Kent Theory is one of the people behind the rank choice voting initiative here on the ballot. He's been k You've been very busy over the last few years, sort of reshaping how politics has been going. You were behind the ballid initiative to open the primaries. You've been behind other ballot initiatives that have really had a big impact
on Colorado. We won't talk about the Gallagor amendment right now, although I did already tell him I'm kind of mad at him about that one, because ranked choice voting is something that I have been very open on the show
about vacillating back and forth. I sort of you know, and I kind of wanted to give you the opportunity to give a solid primmer on what this valid initiative actually does, how our system would work if it passes, and then why we can get into the why we need to do this or we don't whatever after that, but let's start with what it actually does.
Yeah, well, thank you Mandy for shedding some light on this subject because it's so it's so important. What it does is it establishes a very tidy, integrated three step process. Step one, an all candidate primary everybody on one ballot and with their party affiliation number two. The top four advance from that all candidate primary. Step three you go get You got to earn a majority of support, and
we do that through ranked voting. So step one, all candidate primary, all of us voters vote for one person.
Step two.
Four of those advanced, which creates tremendous diversity. You don't just get the fire left and fire right, but you get center right, and center left and maybe even center center.
So you're giving much more choice to that third step, which is the.
General election, where we say, hey to become an elected official in Colorado, earn a majority of support and rather than having a runoff election costing millions of dollars a month after the normal election, if they do in many states, we would achieve it through ranked voting, which is something that already exists in sixty four political jurisdictions across America.
So let me ask you to clarify what happens, because I think the primary ballot is easy to understand. You cast one vote on the primary ballot, and if your person is among the top four vote getters in that primary, you were going to see them on your general election ballot. So let's say we've got candidates ABC and D, just to keep it simple, and candidate A. No candidate gets over fifty percent in the first go round, Okay, so we'll just go in. A came in first place, B
came in second place. C came in third place. D came in fourth place. Okay, So what happens when candidate A is at forty percent and all the other candidates are less?
What happens at that point?
Yeah, So at that point, since no one has demonstrated to a majority of people that they're preferred, then you go to the person who is in fourth place, in last place, and that person D isn't Dog gets taken out. At that point, they've lost. Just like losing in a primary. In the current system, you lose, you don't get to advance.
And so number four, whoever that is, goes away, and any of any of Diaz and Dogs voters who indicate a number two choice, their vote gets reallocated to that number two choice, and then you see if anybody gets over fifty percent from that. If you do, you stop right there. If not, you then take the third place person and reallocate their number two votes and then you automatically are going to get a winner because at that point someone's going to have over fifty percent.
Okay, So this is one of those things that as a person, and I've also been open with my audience about the fact that in two thousand I voted for Ralph Nader because I was voting for the viability of a third party candidate.
Right.
So I'm not opposed to anything that shakes up the two party system. But the biggest concern that I have seen on the against side is that this destroys the two party system.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, well, I'm more conservative than you on this one, because I actually am very nervous about moving away from the two party system, and I think what we're doing is going to save it.
The fact is the two.
Party system has been losing customers at an amazing clip. Half of Colorado voters are now independent, more than Democrats and Republicans combined, and the numbers going up higher and higher. Sixty four percent of young adults under age thirty five are independence, and eighty five percent of Generation Z says that neither party has anything to offer them. And so I actually believe that as opposed to what's happening with the two parties now, where they're becoming more and more.
Extreme to to the left and the right.
They're building higher and higher fences over smaller and smaller parties. We're going to end up with new parties they don't if they don't become more attractive to a majority of the voters.
So this is where this is what I The next question I'm going to ask you.
Is what I love about the potential of ranked choice voting. But even as I talk about the potential, I also think to myself, you know, socialism sounds great on paper, but the reality of socialism is much different than the paper version of socialism, and I have concerns about ranked choice voting. I want to talk specifically about what happened in Alaska, because this is immediately the thing that gets brought up.
In Alaska.
They had two Republicans running against one Democrat. The two Republicans went at it in the primary, and the losing primary candidate their voters did not vote for the Republican in the general, and a Democrat ends up pointing a House seat for Alaska, which is really crazy, just really crazy.
How do you explain to people that this is not going to game the system in that way to where if you have three Republicans running in one Democrat running, the Republicans are not just going to eat each other.
Yeah, now, this one has been so misrepresentative and misunderstood, So I'm glad you're bringing it up first, Mary Peltola. That Democrat that got in actually got more first place votes than the other two candidates right away from the first round. But put that aside for a moment. Alaska is misunderstood. Alaska only has twenty eight percent of their voters registered Republican. Now that's twice as many as are registered Democrats.
There's fourteen.
But fifty five percent of Alaska voters are fiercely independent. And the reason it's viewed as this rock solid Republican state is because they had closed primaries, and so the two parties, even though they had less than fifty percent of the voters, got to set all the rules of the game, and that led to Republican domination. So what happened in that general election is the Democratic candidate appealed, not the two Republicans were still focused on the twenty eight percent, plus some of.
