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You're going to take on the world episode 28, Elections.

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Welcome to the episode of You're going to take on the world.

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I am Dustin, and joining me is Lauren.

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Yay. All right.

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So today was a pretty good day, and I'd be back to doing the podcast again.

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So. And a personal update.

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I actually got to offer for transfer to a new position at work.

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So that'll be nice. Yeah.

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That'd be very nice position. I was hoping for with a decent bump and pay and we were banking on it.

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Yeah. So that's going to be awesome.

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Won't be taking effect for, you know, a little bit, but.

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Oh, man, it's going to be good.

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Yeah, or almost six year old daughter is already planning all the ways that she can spend his money on toys.

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That's typical.

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Oh, yeah. After I explicitly told her that that's not what this is.

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What do they know?

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Meanwhile, we've been daydreaming about electric vehicles.

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I guess we're not any better. Yeah. Just a big, that's just a big boy toy.

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So. And also, you know, it's a 100% remote position.

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So I could work anywhere and that'd be pretty awesome.

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And yeah. So.

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Okay. Let's go ahead and get into it.

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First up, the United States has what I would describe as a beta version of democracy.

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Now it has had a fair number of bug fixes.

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But when you consider that.

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Rolling release.

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Well, you consider that when the Constitution was ratified, there was basically every part of the world was a monarchy.

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There were a few little republics in various places like Italy at that time.

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But they basically rich people or the church had all the power and the US was.

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That's different from us now. How?

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And the US was trying to do better than that.

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We're trying to do better. And one of the things that's kind of crazy on it is like you look at how politics work now.

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Okay. So for one, you compare now to back when the whole constitutional system was set up.

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One of the concerns they had was the lack of information that people had.

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Every voter was a low information voter because information was hard to get.

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Yeah. I mean, news did not travel fast.

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And information just what we take for granted is basic knowledge was it took a lot of work to get to a repository to look at libraries or books or whatever.

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It's like we take it's we have the sum of all human knowledge in our pockets.

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And we use it to look at cat videos.

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And some times democracy shows that by the way.

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And sometimes get a lot of misinformation, which also has been a factor in ruining our democracy.

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But like that issue that's that's moot.

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That's one of the reasons though that in the early days, members of the US house were directly elected by members of their district.

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Senators were not president.

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You have to vote for president, but you didn't actually vote for president.

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You were secretly voting for a panel of electors, like a secret electors who would go to actually elect the president.

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Because some asshole had the thought that well, what if the voters get it wrong?

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And we get they elect the wrong person.

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We need to have a fail safe for that.

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I would agree. Actually, we lived through that.

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So we have. It just lived through what was supposed to have also been the fix for that.

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And it failed. It has never worked.

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No, no, it did not work. It has failed every single time because when the elect.

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Well, okay, one of the big reasons why we have a political system that at its core, the major framework, the core operating system for our government, the Constitution was written before.

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Political parties was even a concept.

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Political left and right wasn't even a concept.

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Yeah. The left and right came from the French Revolution.

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When the liberals sat on the left, the conservatives sat on the right.

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And by the liberals, I mean the revolutionaries who wanted a republic.

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Liberal doesn't mean the same all over the world here.

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That's. And the conservatives wanted a constitutional monarchy.

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And that was the left and right.

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So that's where we get those terms is from the French Revolution.

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We're talking 15, 20 years after the Constitution.

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Right. Parties were not a thing during the time of George Washington.

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Well, okay, they actually were at the very end of his presidency because they effectively were created by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson running against each other.

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Okay. And people forming up behind those two.

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It's creating. It is a natural thing.

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Yeah. Creating the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans.

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I need to bring we need to bring some of these parties back.

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Man, so the wigs. They okay.

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Where the wigs at? Effectively, the Federalists became the wigs after a like 30 year hiatus.

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And the wigs became the Republicans after a five or 10 year hiatus.

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And then they just stopped changing names.

