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.

Mark Leach: Yeah.

Bob Maline: Final Five Voting enables that.

Mark Leach: Well let’s go to some more music and then we’ll, we’ll pick this back up with this, this either or idea

00:29:57
[“They All Laughed” Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong]

00:33:51
Mark Leach: Well, that was Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, whose got the last laugh now? Well, is it Bob Maline? Is it me? Mark Leach, your host here on Ecotopia Soon, W.H.Y.S.L.P. Eau Claire, Wisconsin streaming at whysradio.org 96.3 on your FM Well Bob what do you say and we’re from that era where we say dial.

Bob Maline: Dial. Yes. I knew where you were going with that. Yes.

Mark Leach: But do you got a dial on your device?

Bob Maline: I think I have I think I am dial free. I cannot I suppose my car radio has a dial. Yes.

Mark Leach: Oh, yes. You can listen, you can drive up and down I-94 outside of Eau Claire and listen to the show.

Bob Maline: That’s right.

00:34:45
Mark Leach: We were talking about Final Five, Ranked Choice Voting. And you were making some claim about how this might help this either-or, us or them, black or white, up or down, left or right extremism that we’ve gotten into. And I just I always like to bring in a little historical perspective, especially if I can work Senator Joe McCarthy into this. And, you know, I often point out that the terrible effects of the techniques of deceit that Senator Joe, tail gunner Joe, so expertly introduced, well, they’re probably much older than him, but a lot of people really were like, “Oh, that’s how you do it.” And since the 1950s, there’s been this ratchet effect, snowball effect, you know, this accumulation of more flies and then more gullibility. I mean, it seems like this vicious cycle. And then in 1994, Newt Gingrich became the Speaker of the House. And that, you know, a lot of people might not even remember this. And, of course, you know, because you’re too young to remember this. But Newt Gingrich really changed our legislatures from being one of where legislation would actually get passed. I mean, between the time of Joe McCarthy in the fifties and Newt Gingrich in the nineties, we passed Voting Rights Acts, all kinds of environmental laws, all kinds of good things got passed because Democrats and Republicans were trying to do the right thing. And then Newt Gingrich came along and it became this, I don’t, brass knuckle winner-gets-it-all approach.

Bob Maline: And his, his Contract with America was a highly disciplined messaging for his side to accomplish what you just described.

Mark Leach: Yeah. So I mean that is the approach that it seems like we’re still living in it. Oh, one of the things that he did when he was Speaker of the House is that he was like, “We’re only going to work three days a week.”

Bob Maline: And if all you want to do is shut things down, that’s just fine. Yeah, it’s like the Wisconsin legislature in was it 2021, the the first COVID year and they were down for 11 months because apparently there were no actions needed in the state of Wisconsin as they dealt with COVID. But if all you want to do is nothing, then yeah. Working three days a week as a legislature, that’s easy.

Mark Leach: Well, you can spend the rest of your time campaigning and fundraising

Bob Maline: Good point yeah.

Mark Leach: The other poison. So would Rank Five Voting help get some of the money out of our politics. I mean it’s it’s sort of the last claim of what I’ve been reading about it is like, well, it might help.

Bob Maline: Let me get one- Your comments spurred something I’m going to-

Mark Leach: Oh, go ahead.

Bob Maline: Comment on that. And then that’s a good question. I just read a book called “Kill Switch” by Adam Jentleson. That’s with a “J”. He was I believe he was a communications director for Harry Reid when he was the Senate majority leader. And “Kill Switch” is about the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. It is a great history of and, and even a a look forward on what could be done to enable that legislative body to begin functioning again. As, as you describe, Newt Gingrich in the House and various sometimes well-intentioned reforms that have turned the Senate into a highly minoritarian ruled body. But that’s not what you just asked me. What you just asked me was would Final Five Voting contribute to reducing the impact of money and its toxic effect on our elections and I’ll say a little.

Mark Leach: Mm hmm.

Bob Maline: There is structural change needed. Final Five is a key structural step, but it is not the only structural step. And where it would help reduce the impact of special interest money is with five candidates in the general election in November. In a typical election with five candidates a special interest, whether extremely conservative or extremely liberal, can’t be as effective. Piling all their money in one direction.

