Welcome back to the great outdoors everybody. I have got a challenge video for you today 24 hours me in the silver bullet. I'm gonna be camping out Trying to catch some fish to eat. I've got pretty much everything I need to survive out here on the lake for 24 hours But we will need to be catching some fish for dinner today's video sponsor and literally powering us through the next 24 hours is going to be Blue Eddy an awesome product. So while we're launching the boat, let me tell you about it This is the Blue Eddy AC 180 and this thing blows away any other power station I've ever used and you will not believe how much power it packs Having a portable power station is an essential part of what I do because I'm always having to carry cameras and equipment with Me to recharge and I do a lot of truck camping a lot of hunting and fishing trips that I need that extra power for But it's also a great thing just to have around the house for Emergencies and just to power those things that you don't want to run a long extension court to Blue Eddy hit the nail on the head with this AC 180 because it's the perfect match of size power and affordability This has 1,800 watts of total output and it's got 1,152 watt hours. What does that mean? That means you're gonna be able to run a lot of your high output electrical items Like your portable tools saws drills your heating elements Heaters space heaters things like that off this in a portable unit most units most power stations that are Up to around 2,000 watts of output are very heavy and bulky and big This is something that you can pick up and then you can still run a lot of those high output items on My favorite things about this AC 180 is it's very simple construction You know, I'm rough on my equipment things gonna be riding around on the truck. It's very very solid unit and simple It's got four AC outputs. It's got multiple DC USB ports with a cigarette lighter as well And you can easily switch from AC to DC power when it does come time to recharge this unit It blows away any other portable power station. I've ever owned 1,400 watts of AC input you're gonna get about an 80% charge in 45 minutes That's incredible. So quick trip in recharge it on AC and you're gonna be good to go with Days of power again on this unit You can also hook it up to the solar panels and recharge it that way if you are a truck or a trailer camper even RV this is a must right here You know the whole point of having a unit like this is to have quiet efficient power. This thing runs at 40 Decibels allows you to enjoy everything and not interrupt conversations.  It just ruins the camping trip It's a good idea for everyone to keep something like this at home as well Just in case the power goes out for a little while in those emergencies You can keep your refrigerators running keep that food secure anything else that you need to run This is a good idea as just having as a backup if you need it the price on these for 1,800 watts of output is really affordable guys, so go check them out There's a link in the description Secure one of these for your outdoor adventures and home security We'll be using this to power us through the rest of the trip on board the silver bullet for 24 hours So let's get on with the challenge Leaving the dock My nemesis leg Ray Roberts huge leg got a state park on it I kind of want to get lost in here want to spend an over night to bond with it Maybe that will help me with fishing out here. So throughout today's video We were going to be utilizing the Blue Eddy AC 180. It's going to be powering our refrigerator Our camera batteries. I can even recharge the boat I've got a night fishing live going to try a little night fishing as well You guys know I use the refrigerator a lot Especially in the summer Don't have to worry about ice. It's really nice. So 24 hours. It'll be no problem with that system Okay, I've got all the gear strapped down in the back. I'll do a gear run through with you guys once we get into our first spot If you guys can see my watch Says 105 105 we're gonna officially end the challenge at one. I was on the water Probably about 12 30, but we'll call it one. So in terms of gear already told you about the Blue Eddy We've got the Dometic refrigerator On the back here. I've got my my sleeping pad my cowboy roll. I've never used it down on the boat. So It's hot We're gonna see how that works out, but I have a cook kit and one of these Husky boxes and then I've got basically a sleep kit and the other one and some other little extras To hopefully get us through the bug situation mosquitoes have been terrible. So We could get eaten alive out here. Now. My goal is to catch some food for dinner White bass should be prevalent They usually cooperate. We'll see It's middle of the day right now.  I mean bluegill with giant bass. I think is what we're dealing with There we go.  I think that one will measure. Let's go Let's go 11 inch for baby. Oh Yes Mmm god, that just feels different when you don't have anything to eat That just hits a little different Yes That one crappie will pretty much sustain me. I got bombarded by bluegills. They bit one of my bumping bug legs off I think there's some huge catfish in there, too That's part of what that is Protein in the box y'all it's taking me two hours to catch a couple fish But I got a couple fish feeling better. Let's do a blue eddy power check up and see how much power we've got in here after two hours Running the fridge in the heat and hear the fan cutting on in here. It's really quiet 92% still let's go see if we can find us another brush pile That's got some hog jammers on it like this one. They just didn't want to buy it I don't know they were definitely in there and there was bluegill and he looked amazing There's another one just across the way that I found last time I was out here and it It might be good, too. So let's go check it out and see if we can catch a big haul bass Brush pile number two looks like a very similar situation. There's not as many fish, but Biggins hanging on top just chunked a swim bait out here. I'm gonna throw that on the peak and see what happens Absolutely nothing Got him to react to it That was awesome He was really close to the boat. I just Sped it up real quick. Yeah, but you're strong. I've got a big muscle for you I lost my swim bait, but Got the fish. It's a nice three and a half four pounder That's how it's supposed to happen right there First cast there was a bigger one and this one was on top of a tree and he tagged it Whoo, baby. There we go 24 hour challenge of our having fun and we got dinner good times Get old summer brush pile bass That's a good way to catch these deep brush ball brush pal bass and Also like long extended points and drop-offs Instead of throwing it on the the weighted one Like I've got over here Well, they're both weighted, but this is a weighted weedless hook basically It's just got a this is a 3-8 ounce. I think maybe might even be a quarter on here So really good for like 10 foot or less This is a three-quarter ounce jighead Throw something like that. It's got some got some pop on it So throw that on the jighead and I'll probably not get another bite, but you never know I might fire up the school here Things could get crazy So I'm gonna do Just a slight mod here and Just kiss the nose off Just to give it a flat surface to wedge up against And just thread it through and If you want to get synomical about it like what I did with that last one is I took the used Swim baits off this because this has a screw lock in the nose And that will rip out eventually after you catch enough fish on it But you can take that snip it a little bit and you can still get some clean plastic behind it So you can save your ones use on the On the belly weighted hook and throw them on the jighead It's definitely different on the water when you know, you're gonna be sleeping out here Just kind of taking it breezy right now. I'm idling over things. I've never idle it around Looking for brush rocks Right now is like prime offshore fishing you know three to Five o'clock in the afternoon, so I'm just looking slak is humongous. It's got a lot of good deep contours and I'm sure if I spent enough hours out here. I could find something really cool We are hooked up boys spoon in the flats for kitty cats Yes, sir big blues. It's my second one I've hooked I am figuring something out about catfish that is pretty crazy These blue cats like to eat spoons They're so close to the bottom. They look like the bottom This one's got leeches all over it But I just had another one slam it About five minutes before this one no barbs That is tasty dinner my friends.  