The independents who always vote Republicans.
So they were focused on the thirty five percent that were safe Republicans, and they let her focus on the other sixty five percent of the population.
And so they learned a lesson.
Because one of the great things about ranked voting is that you've got it represent the entire electorate, and it makes sense for you to.
Be thoughtful with them and sensitive to them because they can determine when or not you get reelected.
So essentially, and this is kind of how I have have viewed it from the outside looking in.
The two Republican.
Candidates didn't get they didn't pay attention to the new rules of the game, because ultimately, the real positive for me and ranked choice voting is the potential to change the way campaigns are run. Because to your point, you can no longer just focus on the tiny, little and getting smaller Republican or Democratic Party here in Colorado, you have no choice but to campaign to everyone.
So I love that aspect of it.
But how long do you think it takes kent for politicians, political systems, political consultants to figure out the new rules of the game.
What kind of growing pains are we looking at here?
Yeah?
Well, certainly there won't be zero. That's not the way democracies work. I mean, when when women's suffrage was put in, When when minority voters were allowed, I mean, all these things there are, it's clearly the right direction to go, but there's always some speed bumps. But the factors elected officials are really quick on this stuff, as much as those two Republicans for some reason didn't seem to really get it. So let's talk about the Alaska state Legislature,
which had been totally gridlocked for over a decade. They're actually formed a bipartisan majority governing caucus, these and ours to together, and they didn't even invite the fringe left and the fringe right. They said, you guys have been holding us back for a decade with not wanting to
compromise than anything. So the officially essentially formed almost a new party, and that group is working together because now to get re elected, the path is to get stuff done as opposed to performative art or you want to
demonstrate how you never compromise. And so in Alaska, a majority of the state legislature changed its demeanor and its practices overnight, and they got a budget done in record time that hadn't been done for a decade, and there are other things like that, and so the elected officials are pretty damned sensitive to the incentive system.
So I got a bunch of questions on our text line because so let's kind of do these, you know, as quickly as possible, but thoroughly as possible, because these are all good questions. One of them is from Benita. Ask him how you would audit rank choice voting? How would that process work?
Yeah, this is where I'd have to have of our elections experts give a technically satisfactory answer. What I can tendue to tell you is that there's existing methodology and technology.
To do it. It's been do multiple times. That exists out there. And the great thing.
That's happened now that there's sixty four places doing rank voting across the country is there's an entire ecosystem of pro bono support groups for voter education, material, for marketing material, for technology enhancements. And the good news for Colorado is ninety eight percent of our countanies are already have the necessary technology in house and will help the other two percent.
So we already have the ability to do this, like we have the technology, and we can make this happen.
Absolutely Now.
It takes hard work, and we want to develop with the clerks a very significant and thoughtful implementation plan. We're already in conversations with the governor and going through what should be the line item and his proposed budget that would include millions of dollars for supporting the clerks. So I'm not saying it's easy. But we did Vork by mail. A lot of people said, oh my god, that's going to lead to a cluster. We pulled it off well.
In twenty sixteen we did the semi open primaries, Oh my gosh, everybody said this is too risky, you can't do audits all that.
They were wrong again, So this one is no more or less difficult.
You've got to be on your game, you've got to have resources, but it's totally doable.
A lot of people on the text line are sending some variation of are you trying to cement Democrat power in Colorado forever? Because their concern is and I'm going to use the first Congressional District as an example because it is reliably Democrat and my friend Valdemar Achiletta outstanding candidate on the Republican side. He is fighting a don Quixote like quest in that district just because of the
makeup of the district. So it stands to reason that if you have an open primary, there could be four Democrats that come out of that primary race.
How do you address that concern?
Yeah, here's what's it would be amusing if.
It wasn't such a serious topic.
I just had an hour long debate with the head of the Democratic Party in here in Colorado and the lead attorney, and they are petrified that passing this will take away their supermajority status because we're going to put more and more power back in the voters' hands and put voters in the middle center, left, center, right and center,
put their voice and choice back in the game. And so it's so ironic that we have on the one hand, Dave Williams and Lauren Bobert against us on the our public side, and then the head of the Democratic Party on the Democratic side. And so that's kind of how we know we're doing it right, and we're focused on
the voters because party leaders on each side. Now at the same time, there's a number of hardcore partisans who have endorsed this, including Governor Polis and Mayor Mike Johnston from Denver on the Democratic side, and on the Republican side, people like Dick Wadhams, who was the Republican Party chair for the entire state and ran a bulk of the
successful Republican campaigns. He's on the team as well because he thinks this could be to step forward to actually restore relevance for the Republican Party.