Mark Leach: Mm.

Bob Maline: Truth is same in the primary where a, where a financial interest would try to support one candidate. They can be very effective today in a one winner primary. But in a five winner primary, money is going to get their candidate through into the general election. But in addition to getting through that primary, one of the things that money does now is it suppresses candidates by getting them beat in a primary. If five winners go through in a primary, then money’s effect of beating moderate voices, suppressing moderate voices, is weakened. And so, at least to that regard, Final Five Voting with its open, nonpartisan primary and its ranked choice general election would help reduce the influence of money in elections. But I don’t want to oversell. I know money will still be a very powerful interest and further reforms are going to be needed for that.

00:40:53

Mark Leach: Yeah. So Bob, let’s go over how the primary works again.

Bob Maline: Certainly.

Mark Leach: I assume that the proposed bill wouldn’t change how people get on the primary ballot. They’d still have to have people sign a petition.

Bob Maline: You are correct. Ballot access would remain the same as it is today.

Mark Leach: But the main difference that I have really like is when I go to the primary right now, if there’s a candidate from one or another party that I prefer, I’m only allowed to vote for candidates in that party. I can’t vote Republican for one office and Democrat for another office and Green for a third office or for whatever. And that’s one of the things I really like about this, is that it’s like, why should it be either or why should I be shoehorned into saying, you know, I call myself an independent, but more often than not, I’m voting in one of the parties in the primaries because, I find a better matched my values and what policies I think are the most important right now.

Bob Maline: So, Mark, that makes, that’s exactly right. There are there are several things that are intertwined with this. One of the things…

Mark Leach: Well, maybe I should interrupt you because maybe we should get on to our of our favorites.

Bob Maline: That’s right. Our the the the music election, which we haven’t reviewed yet. And then we can we can hit on some of these other things.

Mark Leach: Let’s remind the listeners that here on Ecotopia Soon we had this fun, faux balloting, where we had a primary for favorite, not necessarily best, but favorite at the moment, band musicians, singer composer. Who do we have on the ballot? The five that got the most votes in the primary.

Bob Maline: So as you mentioned, so you ran a primary. You had a list of many people that people could vote for and your listeners vote voted for one person on that. Or they wrote in their own favorite.

Mark Leach: We got a lot of write ins.

Bob Maline: Yeah, that’s that’s right. My own when I responded to yours was a write in and that’s exactly how it would be in this, with Final Five implemented.

Bob Maline: But the top five vote getters in that primary were the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Sun Ra and Johann Sebastian Bach.

Mark Leach: And how in the world did Sun Ra get enough votes?

Bob Maline: I believe your radio show is the only show where Sun Ra would have made it past that, multi winner top five primary. In that J.S. Bach was the leader. He had six votes, you remember. And again, there were 17 votes turned in half of 17 is eight and a half. So to get over that, nine votes are needed to win. A true majority. Bach had six votes to take the early lead. The Beatles and Bob Dylan were tied with four votes each, so they were in second place. Sun Ra got two votes and Bob Marley, one vote. So that’s where they stood after one round.

Mark Leach: So these were the votes of the highest rank? The ones.

Bob Maline: Yes. When I was sorting those ballots, all I looked at was first choice votes for that. And as you mentioned, when we were doing the presidents, if, say, Bach had gotten nine votes, he would have had a true majority. It would have been done because this this form of voting is to ensure that a majority of people want the winner over the runner up or the other candidates.

Mark Leach: Got it

00:44:52
Bob Maline: Because there was no winner, no one had a true majority, we had to look to who came in last and eliminate that candidate. In this case, it was Bob Marley. He had one vote cast for him. So we looked at that ballot, went to the second place choice on that, and that was Bob Dylan. So after two rounds, Bach was in first place. Dylan had taken a second place position over the Beatles. 5 to 4. Bob Marley was gone and Sun Ra still had his two votes. So a third round was required. In this case, Sun Ra was in last place. His two ballots got redistributed. One ended up going to Bob Dylan, one ended up going to J.S. Bach. After three rounds, Bach was still in the lead. He’s led from the from the gate in this case, Bach with seven, Dylan with six, Beatles with four. And this is a very real situation in… In my lifetime, I can think of elections with Bush, Perot and and Clinton, where, you know, there were relatively close elections in the story I was telling earlier with Coleman, Skip Humphrey and Jesse Ventura, very tight elections, just like we have right here. So finally in the fourth round, the lowest entering the fourth round were the Beatles. They had four ballots. We examined those ballots. And second choice on those, one went to Johann Sebastian Bach. He ended up with eight. Three of those went to Bob Dylan.

