So welcome, everyone. It's great to see you all here. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Caitlin Pina. I am the Director of Operations and Programs for the Center for Election Science. As you all probably know, if you're here, Fargo just had their first approval voting election. So it's super exciting, a big historic event. And I'm really happy to see that all of you are here to kind of celebrate with us and also take a look at these results, talk about what the voters thought about it, and maybe talk about some plans for the future as well. So thank you all for being here. We've obviously got Jed Limke here. He is the leader of Reform Fargo. He started kind of the initiative in Fargo to get approval voting implemented there. And he has been working on making sure that voters were educated ahead of this first election as well. And then Aaron Hamlin is on the line too. He is our Executive Director. Kirsten Elliott, she's our Director of Philanthropy. I'm not sure if she'll be speaking much, but just she's on here just in case she does decide to pop in and say something. And then we might have our Director of Campaigns and Advocacy Chris Raleigh join us in a little while. So that's the cast of characters here. It's good to see you all. Just so you know how this will go, I have some questions and some discussion that I kind of wanna lead with Jed first. So we'll go through that and then we will open it up for a Q&A later. So you can feel free to type in the comments in the comment section and I'll moderate through that and we can bring your questions up. Or if you want to be able to say your question out loud, just use the raise your hand feature that you can see when you click on the participants button, you'll see a little feature that says raise your hand so you can click on that.  I see there's a couple, yeah, there's a couple of comments in the chat. Kirsten says she sees lots of familiar faces. There's definitely lots of familiar faces on here. So that's exciting. But without further ado, I guess we'll get started. So Jed, are you prepared? Have you been able to eat a few bites before getting started? Okay, cool, no worries. I know it's kind of a dinner time right now. I ate a little bit early today in preparation for this. So, but yeah, it's so great to see you. How did you feel about the election? What was it like filling out your first approval voting ballot after all of the hard work you did? Oh no, you're muted, sorry. Just a second. I thought I unmuted you, but you muted yourself back. Okay, there you go. Oh, you're muted again. We're in a vicious cycle. I don't know, did you? Did it work now? Okay, there you go. Okay. What did you ask me? Yeah, it was a long muting cycle. So how, the first approval voting election, how'd you feel? What was it like filling out your ballot when you put all that work in to get it passed? It was good. I waited way too long to fill out my ballot. I actually did both drop it off at the courthouse. But yeah, it felt really good to do it. So, yeah, a lot of many years, literally effort in getting to this point. And I'm really, I'm happy that one made it through. So, I mean, there will be giant asterisks, asterisks, that word all over this year's history books. But yeah, we did it. So, so far, so good. Did you do anything fun on election night? I know, I mean, it's in the middle of the pandemic, so you can't go out and... Yeah, so yeah, normally for election night activities, we do group activities. Like I think when we're waiting to find out if we had won, we were all bowling. When we were waiting to find out if our results were certified, we went and played volleyball. I'm trying to think of what I believe on election night that actually I was golfing. So that's how election night went for me. That's a great socially distancing activity. Exactly. Yes, and Fargo has lots of low-priced public courses. So it was a nice place to be. Yeah, that's awesome. So you did mention that there are lots of asterisks, astroceses... So you can't say anything, yeah. Yeah, around this election. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? How did the pandemic affect to this election? It affected it a ton, to be honest. As it's affecting everything. In the end, we had seven candidates, six of whom were active, one of which had claims to have dropped out. And in the end, the three people that voters had heard of, before 2020, were the three who came out very much on top. As a reminder, this was block-style approval voting. You could elect two people in the end to the city commission. And yes, two of the three people that have a history in this town that's known were the ones that were elected, but of the kind of unknowns, the lowest vote percentage that an unknown dot was 16% of the vote, which is frankly, I mean, that's unheard of. I first passed the post-election that split this many ways. So it was, and I believe, if you voted for one of them, especially, it's because you did believe in that person. So it was nice to see these results come out. I feel kind of bad for the woman who got last place because she was actually beaten up by one of the people who said that he had canceled his campaign early in the year. But that's just how it is. I don't know how much he actually canceled it though, because I still saw yard signs showing up, so I don't know that guy. I don't know. But yeah. That's interesting that there were still yard signs going out, even despite having canceled. So I wonder if that was some, yeah, that's a bit odd. Yeah, I don't know. But that was a really good point that you made about, you know, having a seven-way slash six-way race and the lowest percentage only being 16%, that. Yeah, that's pretty unheard of in a plurality election. So do you feel like that candidate who got the lowest amount, do you think that she was able to kind of pull from people who maybe wouldn't have voted for her otherwise if it was under plurality? Or, I mean, I don't know that you can make any of those assumptions, but... Yeah, so I think that under plurality, she wouldn't have done nearly as well. She shared ideological space with a handful, I think, of three other candidates for the most part that were running out of the seven. And I don't think she would have done remotely as well, but she could have done well enough to influence the end result considering what the difference ended up being. So I keep looking to this direction because that's where I have the results on a different model. No, that's okay. And so, yeah, the results are what we want to talk about a little bit here. So tell us, I think most people here have probably seen some of the results that we posted online, but do you wanna kind of go down the list real quick and just fill everybody in on what those results are and what would I take? Yeah, so in the end, thanks to ballots being mailed to every eligible voter who wanted one in the city, we ended up with 18,805 ballots cast, which I think historically is the largest primary election that we've ever had. So that's something to be said for mailing ballots to people, certainly. The Rachelle Ebola, she got last place in this with 2,976 votes or 16% of the vote. And she got almost 3,000 votes to put it in perspective in our last commission race in 2018 where while we didn't have 18,000 ballots cast but we still had 16,000 ballots class, so quite a few. The second place winner was got fewer votes than she did in this case to think about how that worked out. If I recall correctly, so, or right around that number. Bradford Schrafer, he was the one who dropped out. He got 17% or just over 3,000. Doug Rimpf, an unknown honestly, I mean, he was an NDSU professor, but he's retired and this was his first foray into politics. He got a few hundred more than the previous guy at 18%.  And then after that, we have a huge jump up to a seated commissioner who had lost his reelection bit who got 9,000 votes or so, Tony Greenberg and then our winners, Arlett Preston who had previously been a city commissioner in the 1990s but not since, she got nearly 10,000 votes and John Strand who was running for reelection was reelected with the most at 55% or 10,393 out of 18,805. So as I've made clear to everyone who's asked me about the election so far, approval does not guarantee 50% but it was nice to see that over half of the voters did support the eventual winners, which is I think just a bonus or some icing on the cake for this one this time. Yeah, I think everybody was pretty thrilled to see that the two winners each had over 50%. Like you said, it's really important to emphasize that no voting method and approval voting included can get you a majority winner if you have more than two candidates in the race. So when you see those results that two candidates were able to get a majority, that really gives them like a really solid mandate to govern, right? And it shows that they had broad support from people across the spectrum if they were able to get 55, 53% of the vote. Yeah, for sure. And so that's something else that I wanna talk about a little bit here is the way to calculate that approval percentage, right? So we're talking about 55%, 53% because we're putting the ballots as the denominator there, right? We're dividing the total number of votes by the number of ballots. And what you might see, if any of you guys check out the North Dakota Secretary of State website, they're still using the total number of votes as the denominator. And so it looks like candidates have gotten a lot smaller amount of the percentage of the total vote than what we're saying here because they're adding up all of those approvals and using that as the denominator. So I don't know if you wanna, if there's anything that you wanna say there, Jed. But yeah, I have a lot to say historically on my presentation with this. So it's an ongoing