October 29, 2025 • 17 mins
Jerremy Alexander Newsome and Dave Conley, joined by Rob Richie, debate a national voting holiday inspired by Puerto Rico's communal model to boost turnout beyond mail-in options. They stress civic education for teens, blending critical thinking with hands-on voting simulations. Probing AI's role in campaigns, they warn of deepfake risks eroding trust while highlighting tools for voter outreach. Rob champions ranked choice voting over plurality pitfalls, critiques Nevada's reform missteps, and shouts out groups like FairVote, National Popular Vote, and Unite America for driving ongoing democratic innovations.
Timestamps:
- (00:00) National Voting Holiday: Puerto Rico's Communal Model
- (02:34) Educating Teens: Building Voter Confidence
- (06:16) AI in Elections: Risks and Opportunities
- (10:25) Voting System Concerns: Ranked Choice Advocacy
- (14:20) Reform Organizations: Future Democracy Push
Connect: Rob Richie
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Alex (00:00):
Rob champions holidays for shared engagement, while Jerremy
probes teen education gaps.
The stakes tighten—if communal acts buildtrust, how does AI's misinformation flood
threaten voters' fragile confidence?
Jerremy (00:13):
General take on national voting holiday.
Rob, what'd you think?
Rob (00:18):
It's a nice principle.
It's interesting one part of thecountry that does this, I won't
quiz you, but is Puerto Rico.
So Puerto Rico, part of the United States.
And they don't get to vote forpresident 'cause we do not enfranchise
citizens that live in territories.
Parenthetically, let me just sayif one of us were to say, I'm gonna
move to Puerto Rico and it's a great,beautiful place to be and I'm gonna go
(00:39):
move there, and we establish residency,we can no longer vote for president.
If we say, you know what, I'm gonna golive in Portugal for the next three years.
I can vote absentee from Portugal, butI can't vote absentee from Puerto Rico.
Like I can't vote from withinAmerica because we disenfranchise
that whole set of people.
Something I'm not a fan of.
But anyway, they do have a nationalholiday or a Puerto Rican holiday and
(01:03):
does create not just this simple ideaof oh, you have more time to vote, but
it actually creates a bit of a communalgathering opportunities and, and that's,
I think a cool part of it if we did that.
It's not, that's, you can't bake thatinto the law, but if there's a because
voting at the end of the day is acommunitarian act, we often think of
it like the individual, but your votingpower comes from voting with other people.
(01:25):
And our democracy's healthy wheneveryone, when more people vote.
And it's just this sort of communal thing.
So if it can reinforce that practically,because so many people today vote by mail.
Or when I say vote by mailthat I often wanna hedge that.
'cause it's often people dropoff their ballots, but anyway,
they get a ballot in the mail andthen they somehow get it back.
(01:45):
But they usually do itbefore the election, right?
So they don't need a holiday to do that.
And then we have early voting in more andmore places, and that's a good practice.
And it's oh, I'm gonna be busyon election day, but I can go
vote on Saturday or something.
And so we've changed from the idea likethere's a one day of voting and we should
have a holiday of things to we've alreadycreated access through other means.
So I think the date of the election, theday of the election's, an interesting one.
(02:09):
A lot of countries do vote on the weekend.
But as long as we have early votingand early voting's accessible and
the lines aren't long, or somethinglike I think in some ways that
building on that is probably the more.
The more sensible across every state.
But hey, if a state wants to joinPuerto Rico and have a state holiday
or something like that that, thatseems like I'm all for that creativity.
Jerremy (02:32):
Yeah, I like that.
Awesome.
So Rob, if you had to teach ateenager to vote with confidence,
so I have a 15-year-old where would.
Or how would you start?
Rob (02:44):
We'd start with the building block that our young people in
schools are soon to be citizens.
If they're citizens, wellsoon to be eligible voters.
Maybe that's the way I'd say it.
A lot of them let's hope that theyare and we should treat them that
like we should treat it seriously.
And I think there'sdifferent components of it.
(03:05):
One.
Piece of being a good voter is gettingpracticed in critical thinking.
And there's ways of evaluatinginformation and claims that actually
goes deep into how we teach our kids.
