Josh Lynn of RepresentUS joins Ed to explore political pitfalls from the 1920s that still threaten our politics today. Together they ask: how can we combat those issues, and how can we bring power back to the voters?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Who is Josh Graham Lynn and what is RepresentUs?
So your incentive is to temper your message and not cater to the extremes. Totally. I mean, how much more chill would our world be if elected officials felt a need to speak to a larger audience?
And not only speak to them, but then be accountable to that audience once they get into office. Right. Because then you're kicking them out. But I do want to answer the question. I know people are going to be listening and thinking like, yeah, but you haven't said how it works or what it is. It's really simple.
You choose your first candidate that you think is the best, and then you rank the other ones in order. So number one, Ed. Number two, Josh. Number three, Jane Doe. et cetera. It's literally, that's the whole entire thing. You just rank your candidates in order rather than choosing one. And then as the votes are calculated, they're able to figure out who has a majority support.
Another term for ranked choice voting is instant runoff, right? Is that a phrase that kind of, I think, I like that phrase because it helps me understand that it's sort of a, then the vote counting is a sort of multi-step process. Yeah. Can you walk us through that a little bit? Sure.
Yeah, the application of that is really simple. If, let's say there were four people running for office, and let's say, I'm going to use you as an example again. Let's say Ed gets 51% of the vote, like the first choice votes. The election is over. Ed has won because he got more than 50% of the vote. But let's say you only got 49%.
And then there's three of us who are splitting up all the rest of that other 51%. If that were the case, the vote tabulators would then look at everyone's second choice votes and apply those until somebody reaches more than 51%. And since you were already at 49, it's very likely that people who voted for me, number one, maybe voted for you second, and so you got my votes and you won.
Sometimes what happens, though, is that instead of somebody getting 50, it's really spread out. It's 26, 24, 25, 25. And so those second choice votes actually can make it feel kind of like a horse race, where someone's ahead and then someone else gets ahead. But it's just the same as the runoff elections that they currently use in Georgia.
Where if nobody gets more than 50 percent, you have a second election. Right. But you've already cast your votes for your second election. So you don't need to come back to the polls. Right. You save a bunch of taxpayer money.
The ranking is your sort of second round of. Yeah, exactly. Of the votes. It is so elegant. It's so simple. And it's so intrinsically fair. No wonder we don't use it. Yeah. No wonder we don't use it. Exactly. Exactly.
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