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And then yeah. But you throw a race into it.

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And it's like, let's do a little flip over there. But the one of the reasons why the fact that our system doesn't.

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Wasn't written for parties and yet parties run it.

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Is a problem is the electors.

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You get when a state votes for the majority of a state votes for a candidate.

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That candidate's electors get sent to the electoral college.

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Those electors are picked by that states.

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The party of the candidate that won.

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So again, the party, not the candidate.

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So it's party loyalist.

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It's party. People on the inside of the party who get to do that.

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And they are people who are a handful of times.

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There has been what's known as a faithless selector.

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Somebody who votes counter to what they were supposed to, how they were supposed to vote.

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There have been laws against faithless of electors since the early 1800s.

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Well, I can see why that would be a bit of an issue.

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Which means the idea of the electoral college as a check on stupid voters.

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Well, that got. No, no, it's a way for parties to maintain control and weird ways.

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Before I can just naturally segue to the next thing.

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It is worth pointing out.

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And part of why I say the US has a beta democracy.

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There are a bunch of other countries who have set up their democracies more recently.

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That have what's more reasonably a version one or a version two or three or frickin New Zealand,

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who's effectively a democracy 4.0.

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They see the future. They are the future.

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If we were as good as New Zealand, we could have nice things.

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Oh my God.

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This is why we can't have nice things. There is no.

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There is no way we could get the New Zealand system period.

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Because it would require a major revolution.

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And the wrong people have all the guns.

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Yeah.

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So, but the New Zealand system, I do want to describe it because it's beautiful.

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And there are elements that are getting employed in parts of the US that are improving things.

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I mean, that's and there is ways to do it.

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We just have to do more patches and bug fixes as opposed to major upgrades.

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So the New Zealand system. You vote for the party, not the person.

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Each party has published lists.

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So you know who the person is, but you are voting for the party primarily.

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When people do that anyway, because that's how people vote.

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Yeah, I know it feels so wrong though, right?

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Yeah. But realistically, is our government actually run by one person?

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No. It hasn't been for a long time.

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So it makes more sense. So, but so each party has a candidate list.

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So they do tell you who the candidate is for your district, but you are actually voting for the party.

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Really, it's text if you have a beef out for one particular person.

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It's ranked choice voting.

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Every district has more than one seat, which means every district has more than one representative.

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Most have at least three representatives, which means if you

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support the second major party, not the one that wins your district,

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you still have somebody representing you and your views that you voted for.

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When second and third place can go as well.

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Yeah. More people are represented.

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More sane people, more moderate people.

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Actually, in that case, it doesn't have to be saying or moderate.

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So far. It's more it opens it up for more parties because with the ranked choice with multiple seats,

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if you have 15 people running, 15 parties running in this case,

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only and only three are moving forward votes for the loser parties get dropped.

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And those ballots get reapportion to who their next choice was next best.

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So eventually you get to everybody either has the person they want representing them

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or somebody they're okay with representing them, but not the person that they hate.

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And it except for very small proportion, but it makes the situation.

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And yes, you may have a person you hate, but you also have somebody you like representing you.

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And so it means everybody has somebody they feel is looking out for their local interest

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and their political interests and values in this, the parliament.

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And that is a beautiful thing.

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Sounds like a lot of people would need to be running for office.

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Each party has its lists.

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It's part of the problem that we have in America is that we can afford it.

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It's one thing to have the stipend of running of being a legislature or something,

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but it's another to run the campaign elections are cheap.

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They're so greedy elections are cheap when they only last for a month.

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That's and then that's key.

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You can't have somebody campaigning for a year or two or four.

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And they're also cheaper when you aren't buying a bunch of TV spots constantly.

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One of the cool things with how New Zealand has it set up is that parties who don't win enough seats

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get more seats added to their bench.

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They allow extra seats until everybody has enough.

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But if they aren't being voted in, isn't that people saying that they don't want them there?

