shoe mucker with Siddal defense. So I completed grad school a couple months ago, and when I was in grad school, my lifting patterns really got out of whack. Like I just couldn't lift as much as I wanted to, but I just found I didn't have the emotional energy to really continue to be in the gym consistently. And then our second child was born recently, and so I'm still kind of recovering to get back into a steady pattern of lifting, which is this is the most I've been out of it in the last 10, 13 years of just having a really inconsistent season. Other than that, I've been pretty consistent. So this time around, since I've been out of pocket for a while, I wanted to really restart. I decided to pick up the book, Starting Strength by Mark Ripto, which I highly recommend to you if you're interested in lifting weights ever at all. It's really super heavy on the sciency stuff. However, I found it extremely, extremely helpful. So anyway, I realized a couple of things by reading that book. One, I've been doing a couple lifts, not necessarily wrong, but not the best way I could be doing them. It's really changed how I view squats. It's changed my grip on the deadlift. It's really driven home the importance to me of overhead press. And so I've really been enjoying this book and I'm learning all the stuff that I don't know. And I thought, I should have read this book 10 years ago. I should have read this book when I first started lifting. How much further ahead would I be now if I had that knowledge, if I had that training initially? So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about that in the context of shooting. It was the very first time I went to shoot a gun. I went with me and my buddy, neither one of us had any idea what we were doing. And we had a Springfield XD.  So we got out to the range, went, rented the gun, you know, went into the shooting bay or whatever. And we were safe as far as keeping the gun pointed in the right direction and stuff like that. But we loaded all the bullets in the magazine and then tried to put the magazine in the gun. And we realized we'd loaded all the bullets in the magazine backwards. Right? Shameful and embarrassing story. Come a long way, since then. But the point of that is, of course, we didn't have training. We didn't have education. We were just going out to figure it out like most of you have, like most of us have done, right? Since then, of course, I've gotten lots of training and I've moved up in the world. But my point is, when you're so new like that you don't know what you don't know. Or you do what I did with lifting, which is, I've been doing this for a decade. I know what I'm doing. I've been doing this for a long time. And then you finally get some education and you realize you don't know what you're talking about. And you haven't been doing it right. And you still have a lot to learn. And that, of course, is a repeatable pattern with anything in your life, right? But I think in the shooting world, that is a specifically acute problem. Because I have people come through my classes a lot who think they know what they're talking about. I've been hunting since I was 12.  Experience and competency are not the same thing. Often in life, they are related. However, that is not a guarantee by any stretch. Just because you've been doing something a long time, it just might mean you've been doing it wrong for a long time. So this is my encouragement to you to get some formal training. Learn how to use your gun.  Or if you already have sought formal training, then you understand the importance of what I'm telling you. Getting training from a competent instructor, one is addicting. Two is fun. And three, you understand the need for it. And often it'll lead you to desire more training, right? So don't do what I did. Don't spend 10 years doing something just to find out you did it wrong. Go get some training. Come see me. We'd love to teach you how to shoot those guns. Do brave deeds and endure.


All right. Well, for those of you who are new or haven't been on one of our events yet, my name is Caitlin Pena. I'm the Director of Operations and Programs for the Center for Election Science. I'll kind of be serving as your moderator today. So I'll be keeping tabs on what's going on in the chat and making notes of any questions so that once we get to the Q&A portion, I can kind of read those out for you guys. You can also, if you click on the Participants button at the bottom of the screen, and then there's a button that says Raise Hand, so you can click on that and then we can selectively unmute you if you want to ask your question aloud. And then I also just want to give a quick reminder that we've been having lots of events and they're all on different topics, and so we kind of want to try to keep our questions and our conversation to be on topic with what we're discussing today. So for example, if you have some questions about technical aspects of voting methods, that might be better to email us at contact at electionscience.org or attend one of our other events just so that we can keep the chat and the questions, you know, contained and narrow, and lots of people have questions about what we're talking about, we want to just stay on task. So given that, I will hand it over to Chris and Kirsten. Chris is our director of campaigns and advocacy, and Kirsten is our director of philanthropy, and they will be leading you through this awesome training. So, thanks. Thanks, Caitlin. Well, as Caitlin said, my name is Kirsten Elliott. I'm our director of philanthropy, which is just a fancy way of saying that I raise a lot of our money. And Chris is our director of campaigns. And so both of us have quite a bit of experience creating compelling pitches for people about not only elections, but you know, just lots of different topics we've worked in many different fields. So we really wanted to host this because we have found that when people are able to hone their pitch and they feel really comfortable with it, whether it's a staff person or a board member like Michael who's joining us or any of you, then we're able to more effectively share our message to the hundreds of thousands, millions of people that need to hear about how our elections are broken and how there's a really easy way to fix them. So thank you for joining us today for this workshop. We have a pretty small group. So, you know, if there's a question that comes up in the middle of this, we'll try to get to it as we can. If it's pressing, if not, if you can try to hold them until the end, that'll make it easier for others who join this, this recording later, because we will be posting this on YouTube. So Chris, if you can advance to the next slide. Okay, so what is an elevator pitch? So it is going to be, as this says, a pitch. It's quick. It's an elevator ride. And don't think about an elevator ride to like the top of the Empire State Building.  