By Nora-Kathleen Berryhill
Jan. 16, 2021
In 2018, Katherine Gehl and Austin Ramirez worked together to create Democracy Found. Their proposed Final-Five Voting™ system would combine an open “top five primary” and a ranked-choice general election where voters can rank up to five candidates.
This past November, OTE met with Democracy Found’s executive director Sara Eskrich via Zoom for an in-depth conversation about Final-Five Voting™: what it would mean for Wisconsin’s voting system and the future of election reform throughout the US?
Nora-Kathleen Berryhill:
Can you tell me about the origin story of Democracy Found and how you got to where you are today?
Sara Eskrich:
Democracy Found started approximately two years ago and it really kicked off in May of 2018. It was founded based on the theoretical work on politics industry theory, by Katherine Gehl, who was CEO of Gehl Foods in Germantown. When she was drafting her original Harvard Business school analysis, she sent it around to some of her colleagues for peer review and her colleague Austin Ramirez (who’s also a CEO in Wisconsin, at Husco International) said, “Great, Katherine, I’m totally bought into this theory, absolutely,” but it’s not just theory, right? Ultimately to get this done we have to pass these changes at the state level.” So, they both said, “Okay, let’s see if we can put together an effort to make these changes real in our home state of Wisconsin.”
And so Democracy Found was really created through that collaboration of Katherine and Austin, bringing their networks together for this kind of “test the waters” event in Milwaukee in May of 2018. They had a big event, an “invite all your friends and colleagues and get 400 people together to talk about the theory and see if it resonates kind of event.” And it did. It hugely resonated with everyone in the room and got a great deal of buy-in across the political spectrum in the business community—which was critical to our theory of change. That’s the origin story, and they hired me on to be executive director in fall 2018.
Nora-Kathleen:
In recent years, there’s been so much more debate surrounding election reform, and so many different initiatives proposed, from abolishing the electoral college and more of a top-down strategy, to others advocating for replacing single member district (SMD) systems in states. Since there’s been so many ideas floating around, why do you think that a ranked-choice voting system, the Final-Five Voting™ system that you advocate for, is the best option?
Sara:
It really comes down to our strategy of choosing what not to do. So, as you said, we’re recognizing that there are so many things that we can—and frankly should—do to improve our democracy. In this theoretical framework that Katherine created, she used a Venn diagram. One of the Venn circles is “powerful.” What are changes that are actually going to get at the root cause of this systemic disfunction and the misaligned incentives we have in our electoral system? Then the second circle is what is “achievable.” What can we actually do, the metric for this being what can we do in a period of years, not decades. So, the idea is that constitutional amendments may be really important, but they just don’t meet that definition of achievable in a period of years and not decades. What fits in that overlap of the two circles? What is powerful and achievable? That’s where they landed on electoral change, specifically Final-Five Voting™ and specifically at the state level for congressional elections. The bill that we’re working on is specifically to change federal elections in Wisconsin to use a top five primary and ranked-choice voting in the general election.
We focus on Congress because there is widespread agreement that Congress is broken, right? Their approval ratings are never above 20 percent. When we are trying to build bipartisan support for this bill, in order for it to pass in a purple state like Wisconsin, you really do need both sides of the political spectrum to agree that this is an important change to make, and Final-Five Voting™ is something that systemically does not benefit one side or the other—which is critically important—but also gets at people’s most poignant frustration with Congress’ inability to solve any problems.
Nora-Kathleen:
For the Wisconsin initiative specifically, is it focused on federal and state elections or just federal elections?
Sara:
Specifically, federal elections. To do that in Wisconsin, we have to pass legislation, so it’s not a referendum. It’s a legislative effort because we don’t have in Wisconsin binding ballot initiatives like other states do. So we will have to pass it legislatively, while other states have binding ballot referendum processes, they can use to implement electoral reforms. It’s just not available to us in Wisconsin.
Nora-Kathleen:
Oh, yes. I had forgotten about that caveat there, that Wisconsin’s referendums are essentially just public opinion polls.
Sara:
Yes, it’s kind of complicated in our state because sometimes to change a constitutional amendment in Wisconsin we have to vote on it, but our policy proposal doesn’t require a constitutional amendment change at the state level. We sometimes have ballot initiatives on our ballot in Wisconsin, but they’re non-binding, so there’s nothing forcing the legislature to do what we as voters tell them to do in those non-binding referendums.
Nora-Kathleen:
Next, I want to talk about your thoughts on the recent Massachusetts referendum on ranked-choice voting that was unsuccessful. I think the November election, just broadly speaking in so many ways, had everyone rethinking the political game going forward, processing the results and whether or not there were clear lessons to be learned from them. In light of the Massachusetts referendum that lost even with support from some high-ranking elected officials like Senator Elizabeth Warren, what do you think Democracy Found can learn from the Massachusetts experience?