So I Just stopped off at a point and happened to see movement out here about 26 feet of water and I Got bamboozled on the spoon getting bamboozled right now. It's a it's a tack mode down there. Oh, yeah You can see the fish Look at them following it. They're like, where where are you going man? What do you got? Give it to me? There's a large object amongst The little guys here See what we got going on Spoon is going in. Oh, we got him. I think we got him Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's a largey. No, it's not Thought it was gonna be the way it was coming Coming up to the top just a big old white bass Mission accomplished on dinner all the way. I think I'm gonna do catfish dinner tonight Maybe even crappie breakfasts now Possibly midnight crappie snack. Yeah, maybe stay up and fish got a little special Light right here. This glows underwater. I can plug this in And drop down and fish on it for crappie or bass or whatever whatever wants to buy it. We also might get Some rain. I've been looking at the forecast. It's looking like a 70% chance right now The wee hours possibly tomorrow morning mid-morning, so That should be fun. So you guys stay tuned Found me a nice little calm cove With some shade on the way give another hour We'll go ahead start cleaning up our catfish Cooking it up and it's almost six o'clock power check On the blue Eddie We are at 84% ladies and gentlemen. It says we have 96 hours left I like this spot. I might actually sleep here The bugs are gonna be an issue because the woods is close. They're gonna fly on out and attack me Let's get our kitty cat out of the live well. We're probably gonna have to expire it first give it the old bonk and then We'll get the water. I've never cleaned a fish with my feet in the water. So this should be interesting already see some flies bugs inside of here is my cook kit so I've got A lot of a kutramah got spices Got stuff for tea even got some honey in there Got her propane. Got our trusty Coleman And we've got stuff to eat with and of course Don't leave home without a filet knife got a filet knife in there I've also got another one that I keep in the bass boat and I've even got a Little rug so we can cook on top of that way if we have anything hot We don't want want it getting on our actual boat carpet. So We're all set up here. This thing's really digging in This things are really awesome. I do like these wrappers We just expired our catfish using the old rock method It's actually so nice right here on the bank and I've got a lay down that I'm just gonna carry the catfish over there If we lay them up, I'm not even gonna get the goo on the silver bullet Excuse me. I'll be right back Look at how beautiful that is y'all Hardly any red in that meat the blue catfish just has Tremendous meat. I mean, they're awesome. I've been eating them a lot lately at home and Blackened I was able to do the skinning method just barely Where I didn't have to pull the skin off. I just did it with the filet knife I did it on log, which wasn't the best surface, but still got most of the meat off of it So we'll do the next one and then we'll throw in the skillet throw this one in the fridge for now It is now time to start cooking nice shade over here I'm gonna get some dinner Maybe get an hour 30 minutes a daylight get a topwater explosion. Hopefully all right. Let's hope that our propane works Got me a little lighting device here ferro rod See if this works So go So one of the reasons that I wanted to do this challenge was because I'm gonna love the outdoors. I've I've been thinking about doing this challenge for a while, but I got asked To send in some information for casting for the show alone Someone on casting was interested In me just from watching the channel and it I didn't get cast for the show Don't worry. It got me thinking like could I could I do that? let me know in the comments if you like this kind of stuff and I will push myself because I'm genuine genuine I Don't know how to talk, but I can just tell you I'm very interested in the survival aspect of things It goes right along with hunting fishing Especially backcountry hunting or skillet is smoking. We should probably put some butter in it Just thought I'd give you a little back story to what's going on here. Oh, yeah We are going to butter the heck out of that y'all can't have too much butter No such thing Okay, turn that down turn that down. We got a nice brown butter there. That's that's pretty much perfect Whatever just bit me is not perfect.  I usually do not do a binder on the fish I'm glad I put my little my little rug down because Made ourselves a juicy mess right here Butters hot catfish quadrants Going in. Yeah, buddy. We're looking about ready for a flip y'all Mmm Looking pretty perfect our perfectly seasoned cast iron Doing nicely. I think just a few more minutes and this is gonna be good to go. So we've got a fresh lemon That's gonna be a tasty treat on top. Then I've also got some beats time check We are six hours in so let's get a blue eddy update. I am charging a few more things on This now not just the fridge is going I've been charging my light for tonight Also my GoPro batteries And we're at 81% Says ninety nine point nine hours. It just means Kind of infinite at the level. It's only pulling two watts right now because fridge is Just out of temperature at likes right now. It's not it's not on it's not running Just kind of settled we don't have the sun on us right now So it's it's not gonna pull as much power just as an experiment for fun when I got back from a recent trip I left the blue eddy and my Dometic in the back of my truck and I left it running and It lasted five and a half days Five and a half days, and that wasn't like super hot temperatures, but that's pretty darn good. All right Let's just see what we're dealing with here Cut the heat off.  Come on now. Come on holler at me blue cat caught About three and a half hours ago SPG Takes it home every time y'all That pop in it is amazing. Okay. I'm gonna add a little lemon to that Don't even need it really needs no catch up That was a fine piece of meat fresh slice of limo clean the hands Some of the juices But usually I like to clean this cast iron pretty soon after I'm done cooking it. I've got a little metal scraper it's a chain scraper and Why it's still hot not like piping hot why it's still hot Put a little water in it, and I'll just scrape it with that Rarely use soap. I'll use a little bit of camp suds if you know what that is rinse it out good with water And I'll even re-butter it. I don't re-grease it nothing And it's good. This is this this baby's been with me on a lot of different adventures this blue catfish I Think is leading the pack for me now on Tastiest freshwater fish now when I taste a crappie. I'm like I should go cat fishing more I'm sad to say that it hurts me to say that but they are Fantastic, especially the blue cats.  I got a catfish Try this recipe. Okay, put it in a either a cast iron Or a just stainless steel skillet Go on a medium-high heat Sear it with some butter and some spices Do one flip on it? Then Already have your oven heated to 375 Throw it in that oven for about eight to ten minutes Don't flip it Pull it out. Let it rest a few minutes Tell me what you think because I've been doing that at home and it is it's the jam Okay, I'm done with dinner. I think I'm going to boot that crappie actually out of the live well because that catfish was extremely feeling delicious and I feel very confident about the white bass. We are about to Hopefully get a sundown top water bite. That's the next goal Let's let this guy go and then let's get to fishing You were so lucky that I caught that catfish. See ya Running out light Sneaking up on me With some clouds. I just had one Oh, I have a fish. What is this? Oh my gosh It's so small. I didn't even feel it spotted bass first official night bass Captured, okay, another species today y'all. Holy cow Get it. I might be approaching a record personal record for myself for most Most species in one day lights are officially on This is when things get real interesting. I know you can't see me right now, but We found ourselves a nice tree going night dangling. Okay.  It's really cool Send that down a little bit See if we can attract some fish. I've got some trees They're pretty close to me here. I don't know if you can see those First customer right here, baby. I don't know what kind of minnow this is He's he's darting around I want to see some big dark bass shadows down there All right guys, there's the light Right there and you could start to see there's some activity Forming below right here. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool to be able to see this on the life scope. I Think it's almost time to drop a crappie jig down there There's tons of life under the boat y'all. So I've got the life scope sitting facing the light and I've I've got the back graph Connected to the front life scope Transducer so I can sit in my seat and watch life scope. It's the best Late night boat entertainment there is Okay guys updates We just got our first fish In the boat night fishing. That's a crappie Night fishing under the lights man. I Think that's my first time just dropping a light down in the middle of the lake and getting a fish Got that fish on the Chubby grubby. Oh, oh, just have another one Before bed update. We got ourselves a white bass everybody Send them back down into the light Okay, we got our late night entertainment with our fishing light pretty fun stuff So I can continue Dangling around there if I see any extra big fish coming in now. It's It's time for bed set up. So let's grab the roll By the way, my camera light that I'm running right now is on AC power and it's powered through the Blue Eddie Let's unbuckle this look at that. It is like my front boat deck Was made for this. Oh, yeah We're gonna sleep pretty good They are just coming in y'all They are just coming in Oh That's gonna be a white bass Stuck in the light. Oh No stuck in my light. I get the light and the fish It's like either get a white bass or a crappie Wa bam Here we go guys. That's how I'm gonna end the night right there. That's fun times I'll see you guys in the morning. We survived the night. There was a storm. There was some bad winds that came in and I was just Bobbing up and down got a little tough, but we made it. What a beautiful way to wake up though. Oh my gosh Time to slip on the crocs Look for