The one thing I wanted to talk about very briefly is the Center for Civic Design. We have several reports on the website that they have done. They've been a wonderful partner to FairVote and the ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. I think you have some handouts on your table on the website. We have the principles and guidelines report that was done by their team. The ballot design testing documents. And I understand they're going to be here in Denver later this month to do some more for you all voter education testing documents. And they did go to Minneapolis and they have tested a lot of this information there. And how do you present election results on election night to your voters and to the candidates? So some of the highlights for their design report and I have to say many of these when I was reading through these preparing this PowerPoint pertained to elections in general. And I think one of my colleagues earlier said the same thing. It's really not any different than just managing the normal election. So many of the guidelines you're going to see for the Center for Civic Design pertain to any election that you're doing. Give voters the information they need to prepare to vote. The only thing is when you're going to ranked choice voting from a normal regular election where they just vote for one person. You have to explain the benefits and the basics of what is ranked choice voting. Be prepared to answer their questions and be able to show voters how their ballot is actually going to be used in counting and tallying election results. And so one way to do that is this is a sample. They may be on your tables. I think I might have seen this one that the Center for Civic Design put together. So basically in very simple language, what is ranked choice voting? Why are we using it with as few words as possible? And you notice their icons and their words at the bottom for why it's being used. Save money, stronger voices, broader participation. And so those simple words can can help a voter and the general public understand more about how to use it. So that's an example that they put together. Another guideline that they presented was all of the information should be in clear and simple language. Any of us that have been in elections for any period of time have this kind of pounded into us. Clear and simple language is very important. Keep the information short and to the point and use it everyday words so that anyone will be able to understand it. In elections, we kind of call it kindergarten words, you know, make it simple for everyone. Use illustrations any time you can and use icons very sparingly to draw attention to different types of information. And I have added the Minneapolis Voter Guide from 2017, and they're really proud of it. They've done a great job in Minneapolis through the years, improving each year on the process. Their mission that we kind of started in 2013 was to be the gold standard for ranked choice voting. And I'm so proud to say that they really are. So this voter guide that they did in 2017 utilized the information from the Center for Civic Design on how to do this best, some other information that was presented. Is the how to do election results on election night. And as Councilwoman Glidden pointed out, the Minneapolis folks really set a high standard in the 2017 election. If you can go to their website and click on the mayor's race, you can see this really marvelous visual of how each round of tabulation moved various results from one candidate to the other candidates. So they did a very, very good job on that. But use a combination of text and graphics to tell your story, use color and shading icons to draw attention to the various pieces. It's important to include the details of where the voters expect them and use labels to remind the voters of the most important information. And probably the most important thing is to use plain language if you're explaining local or state laws and terms. And and just very few words to help people understand. An example is this visual. I think it's on your table that the Center for Civic Design created for us in partnership, and it does show how each person's unique ballot and vote for each round is being tabulated. And so any time you can do any kind of a visual, something like this, it really helps the voters and the general public. And I have to say, the media, too, because we have to educate the media on what is ranked choice voting and how it is secure and how we are going to tabulate the results. And so I want to show you a couple more examples of a way you can present this information so that the public can understand how the votes are being re-allocated to other candidates as the tabulation occurs on election night. Everybody is used to having election results before the 10:00 news, right? Well, sometimes in ranked choice voting, we it takes a little bit longer as the gentleman from Alameda indicated, that they still are counting mail ballots after the election night. So the same thing is going to happen with ranked choice voting. It will take some time to pull all the election results together. Some of the candidates will automatically win on election night if they receive over 51% of the vote. Those that don't will have to go into the rounds of tabulation. This is an example of a grid style ballot. Is there on your left, if you're looking at it on your right is the columns and there are various ways you can design the ballot. Minneapolis allows ranking of up to three voters, 3 to 3 candidates, I'm sorry, other jurisdictions rank up to six and maybe up to ten candidates. That's a decision that you'll have to make, but