And so often people think about learningas about the what rather than the how.
But it's like we should alwaysteach people how to think rather
(03:26):
than what to think, right?
And that's, that becomes alifetime skill and we don't
actually do that consistently.
So that's step one.
Step two is to say, okay, let'sreally learn about what it is
to be part of governments at thelocal, state and national level.
So the local level is most accessible.
Schools could go visit town hall andmaybe attend a city council meeting.
(03:49):
Like the turnout rate among young peoplein local elections is just incredibly low.
And it's right after an opportunitywhere we could have introduced them to
like, what does local government do?
They're right here.
They affect, what the parks looklike and, ba basically regulations
that affect you very directly.
And a lot of kids never reallylearn that until they're older and
(04:09):
there's something that happens,which relating to town government.
But then they can go to states.
Here's a practice that severalScandinavian countries do.
They have every single high schoolstudent go to their national capital.
So our analogy would be going toyour state capital, go through a mock
legislature, learn how laws are passed,learn how things are done, go view
(04:32):
and watch the regular legislature,get that hands-on experience, and then
just have that much more appreciationof what state government is.
And today's fractured medialandscape, it's all the more
important to do something thatpeople can learn about this stuff.
And of course, just understand the basiccivic traditions of the country and the
civic history and what the Constitutionis and you know what the rules are.
(04:53):
And of course, being a voting nerd.
Give 'em a lot of chances to do mockelections and rules and think about
voting and try out some different systems.
I really like the idea, I'll finishhere, but sorry I won't just keep
going on forever, but the, but to makestudent government more interesting.
To give student governments somereal power of a certain kind.
(05:15):
Not to override the administrationor something, something interesting.
So they're not just popularitycontests and not like how do we spend
money for the prom or something.
But something that's, that includessome real governing things.
Give students some agency andthen have elections for them that
are interesting and involving.
And so people's firstexperiences of voting.
Are actually more meaningfulthan these sort of oh, it's
(05:36):
just a popularity contest.
And those people are just vain peoplewho wanna have something on their resume.
So we get this negative firstuses of voting, but instead,
Hey, let's try things out.
It is very cool for me that a lotof colleges and universities use
rank choice voting for their studentleaders more than a hundred now.
And that's just an organic thing,and I think that's happening in,
(05:56):
in, in more K through 12 as well.
And I, I think that kindof creativity is great.
Jerremy (06:02):
Yeah, man, you're really easy to talk to about this on this subject.
I love your enthusiasm.
Love your passion.
So thank you.
Just wanna say that I'd be, I would loveto know, Rob, just your general thoughts,
ideas, takes on what's coming up.
Meaning what is AI's role
Campaigns like how could it impact,trust and proportional systems for the
(06:26):
average person or just anything elsethat you are generally considering.
Rob (06:31):
Yeah.
Every new technological advanceaffecting communication can be used
both positively and negatively.
Going back to the printingpress or something like
Jerremy (06:40):
Oh yeah totally
Rob (06:41):
you can print things that help people get educated, or you can
print things that, that miseducatepeople or are disinformation, right?
And that goes way back to 15 hundredsor 16 hundreds or what have you.
And, the role of the internet and socialmedia and newspapers and television.
Huge impact for television, right?
You're like, all of these changes,some positive, some negative, right?
And I think AI fits in with that.
(07:02):
I think we're still in a real learningmode about what AI can do positively
and ne negatively, but I think thenegative is easier to understand, which
is that we tend to trust what we see.
And what we see now can be much moreeasily manipulated to not be real.
So you can have candidates you canhave people running for office, an
(07:22):
AI generation that makes it seem likethey're saying things they didn't say.
And then it gets spread onsocial media and it's never true.
But a lot of people never learn.
It's not true, right?
That just seems really scaryand and complicated to regulate.
But we need to, figure outthat kind of regulation.
'cause so much of that informationcan be passed, just person to person.
(07:42):
It's not even, whatever.
It's just hard to regulate howpeople transfer information.
But we need to look at that becausethere is a lot of efforts to disin
or misinform people and confusepeople and steer them to vote in
certain ways in the positive sense.