discussion with the Secretary of State's office and our county auditor about reporting these things correctly. According to the law that we passed, but we will get that rectified eventually, I'm sure. The reason, or there are several reasons why we chose to go out of ballots cast rather than just somebody voted for at least one and then that's what the denominator is. First and foremost, the election equipment that we were using at the time when we did the initiative would not support making that determination. It could not tell the difference between if you voted for zero people or for one person in a two max vote for two race. And we felt that we needed to have some sort of denominator and allowing them to continue to report percentages as ovals filled in for a candidate out of all ovals filled in was certainly not an acceptable solution. So we chose ballots cast. And the second big reason that we chose that was because we don't know why someone doesn't choose to vote for candidates in a race. It may be because they don't approve of any of them. And we, and since we can't tell, there's, you know, we'd rather be out of ballots cast. We'd rather not infer what their thoughts were there. The, a similar deficiency in the election software that we use also prevented us from having a box or a bubble to fill in that says, I approve of none of these people or whatever that could have allowed us to find, you know, they at least filled in one oval so we know how many ballots there are or whatever too. So we're kind of thwarted at every turn from maybe what one might consider to be ideal. But I think that this is the best possible option given what was available to us. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And it is frustrating because it was written into the initiative that the denominator must be ballots cast, right? So I completely understand how frustrated you must feel that the secretary of state, at least at the state level, they're not respecting what the law now says. Yeah.  So it's they're a little divorced from, from municipal code in that sense. So it's okay. We'll get there. I have a good relationship with them. It's right now our problem is dealing with the county commissioner, or the county auditor a little bit. But we'll get there. We'll figure it out. I recently received word back and they said the state law prevents them from showing us the ballots as well. So we'll see if, you know, we can make some FOIA action happen despite that or not. I'm not entirely sure. That's a conversation for not here, but later. Yeah. Yeah, that's okay. Well, so the next thing that I wanted to discuss then is the idea that has been pushed before approval voting has seen the light of an actual government election that most people will just bullet vote, right? They'll just go ahead and vote for the one candidate or maybe in this case, since they're allowed to vote for two or since two people are being elected, maybe they would just vote for those two and no additional ones. And so what did we see here in this election with how many candidates people approved of? We saw that on average, voters this year voted for 2.27 candidates per ballot.  And yes, you bring up that bullet voting argument. I remember I was in a radio interview during the campaign to get the initiative passed and I had an opponent in that particular interview and he was talking all about how people are going to bullet vote in the face of this. And I said, so your argument is that when people are presented with, you know, the option to vote for more than two, if they want, they're just going to vote, they're going to bullet vote harder or something like that. Like it makes no sense to me. And indeed the voters apparently didn't do that either. Even despite the arguably inflated denominator we're using to make this calculation in the first place. So yeah, I don't think that argument held up. There are certainly people out there who bullet voted. And again, I would also point out to this particular individual and those opponents who say that bullet voting is a problem, is that no, that is a feature. It is not a bug. This is a good thing. If you only approve of something, just vote for them.  We don't want to force you to rank 10 candidates in order. Force you to have a number two or something on a ranked ballot. We don't want that. If you like to vote for them, if you don't, don't. You still have to make your personal decision. You still have to figure all this stuff out and choose to vote for them on an individual basis if you want and we aren't going to force you to do it. But in the end, I mean, 2.27 candidates per ballot is what we got. So that's pretty good.  You see that this is people's first election using approval voting and they're already able to vote for two, at least two candidates because they are filling two seats. And so some people, they might have only really cared in the past about voting for those two candidates. And so to see that the average is more than two is a great thing and it'll be interesting to see how that changes in the future as people get more used to it. Yeah, I'm confident that there are candidates in town who have made it into office because they have followers who will bullet vote just for them and not show support to even ideologically similar candidates. I'm confident that's the case, but that's always going to be the case. We're not going to change how that works. But we will discover that people who follow that type of candidate, I don't think will be as satisfied with their outcome until they decide that they're actually going to vote on policy and not person as they move forward. So we'll find out. Yeah, it will definitely be interesting to see and it'll be super interesting to see once we have a single winner election. Yes, which will be coming up in 2022. I mean, we technically had a single winner election this time for municipal judge, but he ran unopposed. So, but we did have a single winner approval voting election people. Come on, you weren't paying attention to that thing? Yeah, yeah, the single win or the unopposed judge, you know, those are usually all over the media, right? So we conducted a poll of people in Fargo to see how they felt about approval voting, this being their first time, you know, we really wanted to see if people were able to, if they liked it, if they didn't, we found that 71% of voters thought it was easy, 62% said that they liked it. And that 62% includes some people who, you know, said that they wouldn't really recommend it or not that they wouldn't recommend it. I'm sorry, that was for poor judgment on my part, the way that I said that. 54% or the, I am so sorry, I can't find it. Oh, okay, so I think what I'm including is the candidate, the people who only voted for the candidate who ended up losing. So that includes the people who voted for some of those candidates who ended up losing, still said that they liked approval voting, despite the fact that their candidate didn't win. And then we also had 69% who said that they felt like they could vote for their favorite candidate without spoiling the vote, which is amazing. So have you talked to anybody like on the ground? Have you had friends or family or anyone who told you how their experience was or anything like that? Yeah, absolutely. Yesterday I spoke with the local Rotary Club and they were very happy that those who spoke up, which was over half of them who actually lived in Fargo and are members of the local Rotary. So yeah, they all seemed very happy with how it worked out. They felt that they could freely vote for who they wanted to win and they were static that they could show support to candidates that otherwise wouldn't necessarily have gotten support.  So they were aware of some of these other candidates where the general population wasn't. But yeah, and just speaking to other people outside of there, the response has been positive. So yeah. Awesome, that's good to hear. And then I did want to ask you, I know that this being the first election, we wanted to make sure that voters felt prepared. CES, we sent out some postcards just to remind people of how it was going to work and did a little bit of digital advertising. So I wanted to ask you, what were some of the things that Reform Fargo did to educate voters and make sure they felt comfortable with it ahead of time? So we did a lot of digital advertising as well. It was basically all digital. We didn't do any banners. Many of those are pretty expensive. So had there not been a pandemic, our approach would have been different, but very much digital, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, ads on our local paper online, that type of thing. We also spent a considerable amount of time ensuring that every candidate at least had some type of fair shake presence online. So to that end, we interviewed all of the candidates, asked them all the same questions. We professionally had it filmed and cut together and we boosted for all the candidates, we boosted these interviews equally and evenly across all of them to try to make sure that people had a chance to hear from these candidates. And the focus of our interviews, we didn't talk to them about tax policy. We didn't talk to them about housing justice or anything to stay within the wheelhouse of our org. We decided that we would ask them questions about government and openness and how they felt the commission should work and things like that. And the response that we received to those from the candidates was very positive because we were highlighting an angle that they're not normally approached from when it comes to these questions. Like no one asks candidates about voting methods, but we do, so, because we're crazy people. And also for the public, it was very, very positive. Thousands of long engagements on these interviews, many watched