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No, for example, if the fifth place party got 20% of the vote nationwide,

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but only got two people to actually qualify for the legislature.

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They're underrepresented. So they get extra at large members to where you actually have proportional voting or proportional representation.

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And this is called mixed proportional. Other thing that America is not very good at proportionality is not a thing here.

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Like to do that. When it all are none.

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Now the US hasn't obviously hasn't not fixed problems politically here.

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Like there was a time when in most states, only white land owning men could vote.

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White land owning Christian men specifically in some states could vote.

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Yeah. So yay.

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We're gotten a little better. It eventually can expanded to all white men, all men, all people over 21 and then all people over 18.

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Yeah. We had the Voting Rights Act.

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To try to make it very clear that black people get to vote like serious.

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That was that was real in the back.

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That was a serious thing. People get to vote.

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Yeah. And while the Voting Rights Act has been whittled away a fair bit by recent Supreme Court decisions,

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the most recent one has supported it.

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The Supreme Court ruled against Alabama for not representing or not having enough districts to represent this.

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The state's black population. It was a textbook packing and cracking situation where there was one district,

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nearly all black district and then a district that was an area that was majority black,

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that was split exactly in half.

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Literally they cracked that population center in half to make sure that black people got one district.

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Yeah. Not with Alabama having five congressional districts.

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Black people making up enough of the population that the Supreme Court determined there should be at least two majority black districts at least.

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Yeah. So sad that we still have to argue this.

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Yes. Yes, it is. It got sent.

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But race follows political lines.

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And there are certain powers that do not like that.

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Yep. Now, if all those black people were voting a certain way, they wouldn't have a problem with it.

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But unfortunately, they're deemed the bad guys.

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So they. They do that here in Idaho too.

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Yeah. Let's take the most populous district with the most liberals, crack it in half.

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Yeah. Takes all the power out. Uh, it's, it's moved now to coal road.

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Oh my God. Yeah. It doesn't matter what road it is, but back to back to Alabama.

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It was the state legislature drew a new map that made it so that there was one solidly black district and one as they determined it competitively black district.

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Okay. Where they got black people up to 40% of that district.

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That's not what they asked them to do though.

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No, not at all. So the district court judge overthrew that.

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Yeah. The circuit court of appeals put together a three judge panel who drew new districts and by drew new districts.

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Use the district that the software put together that would have been legal that the state had refute had decided not to use.

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And said went with the one this maximum Republicans.

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So the court implemented that one.

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The state sued saying they can't do that.

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They need to give the state more time.

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Right. Because like they couldn't do this overnight like they did the previous redistricting and the supreme courts answer to that was no.

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Yeah. Nice. It wasn't there was no rationale given.

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There was no dissent.

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Nobody signed it.

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Clarence Thomas was the one who had received it.

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He doesn't put rationale on his responses to petitions to the Supreme Court.

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That's because he's not rational. So he just put basically he just sent them no fuck off.

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Yeah. So imagine how often you would want to say that.

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Supreme court judge. Maybe like it was like it's like okay you're in my court and I hate you and this is a waste of my time in fuck off.

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Where's the caller for that? So I have to send call here.

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Oh my God. I should make one. But voting rights are an important thing.

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They they have been weakening. Hopefully we're in a period where they're going to start strengthening and racial minorities will get better representation.

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This is likely to ripple out to Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Texas.

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The Carolinas. Then there's states like Idaho that can go under the radar because it's not racial.

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We don't have the race part of it. We are just splitting it based on political meaning.

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Yeah. Which is a lot easier to justify and hide than it is blatantly race.

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And in Idaho.

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That's fucked up. I have heard people talking about.

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And others. I mean, obviously that's just the one I know.

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But. Right, because we live in we live in Idaho's second congressional district.

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If we moved. Five miles.

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No, 10 miles north. Five miles south or four miles west.

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We would be in first congressional district.