Just like AI can be useful for curatinginformation and supplementing what
(08:05):
you're finding out about, just beinglike, where do I vote tomorrow?
Or something like that.
Or, but also like modern voter guides,like learning about the candidates
and that's just something we need tocreatively think about what we can do.
I would say maybe as a lastmusing is, I think the whole world
(08:26):
is having some challenges withdemocracy in different level.
It's not as pronounced in all countries.
Some countries are less are degrading,deteriorating less, but there's a
general deterioration across the world.
So if you look at the internationalratings of the health of democracy
in civil society, like FreedomHouse is a group that does this.
We've had 20 consecutive yearsof decline internationally.
(08:50):
So not every countryat the same time, but.
It's really problematic and there'sno magic bullets out there, right?
There's no simple solutions.
But I think what can we do for peopleto feel agency and ownership and,
consent of the governed principles.
Yeah.
Outside of elections too, people onlyhave wanna put in so much time into
this stuff but maybe I'm not so that'sa general question that I think is worth
(09:15):
exploring when I'm exploring some andexpand democracy and but I think AI
could be some contributing piece of that.
If in the positive sense of helpingcurate information and give more, ways
for people to understand their choicesand what's going on where they feel
some positive feelings about democracy.
(09:36):
'cause right now there's a lot of negativefeelings about democracy and, some of
the countries that seem to be doing wellin their government, I'm no defender of
China, but China's doing some things thatseemingly like they're economically and
people say maybe we don't need democracy.
China doesn't have it, right?
It's ah, so I think we need to makedemocracy work and we just to do that
we never need to feel we're settled.
(09:57):
It, democracy is an ongoingunfolding and I really love the
fact that the constitution hasthat principle a more perfect union
because it's never per perfect.
It's always on pro progress or we hopeprogress, it's always about change.
Anyway, that's a long-winded way ofsaying that AI, I think is there's a
lot of things to fear about it, butI hope there's some promise as well.
Jerremy (10:20):
I love that.
So speaking about progressand speaking about change.
Last question for you, Rob.
Name one reform that you do not want.
What problem does it actuallymake worse for individuals?
Is there something outthere that you know that's
Trickling down that youreally are opposed against?
Rob (10:44):
it's a good question.
I feel that almosteverything is in context.
Like I am very concerned aboutpushing voter id, but if you make
voter ID accessible and you work outthe edge cases where people don't
have it, maybe we can make it workand if some people really want it.
So I'm really ready to have in,conversations with people about
(11:09):
how to make their reform work.
One that I think is intuitivefor some people, but has
some real challenges is like.
We should all just vote on oneday and count the ballots that day
and have the results that night orsomething like that, and vote on paper.
They do it in Canada so we can do it here.
One of the things like that'sintuitive oh, let's have fast
elections and vote on paper.
(11:30):
Of course people vote on paper, butcount them by hand, but when Canada
does that, or some other countries,they're voting for one thing.
They're
Jerremy (11:38):
Yeah.
Rob (11:38):
There are elections in some of our counties like Los Angeles County,
there will be choices on your ballot.
You go to vote one election, there'llbe more choices on your ballot
that some people in a Europeancountry that vote their whole lives
will vote on their whole lives.
And so I think we have tocome that we created a lot of
(11:59):
things to vote on and consider.
And so that governs the factthat we should not believe.
It's if you couldn't do hand countsfor voting on 45 things, and and
you don't need to if if you buildin guardrails for how to do that.
Maybe I'll mention one other because,'cause I think there we haven't
(12:20):
really talked about rank trust voting.
So lemme just say a little bit moreabout why I think that's good and why
there's a ref reform that is not good.
So rank trust voting is the ideathat if you vote for, if you have
more than two choices and you'reonly electing one, or you in a
multi-member district more, your ballot.
If you just are limited to votefor one, you're leaving blank.
(12:40):
Your preferences aboutall the rest, right?
And you actually might havepreferences about the rest.
And a rank choice ballot changes fromvoting for one, a single choice ballot
to a rank choice ballot where you say,here's my first, second, and third choice.