Sara:
It’s a great question. I will say that we still have a lot to learn based on election results, especially Massachusetts. Massachusetts has binding ballot initiatives and 26 states have binding ballot initiatives, so there are plenty of states where referendums are options for enacting electoral changes. It’s also important to acknowledge that even if you do have binding ballot initiatives as an option, every state can make these changes through the state legislature too. This means that there are different strategies to choose from.
Suffice to say, what we know about Massachusetts so far is that when people knew what ranked-choice voting was, they liked it. The real challenge for that campaign was awareness. And that, as you can appreciate, I’m sure, is a much more challenging thing to do in a COVID-19 environment, because a lot of the traditional tools of campaigning, outreach, and voter education simply weren’t available in the same way. For example, Maine had passed ranked-choice voting via ballot initiative four years ago and then again two years ago. Maine keeps voting to expand use of ranked-choice voting in their state and succeeded in using very traditional campaign tools to build awareness, specifically house parties and a lot of “rank your beers” events, the sort of thing you can imagine helped people to understand that in our daily lives, we rank things all the time, we just don’t think about it. Those opportunities were not available in-person in Massachusetts. We know the pandemic created a hurdle they were not successful in overcoming.
The other thing I’ll say about Massachusetts is that they only did ranked-choice voting. That is a different variation of the policy that we’re working on. One of the interesting things that we’ve learned in our research is that opening up the primaries is actually, amongst many constituencies, a more popular change than ranked-choice voting. This is because many of us have the experience of understanding that the only vote that matters is in the primary election. Our vote in general elections is essentially insignificant because the election has already been decided in the primaries. Primary elections, which have lower voter turnout, are just inherently less representative in a democracy. The fact that Massachusetts was only voting on ranked-choice voting is another thing that we need to spend some time looking at in terms of takeaways for our campaign in Wisconsin. Our campaign is also different because we need to pass it legislatively rather than through referendum. So that’s a different constituency we’re educating and ultimately trying to persuade—that being state legislators and the governor, as opposed to voters as a whole.
Nora-Kathleen:
Definitely. Even though your focus is on educating and persuading legislators rather than the general populace, I still want to ask about the general lack of awareness in Wisconsin about policies like Final-Five Voting™. There has been so much national discussion about the electoral college system, about issues like gerrymandering, and not a lot yet about ranked-choice voting. Actually, in one of my political science classes, I explained what it was when my professor was going through differences between election systems and some classmates were unfamiliar with ranked-choice. Do you find that those awareness campaigns to garner public support can helps persuade Wisconsin legislators too by having their constituents reach out to them and talk about why it’s important?
Sara:
Yeah, a couple thoughts on that. Ultimately, the fact that this policy is brand new to legislators is in some ways a double-edged sword. While they don’t know anything about it, they also don’t have an inherent position for or against it starting out. This can give us the opportunity to have a conversation where they don’t come in with some preordained conclusion about policy. At the same time, if you had asked the general public even five years ago what gerrymandering was, no one would have known. People had no idea. So I do think we are at this precipice where, especially after this election cycle during the pandemic calling attention to the fact that elections are state and locally run, people are starting to understand that we do elections differently in every single state.
One of our hurdles in educating people about electoral innovation generally is the idea of “we can’t change that because it’s always been this way.” And that’s just not true. The constitution in no way dictates how we run our elections; it just says that states decide how we run elections. We have the ability to change that at the state level and use states as “laboratories of democracy” to figure out what policies work best. Again, that’s the opportunity in the fact that this is so new. Once there’s awareness of a policy, you get to the point where things start to get captured, frankly, in a partisan way. If that happens, your policy initiative can get sunk. We know that in Wisconsin in particular, being a purple state, we have to have support from both Republicans and Democrats to get this done. So the fact that people don’t have an opinion about it is not necessarily a bad thing because we can speak with them before they reach a partisan conclusion about it.
Here’s the other thing I would say to your question about broad public support and how influential it is at the legislature. One of the problems we are trying to solve for in creating a system where Congress is accountable to their general electorate is that we have broad consensus throughout the country on a lot of policy issues that are going nowhere, right? We know that there are compromised solutions in immigration, in health care, and on guns—any issue, right? On any issue, you can find policies that have over 80 percent public support, and they go nowhere. And so it is unfortunately, in our current system, it is not enough to build public support on an issue to get it passed.
That is one of the things we hope our structural change will help solve for, that it gives elected officials the freedom to vote for those compromises. In the current system, however, that’s just not enough. So you have to have multiple strategies to educate both legislators and the general public in order to move something politically.
