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This is the first of a two-part episode
Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge, your host Rich Helppie here with our guest today, Mr. Rob Richie. He's been the leader of FairVote since the co-founding of the organization in 1992 and was named president and chief executive in 2018. He has been involved in helping to develop, win, and implement ranked-choice voting in states and more than 20 cities, fair representation voting systems and numerous Voting Rights Act cases, the National Popular Vote plan in 16 states, and voter access proposals like voter pre-registration and automatic voter registrations. Good chance you've seen Mr. Richie because he's been on all sorts of media, too many to name here, everything from CNBC to NPR to Freakonomics, The New York Times, The Washington Post. He is quoted in 11 books. He is a co-author of "Every Vote Equal" and "Whose Votes Count," which is about fair representation voting in his view. He has addressed many conventions and he's here today to talk with us about ranked-choice voting, a topic that a lot of people have heard about, but not very many people know about. We're going to try to go from start to finish today on this most important topic. So Rob, welcome to The Common Bridge. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me.
Rob Richie
Really a great pleasure, Rich, thanks for having me on.
So Rob, our readers, our listeners, and our viewers, they like to know a little bit about our guests. So tell me where you spent your early days and maybe a little bit about your academic preparation and some of your professional experience leading up to what you're doing for FairVote.
Well, I've actually been at FairVote about half my life now, so I guess I have to jump back to those first 29 years. I was a National Park Service kid, my dad was in the Park Service, and they move you around quite a bit. So I had a chance to live in some places like Concord, Massachusetts and Mount Rainier National Park, Grand Coulee Dam, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, outside DC, outside Boston. I then went to Haverford College, near Philadelphia. I'm a Quaker and that's, I think, part of what is tied to how I think about elections and politics. Spent a lot of my 20s kind of figuring out how to connect my aspirations for addressing some of these looming ecological problems, actually did a special issue about global warming way back in 1990, at a community journal. Didn't really work in electoral politics until my fiancee, now wife, lured me into work on a couple of congressional campaigns, and both saw the promise of what elections can be, and also felt they were really not living up to that promise. That's where I looked more into our history, what other countries were doing, and found this fascinating opportunity to connect with a number of other people who felt the same way. I helped found FairVote by connecting with them back in '92.
Richard Helppie
Fantastic. I don't know that anybody knows the exact answer. We get a lot of different viewpoints on this program, we do invite a strong diversity of opinion, although I'm seeing great agreement on the problem, that the elections aren't letting people feel like they're being represented. All these good ideas we need to go through. Ranked-choice voting, let's start with the basics. Suppose one of our listeners, our viewers or our readers had never heard of ranked-choice voting, and just for this exercise, suppose that person's an engineer or a programmer, kind of a logical structured person. How would you explain the design of ranked-choice voting and some of the mechanics? How does it work?
Rob Richie
I think in the most fundamental sense, that what it's doing differently is right in the name of the system, it's ranked-choice voting, rather than single-choice voting. If you go to vote in our current system that we see in most elections, no matter how many people are running, you only get to pick one. So you're leaving your views about everyone else on the table. Also, it's very much all or nothing, you just vote for that person and that's it. Everyone else knows that. If you have a yard sign outside your house, and it says I'm for this person, it's I guess they're for that person, then that's that. Ranked-choice voting is saying no, you should be able to do more than that, you should be able to say who your first choice is but also your second choice, your third choice. So it's a ranked-choice system. The idea of how those ballots are used...there really actually are a lot of interesting ways that ranked-choice voting can work. It's not like a single way it's done or the single application. Really I think where it gets interesting is when you connect it to how it's being used but the most basic concept is that your ballot goes all in with your first choice. If your ballot, though, can't help elect your first choice - that candidate is a weak candidate who doesn't have a chance to win - your ballot goes your second choice, so you have a backup, an alternate. It actually is called the alternate vote sometimes, but it's essentially saying you have a backup to your vote. So let's look at the most basic way that ranked-choice voting is used, sometimes called an instant run-off, which kind of helps clarify. If people know what a run-off election is where everyone votes in the first round and if no one gets a majority of the votes the top two candidates advance and there's a whole second election, two months later, or whenever it is. Ranked-choice voting is essentially saying, well, let's keep the idea that it's important to win a majority but let's not ask people to have to come back again in two months, but see if they actually know how they would vote right now. So your ballot goes your first choice and it stays with your first choice unless your first choice is a weak candidate. You add up all the first choices. If it's a 45% to 40% to 15% - let's say it's just a three candidate race - rather than have a whole traditional run-off election, you're looking at what those voters - who supported the candidate with 15% - what they think and you look at their ballots and you look at who they ranked second, and then you add those ballots to their second choices. So it becomes head to head. One way to think of it is like...so let's say there's a traditional two person race. It's Jim and Nancy, and Nancy gets 55% and Jim gets 45%. Simple. If you add a third candidate, though, you can have Jim, Nancy, and let's say, Sally. Let's say the Jim voters still have 45% but Nancy, who used to have 55% now she goes down to 40% [because] Sally has 15% of the vote. So the very same voters in one set of choices elect one person, but by the addition of a third person, it changes the outcome, if all you're doing is adding one choice. Ranked-choice voting is saying well, that's not actually a fair way to do it. Let's knock out the person who's in last place. In this case, Sally; look at the second choices. Turns out that they're all for Nancy, and so it's back to 55 to 45 percent. And that's really what ranked-choice voting is, you can do it with a lot more candidates. You can you use it in particular different ways but it's this idea of a backup. It's the idea of trying to establish who is the majority winner, who is trying to build a consensus, rather than someone that might be able to finish at the top of the heap with say, 30% of the vote, [to] represent 100% of the people.