And then you you add up all andsay you're electing one person.
The goal is to elect a majority winner.
That's the most representative outcomewhen you're electing one person.
So if you add up all the firstchoices and it's 40 to 35 to
(13:04):
25, you don't have a winner yet.
The candidate who's onlast place is eliminated.
And those voters have had achance to rank candidates.
And then the ballot counts for the secondchoice between the other two candidates.
And you get a head-to-headsimulation and get an instant
runoff kind of majority winner.
That kind of allows third parties to runindependents to run in primaries that
(13:26):
are crowded, incentivizes candidates tobuild true consensus within their party.
A lot of positives to it.
There's some reaction to it.
Where it's saying oh,that's too complicated.
And by the way, for voters, itisn't complicated, but they're
less, it's too complicated.
So there's this push to say, let's requiresingle choice voting like a single choice.
Whoever gets the most votes wins,even if it's 35% and 65% oppose.
(13:49):
That's the way we go.
So you're seeing some states startingto require that kind of election
and imposing that on their cities.
And I think that's a real mistakebecause they are preventing
voters from this chance to havemore representative outcomes.
So I would really push back on thosewho say, oh, all your cities have to
(14:10):
use a single choice plurality system.
Is a real degradation ofrepresentative democracy.
Jerremy (14:17):
Rob, what a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Is there anything you would like to shareor promote with our listeners today?
Rob (14:26):
Let me just end by lifting up the fact that there are
a lot of good organizationsout there doing work on this.
I have the good fortune to actually,right now I'm advising FairBot, which is a
group I led for 32 years now, led by thisgreat leader, Meredith Sumter who I really
appreciate that how we did the baton pass.
And they're like the go-to group forrank trust, voting, proportional, rank
(14:48):
trust, voting, but they work with awhole bunch of state groups and other
national groups like Rank the Vote andthe Rank Trust Voting Resource Center
and represent women and other having thisconversation about structural reform.
The national Popular Votemovement that I've referenced.
There's a group called NationalPopular Vote, which leads the advocacy.
And has done a really heroic job overthe last 20 years, winning state by
(15:09):
state and that keeps moving forwardand I think can, will be successful.
Group Call Unite America does work around.
Taking on the question of if almost allelections are not competitive in November,
what do we do to make the primaries morecompetitive and give voters more agency?
And they do a lot of work around what theycall the primary problem and represent us,
(15:31):
which works on corruption and issue one.
And, they, there's just do someGoogling and realize there's
a lot of people doing work.
And we're talking about elections,but of course, so much about
democracy is this other broader.
Questions about, about thehealth of our civil society.
That is exciting too.
I'll just share thatwith expand Democracy.
What I'm excited about doing and had achance to do some at FairBot, but hope to
(15:53):
do in this ongoing way is to keep lookingat that next generation set of reforms,
the ones that should be looked at.
We have this really exciting abilityin the United States to often get
change going from the bottom up.
We talk about states as thelaboratories of democracy.
You can talk about localgovernment as the test tubes of
(16:13):
democracy through that metaphor.
And, not all states are cities.
Not all states allow theircities to be innovators.
I live in Maryland, they allowcities to be real innovators.
And I think that's a goodprinciple to to push for.
But it also means that a lotof places you can do things.
You can do things in your NGO andjust realize that democracy is
not just a spectator sport, it'ssomething that we all can engage in.
(16:35):
And so expand Mxi is trying to lift up.
Ideas and mobilize resources in anincubation way to support an idea getting
from here to there, and then give them thetools to take it from there to we hope,
scaling And we can't shepherd them thewhole way, but we can get 'em started.
And there's so much todo and it's never ending.
(16:55):
But that's not a negative thing.
It just means we always haveopportunities to learn and look
for best practices and keep makingthis experiment work for all of us.
Jerremy (17:05):
That's right.
That's right.
We will put the links in the shownotes for all of those organizations.
Rob, it was truly a pleasure.
I just, I like speaking with people thatare positive and happy and just have a
beautiful enthusiasm about change and thebetterment of our society and our country.
'cause as you mentioned a fewdifferent times, we're not
perfect, but we're making progress.