Well, I don't know if you answered the question specifically. I mean, and I've kind of been bouncing this around. There are districts that there's almost a zero percent chance the Republican's going to win in the general anyway. So this would just kind of allow you, as a right leaning person to at least have a say, and you know, you could vote for your Republican candidate first and then vote for the least crazy on the.
Other side, or vice versa.
You have that opportunity that for me is the thing that you know, I'm trying to make a point of.
Yeah, Okay, I hear what you're saying.
I apologize for going down a parallel path, but what you say is exactly true. A district that's dominantly Democratic should elect a Democratic person and the one that's dominantly Republican should But what happens in the real world is exactly what.
You just said.
Let's say there's a district is sixty five to thirty five Democrat over Republican, and so that thirty five percent their first vote will be for Mandy Connell because that's their favorite Republican. Their number two vote, they're going to say, I'd much rather have sort of an Amy Klobuch, you're sort of person, not a Bernie Sanders, and so my number two vote is going to be for the moderate Democrat.
Well that's very powerful because it means that.
You're not permanently disenfranchising the minority party in that district.
They actually have a voice.
And if you're the moderate Democratic state senator, for example, you don't have to just run to Bernie Sanders to try to get votes. Suddenly, you market yourself and you listen to all the people in the minority because.
They're very relevant for you.
And I talked to one of our state senators just a couple of days ago who had an actual competitive race and and went door to door and it literally changed her perspective on some policies by her going and knocking on the Republican doors and the independent doors, not just the Democratic she said. She said, if I win, I'm going to be a way better leader because now I spent time listening to them kind of for selfish reasons, but.
I got a lot out of it.
I have a follow up question on how the ranked choice votes are counted, and this one seems like an interesting question.
Mayby what happens if all.
The second choice on candidate C went to candidate D, they were eliminated, then there was then you, I mean, how does that work? If you don't I mean, you would have to have a clear majority though, if you cleared out two candidates, right, No, I guess it could be fifty to fifty.
Well, but fifty to fifty exactly only happens about one out of every twenty thousand elections.
Yeah, once you get.
To where you're eliminating, you've eliminated number four and you go to eliminate number three.
Yeah, you're guaranteed to get a majority with someone.
Okay, Also, let me get some I've got a bunch of questions coming in here, Mandy. I'm sorry to harp on this, But what he's describing is bolder and the more popular moderate Democrat lost because of ranked choice voting.
And I'm talking about Bob Yates.
He should have won easily and he lost because of ranked choice voting, and the progressives, the radical progressives, beat him with ranked choice voting scam. So I know that somebody's brought the Bob Yates situation to your attention, and it almost it does kind of seem like the whole we're going to get the moderated it failed. What do you attribute that to?
Yeah, I mean there's hundreds of elections in our state every year, and in any system, you're going to have some anomalies.
I mean, it's just it's the nature of the beast.
And I don't know enough about that campaign to know exactly what how the different competitors didn't in fact campaign. But what I do know is that this system requires that you get a majority support, and there's almost no way to gain anything given you have to get to
that majority. It either exists or a doesn't. It's not like top two in California, which is a flawed system, because you can gain it with Top four, and you need that majority I've never yet had anyone be able to describe to me a real world scenario where someone gamed it and succeeded. And I mean, I've been on this trail for six months asking the question because I'm sure it's happened somewhere, but not a single opponent has ever been able to cite a single example of gaming.
All right, last comment, and I'll let you respond, and then we've got to wrap it up. No rank choice voting. I do not want to see two Democrats in the general for governor or senator. I want both Republican and Democrat policies to have their voices.
How do you respond to that?
That's why we feel so strongly about top four that in our state, at least in the next fifty years, there's never going to be a case where one party would get all the top four spots.
And if it does happen, it doesn't it means the other party.
Has virtually no support, correct, in which case they don't deserve to be in the battle. So just like why I can't comment on the Boulder situation, you know, in a highly liberal spot or a highly conservative spot, that's what they are. That outcome is appropriate we're not trying to make moderates everywhere.
And I'll close this for this, Mandy.
It's not that we're looking for a world where every candidate lives in the middle.
What we're looking for is a world where.
Every candidate is willing to meet in the middle when common sense dictates on things like immigration, where the people would have reached a consensus compromised twenty years ago.
Yeah, Kent theory. I appreciate what you're trying to do here. I'm going to be putting my voter Go voter Guide out on Monday, but considering the disastrous state of the current Republican Party, I'm relatively certain at this point it's.
A yes for me.
Now.
That won't help you because my.
Endorsement is the kiss of death, but I'm just letting you know for what it's worth, I'm convinced I'm ready to shake things up and I'm ready to do something different because what we're doing now clearly is not working.
Ken. I really appreciate your time today.
Yeah, thank you, Mandy so much.
And I agree that this is a time where the status quo is broken and America needs to step up and fix it.
All right, that's Kent Theory. Thank you Kent