a topwater body. I think I see some birds that are going They're all flying over here It's got to be something going on. All right Let's take this opportunity to get a blue eddy power check power check 64 percent Still so ran the fridge all night at 35 degrees and it is good to go Definitely some shad spawning right here I can see the shed spot. It's got popped Something's popping me First casket and bottled by a white bass. Let's see what this is Start today I'll take a first cast Topwater eat. Oh my gosh. I have a gar possibly Gar on top water Is that a thing? Yes, it is You know how we do it big old snappy nose. Let's see. How can I unhook you? I'm losing a finger this morning. It's my first topwater Connection on a gar and I got him Unhooked himself doesn't seem like a long time to you've been out here about 18 didn't get the best sleep Hungry But at least it's not raining right now, so I probably should have kept all those white bass I Was expecting explosions just to keep happening and that shats ball lasted Like 30 to 40 minutes. I have fished so much in this 24 hours that you know, normally in the morning I'm like, oh my god. Yeah, I'm missing this. I gotta I gotta zip around I gotta gotta make sure I'm on the bite and this morning. I'm like, well, you know, I fish till 12 30 at night I by the way ended up catching Six scrappy and I think four or five white bass. It's pretty fun. Just watching them on the live scope but Fished all day yesterday, so I'm good on the fish department. We're trying to try to survive here at this point So I'm getting hungry and eat some food I've got One more water. I believe to last me Five hours Tail hooked a channel cat. That's a new species folks Oh, buddy's trying to get me Kind of feels like a catfish And it's a drum. That's what it is. It's a it's a big old mega school of drums Weird we have made it 24 hours. Y'all we did it We did it and I think we caught every species in the lake Except maybe a yellow catfish, but I really do think we caught every fish species in the lake We loaded the boat ended with 53 power on the blue eddy Let me show you guys something that is really cool about this now now for me going to Remote areas I want to be able to do this where I can carry a solar panel with me to recharge this thing Keep it on the deck during the day the solar panel charge it up And then recharge the boat at night if I don't have Power if I don't have ac power, you know, don't need an extension cord or anything I'm just plugging in right here. Check this out So right now I am running both I'm running both of my chargers right now Now this has already gone down to 28 percent in about 20 minutes But I have 1200 watts coming out of it right now So that is my my lithium charger right there And then I've got my Minn Kota over there charging my two agms So this thing pulls The juice so I'm going to continue to use this on some other trips and see how far we can really get You know recharging it with solar how much I can get during the day How much is it really charge up the batteries? I'm assuming I'm probably going to get like Uh half a charge or three quarters of a charge with this, but I don't know we'll see And that is it for this adventure y'all. Thanks for hanging with me 24 hours with the silver bullet And also if you like this sort of thing if you like the challenges, let me know in the comments I would be willing to go to some other bodies of water and Do a do a Intimate overnight And also don't forget to go check out blue eddy in the description guys. They uh, I don't Promote any products that I don't use and actually believe in So this is one that I had tested they sent it to me and I was like wow this legitimately is the best one that I have Used so check them out. I think you guys would be happy that you get one And thank you for tuning in for another outdoor adventure. I will see you soon on another one


Welcome back to Vote for Vermont. My name is Ben Kinsley. I am the co-host, co-producer of the show. And tonight our host, Pat McDonald, is out. She's doing some traveling, so I have Executive Director of Campaign for Vermont, Eric with me. And we also have a guest, a very cool guest tonight. We have an interesting topic to discuss. We have Betty from the Vermont League of Women Voters and the St. Alvin, or the St. John'sbury chapter, correct? And we're talking about rank choice voting and instant runoff voting, which is a very interesting topic. So with that, we can dive right in. So Betty, tell us a little bit more about rank, well, actually first, let's talk about you a little bit and to talk about your background, we ask all of our guests to do that and then talk about, move on to the topic of the evening. So I'm Betty Keller, as you said. And I guess the, probably when I was 12 years old, I wouldn't have wanted to be introduced this way, but I'd say a pretty core part of my identity is I'm a PK, which is a preacher's kid. Okay. And so my big life choices are based on what I believe I am called to do. Very cool. And so I grew up, my early years in Illinois, my father was going through college and seminary. We have my mother working full time and my grandmother caring for us in the home, which is just such a wonderful blessing that we had. And his first church was in rural Illinois and his first churches, he had two churches part time in each and then his second set of churches was in East Montpelier, Vermont. So we moved here before sixth grade for me. Spent my first couple of months on Joe's pond until the percentage was available. And thought I was gonna go into journalism and then my junior year of college decided that I was doing a little one week shadowing experience in Boston at Houghton Mifflin and said, you know, I'm not really sure this is what I wanna do. And so a lot of prayer and reflection and decided that I was called to go into medicine and went to UVM College of Medicine, trained for family practice and including the full range, including obstetrics at the University of Utah, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and served on the faculty there for a year, worked in St. John'sbury, family medicine obstetrics. It was hard working full time. By that time I had three children. It was hard working full time and being on call every other day. So we thought we would try an HMO, CHP was in Burlington and see if part time work better.  Now I was doing the HMO setting. So I'd been in a variety of practice and said, you know, none of them really works right. And I'm not seeing my kids enough and I don't wanna practice medicine until we have a better system.  The childcare had been tough. And so I just decided I was called to be home and I've been home ever since. And as the kids grew, I started volunteering in more areas. And about 2004 I started doing media around racism in Vermont and then switched over to healthcare since I have a lot of expertise in that area so I could actually do a good job of interviewing people. And so moved over toward that in the 2008-ish range was very active while we were trying to get a universal healthcare system here in Vermont, which is the fiscally responsible way to provide healthcare for your citizens. And I firmly believe that Americans are smart enough that if all of Europe and Canada and Australia can all do it, then I'm sure that we can do it too. Just have to figure out politically how to get there. And so in the course of this, it came to me that until we can get our political system to work as a better democracy, more reflective of the people who live here, that we will not get a good healthcare system. So I, in 2000, so I think spring of 2016 is when I started becoming more active in the League of Women Voters. And the draw for the League of Women Voters is it's nonpartisan and it's grassroots and it's just very firmly grounded on voter participation and encouraging people to be active participants in the democracy becoming informed. And that was just really calling to me as a way to try to make change.  Right, I have been a professional volunteer for a while now. Right, I have volunteered for a P and H P that's a Physicians for National Health Care, Health Program and a volunteer at NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And a volunteer, well through my Church of Chorus, the United Church of Christ, I was working on the uprooting racism task force is when I first got involved in the media. And then the League of Women Voters now. So tell us briefly a little bit more about League of Women Voters of Vermont, what your main focus areas are, what mission, what's your mission? Oh, so I guess I could just, for anybody who might be interested in participating with League of Women Voters, it's a national organization since 19 or 20, right around the time women were getting the vote and we needed to teach women, how do you vote? How do you register, how do you vote? How do you make the time to get to the polls and how do you learn about the candidates and the issues enough to vote as an informed citizen? And then working with immigrants over the years, in the past we have been much more open to our immigrants because we were immigrants. My own, all of our families were immigrants and those were 100% Native American. And so over the years it's been important to teach our immigrants and our refugees how to vote, how to be active participants in our democracy. And so that focus has been ongoing throughout the years that League of Women Voters has been working. There are state chapters and within each state there can be, so those are called leagues and within each state there can be leagues also, so we have leagues in the Chittany County area and in Central Vermont. St. John's Creek's not actually technically a league, we call it a unit because we're not big enough with enough paying members to call us a league. But we're actually one of the most active areas in the state. And are there any other of those like chapters, those around the state, yeah.  