So you, depending on how old your elevator is, you may have 10 seconds, you may have 30. You might get lucky and have a minute, but you're not going to have very much time. So we want this to be quick. The other nice thing is that much like a conversation you might have with a stranger in an elevator, these are not meant to be high stakes conversations. So you are not pitching this to the president of the United States. That's not what we're teaching you to do today. We're talking about your friend, your family member, someone that you run into at a bar when we're finally all able to go back about our lives, things like that. It's also not a presentation. This is not a TED talk. You do not need to rehearse this. In fact, if you rehearse this too much, you will sound like a robot and you will not encourage anyone to get involved in what you're inviting them to be involved in. And then finally, I would say that when we're looking at elevator pitches, it hopefully invites more conversation. So we don't just want this to be us talking at someone from our point of view and what we think will resonate, you know, with someone who's very like minded with us. We want to be thinking about the person we're talking to and what might resonate with them. So that is what an elevator pitch is and is not. Next slide. So why should you care while you're here. So you do. For some reason you thought that this was important for you to attend. But, you know, if maybe somebody pushed you into coming today and you aren't really sure if you were going to stick around for the whole recording here's my sales pitch. My quick elevator pitch on elevator pitches if we want to get met up. So there's a lot of applications for elevator pitches when you think about your work if you are selling the services that you offer at your business. Maybe you serve on the board of directors for a nonprofit or you volunteer for a nonprofit that can be a really easy free way to help that nonprofit get there the word out. But also it's important for personal relationships. So if you think about networking to establish your own personal brand. So Michael I'm going to keep picking on a little bit he's one of our board members he's an actor. You know if Michael is a good network or if he's able to establish his personal brand really well maybe he lands a new acting gig and that would be really fantastic. But I mean even if it's just meeting someone who might be a potential friend right the more that you can sell who you are. And why you're an interesting person and they should want to hang out with you that's a good thing right we all like to have nice networks that we can rely on for business ideas or just for going out and having drinks with right. And it's also a pretty simple idea so this shouldn't be anything that's too complicated again we're not trying to rehearse a TED talk here we're just trying to work on our communication skills. I would say there's also a really large return on investment that could potentially come from this. It only takes one of these 1020 30 second conversations to go right for you to land a seven figure contract for your employer, or for you to find your employer. I don't know like there are all sorts of things that could happen if you have a carefully refined pitch. And I have certainly seen that over the history of my career and I'm sure Chris has as well. Next slide. Did you get the next slide. Okay, what makes a good elevator pitch. So as I said we're going to try to keep it brief. So in 30 seconds if we can, it will quickly get the person's attention so that they're actually listening to you and not just hoping that the elevator doors going to open soon. I would say that you want to provide enough detail that it's interesting but not too much. We're not looking to get really technical here. And we also want to have a CTA a call to action. So this is something that I think is really critical I find in my work in fundraising but I am sure that Chris finds in his work with organizing as well. If you just talk at someone and about yourself and you don't provide some reason for them to get involved or some way for them to follow up. That's probably the end of the conversation and that makes it less of a good use of your time. So these are the things that we're going to be looking for when we're talking about elevator pitches. So I'm going to transition here just a little bit to Chris because Chris has a really great activity that we're going to work through today. I often teach elevator pitches in small group settings with like board members and things like that. But Chris has a great formula that I love that I think works in big group settings. I'm going to pitch it to him here in just a second. But these are some other things that you're going to be wanting to keep in mind as we are looking at elevator pitches. We want to keep it interesting, brief, simple, concise, and we want to win people over. So Chris, how do we actually do that. That is a great question. Did I draw on the screen, and then we do.  Okay. Yes, no. Okay, great. Thank you guys. Sorry, no one said anything for a minute.  When you are a candidate, you get invited to dozens and dozens and dozens of debates, and you, and I'm sure we've all seen debates on TV. They have to get these, these really important ideas, you know, what are you going to do about climate change, what you're playing for this which we're playing for that in one minute. And as you can tell, it is, it's hard to do that. Right. How do you how do you boil down everything in one minute.  And you finally get opportunity to talk about proof voting. You are competing with this. It's it. It is a little distraction machine that is your phone. Right. That's why I put this guy in here. So the number one thing I want you to keep in mind is you have less time than ever to keep people's attention. So your goal is to whatever you do, however you say, is to keep it interesting and to keep it short. Right. I always try to think of my mind. Okay, if I was a candidate and I have one minute in a debate to talk about a proof voting, how would I do it. And we're going to go through a little exercise today to help you guys think through that process. Now, the number one thing you are probably asking is, well, okay, well, how do I do this, you know, how, let's say I'm in front of everyone, like, I understand supposed to be short. What do I say, right, you already know how to do this process, right, even in high school was beaten to in high school and elementary school middle school in college right. And there's a reason it's not a paragraph essay series it's not 10 paragraph essay by paragraph essay is short enough for you get your point across and and and forces you to to boil things down into its most, you know, pure assessments right so you have what you have in a bi paragraph essay you have a hook you have something interesting in the beginning, your thesis what is this supposed to be about. You're three paragraphs by argument and then your conclusion. The thing about a pitch is essentially it's a five paragraph essay, right, you're doing the same thing. Just, you know, how you do it changed a little bit. Normally, I normally boil it down to four, four parts of a good pitch right you have an anecdote. And that's a story of someone you've heard, or your personal story that use that's interesting.  