you'll notice the voter instructions at the top. It's really important to show a little visual for what they how you actually mark the ballot. And it's that that's really important piece of all of it. I wanted to talk a little bit about educating the public. Again, I'm partial to Minneapolis because that's where I worked in ranked choice voting, but they've done a really good job on their website and I have the address, their vote, Minneapolis, myGov and you can go there and just get all kinds of background information for how they implemented it. Starting in 2009. They used social media, I know you all do here in Denver to Twitter, Facebook to keep the public and the voters and the candidates informed and engaged in the entire process, including on election night when we were doing tabulation. The use of Twitter and Facebook was a really good way to keep everybody engaged. They have a video I'm going to show at the end on how tabulation occurs. That's on their website. Also, they do voter outreach handouts in various languages. The one that really helped them the most, I think, is the Voter Information Guide mailing. They mail this to every household in the city of Minneapolis and in ranked choice voting elections, which is once every four years, they include more information about what ranked choice voting is and how it works. And they do a post-election survey they have in 2013, I believe they did it again this year, surveying election workers and voters in various. People, and the Voter Guide was identified as the most effective tool for learning about ranked choice voting. But I have to stop here and again, always say that our most important informant to the voters is our poll workers in the polling places on Election Day. My colleagues in North Carolina who did a ranked choice voting statewide election in a very short period of time. The poll workers in the polling places are the ones that really, really helped inform the voters and be sure they had the right information. How it works, educating the voters. I have this handout available over here. If some of you would like to take that. This is what Minneapolis uses. It tells people how not to do what not to do with the big red circle and the line drawn through it. It also provides information at the bottom about how to count your vote. And it also says that if you've made a mistake on your ballot, you can please ask for another ballot and you can start over so that it's like a poster that's in every voting location, which is also really, really good. I wanted to give you a just a couple of statistical things, because I love statistics. And looking back on Minneapolis, this is from November of 2013. I don't know. They have all of these numbers put together from this past November's election. But I think it's important to note that the overvotes in are very, very less than less than 0.5%, which is probably comparable to any normal election that you have skipped rankings. There was, again, less than 0.5%. They repeated the candidates in a few. And so that was an area they identified by looking at these statistics that they had to do a little better job on voter education. And so that's the benefit of doing some of these post-election statistics and analysis of how the ballots were actually voted. You can see where do you need to continue to engage with the voters to be sure that they understand? The next one relates to how many people voted, how many were choices, how many people were ranked in the mayor's race in 2013, while over 75% of the voters did three choices? They ranked all three choices. Again, there were a lot of candidates for mayor. You'll notice if you can see this, I'm not sure if everyone can. The city council race had only had one candidate, while of course, only 96% of the people ranked more than only Brook, only ranked one candidate because it was only one. But if you look down any any race that had more than three or four candidates, they they chose at least three choices when they were ranking their ballot. And so these are really good statistics to go back and look at post election when you can review everything after you've got the election certified. The last thing I want to show is the video and I must see if I can do this. This is on the city of Minneapolis website, and it's a really nice, little simple, easy to understand visual about how we're going to count the votes on election night. So I'm going to see if this were oops, it didn't work so we can rely on the gentleman to make it go. In most elections, you only vote for one candidate for each office. But in some elections, voters can rank three or more candidates for each office. It's called ranked choice voting. Here's an example of how it works. All of the candidates will be listed on the ballot in three columns. Make your first choice. Vote in column one by filling in the oval of the candidate you'd most like to win. Vote for your second choice in column two and make your third choice in column three. That's all there is to it. Now let's see how the votes are counted. Let's say there are four candidates running for mayor Aisha, Zach, Omar and Lucy. Once the polls close, we count all the first choice votes first to be elected mayor. A candidate needs more than half the votes. In this example, Aisha has more than half of the votes, so she's declared the winner. However, if no candidate gets more than half the votes, we start eliminating candidates and counting the next choices of those who voted. In this example, Zac is the candidate with the smallest number of first choice votes. So he is cut. We use the second choice votes on Zack's ballots and count those voters second choices instead. If one of the remaining candidates now has more than half of the total votes, that candidate is declared. The winner, if not the next lowest candidate, Lucy, is eliminated. Her votes are now counted for the next choice on the ballot. Some of Lucy's votes went to Zac, who was already eliminated. So those new votes for Zac instead count for those voters. Third choice candidate. We are now down to two candidates, and Omar clearly has more than half of the votes. That makes him the winner. That's how ranked choice voting works. For more information on Ranked Choice voting, visit our Web site. Okay. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Connie. So I think we're actually going to try to get a hands on experience next. So maybe Amber will introduce us to that opportunity. Okay. So we've got a couple of ways that we can test this out. First, you have some paper ballots that should be on your table. We also have the tablets that are in the back of the room against the firewall. And once we collect everything, we will count in that in the tabulation room and bring the results out and show what those look like on the screen. I think what I'll do is I'm going to kick off with one question that I have just given Denver and the jurisdiction that we have here in the city and county of Denver. And the question I have is actually for Dave MacDonald. He being from Oakland is a section two or three county, which means they have multiple languages that they present their ballots in. And so my question really is, given that Denver is also a Section 203 county, we put all of our ballot materials and instructions out in Spanish. I wonder if you could share some information maybe about your experience with multiple languages for voters in in Oakland. Thanks. Yeah, that's a real challenge. When I was a registrar, we had three languages English, Spanish and Chinese. And anything you do in English, you have to do in those other two languages. So if you have an English poll worker, you have to have a Spanish speaking poll worker and they have to be bilingual, which is interesting. I got in trouble with DOJ because we had a really hard time finding enough bilingual Chinese poll workers. I could find a poll workers who spoke only Chinese but limited English, even though we had other English speaking poll workers there. That was not good enough for DOJ. And so they doing this pretty hard on even though we had the poll worker there was not bilingual. So it is a challenge finding staff as well that speak those languages. And I think now I think L.A. is up to nine languages. Los Angeles is up to nine different languages. So when you look at your ballot, it gets even more complicated because you can have all the languages on one ballot or you can have separate ballots for each language, which means in in California, our ballots are huge. It's not unusual for us to have five ballot cards. So imagine all the boxes. You have English boxes, Spanish boxes, Chinese, and then so on, whatever the other languages are. And so it is it is a it's tough to do. It is real hard. So I my hat's off to anybody that does multiple languages. Three is is two isn't to balance English and Spanish because we you can have a bilingual ballot with both languages on a single piece of paper, but get passed two, it gets even more complicated. So I don't know if that answers the question. When they all had just about about these Bay Area elections in particular, but also just about sort of this general question of of racial and ethnic minorities in a ranked first ballot in the Bay Area. As Dave said, there's a big ballot because they're voting on a lot of things, I think. San Francisco in 2016 had more than 30 city ballot measures. If I'm remembering right and more than ten state ballot measures and voting for president and many other offices and then down to the board of Supervisors using ranked choice voting. So when you're sort of seeing Rachel's voting results, it's in a climate where people are voting on a lot of things, you know, a whole lot of people voting by mail, a whole lot of people voting in person. A whole lot of people, you know, you know, most they are for, you know, voting for president or something. And you are seeing, you know, really pretty effective use of the Rangers ballot across demographics. Now, you'll still see kind of a mirror of the the differences of how low income voters sort of handle ballots than higher income voters. But one thing we've looked at very closely is when you're particularly when you're placing two rounds of election, almost always one of them has lower turnout than than the other. And when it has lower turnout, it's sort of disproportionately lower among those communities. So any differences that you see and how people of color may be handling, say, a ranked choice ballot is is much bigger magnified when it's actually the difference is of a of a turnout that that you see. The last thing I'll mention that is New York City used to have 32 local school board elections using ranked choice voting. Did it, in fact, by 1972, the two to about 2000 and there were nine of them and now 32 of them with nine seats on each one. So a lot of offices. But they were voting by counting by hand. And people like, oh, that's kind of a pain. Why don't we move them to voting on equipment and not use the ranked choice system? And the Department of Justice at that point had to pre-clear changes to the New York City ballots under under Section five of the Voting Rights Act. And that was actually the last time the DOJ denied pre-clearance to a change because they thought it would be an adverse impact on racial minorities to take