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If we wouldn't do east 10 miles, we would be in first congressional district.

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The line goes from literally 50 miles away.

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And it is a it follows the interstate highway to gobble up most a Boise.

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Yeah. Specifically the most liberal part of Boise to put it with Eastern Idaho and the Mormons who obviously have population and power.

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So they get just enough.

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Yes, enough to keep things going.

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And it's it's frustrating, but I have heard people who should have known better use Idaho as an example of a not Jerry Mandered state.

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Because obviously you can't Jerry Mander a two district state.

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When no, hilarious.

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It is literally those literally the opposite of what's happened.

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And that's funny. When if you you zoom in on Idaho's map, you can add to zoom in though.

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You have to zoom in close. Use that magnifier.

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You zoom in and you can see the Republicans giving Boise the bird.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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It literally looks like they're flipping off Boise.

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Seriously, we've had this question. Is it better to live in a blue city in a red state or a red state in a blue or a red city in a blue city in a blue state?

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And yeah, we're we're flipping the bird back.

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This like, oh man, I get it now.

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So, but there are ways to fix this.

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Um, besides the revolution.

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Yes. Okay. It's more put the matches away.

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It's more bug fixes.

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Okay. And patches.

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The first one I want to talk about is roll outs, man.

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Is presidential elections. Okay.

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Yeah, that's a big one. There have been so funny.

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I like to be nostalgic about when I first was able to start voting and start paying attention to politics and Bush was literally the worst thing that could ever happen to this country.

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And now I just look back on that laugh. So you pour or pour naive fool.

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The big problem is that the winner of the popular vote nationwide does not always win the electoral vote.

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Yeah. This has happened five times.

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We've only had 46 presidents, which you would five times is almost considered a fluke.

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Five times out of 70 some elections.

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It's happened twice since the year 2000.

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Yeah, let's start becoming a more concerning pattern.

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Oh, it's okay. A little bit more recent.

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Since 1988, no Republican has been elected president with a majority of the popular vote.

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There you go. George W. Bush did get reelected.

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Yeah, but he did not win that first.

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He did not win the popular vote the first time around Trump did not win has never won the majority of the popular vote.

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No. You notice a little one sided party wise here.

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Uh, we all noticed too.

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Now that being said, statistically electoral vote benefits over popular vote on average benefit Democrats more than Republicans.

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Okay. It has never mattered for a Democrat since 1888.

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It's never mattered for a Democrat.

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It hasn't been enough of a difference to matter for a Democrat.

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Okay. But it does slightly favor Democrats more than Republicans just statistically.

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Okay. And the statistics reviewed.

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Okay. I was just saying because there's been a political shift in the past 20 years.

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We've been in the middle of a political shift really for the last 50 as continuing to shift and we have more shifting and it's it's the shifting is continuing.

22:27

Uh, but there is a national popular vote interstate compact that has so far been joined by enough states to account for 205 of the 270 needed electoral.

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votes. There is pending legislation in enough states for another 63 electoral votes at which point if if those all pass.

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They won't all pass. No, but if they did all pass, it would only take one more state to make the electoral college to patch the electoral college out of relevance because it's not relevant.

23:12

No. Yeah.

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It's never served the purpose it was supposed to serve the the only other purpose for which it was supposed to serve.

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Was making sure that slave owners didn't get extra votes for their slaves or lose votes by their slaves not being able to vote or them not being able to vote on behalf of their slaves more accurately.

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Okay. And it in theory and early on benefited small states that benefit was lost when the West was settled because the country got too big.

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Yeah, the United States isn't the biggest country in the world.

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It's not the most populous country in the world, but it's big enough that these cracks and faults of whiteened and torn apart a huge.

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Tornado political landscape in half. Yeah.

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So the electoral college results in nearly every.

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I'll go ahead and go pull the matches back out where I'm ready.

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Every almost every small state is ignored because almost every small state is predictable Ohio got the limelight for a long time.