We are going to do that together today. But in the meantime, I will have Kirsten give an example of how this looks. Thanks, Chris. So yeah, so when we were in St. Louis last year for our staff board retreat that we do annually, Chris kind of sprung this on the rest of the team and he said, Okay, this is how it works now you're going to write it. And as much as I have done this before it was really terrifying. So I'm going to give you what I worked on then, because I think it's a really good example of having to do one on the fly. And that's where you would likely find yourself here. So a little bit of backstory. The question here was what is vote splitting. And since we were in St. Louis, I tried to frame it that way. So, backdoor discussions to privatize the airport and an unresolved increase in the number of violent crimes have ravaged St. Louis, and it's all thanks to our broken democracy, a democracy that by design has allowed candidates to win and win elections with only a third of the city behind them, despite all of the challenges ahead of them. The fact is, these ill advised policies are direct result of the way we choose our elected officials in St. Louis. Because we only allow voters to select one candidate and a crowded field of candidates with similar ideologies we encourage vote splitting. That means the way that we vote literally means that when we offer voters more choices they're more likely to get a worse outcome. But it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to keep dividing our city. We can reunite St. Louis with a better way of voting, and we can elect a leader who represents all of us, not just a fraction of us. St. Louis has an opportunity to pull together and stop dividing ourselves. We just have to rise to the challenge ahead of us. This was by no means perfect, but it was great. This is the idea that we're trying to go with here. That's great. And hopefully you all saw some of the things that we're talking about here, but don't worry we are going to go into them in detail. But thank you, Kirsten, for sharing that we'll use that as the basis to talk going forward. So, in the meantime, we're going to go through this step by step, but every one of you has a prompt. This is an interactive piece today. I would like for everyone to write on their own, you can do it on the computer, the kids scribble down notes. By the end I would like people to share and we'll give people a bit of time at the end. The prompt is why do we need approval voting in our local elections. That is your prompt. Think about that. Keep that in the back of your mind as we move forward. Everyone got that? Why do we need approval voting in our local elections? So the thesis. The thesis is, so, Chris, didn't you put the anecdote before the thesis in your thing before? Yes, I did. Right, but just like in an article you would write for school or an academic article, you don't start with the thesis, right? We need better elections because that's boring. However, this is your guiding light of the whole piece. This is the theme. This is the heart of what you want to say, right? So, for example, Kirsten's piece was, we have these problems because of broken elections. That was the thesis, right? And that is the point of the thesis is it's supposed to be the number one thing you want people to take away, right? And there's two ways, you know, there's a couple different ways to do this argument, right, to figure out what's the most important part of the thesis. One is to do what I just said. What is the one thing I want them to walk away with, right? The other thing is do it, especially something like proof of voting is, okay, boil it down to 10 words or less. Proof of voting causes bad outcomes, right? Proof of voting is hurting our city, right? That's the core of what Kirsten said. I challenge you to even make it seven words or less, right? Sometimes it's too easy. This is what you really want to drive home. And sometimes, and make sure one point here is, remember, you're saying this, right? You're saying this out loud. You don't get to write it down. People don't get to get visual aids. This is make sure you're focusing only on one piece, right? So, you know, don't focus on how it's this or that, you know, don't focus about all 10 different aspects of the city, right? Like Kirsten, that you broke down. You have a lot of issues, but they have one source, right? And it's broken elections. Let's keep moving. And Kirsten, let me know if there's any other questions that kind of come up. Let's get the thesis in hand, right? So, everyone's starting to think about their thesis a little bit for their prompts, right? Okay, good. Anecdotes. So, what is the anecdote? Anecdote is to use a phrase from a recent interview we just did with Dr. Wally Seward in St. Louis. There's two ways you get people's attention. Pain and stories, right? That's the only way to get people interested in what you're talking about. Your job is you are competing with people's phone. You're competing with people's thoughts.  You have to do something that makes it interesting, right? This is the headline. This is what brings people into the story. Nothing is better than your personal story, period. A lot of time people don't think what I have to say is interesting. Completely opposite. Every group, especially all approved voting groups that I've talked to, they ask, what do I say? I say, talk about why you're here. Talk about how these problems aren't getting done in your community. Talk about how, you know, your friends and family are impacted by this. Talk about how, you know, for me, it was I would work in campaigns and no matter what I did, I saw the process was broken, right? That's part of my story. That's why I'm here. This is where you get to be the most creative and you get to create a theme, right? So I showed the picture of this woman holding a picture, right? You can tell. She's going to tell a story about her family, right? And I had one candidate who would talk about his father fighting in D-Day as a way to show people the freedoms fought for in this country and why we should do better, right? It was an interesting way to make people wake up. And the one last thing I'll say about this is people are expecting you to say