Richard Helppie
And so this would work in elections where there was by statute - which might differ from state to state or in the primaries from party to party - that required someone to get 50% plus. Because we've seen lots of elections, where it's 44 to 43 and then the other ones are distributed. So the idea is no one's elected without some preference over that 50% mark. And the manner of getting there is that if there were, in this case, we'll just say - let's say there were four candidates - that if no candidate got over 50%, the candidate that had the least would drop out and their second choice would be voted, and then you'd take a look; is anybody over 50 percent, and if that's not the case, then they eliminate the next least person and use their third choice, or would they use their second choice then again, to try to get over 50?
Rob Richie
Well, your ballot always goes to whoever is ranked highest on the ballot, who's still active. So if your first choice continues to be active and is in the running, your ballot stays with that person because there's a one person/one vote system, so you never get to have two votes count the same time. But if your first choice is in last place, that's the key thing. If your first choice is in last place, that person is knocked out and your ballot goes to your second choice.
Richard Helppie
Okay, that's a real clear way to put that. I know before I started reading about this, I was wondering does it work like the NCAA Football rankings; this is the number one ranked team and they got X number of first place votes, but they get so many points for second and third, and so forth. So there is one vote. So if I cast a ballot for candidate three and candidate three doesn't win and candidate one and two, neither of them have over 50%, if I pick candidate two as my backup choice, then that vote would count. Then they recalculate it, kind of like a pre-set run-off in some respects.
Rob Richie
Exactly. That's why this instant run-off metaphor, makes sense. The way we're talking about, it's often sort of mathematical and things, but let me just sort of put it in human terms. We're probably going to get to this, but I think we've established what it is. What it means from a candidate and voter perspective is you now have a whole different incentive to extend your conversations, so that if you're a candidate, you're trying to get as many first choices as possible, you can't win by being everyone's second choice, you do have to be a candidate who has earned first choices, you have to be looking for people that like you and are ready to be represented by you and want that. But because you're trying to build a consensus, in a sense, you're trying to be the candidate that can beat others head to head, you also need to have conversations with people who are clearly backing someone else and say, here's why I should be your second choice. Here's why I am someone...I recognize I'm not your favorite, but I think I'm making a good case and I can be a good representative and I'm going to listen to you and I hope you respect me. Meanwhile, the voter doesn't just lock into their first choice and stop thinking they have an opportunity. It's not a requirement, by the way, you don't have to rank. Ranking is an opportunity, not a mandate. You can say, Okay, I'm going to learn about some of those other candidates. Some of the cities that have had ranked-choice voting for the first time can - which we've seen a big jump in cities in some states using it - compare pretty directly to what their previous experience was. They'll say, well, a lot more people are going to the debates. Santa Fe, when they used it for their mayoral elections a few years ago, it was particularly talked about like, kids, people are really going to all these debates and [when] you talk to the people going, they say, well, I know who my first choice is but I'm still trying to figure out who I want to rank second and who I might want to rank third. And the candidates all know that so they have to be looking for distinction from the other candidates, but also some common ground with them. So showing that you have some connection to the voter who's decided to vote for someone else, you are trying to look for a connection so that you can be their second choice.
Richard Helppie
I see. Now is ranked-choice voting better for primaries or general elections?