In the White River Junction area there was one a few years ago and it just ran out of volunteers to put that time into it. You have to either recruit new people or people move. Some of those have not been as active recently. But there are folks in the Rolanda area and the Bennington area but they're various levels of activity. Gotcha. And what are the kind of the main focus areas for the league right now? I know I've worked with a couple folks of the league in the past on different policy areas but what's kind of the big broad strokes right now? And you want to know in Vermont or in the nation? In Vermont specifically. Okay, right. So, well voter registration is always, every year you have new crop of 18 year olds who have not voted before and we want to get them all to feel like that is part of who they are. That's their responsibility and their blessing. And we are on college campuses, we're at high schools, things like that, at citizen naturalization ceremonies. And also in the legislature, advocating for things like voter registration automatic, registration through driver's license and that sort of thing. We don't, a lot of those things have already been done in Vermont, we've. Same day voter registration. Yeah, we have, our state is actually pretty advanced as far as like having open primaries and not having states trying to get rid of voters off the polls just based on oh they missed one election or two elections and so we take them off the polls, we don't do that here. And so we don't have to, and our polling places are fair. We're not trying to make people travel 30 miles to get to a polling place or closing them down in parts of town where the poor people live or anything like that which is happening across the country in a number of different places. And we don't have polling places getting changed the last minute, oh my gosh, when I was, so legal women voters as nonpartisans. The next thing I'm gonna tell you is something that I do as Betty Keller. I don't do it as a legal women voters, okay? But when I was in New York City during the primaries, I was there for a reunion of a summer school program that I'd gone to and I was knocking on doors for Bernie in Brooklyn. And so in Brooklyn, the polling places changed. I was trying to tell people that their polling place was at that school and they said, oh no, I got this notice from school saying that they're not gonna be the polling place. So some, there was this mixed message of like is it gonna be at the school or not? Like how could you be changing this on the Friday before the election? So, but we don't do that kind of stuff here. I'm not aware of it happening here. Yeah, I feel like this is pretty much always like a set place and it doesn't change a whole lot. Yeah, I mean you might have to change if you used to do it in the local Catholic school and now you want to do it in a non-partisan and non-religious place. So in St. John'sburg it used to be in the Adams school, but then when they built a new school, it became Father Lively Center and so it was a religious place and then we moved it to our new school. So, you know, it's pretty straightforward. Right. It's not that hard to find where you're supposed to vote. And the primary that was just a few weeks ago was the first time I believe that we've actually implemented same-day voter registration. Like it was the first vote where someone could go in and register a same day at their polling location. Uh-huh, okay. So I think the numbers are relatively low. I don't know that there's a whole lot of awareness about it the first time around, but. Right, whenever you pass new legislation, there's a little lag until people figure it out. Yeah, so it's rolled out now I believe and hopefully people will take advantage of that. Right, so other things the League of Women Voters do is to inform people about the candidate's positions and it's not like we write up and can write something slanted about them. We send out questionnaires to them and ask them to send us, so it's in their own words. Right. Unfortunately, sometimes you have better response than others and it's kind of a useless manual if only one party's candidates respond and we can't really do anything with that because then it looks partisan. So we're in a little bit of a bind and so right now we're in flux about how we do that candidate information but we do continue to do our forums. So if a town asks us or if say the library wants to sponsor a forum or candidates from one party get together with candidates from other parties and they agree that they'd like a forum then or if citizens just say, hey, can you guys or organize this thing that's going on in our town and then we will take that on. So two years ago I did one in Lunenburg when we were requested this fall we're gonna be doing and we did one in St. John'sburg at that time and this fall we're definitely doing one in St. John'sburg I'm not sure where else we've been asked in my local area but that happens throughout the state. Yeah, one of the things I know from having worked with candidates in the past like there's so many of these questionnaires that they get it's hard to know like how hard to find time to respond to all of them, I think is what a lot of it runs into. So you think you might have a little copy and paste plan and it's like this is your position, pop it in there. Everyone should coordinate and have exactly the same survey question and just copy, paste and everything, yeah, so that's great. Are there any like legislative initiatives that you're leading into this year that are kinda gonna be the focus? Well, so the league has something that they call their program for the biennium and the national organization does it on the even years and the national program is to make democracy work and across the country any state where gerrymandering is a big issue they're focusing on gerrymandering. Other states where there has been and sometimes it's the same states where there are issues regarding pulling places getting moved and things like that then they're addressing that. In Vermont, we don't have issues with those things so much. In our state program, we decided to include civics education and I think there's something on climate as well and then also ranked choice voting. Now ranked choice voting has been on the program a number of years ago and actually they collaborated with a number of different nonprofit organizations and in 99, I think it was passed in one house or the other and then in 2000, it was passed in both houses but the governor vetoed it and a few years later, Burlington had asked to do ranked choice voting for its local elections so the councilman may or that sort of thing and for a town in Vermont to do something major like that they actually have to get state approval because it's their town charter. So they had to go through the state legislature and the state did end up approving it and then actually only one or two years like very few election cycles, they already turned around and came back and said we don't want this. Now that's another whole story. Yeah, there's a whole story behind that we might get to later. Might get to later. But ranked choice voting has been used successfully in a number of places and there are a lot of strong benefits for it and so I had wanted to look at trying to do that again and do better education around it this time. There wasn't enough education for the Burlington voters and there was a lot of misinformation. They didn't really understand how it worked. They didn't understand how it worked and when they saw the result they weren't sure that they liked it but also some parties really didn't like it so it might be better for the individual voter and for the community as a whole collectively looking at the voters but not for the parties necessarily all the time. But the League of Women Voters, that's not our concern so much is how the parties feel about something is it serving the voters? Right, it's serving the voters. Yeah, so it's an interesting proposition. I think ranked choice voting is a subset of instant runoff voting which people may be more familiar with. Right, I'm not sure if I'd say it was a subset of, I would have actually almost said instant runoff voting was a subset of ranked choice voting but anyway, they're related. They're not identical but they're related. Right, yeah and I think there's one country that uses it currently for national elections. I think Australia. Right, Australia is, yeah. And they've had it for several decades, right? Quite a long while, right. Now I'm not sure if this is true now but a few years ago when I was first starting to look at this, you had to rank every choice. Like if there were eight candidates you had to rank them all the way down to eight. Right. So the idea was then you 100% would definitely have a majority on whoever the candidate was even if it went through multiple rounds. If you tell people you rank as many as you want and it won't hurt your top candidate if you rank additional people, say there are eight candidates and you only rank the top three or four, well if you rank the three or four least