away the ranked choice ballot because of the effective use that they were making of the ranked choice ballot. So so I think we're just going to people are should line up because I because I think we want to have questions from the microphone. So why don't why don't we do that? Hello. Hi. Thanks. First of all, I want to say thank you. It was an awesome presentation. But this is a policy question for those that really implemented it. In terms of how did you decide on how many choices you were going to give the electorate for each candidate or each race? So I'll just Minneapolis. Ours was actually dictated. By what our elections equipment could handle. So that's why we had only three choices. Our sister city of Saint Paul has up to six choices because they handled it in a different way. And so they had different policy choices. And same thing in Alameda County. We had three choices, really, just because our voting system could only handle three. And what we're seeing in the new generation equipment, including, I think, the Dominion system that people just were trying out, that that I believe can do up to ten rankings. So we're going to generally see, I think, in with with that kind of ballot design, an increased number of rankings. I think it's certainly sensible to, you know, when it's five or six or seven candidates to kind of allow people to rank that many just as one thing. And just about what voters want to do is that in the New York of rather sorry, in the in the 2016 presidential cycle, we did a poll with College of William and Mary when the time the Iowa caucuses and the Republican contests or 11 candidates and we invited people to rank accounts. We didn't say please rank them all. We said we invited them to rank cans. These were thousand likely Republican voters from around the country and more than nine out of ten chose to rank everybody. And you really saw a lot of coherence and and meaning in their rankings, including Donald Trump was the plurality first choice leader and the plurality last choice candidate. It's kind of an interesting example of how voters were reacting to his candidacy. Yeah. I was just going to say San Francisco, I think the initiative was full ranking, but within the initiative it was written to have the option for through only three, if that's what the voting equipment would only allow. So San Francisco has this elastic thing built into the initiative that they can go to for anything. Hi. My name is Rafi. My question is more so directed to Dave. But please, if anyone has. Insights, chime in. You had mentioned. Voter education being a priority. When Alameda adopted ranked choice. What was your process in actually gathering your advisors from the community? Who did you decide to select? Who did you include in the process? Yeah, it was pretty, pretty open. The League of Women Voters was a very active participant, and so they had several representatives. And also in each of the cities, there's a you know, Alameda County is a pretty liberal area. We have a lot of activists. You know, we're home to Berkeley. Anybody heard of Berkeley here? So a pretty liberal city. And so there was a very large community of activists. And so I invited some of them to be on the committee. And it was pretty open. I mean, kind of whoever wanted to be on it with as long as they weren't too disruptive and they had to call the sheriff a couple of times. But, you know, so we had a lot of people on the advisory committee because I figured the more input, the better. And I and you know what happens when you have a committee like that, people are all excited at first and then kind of the fringe drop out and the ones who are really interested hang in there through the whole time. You were coming on Minneapolis. Yeah. You know, I feel like our voter education work has changed each each election. And it's not just about ranked choice voting. We also had some other reforms from the state of Minnesota that I would say sort of layer on to what's happening with ranked choice voting, including we adopted early voting for the state and that is again then just a different layer of of of kind of how the engagement works in the I think in the original year when the when the materials were developed, we had a similar process to what you did where there was sort of an open invite to engaged constituencies, organizations that worked in the community trying to get really community based feedback. And we use that to develop some of the materials, but not just the materials. It was more about then what do we do to resource kind of getting out into the community. And I would say that's sort of like the biggest thing that has continued every election is I swear there's elections workers but also other kind of nonpartisan groups that just cover the city it feels like for a pretty long time during the elections season. So there is just a lot of voter engagement happening, a lot of again, a lot of nonpartisan voter participation kind of work happening around bring choice voting. Now said one thing and maybe, Gerard, you can amplify on this. But my my recollection about San Francisco is that, you know, it did a lot of the upfront work, which is you often see like the first election and then they do less going forward. But they did use some of the cost savings that they were getting from going to ranked choice voting to ultimately have more lasting staffers involved in voter education for everything. If I'm correct me if I'm wrong. But but but then that sort of there was sort of a new, you know, so the city's saving money, but it's using a little bit of that to now have staffers who do voter education throughout the time. Is that currently