(17:25):
And that's really, I think, ultimately thegoal that everyone can get behind regards
to what side of the fence you're on.
Let's go forward, let's find thesolutions that are definitely going
to make the betterment of thiscountry and just work towards those.
So this is really remarkable.
Thank you.
Rob (17:41):
Great to talk and Dave, I hope your voice gets better.
And, but Jerremy, thanks so muchand I look forward to hearing
how you pull this all together.
Jerremy (17:49):
You got it.
Thank you so much, Rob.
Rob champions holidays for shared engagement, while Jerremy
probes teen education gaps.
The stakes tighten—if communal acts buildtrust, how does AI's misinformation flood
threaten voters' fragile confidence?
Jerremy (00:13):
General take on national voting holiday.
Rob, what'd you think?
Rob (00:18):
It's a nice principle.
It's interesting one part of thecountry that does this, I won't
quiz you, but is Puerto Rico.
So Puerto Rico, part of the United States.
And they don't get to vote forpresident 'cause we do not enfranchise
citizens that live in territories.
Parenthetically, let me just sayif one of us were to say, I'm gonna
move to Puerto Rico and it's a great,beautiful place to be and I'm gonna go
(00:39):
move there, and we establish residency,we can no longer vote for president.
If we say, you know what, I'm gonna golive in Portugal for the next three years.
I can vote absentee from Portugal, butI can't vote absentee from Puerto Rico.
Like I can't vote from withinAmerica because we disenfranchise
that whole set of people.
Something I'm not a fan of.
But anyway, they do have a nationalholiday or a Puerto Rican holiday and
(01:03):
does create not just this simple ideaof oh, you have more time to vote, but
it actually creates a bit of a communalgathering opportunities and, and that's,
I think a cool part of it if we did that.
It's not, that's, you can't bake thatinto the law, but if there's a because
voting at the end of the day is acommunitarian act, we often think of
it like the individual, but your votingpower comes from voting with other people.
(01:25):
And our democracy's healthy wheneveryone, when more people vote.
And it's just this sort of communal thing.
So if it can reinforce that practically,because so many people today vote by mail.
Or when I say vote by mailthat I often wanna hedge that.
'cause it's often people dropoff their ballots, but anyway,
they get a ballot in the mail andthen they somehow get it back.
(01:45):
But they usually do itbefore the election, right?
So they don't need a holiday to do that.
And then we have early voting in more andmore places, and that's a good practice.
And it's oh, I'm gonna be busyon election day, but I can go
vote on Saturday or something.
And so we've changed from the idea likethere's a one day of voting and we should
have a holiday of things to we've alreadycreated access through other means.
So I think the date of the election, theday of the election's, an interesting one.
(02:09):
A lot of countries do vote on the weekend.
But as long as we have early votingand early voting's accessible and
the lines aren't long, or somethinglike I think in some ways that
building on that is probably the more.
The more sensible across every state.
But hey, if a state wants to joinPuerto Rico and have a state holiday
or something like that that, thatseems like I'm all for that creativity.
Jerremy (02:32):
Yeah, I like that.
Awesome.
So Rob, if you had to teach ateenager to vote with confidence,
so I have a 15-year-old where would.
Or how would you start?
Rob (02:44):
We'd start with the building block that our young people in
schools are soon to be citizens.
If they're citizens, wellsoon to be eligible voters.
Maybe that's the way I'd say it.
A lot of them let's hope that theyare and we should treat them that
like we should treat it seriously.
And I think there'sdifferent components of it.
(03:05):
One.
Piece of being a good voter is gettingpracticed in critical thinking.
And there's ways of evaluatinginformation and claims that actually
goes deep into how we teach our kids.
And so often people think about learningas about the what rather than the how.
But it's like we should alwaysteach people how to think rather
(03:26):
than what to think, right?
And that's, that becomes alifetime skill and we don't
actually do that consistently.
So that's step one.
Step two is to say, okay, let'sreally learn about what it is
to be part of governments at thelocal, state and national level.
So the local level is most accessible.
Schools could go visit town hall andmaybe attend a city council meeting.