something boring or logical, right? That's what people say. People envy, okay, it's another announcement. It's another announcement. This is about your heart, right? This is where you get to show people who you are. Tell a joke, right? Say something so scary, right? Bring up a hero, bring up a villain, right? Another great one is what if I told you, you know, I want to get people to imagine and you're looking to just really get it in the framework of people, right? And that's difficult to prove about it. We haven't had a lot of, you know, it's math, right? Mathematically, a lot of people like it. We've got to get past that. And if you ever see the stuff in Fargo, the great work they do in Fargo and the great work they do in St. Louis, they make it about the people and making sure that their voice is heard. So that anecdote ties into your thesis. So you've been thinking about your thesis for a little bit. Think about your anecdote. So you have a great thesis, you have a great anecdote. The wigs people up say, what are they saying? They have a thesis. You gave them like, I'm going to hit you with this. Now you got to back it up, right? This is the why. This is the how. This is how we're going to win, right? So there's a couple of different ways you can do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. Or maybe you can do it step by step. First, we get people interested in approval voting. Second, we get people to use approval voting. Third, we're going to, you know, you get people from where you've started to where you're going to go. We're going to talk about that in a second. These points are often confused the thesis, right? I like approval voting because it can be done inexpensively. That may be a thesis, right? But that's often a point, right? Why is approval voting? Approval voting is great. It's maybe your thesis and works for our town. But it's, you know, make sure you're not confusing that the, you know, your points with the heart of what you're trying to do. The thesis is more of the essence, right? These are more logic based. You know, did you know we had eight elections where the winner didn't have 30% of the vote, right? That's important. And notice that I did not start all of this saying, you know, using a numbers like that, right? Numbers, at the beginning as your anecdote, you got to be really careful. Most people, numbers don't mean a lot to them, right? People like numbers. But this is the time to bring numbers, right? Say you say it's morally wrong to have elections be like this. Listen to this. And then you can get into the logic like this. That's what your points are for, right? And again, all their job is to support the thesis. And I have these bobbleheads because that's what you want to see, right? That's what we're here for. You want to see the heads nod, right? You want to see like, that's something you get with when you say something out loud that you don't get to see when you are, you know, maybe writing it down, right? That's why it's so important to try to say this out loud and test it.  So that's normally pretty good. You're going for, and you're going for to make it the broadest audience possible, right? And thankfully, Americans are very expressive. They often go like, that's good. That's what we're looking for, right?  Before we get to there, there's one very important thing we need to talk about for endings. Everyone loves to talk about the beginnings and the endings. There are two types of endings, right? There are cliffs, and then there are ramps, right? So we've all seen a cliff. You know, someone says, approval voting is the best thing that we can do. That's boring. That's awful, right? Or, you know, compare, especially when compared to other methods, approval voting is the obvious choice, right? Something maybe based on logic or, or with approval voting, we can have a world without bad elections. That's a big one, right? So that's what I call the negative framing. Most people, a lot of smart people, right? People that are trying to work on big problems. It's often the, we would like the absence of something, right? We'd like, we would like the absence of bad elections. We would like the absence of climate change. We would like, we'd like those things to not happen. People imagine in the world concrete things. We are, we're trying to get them to imagine something positive, right? And often cliff two is, especially if you have that maybe one minute clock in your head, right? I want you to keep that. That's very important. You want to hit, you want to beat that clock. You want to be done before one minute, right? After one minute, you, you kind of start to lose, right? I want to do that. A ramp is something that ends up in a high note, right? You know, something that finishes, someone that finishes with energy and does that call to action, right? It ties back to that human theme, the emotional part or the themes you set up originally and is framed positively. And the biggest way I mean to get that across is, it's not a world without, it's a world with, right? Does it make any sense? It's not a world without bad elections. It's a world with good elections. It's a world where elections represent the will of the people, something positive, right? Not the negative.   You want to go, duke's a hazard, so straight up. And it's hard, right? You want to think about what you want, right? It's, you have to show people a world where you want.  I want a world where the air and water are clean and, you know, we get to live here for 200 years, right? Where we could, you know, where my family and friends in Florida have a nice place to live for a long time, right? That's positive. That's inclusive. Again, you're going to keep your eye on the clock. One thing I want to, one theory I want to get across to you guys real quick is, I don't know if you've ever heard, the best way to draw a straight line, right? You know, some people, they draw a straight line. Some people do, you make your starting point and you pick your end point, right? And if you draw a little dot for your end point, and you just focus on that dot, you'll hit that line, right? And you'll have a nice straight line almost every time. You're focusing it down the line and hopefully getting straight line. This is your dot. You're setting up your dot ahead of time, right?   