it's currently it's the staffers who do the outreach and community. But when ranked choice voting was implemented, a lot of the outreach was contracted out. We had groups like the Gray Panthers, senior citizens groups. They were funded by the Department of Elections to have people from their organization go out and make presentations. So we actually had some community funding, I think the first first two cycles just to do a very blanket outreach. Hi. My name is Celeste Landry and I was happy today to see that there was a two winner race on today's election because there is a councilmember race like that in the Denver ballot. And I want to let people know that I have copies of the Cambridge ballots for this year where they have 26 rankings for city council and 12 for the school committee. And this afternoon, Robert, she and I are going to be giving a talk on multi winner ranked elections at 130 at the Denver Press Club if anybody wants to attend that. And I wanted to ask Elisabeth because Minneapolis also has a multi winner race. So could you talk a little bit about how that works? Some people won't be able to make it this afternoon, so you'll be all they probably hear. Thanks. Sure. It this is sort of one of these things, honestly, like the explaining feels a little more complicated than what it is. But we have a park board at large positions three, and they are elected differently. So on your ballot, as you fill out the ballot, you select three and then that will ultimately be selected as your three park board candidate. So it's different then for each park board candidate that you would have three choices who's going to fill spot one versus spot two versus about three? So it's just a different way, a different mechanism. And this was again because of how those seats were set up in our city charter originally kind of dictated how that how that happened. It's sort of one of these races, honestly, where I feel like you can get into the weeds with how the counting works in the end, how you fill out the ballot. And which is I mean, in the end, the critical piece. Are people understanding the system? Are they feeling their ballot out correctly? To me that as someone who's been a candidate and kind of seen how those elections work, I feel like that's a critical piece. There is some ballot design issue to this as well. Sometimes there are some challenges presented by your elections vendor, your SO. So that's another issue. And I'll just add that for a multi winner, election systems are different, algorithms are choices one can make. There's sort of ways you can do it where preserves a majority principles or, you know, rancorous voting designed when you're electing one person to uphold the principle of majority rule. And you can do that. So each person has to has to do that or win a multi winner. More common is what they what they do for the park board elections where they do in Cambridge which is a which is to try to have as many people as possible help elect someone. And so when you have more seats, you can actually expand the numbers that are likely to do that. So in Cambridge, you generally have at least 90% of people voting for a winner, but they do that by having each winner not needing 90% to win or 50% to win, but actually needing about a ninth of the vote to win. And that's how that works. But that's that's that's a that's sort of a policy choice for for multi winner races. I thank you for doing this. Councilman Paul Lopez, I represent the west side here in Denver. Two questions. So and they kind of have to do with each other. And I think I alluded to them earlier in our private conversation. But one, I'm curious about the interface between this kind of ballot and an all mail ballot election and the the conflict I would see that would present itself and wondering how you would reconcile that or if there's a protocol to do so. If somebody accidentally filled the first choice and fifth choice or for the same person by air in person, you be able to come up say, Hey, I messed up, can I get another ballot printed? How do you reconcile that, that issue when it comes to an all mail ballot and just those dynamics? I just want to know what your thoughts are with that dynamic. Well, I can address that in Alameda County, over half of our voters vote by mail and half go to the polling place. So we kind of have that now. So if you're in a polling place and you make a mistake on your ballot, you know, you vote for the same candidate twice and you feed it into the machine. It'll kick it out right then. And the poll worker will give you a fresh ballot and you can correct your mistake if you want to. Now, if you're voting by mail, you don't have that opportunity to correct the mistake. So what we do is we scan all those vote by mail ballots through a high speed scanner. Any ballots that are marked incorrectly will get kicked out. And then we'll have staff go through and look at those and see if we can determine why. So, for instance, sometimes what'll happen? I'll vote for Rob as my choice, and then I'll think about it and I'll scratch it out and vote for somebody else. Well, the machine just sees two votes, but if you look at it, you can tell what the voter intent was. So if we know what the voter intent is, then we'll copy it to a fresh ballot. Does that. I, I hope that answers the question. So we we do our best shot, but we can't catch them all that. I mean, knowing what Denver elections does, I mean, it's the same kind of thought process. But I'm just I'm just wondering if there's any policy and protocol on that. So just a short conversation before I'll say what happened in Minneapolis and maybe this is kind of how