Mark Leach: So wait a sec. The Beatles got bumped out. If I remember right in the primary, they were ahead of everybody else.

Bob Maline: In what we see, Bach started out with the lead. Bach had the most votes in the primary. Beatles were a strong second.

Mark Leach: Oh, okay.

Bob Maline: Yup.

Mark Leach: I didn’t remember right.

Bob Maline: Beatles were a strong second. But one of the things, in our pre-recording conversation, we talked a little bit about this, that if you, if you just peeked in after the third round, looking into that fourth round and saw Bach in the lead, Dylan in second, the Beatles in third and thought, well, who would a true majority want your gut kind of tells you that even though Bach is in the lead, I bet there are more Beatles fans that would then move to Dylan if they had to move

Mark Leach: …or vice versa.

Bob Maline: Or vice versa, you’re exactly right.

Mark Leach: Yeah.

Bob Maline: It makes a little bit of sense, both musical style and the era of when they were popular. And so that’s exactly what happened. We eliminated the Beatles in three of those four votes, went to Bob Dylan. He leaped to the, to the lead, and he did get a true majority with nine votes to Johann Sebastian Bach’s, eight votes. And the way I summarize it, very close election. But truly a majority of participants in your election would rather have Dylan than Bach and therefore Dylan should win. And in Final Five Voting, Dylan did win.

Mark Leach: Yeah, if I remember right, nobody gave Dylan a four or five ranking, did they?

Bob Maline: I think you’re right. Again, doing this the way you did, you looked at their total scores and then mean ranks. And Dylan had even though he was tied for second, he had the lowest mean rank meaning just ones, twos, maybe a three but couldn’t have had a four or five in there and still got an average score of two. So you just knew that despite the fact that I know there are people that, Dylan’s nasal tones are not what they’re after, but they didn’t dislike enough to put a four or a five. And so his true strength across the electorate showed through

Mark Leach: Yeah. So to summarize, I mean, with our presidential election, our winner was Abraham Lincoln. But it took what was it, three rounds?

Bob Maline: It took four rounds there to get a true majority

Mark Leach: It took four in both of them.

Bob Maline: That’s right. That’s right. So and one other thing to remind ourselves, Lincoln started out in the lead in that presidential election. So in today’s plurality vote, and I know listeners will know this, but a plurality is when you have the most votes, but not a true majority of all votes cast.

Mark Leach: Right.

Bob Maline: So in today’s plurality voting, Lincoln would have won on that first round, but we wouldn’t have known whether a true majority really supported him more than every other candidate, more than any runner up candidate possible. Well, with Final Five Voting, we know that Lincoln was supported more than any possible runner up. Same thing with Dylan. He did not start in first place. And that could happen in one of our governmental elections. But by the time it was done, we know that he had more support than any potential runner up in this election.

00:50:29
Mark Leach: So one of the things like that appeals to me about this style of voting is it seems to diminish the role of the political parties themselves and I’ve heard, I’ve heard somebody say, maybe it was myself say, you know, it would be great to end the stranglehold that the two party system has on our government. I mean, right now, it’s like if the party leadership doesn’t approve of you, there’s no way you’re going to get in to office with some strange, bizarre exceptions. I mean, maybe Trump is one of the.

Bob Maline: He’s one of those exceptions. You’re exactly right.

Mark Leach: But also making it more feasible for kind of the alternate candidates the alternate to the status quo candidates to get in. That seems really like a good idea. But also it seems like this just might do away with quite a bit of the nastiness. Where it’s the candidate… The campaigns now are so divisive and so mudslinging and there’s so much deceit about, gosh, I just remember I… I wish I would have saved this. I got something from the Republicans. This is decades ago, and it was one of these phony polls. And one of the poll questions was, are you in favor or not of Hillary Clinton sending in the United Nations to search your house for guns and take them?