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Florida too. They got tons of attention tons of advertising tons of campaign stops. They're both so solidly Republican nobody's going to pay any attention to them.

24:41

Yeah. Now it's Michigan and Wisconsin and Nevada and Nevada, which is like 90% desert now Nevada is where you actually start getting into a small state.

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New Hampshire is also an example.

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It's a swing state that gets a lot of attention.

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Those are small enough states that they get they actually do get attention because they are swing states and they matter presidential candidates.

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Once they've won the nomination will never visit Idaho or Wyoming or Hawaii.

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Unless there's a natural disaster.

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It's a it's a waste. They will visit during the primary season because primary delegates are much more proportional.

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Yeah. And Democrats especially will visit during primary season because they can win a state's delegates by visiting the biggest city.

25:39

Just the one just the one city.

25:41

So Bernie Sanders in 2016 came to Boise.

25:45

Yeah. So the national popular vote interstate compact.

25:49

Criticisms for it are that with nobody checking.

25:56

Nobody providing that check on the election.

25:59

It would it makes it it would make it so that there's they would increase the chances of fraud.

26:06

And the election rules are different across the states.

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So you know it's not really an apples to oranges anyway.

26:14

That's the criticism also that small states would be ignored and that it would it's just a liberal.

26:20

That's a part of the course. Liberal big city.

26:24

Now urban liberal elite power grab.

26:26

Okay. What it would actually end up doing is make it would make voting irregularities and actual voter fraud, which is incredibly rare.

26:39

Irrelevant in the year 2000 Florida decided the election over a hundred ballots.

26:48

They got thrown out. If it had been a national popular vote that hundred ballots wouldn't have mattered.

26:54

No. Because Al Gore had half a million more votes nationwide.

27:01

Yeah. I still remember the rumors of ballots being found floating like washing up on the beach.

27:08

It's like they clearly been dumped to not get counted.

27:12

It's like, oh my god. The whole thing was a mess.

27:14

And it's at its most extreme of the probably also Russian.

27:18

It's most extreme with the you know mob political bosses in Chicago and New Jersey.

27:28

30 years ago. New joys.

27:31

It even then the amount of fraud they were able to pull off was in the ballpark of hundreds of votes.

27:41

Yeah, they could influence local elections.

27:44

Definitely, but not presidential popular vote has never been that close.

27:49

And by broadening the pool, it makes irregularities less important.

27:55

And national parlials never actually been relevant either.

28:00

So and national popular vote also makes it.

28:05

It makes it so that a hundred fraudulent votes are a hundred out of a hundred and fifty million.

28:14

As opposed to flipping 40 out of five hundred and thirty five.

28:20

Yeah. It's it makes fraud less of an issue as far as the differences in voting requirements.

28:30

If any of those are actually significant enough to matter, that needs to be fixed.

28:36

What do you mean if the vote?

28:39

So different states have different requirements on what?

28:43

What it takes to be able to vote or to register to vote.

28:47

Okay. So for example, in Oregon, by getting a driver's license, you are registering to vote automatically.

28:56

Yeah. Because they lost you opt out voters.

28:59

And then they mail you about it. Yeah.

29:01

And then you fill out that ballot and send it in. Uh, in Idaho, you have to register to vote and show ID or sign an affidavit proving that.

29:12

A testing under penalty of perjury that you are who you say you are.

29:16

And some states you cannot vote on the day that you register.

29:22

Yeah. So if you're in a state where you must register to vote seven days before you actually cast your ballot.

29:31

And then show ID to prove that you are the person who is on that voter roll.

29:37

And there's other states that are just mailing out ballots.

29:41

That could appear to be very different elections that are an apples and oranges comparison to which I say.

29:51

That's bullshit. Those differences aren't significant because what's it aren't significant for this because what matters is how many citizens cast their vote.

30:03

And who did those citizens who cast their vote cast their vote for?