Nora-Kathleen:
Even beyond the hyper-partisan environment in the US, there’s perhaps even more of a stark divide between moderates and the further left and right wings of both parties. In this context, some have argued that ranked-choice voting systems tend to favor moderates over further left or further right candidates, or at least that’s their concern. At the same time, under our current system, others argue that it is becoming more difficult in some elections and regions for moderates to get elected. How would you address both how our system works now, how it would work under Final-Five Voting™, and then to people across the political spectrum, how much a vote for the candidate they like best would count under each system?
Sara:
Yeah, its a great question, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this policy change is going to continue to gather support and traction. Our policy helps solve for the ideological spectrum that we have in our country. In many ways, right now, we are forced to choose “A” or “B” and we don’t have a ton of power in terms of what those options are because, in many cases, they are already decided for us based on who makes it through the primaries. If it’s a general election and there’s a third party or independent candidate that you want to vote for, but you know that candidate is very unlikely to win, there’s no incentive to vote for that person right now because you’d be wasting your vote or spoiling the election for the candidate that you think is okay.
Our current system in no way allows for healthy competition and ideological diversity that reflects the electorate. In our proposed Final-Five system, you solve for that because the five candidates who make it out of the primaries are going to generally represent the ideological spectrum in the district or within the state, and then, in the general election, people get to vote for who they really want to vote for. Even if your candidate doesn’t win, your vote can make a difference too. If you were running on climate change in the 90s, you were probably a fringe candidate, and you probably got like 5 percent of the vote, right? Well, over time, under our Final-Five system, even if a candidate like that doesn’t win, they’d be able to show growing support for the issue they ran on. Then the major parties start paying attention and are incentivized to address those issues under their party platform, because they want all of those people who are excited about that issue to rank their candidate second.
This would give us the ability to foster more widespread conversation about new issues and policy. Here’s an example: when Ross Perot ran in the 90s as the fiscal candidate and no one thought you could ever win as a candidate who only talked about fiscal policy. He proved that 19 percent of the electorate was willing to throw their vote away on fiscal policy for a presidential election! And guess what? Then both of the major parties wanted that 19 percent of the electorate and they balanced the budget. That’s the power of having a Final-Five system where you get the ideological diversity and also a system that elects the candidate who was able to garner the broadest support amongst the electorate. You may or may not change who ultimately gets elected under this system. In many ways, I’m less interested in changing who gets elected. I’m much more interested in what elected officials are incentivized to do once they are elected.
This new system would also give politicians the flexibility to do things that they can’t currently do (i.e. vote on compromises) which isn’t inherently moderate, it’s just how you solve problems and create progress. So, I think that you’re exactly right to say that one of the criticisms is from people who are further right or further left in that this might elect more moderates. But that’s not what we care about or what this policy is trying to achieve. We just want elected officials to be able to compromise and govern, and I think that’s not a moderate issue, or a left or a right issue, it’s about the much larger issue of ensuring the ability of our legislators to govern and problem solve.
Nora-Kathleen:
Yes, what you’re saying makes me think about how much the past four years, or even the past ten years, have shaped the US political scene to the point where it’s almost as if we don’t remember what our politics was like before. As you were saying, it’s not necessarily a moderate thing to be able to step across the aisle and work on bipartisan solutions to certain issues. It’s often necessary in order to get legislation passed in Congress no matter where you fall ideologically. While some things are more clearly partisan issues than others, I’m hearing from you that, in your opinion, not all policy platforms should get labeled as partisan in the first place?
Sara:
Right, and when you try to pass things in Congress that’s lead by only Republicans or only Democrats, you get trapped in this cycle of rather than improving on something, we’ve been talking about repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without a replacement for over a decade. No matter how you feel about the ACA, we can all agree that there are policy solutions that we should be making to improve our healthcare system.
Nora-Kathleen:
Ok, so I thought about some counterarguments people are making about Final-Five Voting™. Some might say, “Okay, this is complicated. You’re going to have an open primary and then you want people to rank— “it’s up to five candidates, right? You’re not required to put five names down if you don’t want to. But still, the ranking aspect some take issue with. Others might say, “Okay, not everyone is tuned in to politics, especially in states trying to implement ranked-choice voting for state or local rather than federal elections. People might not really be in tune to all of the options and would rather just vote a straight ticket based on party. Not everyone wants to vote cross ballot or will even look into candidates from a different party.” So how do you respond to these arguments and explain how this system won’t be too complicated and would work efficiently?
Sara:
The easiest answer is one that you already alluded to: that you’re no worse off than under the current system because you can still just vote for one candidate if you want to. You can still just vote for your favorite. You’re not losing anything you had under our current election system in this system by just voting for one candidate. From implementations of ranked-choice voting at the municipal level, and more and more so at the state level in places like Maine, we know that people understand how to rank. They do it, they like it. The evidence that we have to date is that it’s a system that works very well when implemented. We will continue to know more as more places begin to adopt these systems and learn from them. Overall though, the evidence that we do have shows that people do like it and do take the opportunity to rank candidates. In many places, we’ve also actually seen voter turnout go up.