favorite people then you eventually, there won't be anybody to look at for your next vote and then you may actually not have a full majority but it still would have been closer. So before we get too far down this road I think maybe we should back up a little bit and let's go and do a brief description of what ranked voting is. And I know we have a quick clip that we can show that's a good example of how it works and then maybe you can kinda run us through in layman's terms what it is, how it works and what it's supposed to be accomplished. So in ranked choice voting you rank your quarter of preference for these folks and it's used already in many professional organizations it's used by motion academy awards, motion picture awards, it's used in a number of different settings as well as being used in some towns in America, some countries, some states, only one state currently has proposed using it but they have to work out constitutional issues but the thing is you rank your candidates so you have your first choice, your second choice, your third choice and your fourth choice. And now we can take a look at how that plays out. So just to show you how ranked choice voting would work so you can actually see it, first I'll just explain that there are four candidates, blue, pink, coral, whatever, yellow and purple and on the ballot I would be putting down that blue is my first choice, coral is my second choice, then yellow and then purple. And the way this looks on this board here is that the blues on top of the coral, my second choice on top of the yellow and then my purple is my last choice and then my vote is gonna go counted with all the other blue first choices. Okay, so that's how that looks. And so that was my sample, I'll put that down here again now. So everybody voted, one of these would be mine and now we'll run through all the people who voted for blue first choice are here, yellow first choice are here, purple first choice are here and coral first choice are here. There are 20 voters so to get at least 50% because we wanna have a majority of people supporting the final selection. Then we would need to have 11 voters. Half would be 10, you have to have at least one more. So that's 11 voters and nobody got that many. The largest one we have is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven so this person would need four more votes for them to actually win this outright. If they'd gotten 11, the election would be done and they would have won. Now though, we have to go to the next step. Since nobody got a majority, we look to see who got the least votes and that would be yellow. And so with these yellow votes, we say, okay, so your candidate is eliminated and who is your second choice? And we'll give those votes to your second choice. So this is going to go to blue. This will go to pink and this will go to blue as well. So now we have six to seven to seven. So the one that has the least votes is blue and again, we'll be distributing those votes to the next choice. So I'll take off their second choice. It's actually the third choice for these two voters you'll recall and it's now down to the second choice for these other folks and this person's already been eliminated too. So that will go down here and you'll see now that Coral only got one of those votes and all the rest are going to purple. So purple is gonna win after all. You'll recall purple only had seven votes to start with but once you see, you know, when some candidates are eliminated, what did they end up with? They have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. So they have 12 votes total. That's more than 11. So they won this election. So hopefully that gave a little bit more of an illustration. It's obviously a little, it's a little more complicated than an actual voting scenario but that should give a pretty good idea of how this is supposed to work and what it's looking to achieve. Yeah, it's a pretty cool system because it really takes into account, trying to find, I think, the candidate that most people can get behind, right?  They may not be able to win over or at least, you know, win over other people that are in, that would vote for the other candidates in the race. So when you have, you know, a race where there's multiple seats that are multiple people running for the same seat, I think, is where you get a scenario where something like this makes a lot of sense. So this is a pretty cool system and you can get fairly complex with it when you have multiple candidates involved. What would you say the real benefits of a ranked choice voting system are? Well, the strongest benefit is that in the end, you hopefully do have a majority and if people didn't all list all the way down to the end, then you may not have majority, but it's way closer than what we currently do. So you have the person who hopefully had the majority support and another benefit is that you have less negative campaigning because you can tell if you're saying nasty things about candidate A, if candidate A doesn't get enough votes and those people go to their second choice, you think candidate A's supporters are gonna vote for you if you said nasty things about their candidate, their favorite candidate. True. So that reduces it by a lot and it doesn't hurt to vote for your favorite person and then the other people that you also can tolerate or you also think would be good candidates or whatever your range is. And a lot of people are really concerned about that. They're like, oh, if I really vote for, if I really vote for, I really, really want yellow, but actually pink is who is going to win or purplish is who is going to win. If I know in the end it's gonna be one of those two candidates, am I wasting my vote to vote for yellow? Right, and that's something that a lot of voters struggle with is like, am I really like this candidate? I don't really think they have a chance. Am I wasting my vote by voting for them? Right, so we call splitting the vote and wasting your vote are two things voters are very concerned about. And the League of Women Voters wants people to feel that their vote counts, that every person's gotta vote and that people will be enthusiastic about going to the polls, not stay home because well my vote doesn't count anyway. I wanted yellow and they're never gonna win so I'll stay home. Or well, yellow and pink are similar in their views and if I vote for yellow that will take a vote away from pink and maybe purple will win instead or something like that. So it really gives people more sense of choice and ownership. Yeah, and I think it makes sense when you have a race with multiple candidates. So when you have like a three-way race or a four-way race for one seat it makes a lot of sense to do something like this because there are some states that have runoff elections and this is kind of basically a runoff for all intents and purposes but it allows you to do a runoff vote calculation by counting your votes but not have to hold a whole new election which is expensive and then you don't have as much turnout in your runoff as you do in your original one. You run into all those kinds of problems where if you have a vote that's that close to this you can do it one vote and you can capture all of that in one. Right, right. So if you need to buy different computer systems or print up different ballots that can be a somewhat added expense. However, if you can eliminate the primary that's a huge expense you get rid of and if you can eliminate any runoffs and you wouldn't have had a runoff if there was a clear majority to begin with. So you may not be saving money on that and if it wasn't gonna happen anyway but if there is a runoff. Now the problem is that, well one problem is that some of these decisions about whether election requires a majority of just a plurality will win. It's all state by state and within a state and maybe town by town about what are the rules for how that works. So that in Vermont, for instance, our US House and Senate seats are just by plurality. So that's where you can have that vote splitting. So if you have one candidate who may be perceived as liberal and two who are perceived as conservative, people who are conservative are like torn on which one do they think is gonna win? Cause they wanna vote for the one they think will win to make sure that they get somebody that they like. And that's really unfortunate to have people having to think that way instead of thinking who I think would be the best candidate. Which, yeah, exactly. I was trying to make that calculation of who's gonna be the most successful candidate not necessarily who's gonna represent me the best. Right, right. Yeah, and the other thing about ranked choice voting if you can have more than two candidates from a party then that really frees up the party to have more choices on the ballot. So for instance, if you have an incumbent and they've been in there for 10 or 15 or whatever years and some people think, you know, they kinda like some fresh blood and other people like, wow, you really don't wanna lose that seat and he or she isn't saying they wanna back down yet, we don't wanna push them out, all that stuff, you know? You can just run both candidates and it doesn't hurt your incumbent to have a newcomer try it out. Right, yeah, and what I think is where a system like this could be really valuable for Vermont, we don't have too many races statewide where you have more than one candidate in a race except for in a primary, right? But if we had open generals and we got rid of primaries, then a