all the way through on several of these interviews to try to learn more about them. And I think that that helped the candidates become better known. It helped the voting method because we got to show that, yeah, there are good candidates out there, not just the ones that you've heard of historically. And yeah, so that all went really well. We also grabbed local volunteers and ran around town and filmed a kind of talking head explainer of what approval voting was. And we aired that explainer, not only on the internet, but we also had it running on local over the air channels and local cable. And on top of that, we had several radio ads recorded and running kind of all the time on local radio around here, especially talk radio, because that's what people listen to. Yeah, that's one thing I'll always remember about Fargo is that you guys like your radio. Yes, we do very much, yeah, it works. Yeah, well, and I think the nice thing about approval voting too, is that like it's awesome that we've all been doing this education to make sure that people felt prepared. But if there were a world where we just didn't have the resources to do that, the nice thing is that the ballot tells them exactly what to do. And as long as they could read that, hopefully they would get it. And that's a nice thing is it's just so easy. Like it just says vote for all the candidates you approve of, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the only problem, the typography was a little squashed in there. They should have had better margins, but I'll take the county to task later, I guess. Yeah, yeah, the ballot design person over there, we were kind of surprised when we saw the ballots. We thought that they kind of looked like they were made in Microsoft Word. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, I think those were the majority of the questions I wanted to ask you. And I know that we had a lot of folks who have questions over in the group chat. So I will go ahead and start skimming through some of those. So Michael Weinbaum is asking, why does Fargo have at-large seats? In Florida, this often indicates minority suppression. Okay, so this is just historic at this point. The Fargo has a commission form of government not to counsel. So there are no wards in Fargo at all. So it's just four commissioners are elected and then the mayor is elected at large. There's a lot of talk about us changing to wards. And that's something that I discussed with the Rotary Club yesterday as well. So we'll see if that comes. I'm certainly not going to pretend that there's no type of minority suppression here in that sense. It should be noted, however, that the demographics here defer wildly from what the demographics in Florida are probably where you are. So it's something that is a long time coming but just hasn't happened yet, unfortunately. But Reform Fargo is definitely researching the issue and trying to figure out if we can be the final male in the at-large coffin if we need to be or maybe make Fargo the first place to use sequential proportional approval voted instead to fill these seats and expand the commission at the same time. So are those some things that you Reform Fargo and or Reform North Dakota are looking at doing? Absolutely we are. A little bit more about your plans there. Yeah, yeah. So we're considering doing that. We, you know, while there are orgs out there doing ballot initiatives right now during the pandemic we are not one of them. So it's just, it's too constraining to do this. Lots of doors need to be knocked to do this the right way I think. And I don't want to put volunteers at risk when they're collecting signatures as some of these other orgs have frankly. But yes, we are looking at expanding the commission and dividing Fargo into wards. Of course, gerrymandering is a big concern. So that's why proportional methods are, you know at least to the geeky ones here, we were more interested in. And we're certainly not afraid to try and make Fargo do, you know, be the first in something. So we're, you know, we're willing to bite that off if we think that it has a good chance. We're also looking at a novel ward idea where we kind of divide Fargo for example into a North and South half and an East and West half and elect people from each of those every cycle. And that would mean that you'd kind of have parts of the wards overlapping with one another. So every citizen would elect someone every cycle. They'd also have at least two commissioners who are considered to be from their ward. And we feel like that could help, you know fight the parochialism that we're worried about but also allow us to have these wards to maybe help to get minority involvement on the commission as well. That is super exciting. So these are all, I know that right now it's hard to make plans because of just the state of the world but so are these kind of early discussions? You're doing research or do you have like timelines or anything like that? I believe that if we were to the pandemic right now we probably would have been gathering signatures to expand the commission already. We're not fans of kitchen sink kind of initiatives. We prefer to keep stuff pretty tight. So even if when we get to the other side of this thing which I'm convinced we will but when we get to the other side of this in all likelihood we will push for both of these things but we'll do it with two separate initiatives that we have people have to sign twice. And yes, that takes more time. It's more of a pain for the person explaining things and it's more of a pain for the citizen who's signing but we really would want them both to stand or die on their own and not be something that's drug through or killed frankly by the other half of the initiative. So but that's something that we're looking at. The first thing though if we had to pick one would probably be to expand the size of the commission first. Right now we have one North Dakota Senator for every 14,000 North Dakotans but we have one city commissioner for every 25,000 Fargoans. So if we increase the size of the commission by four so we double it so it becomes a commission of eight plus the mayor makes nine then we'd actually drop down to the 14,000 to match the state. And there's talk out there of maybe expanding the commission by two but I'm confident we can get support to not only expand it by four but maybe even six or eight which would I think we'd have to have lords at that point or go with proportional wards of course being the devil they know so maybe more likely to pass but either way approval voting would be involved because we would make sure that they're single in a race is with approval voting by the end. Awesome, that's really exciting. I'm really interested to see where things go. So this pandemic it's just screwing everything up isn't it? Another quick question from Michael Weinbaum actually at the top. He asks, do we know what percentage of voters approved of both winners? And I don't think we know that for sure. No we don't because the county does not provide that data and they won't let us see the dollars to get it. We have new voting equipment, ESS something or other but I don't think that they even stored that data seems to be one of those things where they don't store all the data from the ballot they store only the stuff they care about as they're counted. It's not like scanning documents and just logging all of it for them. It's kind of no just find these things and ignore the rest. So unfortunately even if they had that data and were amenable or even if they were amenable to giving us that data they can't just query your database and get it in a creative way. We all have to go through the ballots again. So if we're able to get access to the ballots then we will find volunteers and we will manually count 18,805 ballots and get real on this but until then we don't have it. Okay, gotcha. I think you kind of already answered this but Colin Weaver was asking that now that it's finally happened were there any voters confused or complaining about it? I know you said it was well received that's what our polls showed but have you run into anybody that? Not that I know of beyond the people who were opposed to this in the first place and were loud about it. They were still loud and opposed to it during it but they're a little quieter now. Now the things that the election's done and we'll have another test of this in a couple of years for sure and we had a particularly oppositional voices who are on the city commission and they are both up for re-election in two years. So we will see how loud and noisy it gets them. That'll definitely be an election to watch. Yeah. Let me see, oh, it looks like. Okay, so this is another ballot question. Rob Landfair was asking about the lowest candidate got 16% of the votes. So it sounds like people thought they could only vote for two candidates rather than one. Do we have any idea how many voted for three or more? Nobody heard of Rochelle before April to be honest or truly kind of before May. That's when she really made a splash locally with some other events that were going on. So I wouldn't necessarily say that it's because people were confused. It's just possible certainly. I'm not a prognosticator. I have no idea for certain, but I can tell you nobody knew who Rochelle, Bradford, Doug or Ed were until April, May of this year, if they ever did before they looked at their ballot and said, who are those people? I've heard of Tony, Arlette and John. I'm gonna vote for some of them instead. Right. Yeah, and I mean, that's another kind of separate issue from voting methods, but something that affects the outcomes and affects the way the voting method could function is, is everybody getting a truly fair shot at representing who they are and getting the word out to people? Yeah, and it's certainly not