you've ultimately dealt with it is we adopted an. Ordinance. To ensure that those policy protocols, which are very kind of a elections administrator, kind of driven on what are those protocols and were clear, transparent and people understood how the ballot would be interpreted. Again, with the intention, you're going to give the most benefit of the doubt to the voter so that their votes count. Was the name of that ordinance. Just so we can find it and we can put it up on the, um, I don't know where you're posting information, but. I'll just go to this because this is already addressed actually in most of our laws in Colorado. But, but we do with our dominion system, which is different than what I think any of the systems that are up here, we have what we call adjudication. And so even now with our mail ballot process, if a voter makes a mistake, it goes on screen. And then we have a whole review process, a bipartisan review process where they resolve these discrepancies. And so in a ranked choice model, we have a voter intent guide, it's called. And so you would still be able to resolve those discrepancies and and resolve them so that the ballot was counted appropriately. We also instruct the good thing about mail ballots, and this is kind of one of the things that I know there was a reference to how great that kind of model is. But with ballot delivery, it gives us an ability to to send instructions. So every voter in the city gets the exact same instruction and we're no longer relying on instructions happening verbally at polling places or things like that. So we've really increased the consistency for how we deliver instructions for voting, and we have an ability to design those instructions as we need to within the packet that every voter gets. And so one of the things that's kind of happening in addition to this event is next week the Center for Civic Design is going to test out three different basically ways of designing ballots and three different types of instructions and ask voters for their feedback, and then they'll be able to share all that data with us, which I think is really important because the Center for Civic Design, not only in ranked choice voting, but they've been doing this work kind of with other types of voting. And their research is really guiding the way that we know our designing instructions and certainly the way we've done it in Denver and Stu Club, who's our our staffer, that does a lot of this. He's really tried to adopt the principles of best design so that so that people are getting more visual materials and better instructions. And and you can even see that on some of the ballots that we did. I think Jimi used the Center for Civic Design Principles, which is really helpful for voters. So there's a lot of things in there. And and certainly with our voter intent structure and Colorado's law for for elections, we have those things where we always want to make sure that the the voter's intent is captured regardless. Keenly aware and I think Alton did a good job and one of our tours last time was kind of showing that behind the scenes process. Yeah, I'm just wondering if that prevalence of those errors increased compared to your typical ballot before or if they kind of stayed the same? And I think you talked a little bit about it and just kind of our effects, how that would work in our system. So I appreciate that. Ammar. Yeah. Thank you. Well, I know that you and I showed you kind of showed the percentages for the various mistakes that voters might make. And I do have a chart up here that city of Minneapolis did incorporate into their charter, which is basically their voter intent guide. And it's a nice visual that shows if there is a mistake in the first ranking, that the second ranking then becomes the first choice vote and it shows how the voter's ballot will be counted to the most to the most voter intent can possibly be be made. And I think the issues of are very similar for our Civic and on our CV races. Right. You can make a mistake on a non or B race and still have to figure out how to get your ballot. But the one thing that I believe I'm not going to confirm this. I don't know if Dave has the numbers, but but I'm pretty sure that the rates of at least invalidated ballots are not any more with vote by mail than in person, which is quite interesting when you think about it. But they also have more time, right? So there's that's and that's again, just vote by mail versus in person voting for everybody. But they have a lot more time or time to think about the candidates. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about ranked choice voting is a crisis increases new incentives to find out more about candidates and candidates to tell you more about themselves. And so there's a. Voters tend to learn a little bit more about their voting, whether they're voting in person or about voting by mail. That people. Any more questions and people should come to the microphone if they have one. Hi, Elizabeth. Little page, election coordinator for Denver. How did great choice voting change your wait times for voters in light. I'll ask you a question. You know, it's. We have such a complicated ballot in California, so many ballot cards that we have to make sure we have enough voting booths in a in a polling place. So I didn't see waiting times because of ranked choice. Voting delayed very much during a very exciting contest such as the presidential election. Yes, there are lines out the door. We do a lot of early voting. So the usually 29 days before the election, you can still come and vote. And we would have lines out the door around the block because people were so excited about