system like this would make a whole lot of sense, I think. Right, so yeah, so they're different, happens different in different years. So for instance, a few years ago, we had five candidates just in the Democratic primary for governor. And seriously, none of them had even 30, they all were in the 20s or lower. Right. And so they're all pretty close. So in a circumstance like that, it's harder to say whether, you know, whether the first person gets eliminated was like so closely to the other three that maybe they would have been, you know, favored more by some of the other folks, but it still is so much better that if you have somebody in that one, you automatically give it to the one who got 26 instead of 24%. Right, I'm just thinking back to the 2010 primary where Pierre Shumlin won. That's what I'm talking about. And I think the margin was actually more than or less than two or 3%. I think it was like one and a half percent. It was small. Yeah, like I said, they were like 22 to 25 or 26. Yeah, exactly. It was like 3% from one to like fourth place. It was like kind of what it was. Right, right. And we have a race that's that close. It would have been nice to drop off the bottom candidate and see where those votes went. Exactly, and see where those votes went. Yeah, yeah. The other thing in Vermont is that, you know, I had said we have the plurality voting for our U.S. House and Senate. However, we require a majority for our governor. Right. We require a majority for the governor to be declared a winner in the election. But if there's not, we don't actually do a runoff for our governor. We put it into the legislature. And this almost happened two years ago, four years ago with Scott Milne, because Shumlin did not get a majority and so went to the legislature. Right, right. So yeah, I'm not sure why you said almost, because it actually did. It did. It did go to them. I was thinking, did I miss out on something there? Right, no, it did. And so from the League of Women Voters perspective, that's not honoring the voters' wishes, because you're guessing. You're guessing how the other 8% of people who voted for whatever other candidates were on there, the Libertarian, the Green Party, whatever, all those votes in a ranked choice voting system they would have been distributing, we would know what the voters actually wanted. And here you have legislators sitting there saying, well, I think we really need to vote for the plurality one, because that was the will of the people. And it's like, no, we don't know the will of the people. And if you choose, well, maybe if you can tell, looking at the other three candidates, who do we think those people would have wanted for a second choice? But the politicians are very nervous about their next election. And they're worried their constituents will second guess them and think that they didn't do the right thing and whatever. I remember this being a major debate at the time. Among the legislators about, do I vote for the plurality candidate or do I vote with the way my district went? And how do I vote my conscience? What do you do in that situation? Right. And the ranked choice voting would give you the answer. It wouldn't be thrown to the legislature. So another place that ranked choice voting is used actually in Louisiana for a number of years, like 20 or more years. They've had ranked choice voting for the presidential primaries for military and other overseas people because of the issue around getting, if the primary, something happens different, and then you can't print out the ballot in time for the changes or the general election. Right, and mail it and get it back. And so Louisiana's been doing the longest. And they actually do their House and Senate that way too. And then there's a couple other states that have done it more recently. I think Alabama and Mississippi, yep. And that's because states officiate their presidential primaries, correct? Right. They're not actually a federally officiated election like the general is. Is that correct? Well, wait. Actually, so the results of the general are that you're actually technically voting for an elector. Right. And then the states have to follow strict rules about what happens with those votes. But still, I mean, the electors can get guidance from laws that we write. So for instance, in Vermont, legislators, electors rather, electors are required to vote for a person in the same party as, how do I put this? So when you vote, if you think you're voting for candidate A for the election and that person's like who has been across the country campaigning everything, you're not actually voting for candidate A. You're voting for the electors who have promised to vote for candidate A. Right. And so if something happens and candidate A is suddenly not available or if the electors suddenly decide that candidate A is not an appropriate candidate because something has come out in the news or whatever, those electors have to choose somebody else from the same party. They can't just get somebody else random. Right. They have to choose somebody from the same party. In state by state, some are tied that way to parties, some are tied by other ways, and some are not tied. She's an interesting, presidential elections in particular are very interesting. Yeah, they are complicated. And another whole topic on that one is the national compact, the electoral college, which we probably won't go into now. Could you theoretically put a rank, could a state theoretically put a rank choice voting method in place for a federal election? For the presidential primary, you could. For the presidential primary, but not necessarily for a presidential general. I am not aware of how that could work right now with the US Constitution. Yeah, I would think that would be tricky. Right. So it's more for senators and House members and all the state elected officials, governors, state's attorneys, all those sorts of things. And what challenges are there? Any problems that an IRV system presents? Well, actually, if you don't mind us going back a little bit, I wanted to make sure that we talked about the rest of the pros. Oh, sure. Right, right. So one thing is that the rank choice voting, we talked about some of the issues around strategic voting about people saying, well, I don't want to vote for this person who has no chance or I don't want to split a vote, that sort of thing. There are other ways that elections can work that may be better than plurality voting, but they have more problems with strategic voting. And the instant runoff voting of the various choices has the least problem with strategic voting. And so that's one of the benefits. And another one, we did talk about saving money. Right, yep. OK, good. Yeah, so in the end, basically, it has a better reflection of what the voters actually wanted. Right, exactly. So you get to a candidate that most of the majority of voters can get behind, even if it's not their first choice, it's someone they can live with. So as far as the cons, the main one is that people aren't familiar with it. And so anything new, there's going to be a certain percentage of people who don't want to change. Because how do you know what unintended consequences there might be? So they don't want to change from what they're doing now. And we would definitely need to do some education around why you're doing it so people will be willing to change. And then how do you actually do it? Right, how do you implement it? Right, right. And the printmaking might be more expensive because you have more columns on it.  And the computer programming would be a little different. So there might be more, some expense in that end. But remember, you're saving the money on the end with the primaries if you're able to get rid of the primaries. Right, so you're getting rid of the whole election. Has there been any, how receptive has people you've talked to or people in government in the legislature been to the concept of moving towards either an instant run off method of some sort or getting rid of a primary and making it an open general? Have you gotten any pushback on that? So I had approached several legislators. Some that had, oh, so I didn't actually mention that there was a ranked choice voting bill, a limited one, just for the presidential primary for people who were military overseas. Somebody had, I can't remember who was the one who sponsored that bill. And I was trying to get my own legislators in St. John'sbury to co-sponsor. And I was not successful. And one thing is that you pretty much have to get the Secretary of State on board to do a major election change before legislators will want to sign on to it, since that's the person who has to implement it. That's implemented. Right, and Jim Contos, the Secretary of State, was saying there are other changes coming up regarding how we're going to be voting as far as electronic voting and things, that he didn't think that this was a good time to do that kind of a bill. So it was not raised at all. I mean, it had been, what do you call it, when you put a bill out there?  Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it was introduced, but not moved out of committee. Right, right, right, right. And so the thing is that I do think it'd be a good idea to move forward with the Gummer issue for ranked choice voting for that position. And some folks are, well, one thing is we have an election coming up right now. So the people who you might meet with over the summertime are busy campaigning if they're running again. And they're not sure if they're going to be there. So how much time do they want to put in looking at this bill right now? Right. And so, yeah, it might be, I'm not sure whether it would be better to try to approach them again in that November time after election. They know one way or the other. I know that Dick McCormick is interested in it again. He supported it in the past. But he'd be very interested. Senator Kitchell from my area is concerned about the bad press that it got when they tried it in Burlington. When they tried it in Burlington, yeah. And do we want to wait and see how it works other places some more? But the thing is it's actually out there. It's successfully being used in four towns in the Bay Area in San Francisco. It's been used in Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota. It's been used in Portland, Maine. So we have experienced out there. And it was successful enough in Maine that the state of Maine decided, not the legislature. The legislature and the governor were opposed. But there were enough grassroots organizations out there educating the public that they got a referendum to say that they wanted ranked choice voting. The problem with having a referendum, now we don't have that process in Vermont. But if you have a state that allows a referendum, then the way the question is worded is not vetted by people who have really looked at like your state constitution and stuff. And so there's issues about whether the law as currently written is valid, constitutional right. And if you had asked the legislator is to help you write it up, then you could have had something that would pass constitutional muster. And the legislators, because they weren't involved, aren't really that interested in fixing it. Well, and there are a number of them that don't want it anyway. Right. Yeah, yeah. So are there any circumstances, there's clearly a lot of cases where this is a good option. Are there any circumstances where this might not be the strongest option? Does this translate well to if you're trying to elect multiple people for a specific role? That's a great question. So actually, League of Women Voters across the country has supported having multiple member districts for a lot of different kinds of positions. So for instance, when you're looking at, well, St. John'sbury has a multiple member district. We have two house members and we can vote for two. And Burlington has six house members. I'm not sure whether each one is a different geographic location and you only vote for one or whether they... It's a mixed bag. There are a couple multi-member districts, house districts. The big one though is Chinden County has six Senate seats and that is, there's been a lot of discussion about that. Well, that's really interesting because the idea that in all of the Burlington area, there are zero Republicans. Now, I don't actually belong to a party, but it just seems funny to me that there would be six Democratic seats and zero Republican seats in a city the size of that. And the proportional representation with multi-member seats allows you to have members that more accurately represent the district. So that's another whole topic I don't think we'll have time for today. So we're talking about a multi-member district and I think Chinden County's kind of an extreme example where you have six seats that people are running for. And one of the interesting things, kind of looking at the results from the primary that was just a few weeks ago, is there's a huge spread in the number of votes that each of those candidates are getting, even within one party. Where you have the top vote getter getting twice as many votes as the bottom vote getter. And when you have that large of a spread, it really is difficult to say that all of those seats are representing the population of that geographic area. And I think even in other places where you have multi-member districts, you run into some of those same issues and Chinden County is just kind of an extreme example of that. Right, right, right. The whole multi-member district is not something that we've spent a lot of time here in Vermont and League of Men voters, but I can definitely appreciate that if somebody said this is a problem, can you help us study and can you help us promote a particular kind of legislation. If it was something it would look like it would make our elections provide more representative government and then we would be happy to look at that sort of thing. Yeah, I think it's just an interesting case study where you could apply something like this. Cause I see, I know back in 2014, there was some interest in looking at this both by the Senate Government Operations Committee and at the time I was working with Campaign for Vermont, we did look at this and supported the, they were looking really at instant runoff voting, different various forms of instant runoff. So, maybe we could just explain for the listeners, for those who don't mind something really tedious here. You're still here on this show with us at this point. So in instant runoff voting, you'll remember we had these four different colors up here. Instead of just taking off one tab to look at just the yellows with the ones with the least number, you would have taken all of the yellow and all of the blue. Right. And only looked at the top two candidates and for each of those groups, you would have taken the second choice for each of them unless they happened to like be each other. Like it was both yellow and blue were the first and second choices. You'd go down to see what was the, which candidate of the top two got the highest ranking for each of those voters. Right. So that those numbers would then distributed down. So if with only one round, no matter how many candidates you have, if nobody got the majority vote on the first round, only two candidates advanced to the instant runoff. Right, that's the top two advanced and not all but the bottom. Right. Yep. Yeah, and it's an interesting, it's just an interesting concept of trying to get to, you know, again, get to the candidate or candidates in a multi-seat district that best represent the people of the district. And that's actually how the bill was that Jim Condos had sponsored when he was a senator. I don't know if that was for a constitutional reasons or some reason, because the instant runoff voting does, the ranked choice voting does provide a better representation of the voters' wishes. Right. But did he choose to sponsor the instant runoff voting bill because it was easier to administer or because it was constitutionally easier to know it wouldn't get challenged? Yeah, and there are some questions, there were some questions, I know when I worked on that issue in 2014, there were some questions around constitutionality because of one person, one vote. And I think we run into those anyway with the multi-seat districts because you're casting six votes. So we kind of have those in play anyway in our system. But there's some questions around that and I think there just wasn't a advocate in the state house that was really like, we need to move towards this. They were kind of curious about it. And folks like the League of Women Voters was involved at the conversation at that point. Campaign for Vermont was involved in the conversation. You know, and even Vermont Public Interest Research Group was involved. And again, there wasn't a really strong advocate, just kind of come up and there were some questions around it and you know, all of us kind of agreed that was a good direction to move in but there wasn't really the drive behind it. Wasn't had the drive to get a legislator to actually push it. To actually push it, yeah. Right. The district thing is a concern in a lot of states. It's not a concern for Vermont for our U.S. Congress seats because we only have one in the house. Everybody votes for the senator who's up for a reelection which, you know, we have one one year, another one two years later, and then none the other set because they're in for six years and there's another two. But with the house members, we only get one. So you can't gerrymander the district at all for one candidate. Right, right. So that's the one that would be really good to have ranked choice voting for too. And the thought is the thought for the League of Women Voters too is to get rid of the primary for statewide elections and then use this as kind of a way around, you know, to open that general election up a little bit more. Right, and you might have to look at it. I mean, for instance, you know, if you have 13 candidates running for one seat then the instant runoff voting is less reflective.  