It's going way too, like, I'm going way too slow. I need to wrap this up, right? Maybe wrap up everything else. Maybe some of your points and just hit your perfect world. And again, you want it to be that perfect world of people who are on lives, and it has that call to action piece. Okay. Now, with the rely on you guys, I'm going to put, I can put these back up as you need. Maybe take, or maybe we'll take some questions. But as we do that, I would encourage people to fill out their prompt. You can see us mirroring the importance of keeping things short because this is by far the shortest presentation we have done on zoom because we really do want to hear from you all. So what questions do you all have? Does anybody confuse? Are there parts that you want Chris to explain more? Feel free to stick your questions in the chat or digitally raise your hand and we can unmute you if you have any questions or comments. And even if you just have an idea for what you might say in response to why is approval voting good. We're happy to hear your thoughts as well. So Michael raised his hand, and I have unmuted him. I just wanted to clarify. Chris misspoke at one point and said approval voting when he meant plurality voting approval voting is good plurality voting is bad. That's right. Thank you. Sorry. I can't believe that even left my lips like that. Colin did ask, does each of you have one or two examples to share or just Kirsten. I did not I unfortunately didn't come prepared with an example. I'm not sure if Chris has one or if he if he wants to try off the cuff. Give me and either find my old one. Or, you know, I can give I can give an example. One is basically you don't always have right you never know. Sometimes you don't always know, you know when you're going to have to be able to give the pitch right so I'll do. I'll do mine. I'll do mine then. You know, I have where I have not on thousands of doors. I've got chased by dogs. I've had guns pointed in my face. I have gone up and down. Long driveways just to find that no one was home. I worked on over 10 elections in my life.  And one day I was in my office in Roanoke, Virginia, working on a congressional campaign and I realized, it didn't matter if we won. System was broken. I knew the system was not going to get the things done that I needed to because even if I got this person in there that I believed in. They were not going to be able to make the impact, even the impact that we wanted to make right because the system was so broken. And that's why I'm here because approval voting gives people the opportunity to unbreak that system. What does that mean? Why is that system so broken? One is when you work on a campaign, the point is to try to find the number of people, the least number of people to talk to, right? You think it's campaigns about getting all the votes possible. We have all the data we need. We have everything else we need. We know who will vote and who will not vote, right? They know. The goal is to get it to that lowest number possible because you have finite time, you have finite money. Approval voting forces politicians and forces campaigns to go and talk to more people. And why is that better? Because candidates can win with 32% of the vote time and time and time again and never, and their point is to make sure that they don't lose that 32%. It's not to do anything that might help the 72%. It's about getting that 32% to stay. So with approval voting, we have approved voting in Fargo, North Dakota. We're well on our way to get it in St. Louis, Missouri. I can't imagine a place that needs it more. But every community in America can use it and every community in America needs it. And that's why I need your help. I need your help to make sure that we get the word out about approval voting. Please consider giving money. Please consider giving your time. So we can have a world where every campaign, every politician is forced to listen to people like you. How about that? I am going to pick at you for the fact that that was far over one minute, Chris. So we're going to have to snap this one together. I brought it home. Hey, is that a cup? Okay. But that's a good point. We don't want this, what we were talking about earlier, we don't want this to seem like it's a presentation, but it does help like Chris said to practice it. Sophia had a question in the chat. So Sophia, we can unmute you now. There we go. So I'm wondering if Chris's example almost like a little bit answered my question, but I'll kind of ask it anyway, which is like, I guess one of the things I'm thinking of is that sort of like common wisdom around selling something is like emphasize the positives instead of the negatives. And I'm wondering if you feel like that applies here because if you pair that with the advice to like use anecdotes, I feel like the anecdotes that are most grabbing tend to be the sort of like negative things like bad experiences or like bad outcomes of like the system we have now or something like that. And I guess I was just wondering, I'm trying to grapple with like, how do I combine using an anecdote that's effective that might be sort of like negative in tone with the idea of trying to sell something by like emphasizing the positives and the benefits of it. Chris had great anecdotes, but I'm wondering which were like fun like I don't, I mean yes the like dog barking and gun in your face is like they're negative but it's like, it's, it's really doesn't have that feeling to it because they're so like evocative and can be like used in a sort of like funny personal story way so I think he did a really good job with that but I'm wondering if like him being able to do that is kind of unique to his experience here where like for the most part the rest of us can't say like I worked on elections you know like I worked on campaigns. And so I think that when you have that it's easier to sort of like you're already in the context of the topic. So you like have things to grab from that are relevant. And so I'm kind of just wondering like how do you think the rest of us should balance that tension. Sorry, that was a long question. No, that's a fantastic question and I get that kind of, you know, I understand that right now I was on the campaign site right. I hope what one thing that came across was like, you know, I knew that most of you have not probably worked on campaigns probably and especially to the extent that I have so part of my, my goal is to maybe shock people a little bit and then in the speaking to as few people as possible right. I am totally on board. Your, your goal is to wake people up right people are the status quo is, you know, just going to talk, and I'll get through it for a minute right. If, if let's say you know one piece of it is and I only use this as an example, because we've, I know people talk about this and St. Louis is you could start it being like, we live, you know, if you live in St. Louis, you're talking maybe St. Louis crowd, St. Louis has the highest murder rate in the United States. Right. Dozens of people die needlessly every day in St. Louis. Why are we taking care of that. Why, how is that acceptable by any means. And we have, you know, I got a total on a little bit but you know if I was in St. Louis maybe I would say, who's listening to us. Right. Who, why we elect these people. And I, you may not understand but the way we elect them means whether they listen to us or not. Right. So, and this is a debate we often I really try to not debate but it's a question comes up a time is how do you connect basically the policy thing, right.  