unheard of. I mean, people need to run more than once sometimes. It's rare for someone to just walk up out of the blue and just win. I mean, it happens. I too am familiar with AOC, but that's not necessarily how it works, especially in the middle of a pandemic. So it's just, yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, and so how do you feel like the pandemic affected the candidates and their ability to campaign? Do you think that it was pretty? Yeah, dramatically. In my experience, the candidates who win are the ones who can get their message out, can be heard of, actually make some sort of splash and in particular, they're able to knock doors and so forth. And while I'm not surprised as the three who came out at the top of this, like the definite top, were those three, Tony, Arlette, and John, this definitely affected things. They had to change their strategies a little bit and the other four, I'm just afraid, yeah, they didn't stand near as much of a chance without being able to have in-person meet and greets and events and just, yeah, wandering around the neighborhood knocking doors, so. Which you are well familiar with. Yes, yes, I knocked, oh gosh, 10,000 plus doors, so yeah. Yeah, yeah, see, so you guys should understand why I was asking at the beginning, how did it feel to fill out your approval voting ballot after knocking 10,000 doors and. It felt great, but this pandemic just means I'm gonna be worried about it until at least 2022, but we'll see. Maybe they'll implement some online signature gathering, you never know. Don't get into online voting type. Oh, no, not voting, not voting. I know, but oh, that's pretty adjacent right there, I don't know. You have to remember, North Dakota does not have voter registration as well, so it's probably the only North Dakota in this entire chat, I'd like to remind everyone, we do not have voter registration. Voter ID only recently happened here, you could vote with just by signing an affidavit at the polling place when you walked in, yeah. There are no registered Republicans or Democrats in North Dakota, because it's not a thing.  Right, yeah, definitely unique compared to other states. Oh, yeah. So Colin asks, what was the most surprising thing that happened during this entire process over the last few years? We won, so, I just think it's surprising. It was, to me, I mean, I was confident in the work that we did, but it's still scary. Like, I don't like to count my chickens before they hatch, so I remember even on election nights, we're looking at the data coming in, and I'm in the third frame of my game, and the first precincts are coming in, and we're ahead two to one, I'm like, all right, that's great, but there's only a thousand votes in at this point, and then pretty soon, 40 precincts are in, and we're still ahead two to one, 60, 70, and I'm like, okay, but we gotta wait for it all to be done here now. Yeah, so, yeah, we actually pulled it off, so that was a surprising thing. Also, I think, I don't know if it's surprising to me, because I like to think I'm generally a pretty optimistic and confident person, but I know it's surprising to many at how amenable the people were to having this change, to being approached with this change. I had countless conversations with people, and just explaining them, like, to them, this is approval voting, this is why it's better, or have you ever been frustrated with the commission because of X, Y, or Z, and just watching them light up than being so receptive to this change? People want better systems, they just haven't thought about how better systems can be implemented or how they can exist before, so having those conversations was a lot of fun. So that was a pleasant surprise as we went through the campaign over the last couple of years. Maybe a genuine surprise to me was just how resistant to change some of these entrenched political forces are. When we received opposition, frankly, it came from people that if you're a local you've heard of, and they didn't like it, they just didn't want this thing. Because it's a threat to power, but the people where the power is supposed to be not the politicians, so hopefully we continue to move forward and find more issues that are gonna work out to the betterment of our city and everywhere else. Absolutely. So we've also gotten a few questions about, if you could kind of talk about how the candidates divided into ideological groups, like what was the split there? I know it's kind of subjective, but if there is a guesstimate you can make. Well, I mean, I did meet all of them and have hour-long conversations with all of them, so at least I know them a little bit, but yes, I'm not a political analyst, but I will tell you ideologically, if we're looking at right of center, those voices would have been Bradford, Ed, and Tony. On the line would have been probably Arlette and John, and to the left would have been Doug and Rochelle, that's at various degrees. Doug was probably the furthest to the left, Ed was the furthest to the right. Yes, Doug I would consider to probably be more of a green progressive type, I would say Ed is a small government libertarian type. John would describe himself as a socially liberal and fiscally conservative, I think is how he would say it. Arlette is just, she would say that she's a Democrat, I'm sure, and Tony is a Republican, he's a former GOP legislator locally, so yeah. And then let's see, Bradford, I believe that he was conservative given the support and where I saw it coming from, and the Facebook posts of his that I read when I was creeping on him, and Rochelle, I would say she was probably the closest to the center of the left over there, socially liberal, but much closer to the center than Doug was, for example. And I'm assuming, of course, that there's only one political axis that you could possibly measure anything on, because obviously everybody falls along that line somewhere perfectly, so it's fine, no differences, so yeah. Right, so it sounds like the two candidates, at least from your feeling and the way that you're assessing them, it sounds like they kind of fall towards the middle of that left right spectrum. Middle, middle left, yep. Okay, gotcha, interesting, definitely. Yeah, but I would argue Fargo is probably middle left, at least for, I mean, obviously North Dakota politics are not the same as Florida politics or New York or California politics, but I would argue Fargo is generally a left leaning city even looking at the United States as a whole, it's not Austin, it's not San Francisco, but it's also not Bismarck North Dakota, which is, it leans a different direction. Yeah, and I think that surprises people because people say weird things in Facebook comments, but I just get the sense that people think, oh, Fargo, it's just that little place out there in North Dakota, they're probably just, they're just those flyover people kind of thing, you know, and so I don't know if the, I think that kind of surprised people when they saw, oh, wow, this place that I don't really think about that much implemented this new reform, like, you know, it's... I know, they didn't run me through the woodchipper or anything, so we're fine. Right, we threw the bad elections in the woodchipper though. Yeah, exactly, and the actual woodchippers in our visitors center, by the way, if you ever come and visit, you can hold a severed leg and push it in for a photo op if you really want to, so. Yes, Erin and I did that when we visited and there's even photo proof of it. I think it's been on the Facebook page, yeah, we're like, you know, pretending to be putting a person in it. It was cool to see it, though. We're the biggest small town that you've heard of probably in many respects. Yeah, but I mean, I think that is really important and like really, it's such a great thing that a place like Fargo was the first to get approval voting because it shows that it's something that's accessible. It's something that is for your everyday, like average flyover state person, right? It doesn't, it's not a reform that you need a ton of money for. You don't need to know math and algorithms for. You don't have to be on the coast, like it's for everyone. Yeah, and that was, that's what I think was so important about this. Yeah, that we were someone that you wouldn't think would do it. But as I tried to explain to our opponents when we had these debates and so forth and everybody else, frankly, change can come from anywhere. Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean that we have to just let California do it or Texas do it or what have you. We can also do this. And every day is an experiment. When we were told, oh, nobody's ever done this before. We would just, oh, and if it was adopted, it was thrown out or something like that. It's just, I would just point out to them, like we're not trying to treat Fargo like a Petri dish. It's already a Petri dish. Like no other city has a 125,000 people, lies in the middle of the widest, flattest part of North America, is a farming community, has taxes like this, has policies like that, has roads like, like it's all an experiment. The variables are different wherever you go. The idea that, oh, we can't change that variable because then the experiment will blow up is absolutely the real costuming. And I think that that type of messaging really engaged with people. We just completely diffused this idea that we aren't allowed to give a darn about our city and change things if we want. And that we're just trying to be evil mad scientists that are experimenting on the poor, defenseless citizens of Fargo. They're big people. They can make up their own minds and vote on it. They did and we won two to one. Love it. Couldn't have said it any better. Kirsten is asking, are there any policies that you think or hope will be better addressed in Fargo thanks to approval voting? So yeah, that's what I got to think about that.  