So diluted at that point. So diluted, right. That it may be harder to say that that really represents. So it might be that if a part, and so if one party has like, you know, 13 candidates and another party has five, and then you have a couple other people from other parties, it's just so many. It might be you'd have to have a limit. Like if one party has more than three then they should throw their party primary but they should pay for it themselves. Right now it's on the voters back to pay for those primaries. And if you guys can't sit down and talk together and figure out like only two candidates or only three candidates, then you know, go pay for it yourself. Right, right. Yeah, and that makes, I think that makes some sense. Where like if you have 20, I just need to remember, I can't remember if it was 2014 I think, where there was like 12 candidates running for governor and it made, I think the picture of one of the debates with these 12 candidates made the front page. Well, our presidential in 2016, you had many. Yeah, exactly, in a minute. And that's where like a primary system is actually kind of helpful because it weeds that down to just a few by the end of it. Right, and with the presidential campaign, these are people that are running across the whole country. Like in Vermont, we know our candidates or we can find out about them pretty quickly. And so I'm not as worried about the primaries. If you didn't have a primary at all, then you'd have to figure out what's gonna be your vetting process for the presidents because for one thing you could have 50 candidates. I mean, seriously, I think New Hampshire has a very low threshold for letting you get your name on the ballot and they'll have like 20 or 30 people on there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you can have candidates, you know, people that you can get on the ballot and are just campaigning in New Hampshire, you know. Right, right, right. And so if you know that a whole mess of them are only gonna get 1% and you'll have a couple of standouts, then maybe it doesn't really matter that you have that many. But if you're gonna have like, you know, if you're gonna have 12 candidates and a lot of them have around seven or 8%, then you don't have anybody standing out and that just makes it really, really hard to know what to do with that. So one question, and we kind of touched on it briefly early on that I have is, you know, what is this, how is this gonna impact candidates and how they run their campaigns? Like what effect is this gonna have on how a candidate runs? Right, so one thing we had mentioned is that there would be less negative campaigning. Right. And a whole lot of the money that is spent is spent on negative campaigning. Right. So we're anticipating that you could run an election with less money because you wouldn't need to spend so much money to counter those negative ads that were thrown out there at you and you're having to defend yourself and you're not trying to meet them with also having awful negative ads. Right. Which to me also just sounds wonderful for the voters because I am just so sick of watching negative ads. Right. Freedom of speech, yeah, but I can't get away from that. Like. Yeah, just follows you. I mean it's what, you know, first week in September I can, about three weeks from now they're gonna start up and they're gonna, we're gonna be living with them for five or six weeks. Right, right, right. You can choose where you wanna go, read something on the internet or which newspapers you subscribe to. You know, you can choose which TV shows you turn on to but you can't choose what commercials are thrown at you. Right, exactly. Because how often they come or how negative they are. And it's one of those, you know, I don't know, I agree that it probably will decrease the, you know, the frequency of negative at least from campaigns themselves. I mean you can't really, there's, you know, political action committees involved and stuff like that. You can't really control, the candidates really, we can't really control those. The candidates can't control those but if they have strategists on their teams they should say, gee, this could backfire on us if we're throwing, slinging mud at those candidates then the one we prefer not ever get selected on the lower counts. Right, so you can do things like, you know, and some candidates have talked about doing this where, you know, they just basically say if you're thinking about starting a PAC to support me, don't. Like just stay away and, you know, you can do that, legally you can't coordinate with a PAC cause they don't, you know, you can't talk to them as a candidate. Right, right. So PACs is another whole issue. And that's a whole, another whole issue. Yeah, so let's not go there. It's at a federal level, it's a whole another. Yeah, yeah.  Well, yeah, this is interesting. So I was speaking to someone from Berkeley in California where they have ranked choice voting and she said in the early years when they started doing it, two candidates who had similar positions and they talked to each other about, well, you know, which one of us should run and I really, this is a good time in my life for me to do it. And the other one says, well, yeah, it's actually, if I'm gonna do it, this is a time for me too. And they had very similar positions, but instead of deciding which one of us will run and which one won't, they actually went door to door together. They knocked on doors together. They came out of their brochures and said, yeah, we're very similar. If you like him better, please list me second. So that, and there were some voters that were really confused. It's like, aren't you running against each other? So it really had to be explained to them.  No. No, it was a single seat. Just a single seat. Wow, interesting. But yeah, but they figured that, you know, if you knew them because your daughter was on the Girl Scout team or they went to your church or whatever the thing is and you knew them personally, you preferred one over the other or if you just thought this person might be more effective at negotiating or was less partisan or more partisan or whatever, if there was some reason you liked one better than the other one but you liked their positions, which were quite similar, you would list someone you liked better. And since they were quite similar, you were likely to list the other one next unless there was another candidate also that had a similar position, but. That's interesting. It was very interesting. That is very interesting. Yeah, and actually someone was telling me that one of the cons that Burlington experienced was that like, gosh, there was one candidate who was actually out there saying, if I'm not your first choice, vote for me second choice. And that was perceived by some people as being a negative. To me, what's wrong with that? I don't see a problem with that. Right, exactly. And I think, you know, Burlington, we don't have a ton of time to talk about it, but I think, you know, Burlington didn't really advertise well the changes that they were making and how to use the new voting system. And they kind of had an election that a lot of people were confused about the results of, and, you know. All right, so Burlington was kind of a situation, I think of, you know, where it wasn't explained well, but then, you know, there was, it doesn't, ranked choice voting doesn't really favor parties. It really puts the weight back into, you know, on the voters to decide who they want representing them. And so for parties, especially establishment parties, I think, you know, they're able to cast that as, oh, we don't want this because it's not reflective of our interests as a party, not necessarily the interests of people. Right. I don't know what your take is on that. Yeah, I would agree. Yeah. Now that they would say it that way. Now that they would say it that way, but that's essential. But that would be the underlying, right? Where it's like, you know, this is not good for our interests, so therefore it's not good for anyone's interest, that they could say. The League of Women Voters supports it because they are not concerned about the parties or concerned about the voters. The voters and making sure that, you know, whoever is elected is representative of the voters. Right, right. Thank you. So anything else we should know about ranked choice voting? We've only got two minutes left in our show tonight, so like what's, if there's one thing that our guests need to know about ranked choice voting, what is that? Well, if you wanted to help on the education process, even if you're not sure that's what you want, if you want to learn more about it, you could contact the League of Women Voters and ask them to do a presentation for you or they could send you a slideshow and you could, you know, we have the materials that Maine used that we can share. If you want to speak with your local legislator and see if we could get more sponsors or at least find out from them, you know, what their concerns are and, you know, we could figure out a strategy for how to move forward with getting this more representative form of voting. And Vermont doesn't have a referendum system, so we can't just go out and say, hey, we want to pass this law, the way that Maine did, but if people do want to move down this road, what's the best way to get involved and to start moving the needle? Well, like I said, you can contact the League of Women Voters of Vermont and the website, we can flash on the screen. Yeah, we'll put it up right on the screen for you. Okay, great. And yeah, one way to find it, if you can't remember the other one, if you don't have a pencil to write down while it's on there, is if you go to the lwv.org website and then on there will be a little box you can put in your zip code and click Find a League and then your zip code will have given you Vermont and there are choices of those two little leagues I had mentioned that are big enough to actually be leagues instead of just units and then it says the Vermont and just click on the Vermont one to get more information. You can send in, look at the website from there, get our webpage from the top of that. Awesome, Betty, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is a really interesting topic. I'm always... Great talking with you. I always love talking about these types of things and thank you for watching. I hope you'll join us again next week and until then, keep listening beyond the soundbites.