Bridge The Divide – Ecotopia Soon

“Ecotopia Soon!” broadcasts weekly from W.H.Y.S-Radio, community supported radio, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “Ecotopia Soon!” is hosted by Mark Leach. This is an unedited interview with Bob Maline, a volunteer with Bridge the Divide, about Final Five Voting and what it can do for Wisconsin. The full transcript and the audio interview is below.

Mark Leach: Well, here’s how I see it from our leaky canoe. Everyone alive is in this leaky canoe with me. With you. And I can see the safe shore of Ecotopia. If and when we get there, all of humanity will treat nature as if it is the only life support system we’re ever going to have. Which I think it is. And we’ll treat each other.
All of us human beings as we deserve to be treated regardless of their skin color, their gender, their sexual preference, their cultural history. All that stuff. It doesn’t really matter. But I can’t get people in this leaky canoe organized as much as I shout, “We’re sinking. We’re sinking.” I just can’t get enough people’s attention. I’m either ignored or I’m frequently told.

Mark Leach, you’re just too negative. Well, as much as I want to get this canoe to safety, I realize my influence only reaches a little ways. And that’s why I am so happy. I ran into Bob Maline. He’s got an idea that could help get our elected officials more responsive to their constituents, which should make them better problem solvers and with better problem solvers.

Maybe we can get this leaky canoe to the safe shore of Ecotopia. And I’m talking about ranked choice voting. I always have to say rank-ed because it’s usually sounds like rank choice and it’s not. Nothing rank about it. It’s rank- ed. My guest today is Bob Maline. And if I can’t welcome Bob and all of you listeners to the safe shore of Ecotopia now, I do welcome you, Bob, and everyone else to ecotopia soon. So…

Bob Maline: Mark, thank you very much. It is great to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this for a couple of weeks.

Mark Leach: Well, I ran into you because you invited my sweetheart to your house and I tagged along and to learn about ranked choice voting. And I learned a little bit about you. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our listening audience?

Bob Maline: I’ll do that. Thank you, Mark. So my name is Bob Maline. I am a retired 3M-er. I’m an engineer by training. But as I retired a few years ago, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to plug deeper into my own community. One of my side gigs is I’m a substitute teacher. I teach at all the different Hudson schools.

I live in Hudson, Wisconsin. I spend my year as a an elementary school teacher. I do K through five and I am hopping from morning to afternoon on that. It is a great retirement gig if you’ve got the right mindset. Part of my background I had as I was working, you know, and raising a family. I always had time and energy for additional activities, for volunteer activities.

I knew it was time to retire when the only energy I had was work, go home and sleep. So I wanted to be able to retire and do additional things. One of my additional things is I’m a volunteer with an organization called Pierce County Grassroots Organizing, and their latest project is Bridge the Divide. Bridge the Divide is a project to change the structure of how we vote in Wisconsin in order to get rid of some of the nastiness that’s in a campaign that that pollutes our airways every campaign season.

00:05:02
Bob Maline: It also reduces some of the incentive to do nothing in a legislature, reducing the incentive to push to more and more extremes. It eliminates the spoiler effect for a small party that is enabling small parties to rise to whatever strength they might on the strength of their ideas.

Mark Leach: And that spoiler effect I was reading about, I think it was Colorado, and I can’t even remember what race it was, governor, but there was the polls are showing at a three way race. The Democrat and the Independent were both getting about a little over a third of the vote. And the Republican was getting less

Bob Maline: Right.

Mark Leach: But they referred to the Independent as the spoiler.

Bob Maline: Right.

Mark Leach: It’s like, wait a second, why is that person a spoiler? They’re a legitimate candidate, aren’t they?

Bob Maline: They are. You’re both right. You and that announcer, whoever said it, you were looking at the strength of their support. And you’re right, they were no spoiler. And at the same time, whatever broadcaster or reporter you were reading in this country at this time, it is true that independents fill that spoiler role more than the two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans, much more often than not, that is the case.

I want to share one other spot from my background where that was not the case. A couple of decades ago. I lived in Minnesota and I was a volunteer with the Minnesota Independence Party at the time, what I really was after. I didn’t like the fact that we had only two real choices in an election. I wanted more choices.

So that’s one of the things that brought me to the Minnesota Independence Party. They were a small party. Dean Barkley had won more than 5% of the statewide vote. And that crossed a major threshold in Minnesota. They had very favorable campaign laws for a small party. When Dean, in his run for the Senate, got more than 5% of the vote statewide, we qualified as a major party.