Rob Richie
Well, there are different arguments and I think it's more politically viable right now for primary elections. The most dramatic uses that we're seeing are for general elections, it really draws a lot of attention. But I think that the partisan element of it and the fact that of course, someone's going to win and everyone else is going to lose - shockingly, that actually still happens - but people just sort of put it into partisan terms. I do want it ultimately used for all of our partisan elections. I find that primary elections, both parties have a real strong interest to get nominees who bring their party together and put them in a good position to win in November, and ranked-choice voting really does that. So, we've seen some really interesting uses of it, like Democrats used it in presidential primaries in four states in 2020 and it really worked well. And then in Virginia, Republicans have used it multiple times, including Glenn Youngkin, who's the governor of Virginia, he won a seven way race for governor with ranked-choice voting, and they used it in three congressional primaries this spring by their own choice. They just want to get nominees who help bring the party together. So I think that it's something that I expect will build more quickly in primaries, and it's being used in a lot of nonpartisan elections. We're up to more than 50 cities and counties that are nonpartisan, that are using it often to just fold two rounds of voting into one. The argument is it served as a faster, cheaper - I would argue better - way of voting and that's catching on. So we expect a number of cities, it could go from 50 to 500 in the next three or four years, and I think we'll see a real growth of use in primaries, and we'll have conversations about partisan elections. I do hope that keeps going that direction but it may go quicker for the primaries.
Richard Helppie
I think about the Trump phenomenon in 2016. He was winning a lot of the early primaries, winner take all with like 22% of the vote. And so that's a great thought exercise, like what would happen if the vote had to go through ranked-choice - probably at one through 17 in that case - until someone got 50%.
Rob Richie
Can I actually comment on that Rich, because it's kind of interesting. We did a poll ourselves. National poll, we were working with the College of William and Mary right around the time of the Iowa caucuses. So there were still 11 active Republicans. Trump was a leader in first choices nationally but he did lose the instant run-off. In that case, it was at Ted Cruz's peak, so actually Ted Cruz was the one who ended up defeating him head to head. But interestingly, Trump was the candidate that a plurality of people, meaning a substantial number of people ranked him first. But he was actually the candidate that most people ranked last as well. So he was the candidate who led in last choices and led in first choices - he was very polarizing. In the current system that's okay for him, it doesn't really matter, because the first choice is as long as you are finishing at the top of the heap that's good enough. But I think under different rules, I suspect he would have had to change his behavior and change how he ran in those nomination contests - or lost - I think that that's probably what would have happened. We did see a number of polls where you could simulate ranked-choice voting across those early contests and it is true that he generally was losing those, if it was head to head against the strongest person, whether it was Rubio or Kasich in New Hampshire, or whomever it might be. But it's an alternate world, that wasn't the system that people used, but I think it does make the point that it does help a party make sure - kind of confirms - that they're getting the best candidate for themselves.
Richard Helppie
The big take-aways on my show are this, that people are just exhausted with the polarization, with the partisanship, it's cult Blue versus cult Red, and it just gets exhausting. People don't feel like they're being represented, that we still have major issues that are solvable, but they're just not getting the attention. And people are getting chewed up in this partisan system. I've also read a little bit about open primaries. So instead of having a Republican primary and a Democratic primary, having an open primary, irrespective of party affiliation, and then using ranked-choice to select perhaps four people for the general election, and then also ranked-choice voting in general. Is that an option or a preferred method or what more do we need to inform our audience about?
Rob Richie
Well, that is a system that FairVote did propose about ten years ago, for the first time, really, in the context of how we thought that states that were starting to use that kind of open blanket primary ballot with a top two formula. So California and Washington do that, say, where everyone votes in the first round, every candidate is running together regardless of party, you vote for one, and then the top two face off. And what that generally means is third parties; Independents almost never make the November ballot. You either have just a traditional Democrat versus Republican contest, which is what we typically see, or you get two candidates of the same party and no candidates of the second biggest party, which has its downsides as well. It's not like the full debate about having people have a chance to have their voice heard. So we said, well, if you want to open up the primary ballot the way they do in California and Washington, why don't you consider advancing more than two? We suggested four, have a write-in option. If you ever feel frustrated that none of those four people represent you can always write someone in and then use ranked-choice voting, which is a great way to handle choice. That idea got out there. Some folks in Alaska, who were looking into top two back in 2019 were interested in this. A woman named Katherine Gehl has done a really good job popularizing the ideas. She's written a book with Harvard business professor Michael Porter that helped people think about this. So they decided to do top four instead of top two; Alaska passed that in 2020. So the voters agreed it was a good idea and they got to use it unexpectedly when Don Young died this year and there's a special election. We can talk some about that contest, but they're using it for all their elections right now. So it's been used for one race so far, for one office, and it's going to be used for all offices in Alaska. I think for FairVote, we like ranked-choice voting, we believe it's a very good system, even without that open primary system. Maine also uses it for their congressional elections, senate elections and they still have a traditional primary for each party, third parties and Independents can get right onto the November ballot. So there might be three, four or five candidates and then they use ranked-choice voting in November. We think that's also a good system. But we might talk later about how you can then broaden it into multi-member districts and have an American form of proportional representation that we think is a particularly...what we say, is the most preferred system. There are some very strong advocates of the Alaska model; you can see its impact so when we talk a little bit more about that you will see just what it means in a fascinating way. We're proud that that we proposed it, we are not singularly focused on it, though, it's kind of a choice about primaries but if you're going to do the California model, we would definitely urge this top four or top five system.