(03:49):
Like the turnout rate among young peoplein local elections is just incredibly low.
And it's right after an opportunitywhere we could have introduced them to
like, what does local government do?
They're right here.
They affect, what the parks looklike and, ba basically regulations
that affect you very directly.
And a lot of kids never reallylearn that until they're older and
(04:09):
there's something that happens,which relating to town government.
But then they can go to states.
Here's a practice that severalScandinavian countries do.
They have every single high schoolstudent go to their national capital.
So our analogy would be going toyour state capital, go through a mock
legislature, learn how laws are passed,learn how things are done, go view
(04:32):
and watch the regular legislature,get that hands-on experience, and then
just have that much more appreciationof what state government is.
And today's fractured medialandscape, it's all the more
important to do something thatpeople can learn about this stuff.
And of course, just understand the basiccivic traditions of the country and the
civic history and what the Constitutionis and you know what the rules are.
(04:53):
And of course, being a voting nerd.
Give 'em a lot of chances to do mockelections and rules and think about
voting and try out some different systems.
I really like the idea, I'll finishhere, but sorry I won't just keep
going on forever, but the, but to makestudent government more interesting.
To give student governments somereal power of a certain kind.
(05:15):
Not to override the administrationor something, something interesting.
So they're not just popularitycontests and not like how do we spend
money for the prom or something.
But something that's, that includessome real governing things.
Give students some agency andthen have elections for them that
are interesting and involving.
And so people's firstexperiences of voting.
Are actually more meaningfulthan these sort of oh, it's
(05:36):
just a popularity contest.
And those people are just vain peoplewho wanna have something on their resume.
So we get this negative firstuses of voting, but instead,
Hey, let's try things out.
It is very cool for me that a lotof colleges and universities use
rank choice voting for their studentleaders more than a hundred now.
And that's just an organic thing,and I think that's happening in,
(05:56):
in, in more K through 12 as well.
And I, I think that kindof creativity is great.
Jerremy (06:02):
Yeah, man, you're really easy to talk to about this on this subject.
I love your enthusiasm.
Love your passion.
So thank you.
Just wanna say that I'd be, I would loveto know, Rob, just your general thoughts,
ideas, takes on what's coming up.
Meaning what is AI's role
Campaigns like how could it impact,trust and proportional systems for the
(06:26):
average person or just anything elsethat you are generally considering.
Rob (06:31):
Yeah.
Every new technological advanceaffecting communication can be used
both positively and negatively.
Going back to the printingpress or something like
Jerremy (06:40):
Oh yeah totally
Rob (06:41):
you can print things that help people get educated, or you can
print things that, that miseducatepeople or are disinformation, right?
And that goes way back to 15 hundredsor 16 hundreds or what have you.
And, the role of the internet and socialmedia and newspapers and television.
Huge impact for television, right?
You're like, all of these changes,some positive, some negative, right?
And I think AI fits in with that.
(07:02):
I think we're still in a real learningmode about what AI can do positively
and ne negatively, but I think thenegative is easier to understand, which
is that we tend to trust what we see.
And what we see now can be much moreeasily manipulated to not be real.
So you can have candidates you canhave people running for office, an
(07:22):
AI generation that makes it seem likethey're saying things they didn't say.
And then it gets spread onsocial media and it's never true.
But a lot of people never learn.
It's not true, right?
That just seems really scaryand and complicated to regulate.
But we need to, figure outthat kind of regulation.
'cause so much of that informationcan be passed, just person to person.
(07:42):
It's not even, whatever.
It's just hard to regulate howpeople transfer information.
But we need to look at that becausethere is a lot of efforts to disin
or misinform people and confusepeople and steer them to vote in
certain ways in the positive sense.
Just like AI can be useful for curatinginformation and supplementing what
(08:05):
you're finding out about, just beinglike, where do I vote tomorrow?
Or something like that.
Or, but also like modern voter guides,like learning about the candidates
and that's just something we need tocreatively think about what we can do.
I would say maybe as a lastmusing is, I think the whole world
(08:26):
is having some challenges withdemocracy in different level.
It's not as pronounced in all countries.
Some countries are less are degrading,deteriorating less, but there's a
general deterioration across the world.