And I assume if I hold up my quote fingers real close to the microphone, the listeners can hear that. So it was a major party in the state of Minnesota while still being small, but that allowed them to have certain advantages in the in the election, not advantages over the major party, but but things that would help them catch up.

I’d worked for various campaigns for the Independence Party, and one day Jesse Ventura, his campaign manager, called me. We had worked together on previous campaigns. He asked, Do you want to be on Jesse’s campaign? And I said, Well, what’s available? We talked about a couple of different jobs. This and that. And he mentioned campaign treasurer. And what I thought was, if I’m treasurer, that’s going to force me to learn the campaign finance laws.

And that was very appealing to me. So I said I would do that. I was his campaign treasurer. We started about six months before the election. We worked through this election. The momentum climbed and climbed and climbed. Toward the end, it got to the point where I couldn’t keep up and most of the volunteers available were way on the other side of the Twin Cities.

So my wife, rather than looking at me and saying, What have you gotten yourself into, Bob? She said, How can I help? One of the absolute highlights of my marriage. How can you help? And so my wife was the assistant campaign treasurer and as you know, Jesse Ventura beat the odds, won that election with a plurality of the vote, not a majority, not over 50%.

But he did beat those major parties. And, Mark, to your point. Yeah, how could you call him a spoiler when he actually got more votes than all the others? And yet in American politics, those independents, traditionally their role is as a potential spoiler as you know. Otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting in front of you this final five voting, which features an open nonpartisan primary followed by a ranked choice general election, eliminates that spoiler effect.

There’s never a penalty for voting for who you really want in that. Of those top five. And if it is happens to be a small party without many other people voting for them, well, your vote will get reallocated to your next choice or your third choice. And that is one of the powers of Final Five voting featuring a ranked choice general election.

Mark Leach: Well, we’re going to spend much of the hour speaking about that, talking about that, conversing about it. But let’s get some music.

00:10:24
[“I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” The Ink Spots]

00:13:31
Mark Leach: Well, you are listening to Ecotopia Soon on W.H.Y.S.L.P. Low Power Radio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I’m your host, Mark Leach. And I’m joined today with Bob Maline, a expert and ranked choice voting. It is kind of hard to say you ranked choice voting ranked choice. It’s not rank it’s ranked. Oh, we just heard the ink spots from scratchy 78.

So Bob, you were telling us some of the advantages of ranked five voting and and I thought it would be useful for us to have a real example. So I asked listeners gosh, weeks ago to vote in a primary and we got 69 people to vote in the primary. And part of that was I went around at some of the social events I was at and just asked them, who would you like to be the next president if you could bring anybody back from the dead to do it?

And also, who’s your favorite band? Musician, composer, singer. And so we got 69 ballots. We also had a way to vote online, which had its own challenges, letting meet people, letting people know what the link was to get there. And when that concluded, we had took the top five voter or the top five vote getters from the primary, and then they were on the ranked five final five voting ranked choice final five ballot.

00:15:24
Mark Leach: We didn’t get as many as nearly as many votes, partly because I didn’t go to so many social events, and it was really hard to get people to just quickly say how they ranked them. Everybody wanted to talk about, Oh, I like this band because of this, and I don’t know Bob Marley. I don’t know. He’s with sort of a homophobic something or other.

Bob Maline: You brought back good memories and bad and people wanted. To share those memories. Yeah.

Mark Leach: You know, and some people much younger than me had names of bands that I had never heard of. So that was fun for me because then I got to come home and find some of their music and listen to it, but also last week, our regular listeners might know that the station wasn’t operating when this show was on of something happened to the computer at four or five in the morning and nobody turned it back on until 830, which was after this show.

So there was another chance for listeners to learn about about this. But we’ve got we’ve got the ballots here in front of us. Bob’s been working on his arithmetic skills, and I have. And so the way rank five ranked choice Final five voting works.

Bob Maline: We call it, we call it Final Five Voting. And that is a combination of two things. An open, nonpartisan primary followed by a ranked choice general election. And so that final five it’s it’s not a a decades long thing in the political science world, but it’s picking up a little bit now because that’s when Alaska did theirs. When they recently implemented this, they decided to go with four, five.

It’s called Final Four Voting.

Mark Leach: Yeah.