Bob Maline: What? No black helicopters?

Mark Leach: They’re like, wait a second, what, what kind of campaign actually like says something like that.

Bob Maline: Right.

Mark Leach: And but the appeal here is that if you’re if you are running against Hillary Clinton, maybe you would want some of the people who would put Hillary Clinton down as a one or a two. You might want her voters to put you down as the two or the three

Bob Maline: Mark, you bring up a really important point. So nasty campaigns, nasty lying campaigns are not just a pain to sit through to listen through. They are not just someone being overly sensitive. They are a toxin on our country.

Mark Leach: Absolutely.

Bob Maline: And you and I talked a moment ago about everyone within one body has both individualistic, selfish interests and some affinity for group cooperation. I happen to believe that. In both of those are true and natural to people. I believe that to truly thrive on a on a heavily populated planet, we need to foster cooperation. So in America today, these nasty, lying, divisive campaigns, they weaken our country. Final Five Voting with its ranked choice general election inspires. It doesn’t force candidates to eliminate nastiness. Nastiness. It inspires them to do so and it penalizes nastiness. Mark, let’s say you and I are running against each other and I want to go scorched earth and just trash you. I want to make up lies about you. But I need your voters, your supporters, to think of me favorably and maybe be their second or third choice. That’s my only path to winning in a Final Five Voting with a ranked choice general election. I have to refrain from from tearing you down. We’re still going to compete very rigorously. It’s going to be a hard fought election. But I have to not foster hatred because I need your voters to think of me as their second choice.

Mark Leach: You mean maybe we could actually talk about policy? We might talk about how we get this leaky canoe to the safe shore of Ecotopia?

00:54:51
Bob Maline: We would talk about what are the right orders to use and who’s going to bail while someone’s paddling. Yes. And even if we disagree, we’re going to moderate how… we’re never going to stop short of highlighting policy differences. But there’s a difference between highlighting policy differences and spewing, trying to drum up hatred. And there are penalties, penalties in this system for drumming up hatred. If we have time, one other thing that really is a is a key feature of this.

Mark Leach: Well, you know, I was just about to say we are already out of time, but go ahead.

Bob Maline: Well, I’ll be brief and then I’ll save any stories for a future, for a future visit. I think many of your listeners will have heard the threat, which is used in today’s politics. If any one candidate dares to compromise with the across the aisle, with an opponent, and they would think of them as the enemy. And I cannot emphasize this enough. They would call a political opponent an enemy, another American that they just disagree with. If they compromise, the extremists weapon is to primary them.

Mark Leach: Right.

Bob Maline: They find someone more extreme. They both threaten them and they actually do bring in this much more extreme person. And it happens on both sides. Run that person in a single winner primary. And the incumbent that is terrified of getting beat in a single winter primary, not being able to take their message to the whole electorate, to the whole district, and trying to sell their accomplishments on what they actually did to both sides, to the whole electorate. A multi winner primary like in Final Five Voting, a multi winner primary takes the extremists most effective weapon, primarying that person, out of their hands.

Mark Leach: Yes. And that seems to be why Robin Vos is acting so crazily these days. But maybe he’s just crazy. I don’t know. Well, we’re about out of time. And so I want to thank once again the people at W.H.Y.S Radio for helping make sure this gets played like it didn’t last week. But through no fault of their own, that darn computer just cut out. And so it goes. I want to thank Bob Maline for being here and sharing his passion and expertise, for helping us have a better way of electing people that might solve some of our cultural, social, political problems. Thank you, Bob.

Bob Maline: You are very welcome. I hope to do it again Mark.

Mark Leach: Yeah. Well I’ll be very happy to have you back again and again. This has been a delight and I can’t think of anybody else to thank. And so which train should we get on, Bob? This is an either or question. Should we get on the love train or the peace train?

Bob Maline: I’ll take the peace train, please.

Mark Leach: Okay, everybody join us. You have been listening to Ecotopia Soon! I’m your slow talking host on Ecotopia Soon! Well, you know, Bob, I don’t have “Peace Train” lined up in the queue, so we’ve got to go with our second choice. “Friendship Train”. All aboard.

[“Friendship Train” Gladys Knight & The Pips]