It's okay to talk about. You know, another thing I often bring up in it was kind of easy crutch is a villain. Right. I used to bring it all the time, you know, and partisan campaigns are quite clear villains and heroes right. You know, when I was on the front lines with Senator so and so. That's cool. Or I knocked doors with, you know, this person and they said, never give up, maybe, you know, there's 100 different ways but really I want you to think about. And largely, it comes down to the question. Why are you here, you personally, Sophia, right, why are you here. That's the most important question out that's organizing day number one question number one. Right. Why are you here. That's your story. I want to piggyback in here too because I deal with this a lot Sophia, in terms of what I do so I write a lot of grants, I talked to a lot of our donors, and I think you're right we want to focus on the positives like when we're trying to sell someone on something and largely this is. But I, I don't think you can effectively sell something to someone if you don't create a problem. That's also kind of selling and marketing 101 is there has to be a problem and either it has to exist naturally or we have to create it. So if I'm writing a grant proposal I let the funder know that there are lots of problems in our democracy, but there's a really easy and simple way to fix it and I try to get into that as quickly as I can. And I had another thought as well like in trying to frame this. I think another way is maybe just to think of the negative and flip it on its head so I think in St. Louis it's really easy to think of how there's all this vote splitting and it's really awful and it kind of is part of the systemic racism that exists in St. But I think the other thing that you could use in that example is how many candidates of color ran last time, and how incredible it is that there are all these people that more accurately represent the city of St. Louis that are stepping up to lead as mayor. But then we're not ending up with that person that's in that seat of power. And but it's a problem that's very easily solvable. So I hope that that gives like another idea on how you might be able to frame things a little more positively. Any questions? Feel free to stick them in the chat or raise your hand. Mindy says approval voting I'm confused it boils down to money. Mindy can you further clarify or if you want I can unmute you. Looks like Brian has his hand raised now too. Okay. Let's see in a minute if she wants to clarify in the chat and then I will go ahead and lower Brian or unmute Brian. Hello. Oh, is that Mindy? That's me. Okay, go ahead and then we'll go to Brian. The question that I have is the reason I said confused is it seems to always boil down to money in campaigns. If you don't have the money, even, even local elections on the township level, you know, on the borough level, you have to have money to put into these campaigns to even get anywhere. You don't have the money you don't have the backing.  But you have to have money to be heard and your and for your ideas to be heard and that's one thing here that I haven't heard mentioned at all. That's why I'm confused because the money is the root of where you're going to go and how far you're going to go. Hey, that's a great question, Mindy. I think, and it brings up a very important piece is sometimes you have to think and especially with a thing like approval voting is to think about the process backwards. Right. So for example, Mindy, in your case is money, right? Money is not going anywhere. Period. And then, and it's, it looks like it's going to be with us for elections for a while. Part, so let's, you know, deconstruct that problem, right? So part of who gets money is people who are viable, right? If you get no money, if you don't run, you don't run. It's probably because either maybe you didn't think you get the money, or you didn't think you could get the votes, or, you know, there's four or five people running already that already have your platform. You're going to split with them, right? Part of that process, and one of them, you know, one of the ways you might attack that is, listen, I know that mayor such and such has deep pockets or gets money from this and that, but I think with approval voting, the ideas will stand out more, right? Money will still be there. We're not going to get any money. But if you have a good idea, that matters more because you can actually get the votes, right? It's not just about, it's not just about how many ads can I do, right? You're going to have to stand up against everyone else, and you're going to have to have good ideas, right? And you can put your name on every billboard, but if your ideas stink, people will know that, and people have the opportunity to vote on it. We don't have the answer yet, right? We don't have that answer that, you know, how will this come back? The money in politics part. But we are at that piece we're working out, but we are at least going to empower the voter. And by empowering the voter candidates have more people that they can go for, because at the end, the only thing that matters is the votes. So that's a great question. You just got to kind of deconstruct a little bit. And now, you know, I wasn't trying to fit approval voting in a box, but I believe that. I believe that, you know, you have more candidates. They'll have better ideas. And, you know, we see that in the Democratic presidential primary, we just had, there are people who have great ideas, right? Really good ideas. They're really flooded to the top. And what, and we see in our research, they could not just get past the plurality voting, right? And we all know too, people get money to winners, right? They get money to people I think are going to win, right? I think if this changes who may win, it can change who gets money. All right. Well, I think Brian still has his hand up. So I'll go ahead and unmute him. All right. Thanks. I thought maybe you guys are going to have a pitch already pretty much distilled and ready to hand out for us to memorize. This is kind of what I was thinking, but I'm a little bit confused because it seems to me that the city or the campaign. That we're trying to get approval voting implemented in is going to dictate what the pitch is going to be. I didn't know how much of it was campaign or city specific and how much of it was personal, because I guess if I'm at a Thanksgiving table, talking to relatives about approval voting, I have every personal pitch. And for what you did in St. Louis, I would think everybody's going door to door pretty much would use