Bob Maline: In Wisconsin, there’s a bill in the legislature and it refers to Final Five voting. So it’s that that terminology, final five voting is catching on.

Mark Leach: Or final four.

Bob Maline: Or final four for Alaska. Yes. Yeah.

Mark Leach: The thing is, there’s a lot fewer people in Alaska than here that might have a hard time finding the fifth candidate

Bob Maline: In, they had a special election. They had an opening in there for their congressional representation. So they just had a special election. Santa Clause was written in in their primary. Sarah Palin competed in that primary.

Mark Leach: Did she beat Santa Claus? She beat.

Bob Maline: Santa Claus, yes. So don’t tell tell your kids that that that you got to be good. Otherwise, Sarah Palin’s going to beat Santa Claus in that Final Four in Alaska. Their special election two Republicans, one independent and one Democrat emerged as the four winners of that multi winner primary.

So in August, coming up, they’ll have their general election for that special election. And voters in Alaska will rank one through four those four candidates.

Mark Leach: In our ballot. Our five candidates for president were Bernie Sanders, Abraham Lincoln, Liz Cheney, Barack Obama and Harry S Truman. So two Republicans, Abraham Lincoln and Liz Cheney, one independent, Bernie Sanders, and two Democrats, Barack Obama and Harry Truman.

Bob Maline: You’re right that. So that’s a good distribution and that that just happened as your as your audience responded, those were the people that they wanted to vote for in their primary. So that that worked out as a good demonstration of this. You you had shared with me the results earlier this morning, and I walked through those to, to make sure that I was up to speed on it.

Bob Maline: Shall I share the results now?

Mark Leach: Well, let me just give a couple of comments.

Bob Maline: Oh, sure.

Mark Leach: From the voters, uh, one voter. He said that or he or she I don’t know who it was, said no living person would want to be president of the United States. Vote Truman and Lincoln. And somebody else very sincerely wrote a lengthy thing about how Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in their lifetime that really matched their values.

00:20:03
Bob Maline: Oh, I can believe that you need some free thinking people because we’ve got free thinking Americans. And so you need people that have a wide variety of thoughts in order to match your values. Doesn’t mean you’re going to win. But I can absolutely understand where someone would say that. If you’d like, I can give the results.

Mark Leach: Oh, let’s get let’s get into at least the first round here. So if some if one of the candidates gets over 50% of number one choices, number one ranks on the ballot, then they’re in.

Bob Maline: That’s exactly right.

Mark Leach: But we didn’t get that. So…

Bob Maline: I do like the way you say that when you when you say let’s let’s start with the first round and then we can if we have any observations, we can make them in this. As you said, we got fewer respondents in the general election than the primary. And of course, that’s very different than a a an actual election run by the government.

That’s okay. It still works to illustrate this just fine. You got 17 respondents and on each of those ballots. People made five markings, but only one of those markings is valid at a time. So in this first round, we’re just going to look at their first choices. Bernie got five, Lincoln six, Liz Cheney, zero. I can tell you this with many people who disagree with her on every issue imaginable, appreciate the fact that she has a red line which she will not cross and insurrection and a coup attempt is on the other side of the red line for her.

Bob Maline: So good for her.

Mark Leach: Yeah.

Bob Maline: Even if there’s not an issue that you support her on.

Mark Leach: Hmm.

Bob Maline: Barack Obama got two, and Harry Truman got four, so remember, there were 17 ballots cast. Half of that is eight and a half. So nine are required to win and nobody got nine. So in that first round, we’d look to who who came in last place, Liz Cheney, with no votes. We would eliminate Liz Cheney

Mark Leach: Bye Liz!

Bob Maline: Goodbye, Liz.

Mark Leach: Thank you.

Bob Maline: Yeah. With no votes. That means there’s nothing to redistribute. So technically, in round two, all those same totals remain. Bernie with five, Lincoln with six, Obama with two, and Truman with four. No change. Nobody’s got the nine required to win. So we need a third round. We look to who’s in last place, and that’s Barack Obama. In this case, he’s got two votes.
Those two votes are going to get redistributed. So we look we looked on those ballots. And as it turned out, in each case, Abe Lincoln was the second choice for each of those ballots. So Abe’s total goes up by two after. Now the third round, Bernie has five. Lincoln, eight, a strong lead, Harry Truman with four. But Lincoln’s strong lead of eight still doesn’t cross that threshold. He does not have true majority yet.