Richard Helppie
Right. What I'm trying to help bring to the public's attention is this, we have a current system, we have closed primaries, I know in my home state of Michigan, we have to pick. You can pick [that] you're going to vote Republican or the Democratic primary when you go in, you can't vote them both, you have to pick one per session. So we have closed primaries, you typically get low voter turnout. So you get appeals to the most fervent versus the most practical or centrist and you end up with a "lesser of evils" in the general election. That's kind of where we're at right now, with some exceptions, or how many of the congressional districts are, indeed, contested. Versus ranked-choice voting, potentially, you have an open primary, you get four top candidates, and then you get a ranked-choice in the general election. Maybe it's a Libertarian and a Green party and an Independent and one of the major parties. I think about things like campaign spending, it's real easy, in a two horse race, to throw up a lot of negatives against your opponent. In fact we've got that here in the state of Michigan. I doubt that our governor would survive an open primary and 100% of her ads are just negative on the other candidate. I'm just wondering that if there was a broader field, how that campaign spending might go? Do you have any view on that? I don't know, you said you worked on some elections and if it's not a fair question, we can move on to talk about some other things.
Rob Richie
No, I think a lot of the big money that we see is in a zero sum head to head choice, where it's basically one person or the other. Ad spending seems to be most effective when you're trying to discourage people from voting for someone else, it's the negative attacks. A lot of the tactics are actually just don't vote at all, they're actually sort of a voter suppression kind of thing. But they also are certainly, well, that person's terrible, you should vote for me. The way that it has worked out in a meta level is that most voters have gotten very decisive in saying, well, I may not like either party, but I prefer one or the other. So most people, at this point, have a preference. A lot of the ads are reminding people why they don't like the other party and why they should come home to their party. It's just that [there are] 7% of people that haven't made up their mind about which party they really want to go for, and just saying, well, that person's terrible, so vote for me just because the other person is terrible. I think a lot of the money, basically, I would say, in a close election, in a partisan election, 90% of the money is targeted at about 8% of people and it's largely negative. So I think if you have greater choice, it's not as binary, it's not as simplistic and you have to make more of an affirmative case. I think money matters, for sure, but at the same time, it's other kinds of ways. Certainly, we find that in a city election, we've really seen it a lot. It's not blanketing the city with ads. It's actually finding a way to connect with voters in some direct way where you earn their respect. It really seems to be about that. That's not necessarily taking money, it's taking like shoe leather at a certain kind of campaigning. As we scale, it's obviously...your governor of Michigan is not going to knock on every door in Michigan - but people associated with her could - you are making that case. I don't want to pretend that it would do away with money in politics, but I think it would lessen its influence.
Richard Helppie
That's kind of my sense. Obviously a lot of training would have to go on with doing the voting precincts and apparatus. Does FairVote do any kind of education outreach and say, look, if you want to move to this type of system by referendum, or whatever our state allows, do you have any programs to say, here's what you need to do in terms of software processes, in terms of counting those votes? Because it's a little different matter I would think.
Rob Richie
Well, for a long time - for the first 25 years of our history, FairVote - we were everything ranked-choice voting. There would be great state and local, usually volunteer run, groups that we would try to help and assist, but we had to be very attentive to ballot counting and machines and voter education and so on. As the efforts have scaled and as more people have gotten involved and more groups have gotten involved - in a great way - there's an ecosystem of groups that do different things. So there's a group called the Ranked-choice Voting Resource Center, which is particularly focused on election administration and voting equipment. They've developed a free open source software that can be built into existing voting equipment to help do ranked-choice voting, ballot design, things like that. Then there's a group called Democracy Rising. There are other groups that do this really well at the state level that really focus on voter education and candidate education, because in some ways candidates need to really understand it; you don't want them to be out there campaigning in a bad way for ranked-choice voting, and then they are frustrated and blame the system when in fact, they just didn't know the rules.