voting for the president and that just during the first Obama election, I know I had one woman came in. She was the first time she'd ever voted. She was 105 years old. And there was a huge line of people. And so this is the one time I made the exception. I let her take cuts as she came to the front of the line and as she voted. But really, to answer your question, the archive does not really confuse people that much because it's fairly simple and there aren't that many contests really with our. It's just your your local local races. I'll just add that in Minneapolis, I think similar to what you described, we have election judges who are there just to make sure there is someone to explain the ballot if there are last minute questions. Again, that's in addition to kind of all the other things that have happened. And then just again, we still in Minneapolis, we have our municipal elections a year where there are no other elections. And so the 45% was humungous turnout for us. So we do staff to make sure people don't have inappropriate waits. But this is a different turnout kind of election than other elections, presidential year elections. Any questions? My name is Ryan and I'm visiting here from Utah, so I really appreciate you holding this event for us. My question revolves one of the virtues that we hear about ranked choice voting an awful lot is that it eliminates plurality in elections, and there are several instances in ranked choice voting where plurality still is an issue. One specific one, maybe Gerard can answer. I'm in 2006 in San Francisco, there were almost 20,000 votes cast in a District four race, and the winner won that election with about 8400 votes cast. So by the time you exhaust some of those votes and things like that, there is still the possibility to end up with kind of a false false majority on that of getting the 50%. I just wonder if you could talk about that just a little bit. Well, I'll start. And then others can comment too. So. So in rancorous voting, if you like, in Australia, you may people may know that Australia mandates voting and so not everyone votes, but they can be fined for not voting. They also in that spirit, they mandate ranking, right? So they're really like trying to make you make a choice. Right. And and that's not something that's part of any ranked choice voting election use in the United States or anywhere else that I know of. And so if you don't mandate ranking, then it's possible that you know that your top choices that you've ranked get eliminated and then your ballot's not going to count for someone, right? So that if you compare the first round totals with the last round totals, there are a certain number of drop off like people that have chosen not to. Not to rank in the places where they restrict rankings to three that can there be some people who rank three people who just don't get to the final two if it's where they don't have a restriction on rankings? It's sort of a voluntary abstention. It's a choice to say, you know what, I don't care about any of these other people. You know, I'm indifferent to them. And I guess my belief has always been, well, if I'm indifferent to the people, it's sort of like not voting in the first, but, you know, it's an abstention. So that kind of drop off, which tends, by the way, to be a lot less than in regular runoff elections, like the drop off in regular runoff elections, as I showed in that slide on average is almost 40% right in the congressional runoff primaries, which I know that Utah is debating. They might end up having, you know, congressional primary runoffs would probably drop off to 30, 40%. What you see kind of the drop off you might see in a regular spending election is more in the order of 5 to 10%. You know, so it's people that that that that drop off in in a really fractured race like this one in San Francisco, you might be referring to when no candidate got more than 11% or first races super. You know, it would have been a fractured race under any circumstance. And so a limit of three rankings. There were a lot of ballots that didn't didn't end up counting when it got down to two. But that's a real outlier. The rest are usually in the sort of 5 to 10% drop off. So it's not necessarily a majority in the first round, but it is a majority of the willing in a sense, particularly if there's not a limit on rankings of people that made a choice, they're having a chance to express it. And and so it's a majority of the final round. It might not might not always be a majority of the first round. And if anyone else wants to add on to that. Well, I think that's a that's a good explanation. I will say to where I and maybe, Rob, you can speak to this, the majority vast majority of races seem to have something that is 50% plus one. There are some, including Minneapolis, where we have had something, again, because of the drop off, where it is less than 50% . But still, the races I have seen have been in the high forties. So maybe you can speak a little bit to when we talk about plurality or you know, what, what does that look like in ranked choice voting? Yeah. And it's obviously there's a have a different, different measure also of sort of what voters might be meaning like in the current Minneapolis mayor race that just happened, the winner was ranked. In the top three out of it was ten candidates for mayor, 11 more, something like something, a bunch of candidates. And this person, I think maybe even 15 or something, right. So ranked in the top three by more than half of voters. However, some of those voters ranked his opponent in the final round. As a higher choice. So his two bouts didn't count for him in the final