So there's definitely housing issues in town that need to be addressed in zoning issues in town. We do seem to have an inordinate amount of property tax adjustments in favor of a handful of landowners and developers in the area. And I think that the shift in the commission will help to temper that further, which I frankly think is quite important. We also, it's interesting. I think Fargo is gonna be a better place because of approval voting certainly because we're going to have more of the will of the people that's enforced.  For example, on busy roads and that's, I just that want to sell off our parks and things. And the people don't want that. But a fifth of the commission does, so it's crazy. And I would like to make sure that viewpoints like that don't stick around if they're not what the people want. If the people of Fargo don't wanna have public parks, don't wanna have public transit, want to lower taxes, raise taxes, de-zone, build a factory in every corner or have draconian housing so that every place has to be perfectly manicured like an HOA on steroids, then the people should be able to do that. And, but they need a responsive governmental body to be able to do that. And I want the city to be responsive to the needs of the people. And I think approval is going to get us there. It's already started to shift things a little bit. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the responsiveness is the most important thing. Every single one of us has different ideas about policies and politics and candidates. But the important thing is that the government actually listens to all of us and then that they do what is in the best interest of, the broad majority, not the broad majority, the broad amount of the electorate that is, it's hard to say because we're also used to using the word majority, but we really can't use that word. You can say polarity, I can't say it, but you can.  But if the most people in Fargo, a broad amount of them want to get rid of the parks, then maybe that's what should be done, but. So it's not going to happen. We are the city of parks. That's one of the mottos.  And he did it in the city commission, doesn't even control the parks. It's a separate entity. The Fargo Parks District is a separate thing. Like there's a separate board. Like it does not control, but it's, ah. We'll get off of the policy subject so that we don't give Jed a heart attack or anything. So here's an even more fun question from Steve. What were the arguments of people who didn't support approval voting in Fargo? So the arguments were people are going to bullet vote.  They won't understand the ballots. We were hit with, it's never been done anywhere before, which I think I previously addressed. But yes, yes, you're just experimenting on people. It's just sponsored by coastal elites. God, they love that here. I mean, we are in the center of the continent. So if you're allowed to say that anywhere, I guess it's here, but it's still ridiculous. People to say it, you know, geographical center in North America is in rugby, North Dakota. So don't forget that everybody out there keeping score at home. But yeah, those are the types of arguments we would get. It was a lot of frankly, it was a lot of fluff. When we'd get into anything deeper, like, you know, I mean, we have to address the bullet voting question. Or then, you know, there were some opponents to this, certainly who were proponents of change, but opponents of this particular change. Obviously the 1,200 pound gorilla in the room is ranked choice voting or instant runoff. And I don't understand, they're not the same, but they're used to changeably. And there'd be people who go, well, why not that? Why this, not that? And then we could just point out to them, well, our equipment's not compatible with ranked ballots, but it is compatible with this. And this is simpler and it's precinct sumbable. And yeah, by the time you say the word's precinct sumbable to a voter, unless you're like sitting down, like you've lost that voter, by the way, so never get that far into the weeds. Yeah, so that's how that works. But yeah, you wanna, other things, what are the stuff? Oh, socialist takeover of the city, that's a good one.  But yeah, your people, that was always fun when they talk about that type of thing in defiance. And we just asked them, where in this initiative does it say that only Star Trek fans are allowed to be on the commission? Where is that language in this thing? So there are a lot of people who, when it comes right down to it, like to argue and they do not argue in good faith with you. And if you are knocking doors or gathering signatures, you just have to learn how to just smile and be extra positive with them and just keep saying the same thing until they either go away or you are able to extract yourself from that situation. So because in the end, they're grossly outnumbered by the people who are open to at least listening to you and probably open to change. There was a nice thing, I mean, I'll be honest, the opposition did not see us coming. They did not realize that we had volunteers, dozens of them, they did not realize that we were motivated and we were going to knock every door in town if we had to. They were not prepared for the fact that even though it was inefficient, we insisted upon not only knocking doors and neighborhoods where there were 20 homes to a block, but we knocked doors and neighborhoods where there were two homes to a block because of their gross size in the fancier parts of town. Like we were bound and determined to make sure that we left no stone unturned that we would knock every door and speak to people from every walk of life in order to educate and hopefully pass it. And they organized too little, too late and I suspect should we come up with other initiatives in the future that they may be more organized if they're opposed to what we're doing and if we ever do have the opportunity to go statewide depending on how this fall goes, we expect to have a much more defiant opposition than we had the last time. Yeah and I think it's awesome the fact that you guys did so much outreach and you clearly see the fruits of your labor in the results because 64% of people approved of that measure. Not only did we win two to one overall, we won two to one in every precinct. Every single precinct, yes. Like that's not supposed to happen. Like we swept the precincts. Like even the precincts where nine people voted, it was six in favor and three opposed. Like it worked out. So by the way, yes, that's right, these acres. That was way on the boonies, but yes, there was a really small one on election day. Yeah, awesome though. So Chris asks, do you feel that the folks who got elected may feel more empowered now than they would have before with approval voting and getting over 50%? Absolutely, absolutely. I know that they, both of those who were elected have told me about how they know that the people were behind them. One in particular told me that now they feel that there's more of an ally, there's more weight to what they're going to say on the commission because they can say, look over half of the people or this many people voted for me to be here. And that's a really important thing, I think. Now, obviously being elected were four out of five people or six out of seven did not vote for you and you still make it. Does not necessarily mean that you as a politician, you're going to not act as if everyone is behind you back home, wherever you're elected from. But these particular politicians can actually legitimately say it now. And commissioners frankly couldn't before. These are the highest percent of voter wins we've ever had for the city commission. Just that that's it. The mayor when he runs unopposed, sure he gets 95% of the vote, not commissioners. It's not how it works. So what were some of the previous percentages that commissioners were winning with to give folks an idea?  Well, I have it here, but I was- Nope, I'll pull it off of my own website. You don't have to look there. So, well, and I have the secretary of state and it's confusing still because they are doing the votes as the denominator. In 2015, our winner got 21.8% of the vote. That was a single winner race. It was a special election due to a previous mayor of the city dying and some kind of shifting around where the candidates were. In 2016, two winner race, they won with 30% and 28% of the votes in 2018. During our signature drive, we had winners who won with 33% and 30%. And I will say that us collecting signatures during an election that the initiative was meant to address was a helpful thing because then we had yet another example of what vote splitting does and how ridiculous it is that we have people who are winning with seven out of 10 voters not voting for them and it was fresh in people's minds. So to any of you out there who are thinking about collecting signatures, timing is important. So. Absolutely. Well, I think I've got one more question here from Colin. If anybody else has questions, I think we'll probably want to wrap up here in a few minutes so that Judd can get back to his life and his family. But so get any remaining questions in there real quick. But from Colin, he says, was there a particular interest group that was against it in Fargo other than incumbent politicians who were winning an old system? I mean, I can say how I sense it. There was no group organized that came out and explicitly said, no, don't vote for this. There wasn't a group that said that. They're like, the Chamber of Commerce did not endorse us but they did not formally oppose us. We did incidentally get endorsements from the ACLU of North Dakota and our local firefighters union, which was interesting.  