30:08

And the rules to be a citizen is the same for the entire United States.

30:12

Think it would be that simple. Also, if a state's rules are so radically different that you don't think that's a real election, sue them with what lawyer on what?

30:25

Or take it to Congress and have Congress set standards for how the elections are going to work.

30:31

That would be fine. Uh, good luck getting good.

30:35

Good luck getting Congress to do anything right now, but, but the national popular vote interstate compact it, it would solve things.

30:47

And for it to take effect, there needs to be enough states who have joined to account for 270 or more electoral votes or a majority at which point it goes into effect.

31:01

And whoever wins the national popular vote gets those 270 electoral votes.

31:08

Why do I feel like this is a setup for something awful in the future though?

31:12

I don't know, man. I'm just now this is coming from somebody who is obviously a little like PTSD over previous elections.

31:19

Yeah. Actually, no, not PTSD. That's a very real thing not to make a light of that.

31:24

But, um, Trump was so out there.

31:28

It was not going to happen. You didn't win.

31:30

He didn't, he was under the national interstate compact.

31:33

He wouldn't have won. What I'm saying though is what if we get the crazy who does?

31:38

It's no different than now. It happened.

31:40

It already happened to the electoral college. The electoral college made it happen.

31:44

Huh? The national interstates.

31:46

I'm not saying the current system's better.

31:49

I'm just saying that setting it up where it's okay.

31:51

Just pure national people are dumb.

31:54

We are cattle. We will vote for whoever's pretty or shiny or claims to be good at business.

32:01

It's I see the hesitation in allowing just a pure popular vote because no offense, but we're dumb.

32:09

Yeah. Then we need to make it so that the electoral college actually means something.

32:14

Maybe that would be a better route, but I don't know.

32:16

I, of course, I'm not a political scientist.

32:18

I don't know how to fix that. To make that work, you would need to have electors electors be professional electors who are specialists in their field.

32:26

Yes. And who?

32:28

That can happen. And who are the oligarchy who decides who's president and ignores the political will of the people?

32:35

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that goes to so if you ever had the case where with the national popular vote or without the national popular vote.

32:45

If the popular vote went for a candidate and the electoral college vote,

32:52

theoretically, should go to that candidate and the electoral college went the other way.

32:58

People would be up in arms for good reason and most likely Congress literally what happened and we didn't do anything.

33:04

No, okay. Trump won the electoral college.

33:08

Right. That's why I'm saying you just said that.

33:10

He won the elect. He if he won enough loses the popular vote or wins the popular vote loses the popular vote.

33:17

The electoral college says, if you guys were going to go ahead and vote for this other guy anyway,

33:22

then they shouldn't be up in arms over it.

33:24

Instead of the guys even. No.

33:27

And no, that's not what I'm saying in the current system.

33:31

So what I was describing would be using using.

33:34

I can't use Trump as the example.

33:37

It would have been 2020 would be the example I'm describing not 2016.

33:40

Okay. Biden wins the popular vote.

33:42

He wins enough states to get enough electors to win.

33:46

And if the electoral college had just said no, we want more Trump.

33:52

That would be that would be the risk of putting in a group of specialists specialists.

33:59

Yeah. They're corruptible. Not that, you know, the mass citizen jury isn't also corruptible because we are.

34:06

That's what campaigns are for.

34:08

That's what the Russians did. The bribeen is for.

34:11

But yeah, yeah, it certainly looks better on paper after the fact.

34:17

It would be an improvement to a system that is inherently for an example of why the fact

34:27

that we have a president is danger.

34:30

Our political system is inherently dangerous.

34:33

It has been tried.

34:35

It has been copied in every country south of us.

34:42

Not necessarily all the Caribbean islands.

34:45

Many countries south of every country.

34:47

No, every country on the north and south American mainland except for Canada has followed

34:54

an American style strong presidential government with legislature.

34:59

Every single one got a military coup.