choice because they were counting for someone else. But those voters had made a sort of an expression of interest in support for it, for that candidate. And so if you look at it that way, you almost always get the winners getting expressions of support for more than 50%. And from in a sense, from a from the the the voter perspective, they they in a sense, feel represented by that person to a degree. Right. You know, like like they they made an affirmative decision to rank them. But anyway, that's sort of getting in the weeds. But it is sort of a way that it's a different it's not just sort of a one on one thing. It's a it's how you attract support from a from a community of people. And certainly the candidates see it that way where they need to reach out to as many people as possible. So when the new mayor of Minneapolis, you know, got affirmative expression of support for more than half the voters, and that to me seems important. I just want to say something on that because and this is in this isn't expressly answering that question. But just on this point of how candidates look at being ranked, I talked to the the winning candidate in a race that wasn't featured in my presentation, but also was very competitive. There was a socialist candidate. There was a Green Party candidate. There was kind of a business minded DFL candidate and another DFL candidate. And so the the the winner was the DFL candidate who who called himself a kind of a progressive DFL candidate. And he said to me after the race that he looked at the fact that he was ranked by 70 some percent of voters in in in the election. I mean, he was looking at who actually wanted to select him as one of their top three, and that mattered to him because it helped him understand also the spread of where were the voters. It gave him a very clear picture of where were the voters at in the war that he was elected to represent, what was the contours of that? And then where did he fall within that? So I thought it was really interesting, a comment to me by a winning candidate. Other questions. Yeah. Can anybody say at all, talk at all about what the opposition has been as it is and entities have taken on ranked choice voting? What are the common threads in that opposition and what are some of the strongest points that opposition groups have made. Wants to tackle that? I can talk a little bit about it. You know, the I guess the opposition is a lack of understanding of what ranked choice voting as it's something different it's new and. It can be confusing once you start diving down into some of the minutia. So we got that a lot. We got opposition because of cost, even though I think if it's done correctly, there's cost savings. But initially, you spend more money if you're going to do a lot of outreach. We had to buy. We had to do all of our outreach. We had to buy software to do our CV. We had the additional poll workers. So there was some initial expense that normally wouldn't be in an election. But then, you know, the software gets amortized over multiple elections and and that kind of goes away. So the other thing I think that that I kind of saw is elected officials and I know we have some in the room, so don't take this personally. But elected officials know how to win a certain kind of contest. And now all of a sudden here is a ranked choice voting contest. And this is different. I've never won that kind of election, so what do I do? And so I think there's been a little bit of a learning curve. There were some unrealistic expectations on candidates parts. I know we had one mayor in one of the cities who was an ardent, ardent supporter of ranked choice voting because it was he thought it was going to save him money and running his campaign. You'd only have to run one campaign rather than two. So he pushed it through the city and got it adopted. Well, of course, you know what happened. He he lost the ranked choice voting contest. And now he is an ardent advocate to eliminate ranked choice voting. And he used to send emails all the time saying, why did I make them do this? So it was it was kind of funny to see that happen. But so I think it's a it's really a lack of understanding sometimes about what it really means to win an election campaign. So and I think I'll just add very quickly that the turn of Elizabeth, which but I think is that one of the lessons learned in Minneapolis in some ways has been a good example for for doing this, which is to make sure that all the players in elections, the people most involved, really understand the system, because if they go in misinformed and then lose, like Dave was mentioned earlier, some people go out there and say, Rank me first, second and third thinking that helps and it doesn't help. And and and if they find out later didn't help and they, you know, it just just makes them feel stupid or something, you know, and then they're they're more and more likely to feel like they shouldn't do it. So just making sure that the key players understand it and then understand outcomes, which is one of the things that's interesting about that Minneapolis video, which is showing both winners and losers sort of accepting the outcome. We also had to deal with the situation in these early adoptions of ranked choice voting, that there wasn't a turnkey solution to implementing it. There would be. Taking over the world. I think if that was going to happen, it probably already would have with viruses which are basically nature's nanobots. And even though it's cold and flu season, viruses have not actually taken over the world, they are limited by their resources and they compete with each other all the different types that are out there