I think the newspaper endorsed it too, right? Yeah, the newspaper did too, which was nice. But they having formal opposition in that sense, no. But I will say in general, if we received opposition, the person opposing us was either in an incumbent political operative or both and nine times out of 10, they were conservative in our particular case. So there were certainly, you know, socialists lefties, liberals, progressives and Democrats who didn't want this either. But, you know, you were far more likely to find a Republican or a conservative who was opposed.  I think in particular, some of that was because the commissioner who was elected in 2015 with four out of five not voting for him and was vocally opposed to this initiative is a libertarian himself. And I think that there was a lot of local thought leadership in that sense. And that caused many to turn against us before they even knew what we were talking about. It was interesting watching our Facebook ads go up during the time and we specifically, you know, targeted and crafted some for a libertarian audience. And I saw engagement from self-identified libertarians and then them share it to the pages of some of the more prominent officials in town and have them say, no, they're all socialists. Don't vote for that. And then they change their minds immediately, which as an aside, I think is, I'm pretty sure that's not what libertarianism is, is to just listen to whatever authority tells you, but what do I know? I guess that's kind of how that seemed to have worked out. So, but... Yeah, and that's interesting because approval voting is, the way it's set up specifically can help libertarians, green parties, independent candidates because in our current system, people won't vote for them specifically because they're worried about throwing away their one precious vote on someone who, quote unquote, can't win. And so if you have approval voting, you, those candidates can actually gain support in the interaction. Well, some of it happened, I do think, I mean, I understand it in the sense that in particularly this commissioner, Tony Gehrig, when he was elected in 2015 with four out of five people not voting for him, there was significant vote splitting that led to him winning. If you looked at the ideological makeup of the candidates that were running opposed to him, there was a lot of similarity. I think of the six of them, including him, the five remaining, I believe three, if not four, you would consider to be left a center and only one was conservative. I mean, there was certainly vote splitting, I think that contributed to his victory. He's gonna hate me for saying it if he ever sees this, but I do genuinely believe that that led to part of that. And, but I believe that in part because of the conversations I had with actual voters in town at their doors who self-identified as libertarian or libertarian leaning, who told me the only way we can get someone in is with the system the way it is right now and everyone being disorganized. And I didn't hear that once or twice. I heard it a dozen times, you know? When I was out there knocking doors, I vividly remember a conversation with one of these voters in, you know, after the sun had dropped that night in his front yard as I was standing next to some Flamingo lawn ornaments as we were talking about how he said, no, I understand what you're saying, but this is the only way to get people in is for everyone else to be disorganized. And I said, but what if the people in general don't believe in that message and you're only winning because of an anomaly, an artifact of the math of the current system and he just, no, I don't care. I just want to win. And I think that that was a driving force behind many of those who opposed us in that camp. Yeah, that's unfortunate when, you know, any reform, no matter what it is, is people are pushing it in bad faith, right? Or lack of reform, I guess, in that case, that's a lack of reform being pushed in bad faith. Whereas with approval voting, you were coming in saying, I'm not here trying to get any specific interest, any specific party elected. I just want to make sure that our government is responsive and that the representatives who are elected represent what the people really wanted. Absolutely. And that's just one of the hardest parts about that conversation, though, is that you, if the problem exists to a point where the people are upset about it or willing to listen to you about improving the system, that means that you have specific candidates and elections to point at. And there are winners and losers from those elections that mean something to the citizens that you're talking to. And that starts to draw lines in the sand, unfortunately, before you get there. It's hard for many to separate the, you know, the math and the mechanics of a better system from the, but how's that gonna affect my guy? Right. It's a thought process. Yeah, I think it's hard because, you know, like the Center for Election Science, we're completely nonpartisan. We're not here to push any particular candidate, any political party, but it's when you're talking about election reform, it can be really tricky to disentangle that from the politics and the people involved, right? And I was actually just talking about that with one of our supporters who's on the line today. Christine, we were kind of going back and forth a little bit earlier about, you know, how do we talk about voting reform and how it can help without sounding like we are trying to push any specific agenda because we're not, right? But everybody has their own politics and... Yeah, and it's like, and we purposely tried, you know, there was a lot of outreach to the leaders in these local, you know, political spheres that were generally opposed to us. And we put a lot of time in just to outreaching to them and having legit conversations with them. Yes, the squeaky wheels did get a lot of grease from us. We tried.  I mean, I'm proof of that. I'm absolutely proof of that. You were the squeakiest wheel. Yes, I was ridiculously squeaky, much to the consternation of our commission, no doubt. What you're supposed to do when I was appointed to the elections reforms task force to address this issue way back in 2016, it sounds like what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to just go to these meetings, have some mundane boring conversations and recommend a few milk toast things for the commission to pass, and then they can say they address the issue. And that is not how I approach that thing at all. And the commissioner who had nominated me said that he got a lot of grief from the other commissioners on like subsequent nominations to boards because they didn't like that he had appointed an activist to that first board. And I wasn't an activist is the thing. Yes, I won now, but I was not someone, you know, standing on the street corners, you're going to city hall and carrying a placard that screams about park districts and things. I was not one of those guys at all. I always voted, but beyond that, no, but they made me one because they fought so darn hard not to do their darn jobs. And now I, yeah, they lit a fire under me and I don't know if it's going to go out. It doesn't seem like it. You seem pretty fired up, so that's good. I like fired up, Jed, though, it's exciting. I do have to say about the Libertarians. I want to call out that Pat Dixon and Rock Howard in the chat are talking about how the Libertarian party of Texas just had an approval voting. They had their national convention this weekend. They use approval voting, so that's super exciting and has helped them for endorsing it. Start sending letters to the Libertarians up here, because I mean, we coordinated those types of calls. We had larger national officials whose names escaped me, forgive me, but we had these conversations. We had emails exchanged. I got people in touch with one another to discuss these things, but it's, I don't, it was funny, the political leaders that are Libertarian here very much were Libertarian in the sense that I could think of where they're recalcitrant, stubbornly defined in the face of authority. I'm going to make up my own mind, yet the other citizens who identified as it were not necessarily of that same bit and it was just, it was interesting to me. But that being said, again, there were plenty of Libertarians who supported us. We were very proud. We had a seminal former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate in our state was on our sponsoring committee. We were very purposeful, by the way.  