35:02

Many of them have had multiple military coups.

35:05

So where a fluke we are the only system like ours to have not had it.

35:12

Go completely wrong.

35:14

Not turn into a dictatorship. Yeah, no country.

35:19

No country established since like 1830 has gone with the crazy American system.

35:27

And even when the US sets up new political systems for countries, Japan, Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq,

35:36

we don't go with an American style system.

35:39

We go with a parliamentary democracy and a weak president or other figurehead.

35:46

And you have a prime minister's head of government.

35:49

Yeah, but somebody who can be fired easily.

35:52

Okay. Yeah. All right.

35:55

So that moves on to the jungle primary, which is our best hope at fixing Congress.

36:03

Yeah, because presidential presidents are finding the Andy.

36:09

But it's the people who actually make the laws and pass the laws and pass the budget

36:13

that really run the country.

36:15

And they are not right now.

36:18

We have had for a long time.

36:20

We've had periods of time in the US where bipartisan votes were the norm,

36:25

where a split Congress could still pass laws, where a Congress from the opposing party of the president

36:34

could still pass laws that could get signed into law.

36:36

Like it has been a thing through much of US history.

36:41

We are in a point in history where it is that it's most corrupted.

36:45

And it is because of the winner takes all primary and then the winner takes all general election.

36:56

Where in enough states, where whoever wins one party's primary is guaranteed to win the state's general election.

37:07

If that means the party, the people who take part in the closed primary,

37:14

because it's mostly closed primaries, is those are the people who choose the person who will be representing them.

37:24

Yeah. And Idaho, the Republicans who take part in the primary are the only ones who get to pick who will be Idaho's congressional representatives.

37:35

Yeah. Nobody else has a say.

37:38

It's already decided before it gets under the general election ballot.

37:43

Is around here that's how people vote.

37:45

But wouldn't make a difference anyway.

37:47

The open primary or jungle primary system can fix this.

37:53

Now open primary has two meanings.

37:57

There is the normal plain meaning, which is voters don't have to be a member of a party to participate in its primary election.

38:05

This is the case for at least one party in 20 states.

38:10

It used to be the case in Idaho until quite recently.

38:14

Yeah. It ended years ago.

38:17

Yeah, just a few years ago until then independence could pick whichever ballot they wanted to vote in or vote on and they'd get that ballot.

38:24

Yeah. Idaho has an open primaries initiative that is actually calling for a jungle primary, which is something different.

38:32

They chose the wrong word because it's less scary.

38:35

Okay. And with the jungle primaries, these are already the case in Washington, California, Nebraska, Alaska, and Louisiana.

38:47

Okay. Oh, Louisiana.

38:49

Louisiana. Okay.

38:52

They're sort of. They don't actually have primaries.

38:55

They do presidential primaries.

38:57

Well, the state doesn't the parties do because the state only does one election on odd number years.

39:04

It's in October and even number years.

39:07

It's in November on the federal election day.

39:11

If somebody wins a majority of the vote in the only election they have in Louisiana, that person wins.

39:19

If nobody wins a majority, they do a runoff.

39:23

And the top two run against each other for the next two weeks and then they have a runoff election and then somebody wins.

39:31

It might be, it might be more than two weeks, but it's not as bad as some, it's not the best, but it's not as bad as some systems.

39:41

Okay. Yeah.

39:43

Washington, California, and Nebraska have top two primaries.

39:48

Everybody runs on the same ballot.

39:50

The top two from the primary election move on to the general election.

39:56

Effectively, it's an automatic runoff.

39:59

Okay. But even if one person wins 54% of the vote in the primary, the person who comes in second still gets another chance to run against that person more directly.

40:11

Okay. This does result in cases where you have two Republicans running against each other in the general election or two Democrats running against each other in the general election.

40:23

Two great examples for each of those would be from California.

40:28

California's last Senate election was two Democrats running against each other.