Richard Helppie
That's a great segue to Alaska, because my understanding is that for this special election to replace representative Young, Sarah Palin, who was one of the candidates, said, oh, don't vote for ranked-choice at all, just cast one ballot. So here's some data. The winner, Ms. Peltola - I'm not sure how to pronounce Peltola - in the first round, she got 77,400 votes, Palin 60,264 and another Republican, Begich 55,800. So you could make a case to say 115,000 people picked a Republican and 77,000 picked the Democrat. That's what one group is saying. In the second round, Begich comes out because he's third place, Peltola adds 13,866 votes for a total of 91,266. Begich's voters added 25,762 votes for [Palin] 86,026. When you total Peltola and Palin, Peltola was over 50% of those votes cast. Now, here's an interesting stat coming out of this. 20% of the voters for Begich picked no second choice, as directed by candidate Palin. So that's about 11,000 and change votes. So if half of those Begich voters who picked no second choice actually cast a [second choice] ballot, Palin probably would have been the winner. Now again, is that education of the voters? Is it administration? But I just wondered what your cut on this would be, what does that mean in turn for campaigns for election, given this record? And what's it going to mean for this election for the full term? I guess it's coming up in November with the same three candidates in the race.
Rob Richie
The same three candidates plus a Libertarian is now going to be in the mix. So they'll have a fourth candidate plus a write-in but it's basically down to those three. I think one thing is if every voter had ranked, but they had ranked in the same pattern, that the voters who did rank - most voters who supported Begich did rank, about 80% of his voters did decide to rank a second choice - how did they it was very interesting because they had to choose between a Democrat, and they were voting for a Republican first, so they either had to rank a Democrat second [or the other Republican]. But an interesting Native Alaskan - someone who was very close to Don Young (who was the Republican who had died) from western Alaska - when she was in the legislature worked in what's called the Bush Caucus, which was about people involved in rural parts of Alaska, had gotten a reputation as someone who had worked really well across party lines in the legislature. [She] actually was very close to Sarah Palin, interestingly, because they were both young moms when Governor Palin was governor and Peltola was in the legislature. So she had a reputation of working across party lines but still, she's a Democrat. So if I'm a Republican voter, am I really going to rank her ahead of Palin? Well, 30% of people who ranked did. Then you had Sarah Palin who - a very nationally well-known candidate because she ran for vice president - within Alaska, she's actually pretty unpopular. The voters, the polls consistently show about 60% of Alaskans see her negatively. She resigned as governor.
Richard Helppie
That's just election analysis and that's not what we're talking about. I'm looking at the numbers. In the second choice, the numbers that Palin got were almost twice of what Peltola got. So Begichs voters didn't really move to Peltola. They didn't speak or they went two to one in favor of Palin.
Rob Richie
Right. But if everyone, Rich, that didn't rank ranked in that same pattern, Peltola still wins. I'm just explaining why, that within Alaska, it's more complicated than just every Republican wants to vote for a Republican no matter what.
Richard Helppie
It's speculation on what would those 11,000 votes...if Palin took two thirds of that 11,200, and I haven't done the math, but it still put her ahead.
Rob Richie
But I have done the math, and so that if they voted in the same pattern, as those who did rank, she doesn't win. So it's not really...what was really Sarah Palin's problem in that election was a bunch of Begich people decided to rank Peltola, that was the most significant reason that she lost. Of course, the most significant reasons she lost was she was down by 9% in first choices, so keep in mind that if ranked-choice voting hadn't been used at all, Peltola would have won by nine points.
Richard Helppie
What I want to try to leap off into is this, as I'm reading in preparation for our talk today, more of the criticism came from the right of center and more of the support from the left of center. Now there are exceptions to this, Jerry Brown, for example, in California vetoed some ranked-choice things. And I'm trying to figure out why one side or the other would think it's an advantage or disadvantage, and we have scant little data and if we're all trying to get to the same place that we want somebody with a broad appeal, and to avoid the extremes, how are we doing? And why does one group lean one way or the other group lean the other way?