Then if anybody ever said, wow, this is just going to help blah, blah, blah, I could point to the name that they've heard of because we got people you've heard of that are local and said, no, actually this person's on this thing too and they support this. So it was a, that's another thing that I would recommend. If you're able, if you're in one of those states where you're fortunate enough to be able to do initiatives, work your butt off, find that Democrat, that Republican, that Libertarian, that socialist, that green, that centrist, find the ones that other people have heard of and convince them to be on your sponsoring committee. Like we were only required to have three people on our sponsoring committee. We had, well, I don't know, I can't count nine or six or eight or some number that's more than three on that thing so we could get enough butts in those seats so we could diffuse any of those political arguments but just point to that name if it really came down to it. I love that, that's awesome advice. And I want to make sure that we can get off here in a timely manner. So let me just ask you this last question, which kind of goes along with what you were just saying. So do you have any advice for people who might want to run an approval voting campaign? It's a lot of work. It's fulfilling, but it is a lot of work. And I'm not trying to scare you, it's more work than you think it's going to be though. But you just have to believe in what in the heck you're doing. And that's what it comes down to and not be afraid to put yourself out of your comfort zone. Now I have a lot of experience, being on television and speaking on the radio and giving speeches and so forth. And some of you have attended those, and you have to be an advocate for this thing all the time but in a friendly way. You got to be able to put your personal politics aside and be objective. About this change and be able to advocate for it in that way, but you also need to think about it. Not only do you need to be able to put your politics aside, but you need to be able to put those political pants back on sometimes and the pants of other people to be able to speak to voters from their perspective, help them understand the case for why this is also good for you, even though I'm not really like you politically or for this person, you got to be able to make those arguments. And you got to be willing to change how you're doing some of your arguments too. If you said the word plurality to someone, you're trying to get a signature from, you're probably already too far into the weeds. Okay, that's what it is. Like, if you say monotonicity to someone, you've probably gone too far, not always.   I'm not saying that at all, but voters have not thought about this stuff. They get their ballot, they fill it out, and they drop it in a box and they're done with it. They've never thought to themselves, well, I could rank them or maybe we could write an essay about who I think should be mayor and then we could have a whole bunch of retired elementary school teachers grade them and pick a mayor out of the hat. Like, they've never thought that there's another way to make these choices before. So you have to approach them in a simple and direct way, but be willing to go there if you have to. Yes, I had conversations about what it means to be non-monotonic with someone who liked RRV because they had seen a purple ad on Facebook at one point in the past, okay? But for the most part, people haven't seen those ads. They haven't seen any ads. They don't know. They've never thought about it before. They are right for the picking in that sense because this is an undeveloped space. I have said several times in the past that if I walk into a room and I yell abortion, everybody has an opinion. They've heard of it, they have an opinion. You might be able to sway them in a few years of intense debates if you want to do that. They have opinions already, but if I walk into a room and I go election method, approval voting, it is crickets. Nobody knows what you're talking about. Take advantage of that. You can use that. That is part of why IRV is becoming synonymous with election reform though. However, online, when you run into this stuff, when I browse Reddit, when I browse Facebook, I still see, you know, like, this is why we need ranked choice voting. And like, no, this is why we need election reform. So I do think time is of the essence in making sure that we get more cities, more counties, more states under our belt using a better method out there because right now IRV is kind of becoming genericized in a bad way. You know, it's not the only reform out there. I'm not saying that it doesn't work. I'm just saying it is not the only game in town and I don't think it's as good as approval voting. And you just got to be willing to get out there, knock a lot of doors, but also gosh, I don't know, as I give you all a pep talk for a campaign that you're not running right now, but also be willing to take breaks and give yourself your own time too. But it is gonna be a lot of work. During that summer, I four or five nights a week, I was either gathering signatures or knocking doors for the bulk of it is what it is. We had other volunteers too, but other volunteers are other volunteers. They're not who you are. You're the organizer. You need to make sure that you're leading by example and going out. You can't call and be like, well, I thought you were going to go out today. No, it's got to be, I thought we were going to go out today. That's how you make sure that you keep going out there and you have other people help them to help. And then you knock a few doors and they're knocking with you and then pretty soon they're taking one side of the street and you're on the other. And then pretty soon, you're three blocks apart from each other and you're going to meet in a little while. Once you get to the end of your area, your precinct that you broke out. So you will get there. You can lead other people to do it. Just have, just be sure of what you're doing and be, but don't lie. You can be confident in what you're doing, but don't lie to them. Tell them, this is hard work. I don't think that is perfect, but I think that it is a great plan and we're going to do it and we're going to do it together and you get a lot done. I don't know, something like that. I don't know, I try to say everything, assuming that it's going up on the internet and in some sort of history book somewhere. So I'll make it all flowery. I'll use some big words maybe, but yeah. No, I think that was great advice, especially just the way you ended it, like just being authentic and just being straightforward about what the benefits are. And if somebody asks you about a weakness that really is a weakness, it's okay to say, yeah, like there is no perfect voting method, nothing's ever going to be 100%, but this is an amazing improvement, right? So thank you so much, Jed. I, we all really, really, really appreciate all the work you've done to get approval voting implemented in Fargo and the fact that you continue to humor us and join in on our online events. I know I'm always bugging you with these, so thank you. And we've had some folks in the chat saying that you are the man, have to tell you that, and saying thank you for all of your hard work. Kathleen from the League of Women Voters in St. Louis, who they're mixed up, hopefully. She said, thank you so much. You've given the folks in St. Louis a lot of hope. So hopefully that makes you feel good because you've done an amazing job, so. Well, thanks, yeah. Well, I'm happy to help. Yeah, if any of you want to email me, you can email me at jedatreformfargo.org and I will attempt to get your email at some point. I'm happy to respond or you can find us, find contact information at reformfargo.org as well. I haven't updated the thing since the election, but you can watch all the Canada interviews for candidates that you'll never vote for if you want, but they're on there. They're really good. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, worked hard on them, so. But yeah, and I'm happy to participate in these types of discussions, generally, just not Thursdays. That's volleyball night, so just not Thursdays. Definitely don't miss out on volleyball. Yeah, that's right. I'm a dominant force in sand volleyball. I'm six foot nine, so I don't even have to jump out there, so you gotta watch out. Yeah, I wouldn't want to go up against you playing volleyball, for sure. Well, and. We're at the bottom of our league in wins, but don't tell anybody. Oh no, I won't tell. And just so everybody here knows, we are trying to find kind of the next Jed, the next Bargo. We want to give out some grants to people who are able to send in a good proposal for a campaign in their area. So we have put together an RFP, a request for proposals, so you guys can check that out in the link that I just sent in the chat. But we are accepting those through early to mid September. I'm sorry, I don't have the date off the top of my head. But check out that link and see if that's something that you might be interested in applying for. We really want to find more cities and help get them better elections, like what Bargo is doing. So yeah, thank you so much, Jed. We really appreciate it. And thank you to everyone on the call. Thank you all so much for your support. I know many of you have been around for a while and you may have even contributed to the Bargo campaign. So we really appreciate all of you as well and look forward to working more with you in the future. So thanks to everyone and have a great night. Yeah, Yvette, thank you.


Welcome to George H. Schmitz's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Spinoza's Political Theory Benedict Spinoza presented his political theory in two works, The Theologico-Political Triatus, beginning with chapter 16, published anonymously in 1670, and The Political Triatus, an unfinished book that was published posthumously in 1677, the year of Spinoza's death. Although the latter book presents one of the earliest defenses of democracy ever written, its discussion of Spinoza's fundamental ideas about rights and sovereignty does little more than summarize the more extensive treatment found in the former. In an age, when it was increasingly common to write scholarly books in the vernacular, Spinoza wrote everything in Latin, and he did so for what he regarded as a compelling reason. As he explained in the preface to The Theologico-Political Triatus, only educated philosophical readers were likely to give his ideas a fair hearing. To the rest of mankind, I care not to commend my triatus, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them. Most educated readers in Spinoza's day could read Latin, which had served for centuries as the universal language among Europeans, as French would later do, and as English does now. Most of the common people could not read Latin, and Spinoza viewed the multitude as so filled with prejudices embraced under the name of religion, and so prone to praise or blame by impulse rather than by reason, that it was better for them not to read the triatus at all rather than misinterpret