So if you look at the internationalratings of the health of democracy
in civil society, like FreedomHouse is a group that does this.
We've had 20 consecutive yearsof decline internationally.
(08:50):
So not every countryat the same time, but.
It's really problematic and there'sno magic bullets out there, right?
There's no simple solutions.
But I think what can we do for peopleto feel agency and ownership and,
consent of the governed principles.
Yeah.
Outside of elections too, people onlyhave wanna put in so much time into
this stuff but maybe I'm not so that'sa general question that I think is worth
(09:15):
exploring when I'm exploring some andexpand democracy and but I think AI
could be some contributing piece of that.
If in the positive sense of helpingcurate information and give more, ways
for people to understand their choicesand what's going on where they feel
some positive feelings about democracy.
(09:36):
'cause right now there's a lot of negativefeelings about democracy and, some of
the countries that seem to be doing wellin their government, I'm no defender of
China, but China's doing some things thatseemingly like they're economically and
people say maybe we don't need democracy.
China doesn't have it, right?
It's ah, so I think we need to makedemocracy work and we just to do that
we never need to feel we're settled.
(09:57):
It, democracy is an ongoingunfolding and I really love the
fact that the constitution hasthat principle a more perfect union
because it's never per perfect.
It's always on pro progress or we hopeprogress, it's always about change.
Anyway, that's a long-winded way ofsaying that AI, I think is there's a
lot of things to fear about it, butI hope there's some promise as well.
Jerremy (10:20):
I love that.
So speaking about progressand speaking about change.
Last question for you, Rob.
Name one reform that you do not want.
What problem does it actuallymake worse for individuals?
Is there something outthere that you know that's
Trickling down that youreally are opposed against?
Rob (10:44):
it's a good question.
I feel that almosteverything is in context.
Like I am very concerned aboutpushing voter id, but if you make
voter ID accessible and you work outthe edge cases where people don't
have it, maybe we can make it workand if some people really want it.
So I'm really ready to have in,conversations with people about
(11:09):
how to make their reform work.
One that I think is intuitivefor some people, but has
some real challenges is like.
We should all just vote on oneday and count the ballots that day
and have the results that night orsomething like that, and vote on paper.
They do it in Canada so we can do it here.
One of the things like that'sintuitive oh, let's have fast
elections and vote on paper.
(11:30):
Of course people vote on paper, butcount them by hand, but when Canada
does that, or some other countries,they're voting for one thing.
They're
Jerremy (11:38):
Yeah.
Rob (11:38):
There are elections in some of our counties like Los Angeles County,
there will be choices on your ballot.
You go to vote one election, there'llbe more choices on your ballot
that some people in a Europeancountry that vote their whole lives
will vote on their whole lives.
And so I think we have tocome that we created a lot of
(11:59):
things to vote on and consider.
And so that governs the factthat we should not believe.
It's if you couldn't do hand countsfor voting on 45 things, and and
you don't need to if if you buildin guardrails for how to do that.
Maybe I'll mention one other because,'cause I think there we haven't
(12:20):
really talked about rank trust voting.
So lemme just say a little bit moreabout why I think that's good and why
there's a ref reform that is not good.
So rank trust voting is the ideathat if you vote for, if you have
more than two choices and you'reonly electing one, or you in a
multi-member district more, your ballot.
If you just are limited to votefor one, you're leaving blank.
(12:40):
Your preferences aboutall the rest, right?
And you actually might havepreferences about the rest.
And a rank choice ballot changes fromvoting for one, a single choice ballot
to a rank choice ballot where you say,here's my first, second, and third choice.
And then you you add up all andsay you're electing one person.
The goal is to elect a majority winner.
That's the most representative outcomewhen you're electing one person.
So if you add up all the firstchoices and it's 40 to 35 to
(13:04):
25, you don't have a winner yet.
The candidate who's onlast place is eliminated.
And those voters have had achance to rank candidates.
And then the ballot counts for the secondchoice between the other two candidates.
And you get a head-to-headsimulation and get an instant
runoff kind of majority winner.