Rob Richie
Let's get there. But can I just finish the point I'm trying to make about Alaska, because it gets to your point about polarization. So can we try to use this as a way to connect to polarization?
Richard Helppie
Yeah, absolutely. We're having a talk, Rob, I'm glad to be chatting with you today. So fire away, man.
Rob Richie
I know you maybe felt it was just like political analysis, but it's about polarization. So what Alaska showed is that if you, as a Democrat, can get 30% of a Republican's voters to rank you ahead of a second Republican, you can win even in Alaska, which is a Republican leaning state. There's a reason that it happened. It wasn't just random, it was about the way they embraced the system, the way they positioned themselves, and the incentives the system created to try to do that. So Peltola embraced ranked-choice voting, she said she was going to rank on her ballot, she found some ways to be positive about both Republican candidates because she didn't know what the order of finish for sure. And that was important for her ultimate victory that she's going to be tested again. Sarah Palin didn't do that. She ran the kind of old school, vote for me, everyone else was kind of a bum [campaign]. If that's how you run, you tend not to do well with ranked-choice voting. Actually, that's why the system does something intriguing for trying to bring us together. The same thing happened in Maine in a more modest way. So you ask why Republicans are at this point more negative about ranked-choice voting. It's very primal, very simplistic and based on two elections. It's the Sarah Palin election that just happened. But if you look at it, it's actually pretty transparent. It was the way she ran and who she is within Alaska. It's not Republican/Democrat. It's about the way you run in the system. A lot of analysts have actually made that point, there's a simplistic, gosh, I can't believe we lost that seat, it must be the new system but there are others who have said, well, it's really the way that Sarah Palin chose to run within the system. And they're going to get to run again in six weeks, and we'll see what happens. In the Maine election in 2018 - this was a very swingy district, it's a district that Obama carried in 2012 and then Trump carried in 2016 - it's one that a lot of voters are in play and a Republican coming in, in 2018, had a narrow lead in first choices, just one point - very close - it was like 47 to 46, something like that. But there were a bunch of Independent voters, about 10%, or close to it, and they are the classic swing voters, they chose to rank an Independent first. The Republican, a guy named Bruce Poliquin, had been very dismissive of people running as Independents, said that they weren't qualified, and he essentially said, anyone who's voting for these clowns they're just like clowns themselves, or some version of that. The Democrat who was challenging him, made a case that there were some things that he was learning from the Independent candidates, he was glad they were part of the field and he kind of made a connection to them and he got about two out of every three of those votes, and then he ended up winning. So it's very much tied to the way they ran but the Republicans just saw that they lost a seat and were frustrated. It's really those two elections, that are actually explaining it. But we're also seeing, in a more quiet way, a lot of Republican interest in this, really more tied to primaries at this point. But we'll also see what happens after November because there are going to be some big partisan elections.
Richard Helppie
Look, the Republicans, if they had any brains, would find a way to show Trump the door. I've been saying that for years. The last two presidential cycles have been a lesser of evils; we haven't gotten any really good choices, okay, in my humble opinion, in the last two cycles. I was just curious as to why that tilt would go there because the object of the game is not only the election, but it's what people do after they get there. So when I hear that a Democrat or a Republican won, and by gosh, they sure appealed to the other side and then they go to Washington and you know who's in Washington; it's Kevin McCarthy and it's Nancy Pelosi, it's Charles Schumer and it's Mitch McConnell and they're controlling committee assignments, they're controlling campaign funds, and they're making sure they get that vote out. That tension for Mary Peltola, when she gets to Washington, that pressure on her to vote with the party - although it may be against her more conservative or libertarian electorate - that, to me, is where we begin to get real democracy back, where we're not so concerned about the outcome of the election based on what badge; the election's over, now go represent us. When I think about presidential politics, if you go back to the 1960 election, we had two people, either which was qualified to be president of the United States, then it was a very close election. They both had respect for each other and there's a great deal written about how they handled that. Now, neither one of them, neither Nixon nor John Kennedy, could be nominated by their own party today. Nixon was far too liberal with the Environmental Protection Agency, with health care reform and such. And of course, Kennedy was also a defense hawk and a tax czar. So we've gone from that time to this really extreme polarization and it's filtered down. My concern was what forms of voting reform can help us get to the point where we can hold those that we elect accountable to us again.
Brian Kruger
We're going to stop right there. That concludes part one of Rich's interview with Rob Richie. Join us next week in Episode 176 for the conclusion of this fascinating conversation about ranked-choice voting.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
Ranked-Choice Voting- A Closer Look