a generic pitch, but what do you say about that? Oh, sorry, Chris. I didn't mean to jump in. So, so Brian, I think that you bring up a really good point here and that's the point of framing. We could certainly, I mean, we have tried to develop some resources on the CES website. One of those was a letter to the editor template. But in that workshop that we did recently, we had a newspaper veteran from Arkansas come and talk about his experience with that and he said, look, he's like, we can tell when there's a letter writing campaign, we don't publish them. I think the same thing can be said with elevator pitches. People can tell when you came and you just reversed some lines. It's going to sound disingenuous. People aren't going to pick it up. It's a little bit more work, but I take second. I know Brian, I'm not him. We both live in Arkansas. Brian, you have a really great story, I think, and I think it just depends on who you're talking to. So, certainly, we can talk about if there's not an active campaign happening, we can talk about maybe the Democratic primary that Chris just mentioned. And that's very salient for a lot of people. But if you know the person that you're talking to it, someone at the dinner table, maybe it's the mayoral race in Little Rock, or maybe it's the governor's race that you talk about. So, there is an aspect of knowing your audience. I would say, in my opinion, when I have had to do pitching, if I don't know someone's background or I'm not from the area, I try to stick with national politics. And then just be very, very careful that you don't seem like you're picking any one candidate as your favorite because you also might alienate someone who doesn't believe the same way that you do. Yeah, well said by Kirsten. Again, Brian, just real quick, your story is the only story that people care about, right?  They want to hear you, why you think it's good. And that's what we push for, we try really hard at CES to people tell us all the time exactly what you said, Brian, just tell me what to say, I'll say it, right? And you're not wrong, you know, to believe that. But we know what is powerful and to grow this movement in general is people like yourself, you know, thinking through, you know, this is why we do this exercise when you're not put on the spot, right? You do this exercise at a time. So if you ever need to, you say, you know, oh, I'm going to bring up how I worked in that campaign, I'm going to bring up this and that. We've got another question in here from Mindy. She says, is the goal here to run for a position yourself or is the goal to sign up a lot of people to run in an election approval voting is not well defined in this exercise. So, so first up, Mindy, we, we advocate for approval voting. And then I'm sure there will be two or three people but links in the chat after I say that so it's type of voting where you vote for all the people that you like. And then we'll let the articles you will get in the meantime and help explain that. What we are pushing, if anything we're pushing for is assuming you're talking to a bunch of people have no clue what that means and how it may help them, right? What it means to you, how it may help them. That's what we're talking about. And we're using this specifically to, you know, to get people thinking about, okay, how would I pitch a friend? How would I pitch the legal women voters on supporting this? That's, that's normally kind of what we're looking for. And I believe that Colin has helped us out here with a list of common complaints about the status quo that he thinks approval voting would improve. So, he says extreme partisan popularity contest personality contest horse race voter suppression low turnout the electoral college my candidate lost money in politics. No good candidates. I'm just scratching their head right now those are all really good answers but I do think it would be interesting. We only have a few of you here so I mean, you're welcome to put it in the chat or if you just want to unmute yourself. I'd be really interested I think something that we don't talk about a lot at CES because it can get more partisan and we are totally non partisan is specific topics that you think would be improved by approval voting. And I'm going to pick on Michael for a second know that Michael cares a lot about environmental causes and that's a lot of the reason he cares about approval voting. So, if anybody wants to share in the chat what their, you know, particular policy issues that are that they care about that might inspire some people to. I don't think my goal is on the chat anymore. Oh, there he is. Okay, sorry. I thought he had just left. Okay, yeah, the videos went out of order at the top of my screen. So you can put on meet yourself Michael. Yeah, was sorry was that that was a question to me. No, I don't I don't think so I think she was just making sure that you were still on there and I was just saying that environmental issues were an issue that you care about but Michael is there anything else that you can think of policy wise that you care about that is why you are interested in Yeah well I think the fundamental problem for me approval voting solves this fundamental problem of having elected representatives who don't who aren't responsive to what voters want. And I think there are tons and tons of things that voters want that are that are very, you know, widely popular things that the government ought to be doing it isn't doing simply because they're not they're more responsive to moneyed to the will of the voters. And that's because the voters can't really say what they want with our voting system so saving the planet top of the list. You know, if you believe that we should have universal health care or if you believe in, you know, supports like that or wrote down a list of things once. See if I have it at hand. I'm filling up his list and because we are going to post this on YouTube later and share it on social media I did just want to remind everyone that I know that we may not want to share our elevator pitches here live. But if you are interested in having your pitch reviewed, even if it's just written out or if you want to film yourself you can send it to us at contact at election science.org. We're going to put a June 1 deadline on that but as long as you send it to us by then we're happy to review it provides some helpful feedback so that you can hone the pitch. There are some policies that I think are sort of things that people might care about that are problems that aren't getting fixed, because of unresponsive politicians. And this is just my own list. So I read it off. Please. Change lack of health care for education lack of elder care lack of childcare lack of parental leave too much corporate influence over politicians. Corporate welfare Amazon doesn't pay taxes. Verizon gets to