40:33

There was a story we talked about on the podcast many, many years ago about two Republicans in a district in California.

40:41

Running against each other in the general election for a house seat, both visiting the local atheist group there to try to win votes, getting desperate because when it's two people from the same party, because two people, the same party doesn't mean much.

40:57

It can mean massive differences in policy.

41:00

Also, when it comes to getting elected, if you assume it's a relatively even split between those two in their own party,

41:08

any niche helps whoever can win over more of the other party wins.

41:13

It has a result of making things more moderate.

41:17

Yeah, which is what we need right now.

41:20

Now, then there is the Alaskan system, which Idaho has a ballot initiative that is currently collecting signatures to adopt exactly the Alaskan system,

41:34

which is top four with ranked choice voting in the general election.

41:40

Yeah, I like ranked choice.

41:42

Okay. So 12 people run in the primary for move on.

41:47

Reasonably, for some offices in Idaho, it would be three Republicans in a Democrat moving on to the general election.

41:55

Okay. Yeah.

41:57

So the ranked choice voting and you pick your first choice, second choice, third choice in Idaho, that would end up meaning the Democrat,

42:10

the Democrat would probably be one of the first ones out.

42:13

But the people who voted first for the Democrat, whoever they hated least out of the Republican candidates would be the one who would win.

42:22

The enemy of my enemy.

42:24

Yes. So the Democrat would lose.

42:27

And the Democrat would lose. But you would end up with something a little bit more sane.

42:30

Yep. It's so funny thinking back to growing up.

42:33

I think that was sane compared to what we have now.

42:37

We actually grew up in the era, we grew up in the end of the statesmen era, where there were people who we honestly could call good statesmen bipartisan negotiators.

42:48

They could work across the table.

42:50

They were great.

42:52

And that's all gone now.

42:54

When we were kids, Idaho had a Democratic governor and Oregon had a Republican legislature.

43:02

And they were respected.

43:04

And they got things done.

43:06

They got things done. And now it's just rabid versus rabid.

43:09

And well, no, it's not.

43:11

It's not even rabid versus rabid.

43:13

That would be, that would be signifying that there's this far right crazy versus a far left crazy.

43:18

But that's not what's happening either.

43:20

There's a far right crazy. And they're holding the rest of their party hostage.

43:24

And those guys, the moderate Republicans don't have a say anymore.

43:28

That sucks. Ranked choice.

43:30

That's a Democrat. We need them.

43:32

And ranked choice would help that.

43:34

And these either a top two or even better ranked choice also has the benefit of increasing the chances of getting third party candidates without them being spoilers.

43:47

Because at present in the winner takes all system, the top or a third party candidate is running against the main two and drawing votes away from one of the two viable candidates.

44:04

Yeah. In a top two system, there are only two in the general election.

44:10

So there are no spoilers.

44:12

There's no green party candidate. Right.

44:14

So what about top four? In a top four, you could have for a hypothetical, to Republicans, a Democrat and a socialist make it to the general election in a top four system.

44:28

The people who vote for the socialist are probably going to vote to have the Democrat as their second choice.

44:35

The people voting for the socialist probably won't, that candidate probably won't win.

44:40

But they get to vote for the person they want, while also signifying who they're okay with.

44:46

Yeah. They get to be proud that they voted for that.

44:49

They stuck it to the man by voting for this other party that better aligns with their views while not letting their enemy win.

44:59

Yeah. So all around, it would be an improvement.

45:04

We need this.

45:06

We need politics to get more sane.

45:09

We need more sane people to run too.

45:12

Yeah. That's a big ask, because sane people don't have the money, time, energy, and the insanity it takes to run campaigns and cow-tow to parties and

45:25

a slight cheat and steal to get into positions of power.

45:30

Well, on that note, that's it for this week.

45:35

Lauren, thank you for joining me.

45:38

Thank you.

45:40

And until next time.

45:43

Remember, not all those who wander are lost.

45:47

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