That kind of allows third parties to runindependents to run in primaries that
(13:26):
are crowded, incentivizes candidates tobuild true consensus within their party.
A lot of positives to it.
There's some reaction to it.
Where it's saying oh,that's too complicated.
And by the way, for voters, itisn't complicated, but they're
less, it's too complicated.
So there's this push to say, let's requiresingle choice voting like a single choice.
Whoever gets the most votes wins,even if it's 35% and 65% oppose.
(13:49):
That's the way we go.
So you're seeing some states startingto require that kind of election
and imposing that on their cities.
And I think that's a real mistakebecause they are preventing
voters from this chance to havemore representative outcomes.
So I would really push back on thosewho say, oh, all your cities have to
(14:10):
use a single choice plurality system.
Is a real degradation ofrepresentative democracy.
Jerremy (14:17):
Rob, what a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Is there anything you would like to shareor promote with our listeners today?
Rob (14:26):
Let me just end by lifting up the fact that there are
a lot of good organizationsout there doing work on this.
I have the good fortune to actually,right now I'm advising FairBot, which is a
group I led for 32 years now, led by thisgreat leader, Meredith Sumter who I really
appreciate that how we did the baton pass.
And they're like the go-to group forrank trust, voting, proportional, rank
(14:48):
trust, voting, but they work with awhole bunch of state groups and other
national groups like Rank the Vote andthe Rank Trust Voting Resource Center
and represent women and other having thisconversation about structural reform.
The national Popular Votemovement that I've referenced.
There's a group called NationalPopular Vote, which leads the advocacy.
And has done a really heroic job overthe last 20 years, winning state by
(15:09):
state and that keeps moving forwardand I think can, will be successful.
Group Call Unite America does work around.
Taking on the question of if almost allelections are not competitive in November,
what do we do to make the primaries morecompetitive and give voters more agency?
And they do a lot of work around what theycall the primary problem and represent us,
(15:31):
which works on corruption and issue one.
And, they, there's just do someGoogling and realize there's
a lot of people doing work.
And we're talking about elections,but of course, so much about
democracy is this other broader.
Questions about, about thehealth of our civil society.
That is exciting too.
I'll just share thatwith expand Democracy.
What I'm excited about doing and had achance to do some at FairBot, but hope to
(15:53):
do in this ongoing way is to keep lookingat that next generation set of reforms,
the ones that should be looked at.
We have this really exciting abilityin the United States to often get
change going from the bottom up.
We talk about states as thelaboratories of democracy.
You can talk about localgovernment as the test tubes of
(16:13):
democracy through that metaphor.
And, not all states are cities.
Not all states allow theircities to be innovators.
I live in Maryland, they allowcities to be real innovators.
And I think that's a goodprinciple to to push for.
But it also means that a lotof places you can do things.
You can do things in your NGO andjust realize that democracy is
not just a spectator sport, it'ssomething that we all can engage in.
(16:35):
And so expand Mxi is trying to lift up.
Ideas and mobilize resources in anincubation way to support an idea getting
from here to there, and then give them thetools to take it from there to we hope,
scaling And we can't shepherd them thewhole way, but we can get 'em started.
And there's so much todo and it's never ending.
(16:55):
But that's not a negative thing.
It just means we always haveopportunities to learn and look
for best practices and keep makingthis experiment work for all of us.
Jerremy (17:05):
That's right.
That's right.
We will put the links in the shownotes for all of those organizations.
Rob, it was truly a pleasure.
I just, I like speaking with people thatare positive and happy and just have a
beautiful enthusiasm about change and thebetterment of our society and our country.
'cause as you mentioned a fewdifferent times, we're not
perfect, but we're making progress.
(17:25):
And that's really, I think, ultimately thegoal that everyone can get behind regards
to what side of the fence you're on.
Let's go forward, let's find thesolutions that are definitely going
to make the betterment of thiscountry and just work towards those.
So this is really remarkable.
Thank you.
Rob (17:41):
Great to talk and Dave, I hope your voice gets better.
And, but Jerremy, thanks so muchand I look forward to hearing
how you pull this all together.
Jerremy (17:49):
You got it.
Thank you so much, Rob.
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