deduct what it pays its employees but as an actor I don't get to deduct what I pay my agents. There are large corporations against everyone else low voter turnout dissatisfaction with electric representatives lack of new ideas or parties and elections gerrymandering increasingly complex and unfair laws that require the hiring of revolving door consultants. There we go. I think those are all great. Does anybody else want to share anything else or have any questions. It looks like Brian may have raised his hand again. I had this interesting idea a while back that I had missed mentioned to Kirsten before, but you had mentioned ending on a perfect world high note. And I really love that short little video that I've seen on the trophic cascade that happened in Yellowstone National Park when all they did was introduce wolves, and they step back, and they had this massive this amazing ripple effect. And that's sort of my view of what approval would do to our elections and our probably our whole political landscape and I wonder what you guys thought of that idea. I love that. I need to grab that link and put that in the YouTube description but also maybe in the chat for people who aren't familiar with it because Colin said Brian maybe stealing his question and so I think we may have may have been on the same wavelength but yeah I think that that's a great example, Brian I mean what a great way to explain to someone the importance of protecting our environment but in a really positive way that just leaves you feeling like there are possibilities to do good. I also think about like what's happening right now when we're talking about this pandemic and there are so many bad things that are happening but then we look and we see these stories of people in India being able to see mountain ranges that they haven't been able to see in their lifetime because there's been so much pollution right. That's pretty cool. So, I will, I will jump on Colin's question he asked to explain the perfect world a little bit more. And then, you know, and does approval voting, create a perfect world, well yeah if you know if you want to be, you know, just rhetorical, but the perfect world Colin is we simply what they said right, imagining what the outcome is not what the outcome is not right. And by what I mean by that is, we often talk about a world without perfect example, you know, parts without trash, you know, no litter, you know, clean it, but right you're thinking about the trash, right you're not thinking about the park. Is that enough is a good example like I want you to think about a clean and pristine park with, you know, ducks back on the pond and kids playing on the playground and great. I was talking about the trash, you know, the whole thing could have been about we need recycling campaign right, but I want you to focus on what it is, not what it is not.  And we think approval voting. It's a nice bow is, you know, we think democracy is the park. Right. We think democracy is beautiful and good. There's a lot of trash on it. Right. And I don't want us and we focus endlessly on the trash. Right. But we think with approval voting. It's a way for us to clean the park. Right. It's for us to get what we want, which is a clean park. And that's what I want you to think about is think about either at the national level, or the local level. What does that look like, you know, and a lot of times it just boils down to hey if people listen to us, we could get X, we could get why exactly like Michael said, right, because the point is, people listening. And I want to make one other note there to just to kind of wrap this up in terms of selling things I think we always want to be really careful that we're not over promising and then under delivering that's a problem. But I also think that the other thing we should consider is, you know, if you walked into a job interview and you were, and somebody said why should we hire you for this position, you probably wouldn't say, I'm a pretty good candidate. Seven out of 10 of the criteria on your list and I'm a pretty hard worker, except on days where it's warm and I prefer to be in the mountains hiking with my friends. Like, that's the honest to God answer right for most of us. We're not perfect, but that doesn't sell things. That's not how Apple sells you a new phone. That's not how you sell yourself to an employer. I would encourage you to think of it that way too, that we do have to create sometimes a picture that is not totally accurate, but is not a flying either. It's a fine line to walk. Maybe we have time for one more. I saw Kenita had her hand raised. Yeah, I was just about to say, can you just cut her hand up so I think this will be the last question here. So, Kenita, you can go ahead. I'm still trying to get a sense of when approval voting is useful. And when it's not, I mean, is it useful for when something is just a yes no question or if there's just one candidate versus another quest candidate, all of the approval voting things that I see are when there are three or more candidates and you're choosing a number of them that you approve of. But if, you know, if it's just yes or no. Well, you people probably don't approve of both yes and no. So, is it, does it devolve to being the same as plurality voting if they're only two. Yeah, so I can go ahead and answer that real quick. You're exactly right, Kenita, if there are only two candidates in a race or if you're asking a yes or no question like, you know, on a school, a school levy for example. Are we going to let to pass the levy or not in those cases. Yeah, you don't you don't need approval voting approval voting is for cases where you have more than two candidates or more than two options. That way you're not splitting the vote amongst, you know, various options that people might actually agree with. Does that make sense. Yeah, I'm just trying to find the most. If I'm trying to get the concept of approval voting off to people around to people trying to, you know, show the maximum number of cases where it would be useful. Sure. I think, and I can like Kirsten or Chris chime in here too but I think a great. A great example here is primaries, because in primaries there's always tons of candidates running right and then in the past couple presidential elections we've seen even bigger lists of candidates running in the primaries than we saw before. So I think that's a really relatable and easy example for you to use with people. I think, I think we have to run, but I first I want to say thank you to everyone who came. Please send us your your pitches your, your, you can send it to our email which we put in the chat will send out afterwards. If you ever have any questions or if you want to try to give us your pitch, your best pitch. This, let's have it. Thank you very much. Yes, thanks everyone have a great day.