it after their want. Utter neglect by the masses was preferable to the outcry that his ideas, especially his call for freedom of religion and his denial that reason is a mere handmade to theology, might provoke among the common people if those ideas became widely known. Such an outcry might jeopardize Spinoza's personal safety and lead to the censorship of his writings, a measure advocated by many of his critics, even in liberal Holland, in which case the triatus might become unavailable to those who stood to benefit from it the most. Spinoza concluded the preface with a type of political genuflection that was regarded as a necessary safety measure by many free thinkers of his time. I have written nothing, he declared, which I do not most willingly submit to the examination and judgment of my country's rulers, and I am ready to retract anything which they shall decide to be repugnant to the laws or prejudicial to the public good. Spinoza had taken scrupulous care and striven to keep an entire accordance with the laws of my country, with loyalty, and with morality. Spinoza's controversial ideas extended beyond the realm of religion into the realm of politics, both theoretical and practical. In Spinoza's political ideas lurk the ghost of Niccolò Machiovelli and Thomas Hobbes, a defense of real politic that claimed to base politics on the stark realities of human nature, on man as he really is, rather than man as we think he ought to be. This perspective led Spinoza to repudiate the conventional moral nature of rights and to substitute a purely descriptive account of rights that equated rights with sheer power. According to Spinoza, what we have the power to do, we also have the right to do. Spinoza, a strict determinist, believed that human nature impels every individual to seek his own preservation and welfare, so we have a right to take whatever measures we deem necessary to achieve those ends, however incorrect or irrational our judgments may be. As he put it in the triatus, whatsoever, therefore, an individual considered under the sway of nature thinks useful for himself, whether led by sound reason or impelled by the passions that he has a sovereign right to seek and to take for himself as best he can, whether by force, cunning, and treaty, or any other means. Consequently, he may regard as an enemy anyone who hinders the accomplishment of his purpose. Spinoza applied his purely naturalistic conception of a right to all living creatures, not merely to human beings. Thus, large fish have the sovereign right to devour small fish because such behavior is inherent in their natures. Spinoza reached this conclusion by personifying nature as when he wrote that it is certain that nature, taken in the abstract, has sovereign right to do anything she can. In other words, her right is co-extensive with her power. Hence, the rights of human beings are limited only by their powers. This principle applies as much to irrational actions and persons as it does to rational actions and persons. Spinoza, of course, was a great champion of reason and defended its indispensable role in the pursuit of happiness. But he also understood that most people are motivated largely by their passions, however destructive to oneself and others those passions may be. Passions that generate irrational behavior are part of human nature. So rights do not vary according to the rationality of the acting agent, just as the wise man has sovereign right to live according to the laws of reason.   Spinoza rejected the notion of a universe that is intrinsically rational. Nature, per se, is neither rational nor irrational. To render any such judgment is to impose on nature a human judgment. Man is a mere speck in the cosmos. A being whose first and primary natural impulse is to preserve his own being. If some methods of survival strike us as better or more rational than other methods, this is true only from our limited perspective. Nature is not bounded by the laws of human reason, which aims only at man's true benefit and preservation. If some human actions appear to us evil, immoral or unjust, this is only because we are ignorant of the ways of nature in the broadest sense. In reality, that which reason considers evil is not evil in respect to the order and laws of nature as a whole, but only in respect to the laws of our reason. These and similar comments are closely related to Spinoza's insistence that philosophers should study human passions objectively, as entomologists study bugs. The goal of a philosopher is to understand how our passions influence our actions, not to assess those passions as good or bad, right or wrong, rational or irrational. Thus, Spinoza asserted that power and right are co-extensive, that we have a right to do anything we regard as useful to our own preservation and welfare. From there, it follows that people in a state of nature, a society without government, are natural enemies.  And from that unlimited right, perpetual social conflict will inevitably ensue. This premise is thoroughly Hobbesian, despite the considerable efforts of philosophers sympathetic to Spinoza to distance him from the odious Hobbes. That is not to say, Spinoza agreed with Hobbes down the line. There were significant differences between the two. Most notably, Spinoza's repudiation of political absolutism in favor of democracy, his defense of freedom of speech and religion, and so forth. Indeed, in contrast to Hobbes, Spinoza made it clear that individual freedom should be the ultimate goal of government. The object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled, neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. So how did Spinoza get from his Hobbesian premises, such as the claim that justice and injustice do not exist in the state of nature, but are determined solely by government to his defense of an essentially free society? The journey was a bumpy ride to say the least. Spinoza maintained that people will come to understand that their interests are best served by leaving the state of nature an anarchistic condition where people may do anything they have the power to do and by agreeing to form a civil society. In civil society, they transfer their right of free action in favor of a government that will determine which actions are just and permissible and which actions are not. This version of the social contract is peculiar since Spinoza's conception of a right has no moral element that would permit us to say that people, whether rulers or the ruled, are morally obligated to respect their part of the social contract. Spinoza did not flinch when considering this problem. Rather, he held doggedly to his naturalistic conception of rights while defending his version of social contract theory. Consider a democracy, a civil society in which the people as a whole control government. The right of the people to rule is based on nothing more than the majority possessing greater power than the minority which enables the majority to enforce its common will against dissenters and it is precisely this greater power that gives them the right to rule. The government in a democracy which supposedly speaks for the people can pass any laws it likes and is able to enforce as we would expect in Spinoza's theory the rights of a government are identical to its power. Whatever a government can do it has the right to do by virtue of its superior power to enforce its will so where can individual freedom possibly find refuge in Spinoza's thoroughly anti-libertarian theory of rights? I covered Spinoza's answer in the previous chapter explaining his theory of inalienable rights to reiterate inalienable rights according to Spinoza are those rights i.e. powers that are so embedded in human nature that they cannot possibly be transferred, abandoned or otherwise alienated in any circumstances. It is therefore absurd because it is impossible for any government to claim dominion over such rights. Governmental power is limited by human nature itself not by moral principles based on reason since no government can do what cannot possibly be done since no government has the power to accomplish the impossible. No government can claim the right to control freedom of speech and religion and other rights based on the inalienable powers of human beings. In addition and also discussed in the preceding chapter a democratic government must retain the respect of the people if it wishes to elicit obedience to its laws and decrees. People will regard a government as desirable only if they believe that life under that government is preferable to a state of nature or to another government. Current rulers will be able to retain their power only as long as they do not lapse into tyranny and in line with Spinoza's theory of rights a government that loses its ability to rule also loses its right to rule. Spinoza's theory of rights in government may strike libertarian readers as downright bizarre welcome to the club. I regarded as a massive failure considered as a whole and an embarrassing failure to boot. How someone with Spinoza's brilliance and passionate love of freedom could defend such a rickety theory remains a mystery to me. Its holes are so large and obvious that I hesitate to point them out for fear of insulting the intelligence of my readers. Nevertheless I will run that risk in the next chapter where I discuss some objections to Spinoza's political theory in particular and to the real politic approach in general. Philosophers who pride themselves on their political realism and who repudiate and ridicule the supposedly soft-headed speculative reasoning of those philosophers who defend the conventional notion in classical liberalism of natural rights often end up producing the most god-awful philosophical mush imaginable. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history visit www.libertarianism.org