Mark Leach: So, and Truman hasn’t picked up any more votes.

Bob Maline: Truman has not picked up any more votes. And as I you know, just for myself, Abe Lincoln scores very high in some of these historian ratings of presidential accomplishment. In my heart, he is near and dear. It did not surprise me when I saw Abe Lincoln picking up votes. In that fourth round, Harry Truman is now in last place. His, he gets dropped. He is no longer a valid candidate. His ballots get reassigned. And on his second choice on two of them was Bernie. Bernie gains two. Second choice was Lincoln. Lincoln gains, gains two.

Mark Leach: I know who’s winning.

Bob Maline: Yes, you do. So after four rounds, Bernie Sanders has a very respectable, but second place, seven votes. Abraham Lincoln, a winning true majority of ten votes. Abe Lincoln wins. And the way I like to say it on this is we now know for sure in a way that we wouldn’t have in a straight plurality election where just the first round counts. We know for sure that Abe Lincoln is preferred over Bernie Sanders by a majority of these voters.

Mark Leach: And if we looked at the just the mean of the ranks, can’t quite remember how that worked out. But…

Bob Maline: You looked at that.

Mark Leach: Liz Cheney, I know, is at the very bottom. She didn’t get any ones or twos, did she?

00:25:04
Bob Maline: She did not. She got no no first place votes. And Mark, you did something that I had not thought of doing. You looked at each candidate and created a mean or average of their rankings. And that was that was very interesting because in the Abe Lincoln started in the lead in this in this whole election. But he also had the very lowest mean rank. So what that meant is Abe didn’t get fives and fours even when he wasn’t a one. He got twos and threes. So you knew just from looking at that, that when we went through the whole process, he was going to do very well?

Mark Leach: Well, I suspected as much.

Bob Maline: If as I look at this, we saw that we saw that Bernie Sanders, he had more first place votes, but he also had a better average than Harry Truman, who ended up coming in third. And that played out. You just what you did is you looked for ways of getting an indication of in addition to who had the most first place votes, who had fewer haters, four and five place votes, and who and who was who were people’s second choice. And that is a really a value of any ranked choice system. So…

Mark Leach: Yeah, well, speaking as an ecologist and when we collect ecological data, it’s because we collect the data that we do collect, partly because it’s feasible to collect the data. And secondly, we have some reason to think it’s a surrogate for what we really want to know.

Bob Maline: That’s a great point.

Mark Leach: And what we really want to know in elections is what do the people want in their elected officials? We’re not getting what we want now.

Bob Maline: Mark the- oh, please, continue.

Mark Leach: We’re not getting what we want now. And so I think there may be a problem with this winner take all system. And I think what you’re talking about is that this Ranked Choice Voting may reflect better what people really want. They might want either Bernie Sanders or Abraham Lincoln.

Bob Maline: I love the way you say that, and I love the analogy for the ecologist. You’re trying to find something. You’re trying to trying to gain some knowledge, but you have you have to it’s a complex thing. It’s not it’s not just I want to I want to get samples from from a yeti. You’ve got a balance. Yeah, this is doable. I can actually find a grizzly bear. Maybe I need samples from that. You’re balancing your true desire from what’s attainable. And you’re. And you have this complex set of desires. As an ecologist, it’s the same thing as a voter. Your vote is a complex set of political desires, wants, needs, and judgment of what’s available.

In today’s voting, I like to do this. And Mark, you’ll remember this from the House party. Mark, I’m going to ask you a question and I’m going to ask it as a narrowly focused yes or no answer. Mark, have you finally stopped cheating on your income taxes? No, no, no, don’t answer that. I have taken a complex thing you want to be able to explain. I’m not cheating. I don’t cheat. I haven’t cheated. I do. I whether I make a mistake or not, I pay my fair share. But I tried to shoehorn your complex answer into a very narrow yes or no question. And I think that’s how voting is today. You have complex needs to express and you said it very well earlier. You might want Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders over all the rest.

Final Five Voting, with its ranked choice general election allows you to express complex ideas in the form of a ranking. It’s almost an if then statement. Well, if I could have Bernie Sanders, I want him. But if I can’t have him, if he has no chance, well, then I might want Barack Obama or vice versa. And this is how people really think. This is what’s going on underneath people’s elected election expression. It’s just that in a system right now, they are heavily constrained in what markings they can put on there.