Nora-Kathleen:
That brings me to my next question about how our party system would work under a Final-Five Voting™ system. Policy proposals for election reform like abolishing the Electoral College, as you were saying earlier, tend to get a partisan label kind of attached to them. In the case of the Electoral College, a lot of Republicans argue that its elimination would create an unfair advantage because the popular vote tends to lean towards Democrats. So how do you argue that Final-Five Voting™ won’t have negative repercussions for one party or another, especially when talking to Republicans since many are opposed to other reform proposals like abolishing the Electoral College?
Sara:
I think that one of the strongest arguments for Final-Five Voting™ is the argument that Congressman Mike Gallagher makes. He’s a newer Republican that, when he got to Congress, was completely shocked at how dysfunctional the institution has become and how much power the institution has ceded over time. We’re supposed to have three coequal branches of government. Congress’s inability to act and do its job is really making it a very weak branch comparatively. That’s not good for democracy and not good for our system as a whole. So, having the electoral freedom to solve problems, compromise, and do work in that branch of government through lawmaking and legislating is good for our system.
Our policy proposal is not going to come into a Democratic district and elect a Republican, or vice versa. You can play out every scenario—we talk to politicos all the time and tell them, “Help me see if I’m missing something, where you could show me that this system would fundamentally change outcomes in a misrepresentative way,” and you can’t, because it doesn’t. It’s really about having those conversations bluntly and saying, “Think about it: you’re electing the person that’s most broadly acceptable to the district or state.” If you live in a district that sways one way or another, you’re going to end up seeing policy debates among Democrats or among Republicans in those districts to get to the person who’s ultimately elected. There are a lot of indirect benefits to democracy through that process.
In Maine, they didn’t even interrupt the primary system which we think is so important, and yet, the first time they implemented rank-choice voting, a Democrat got elected. A lot of people were like, “Oh, look! A Democrat got elected!” But then Senator Susan Collins just got reelected in Maine and rank-choice voting was still in place. So there’s nothing about the system that benefits one party over another.
Nora-Kathleen:
You’re proposing a bill in the Wisconsin legislature early in 2021, correct?
Sara:
Yes, we’re working towards introducing a bill as soon as the legislature comes back into session, so sometime in the first quarter of 2021. It will be introduced by a bipartisan set of legislators in both the State Assembly and in the State Senate. We’re looking forward to having conversations about Final-Five Voting and building support for our policy. I think it’s important to highlight that it’s going to be introduced in a bipartisan fashion because unfortunately these days that’s not a common occurrence. The fact that we will have support from legislators on both sides of the aisle, and true support and engagement—and not just on different sides of the isle but across the ideological spectrum—I think is a strong endorsement of the fact that our policy is systemic and structural and just an improvement on our system.
Nora-Kathleen:
You know, I would think that this bill could be something that could garner national attention because that is rare for a bill to be proposed with strong bipartisan support and consensus. Especially with the spotlight on Wisconsin over past few months because of the election, where our state’s political differences have been underscored, that is a remarkable achievement.
Sara:
Thank you, we appreciate that.
Nora-Kathleen:
Then, before we go, since this is for OTE and we focus on lifting up the voices and perspectives of Edgewood College students, why do you think students should care about Final-Five Voting ™, and how could they get involved with election reform through nonprofits like Democracy Found?
Sara:
Yeah, thanks for asking the question. First of all, I think Edgewood College is fantastic. I used to represent Edgewood College on City Council, so I love the students and know what a difference they can make. One thing I will say is that it’s inspiring to me that so much of the support for electoral innovation and change is coming from the next generation. I think this is because young people feel in no way tied to our current system. They have a knowledge that our current system is not serving us well and less of those ideologically and politically divided ties—you see far less young people identifying as Democrats or Republicans in the same way.
Instead, I see much more of a desire to be independent thinkers when considering new ideas, policies, and candidates. In order to take advantage of that, one of the things that we need is help building awareness. As you said, you had to explain what ranked-choice voting was in one of your classes … we need to talk more about this. We need to insert into conversations about politics more hopeful language around bipartisan— nonpartisan—solutions to fix our system. When people know about ranked-choice voting, they like it. So that’s our fundamental challenge right now. I hope people dig in and learn more about it so that they can help spread the word.
The other thing I would say is that I know a lot of college students in Madison come here from all over the state of Wisconsin. Something that we really need to do at Democracy Found is make sure that we’re building support in all parts of the state. If students have family or people that they know in other regions of Wisconsin that they think would be interested in getting involved, please send them to our website. It’s very easy to sign up to be a supporter and to get in touch with me if they want information about how to get more deeply involved, because we need to make sure that we have that broad base of support.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Readers can learn more
about Democracy Found and Final-Five Voting™ at https://democracyfound.org.
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