Center for Election Science

parent: Organizations

This is the logo for C4ES, as found at https://electionscience.org on Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The Center for Election Science (CES or C4ES) is an American 501(c)(3) electoral reform advocacy organization. It advocates for cardinal voting methods such as approval voting and score voting. Its goal is to implement approval voting in at least 5 cities with 50,000 people by 2022.

Wikipedia

There's an article on Wikipedia about this organization. See wikipedia:electionscience.org

News

The news from C4ES can be found here:

• https://electionscience.org/about/media-mentions/

It can't be found on blog.electionscience.org or news.electionscience.org.

Unrig 2019

Below is Aaron Hamlin's speech about C4ES, that he gave at the "Unrig Summit" on June 19, 2019 on behalf of The Center for Election Science. The summary of the video:

How did Fargo, ND (yes—the Fargo that featured Steve Buscemi in a woodchipper) lead the charge for a more representative democracy? Aaron Hamlin of The Center for Election Science tells the inspiring story of how one citizen's passion and grassroots activism sparked a successful movement to make Fargo the first city in the US to implement approval voting.

The video can be found on YouTube, licensed under the "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)". The transcript follows:

• 0th minute (00:00 - 00:59)
  • 00:00
    • (upbeat music)
  • 00:04
    • I'm here to tell you a story about Fargo, North Dakota; and yes, I'm talking about that Fargo, the one with the wood chipper.
  • 00:15
    • But Fargo isn't just a Coen Brothers movie; Fargo is a community of 120,000 people who care about their community.
  • 00:27
    • Fargo is also the setting for an interesting election.
  • 00:30
    • There was an election in 2015 where there was a six-way race for commissioner, and the winner of that election won with just 22% of the vote.
  • 00:41
    • That's hardly a mandate.  The vote splitting was obvious.
  • 00:44
    • This was unfortunately not an isolated incident for Fargo.  This has happened before, and it would happen after.
  • 00:51
    • This is something common in cities across the country.
  • 00:54
    • But this was embarrassing for the commission itself, and so they had to do something about it.  They went ahead and developed a task force to figure out a better voting method to address this vote-splitting problem.

• 1st minute (1:00-2:00)
  • 01:08
    • And that's when the main character of our story comes into play.
  • 01:12
    • This is Jed Lemke.  Jed is six foot nine and, as you can see from the picture, he barely fits inside normal door frames.
  • 01:22
    • But Jed's height is not his most salient attribute.
  • 01:26
    • His most salient attribute is his passion, and he is passionate about his city of Fargo and making sure that they have the strong elections.
  • 01:36
    • So, Jed had reached out to us and he had asked, "What do we do about our elections, we can't have this happen again."
  • 01:44
    • And so in reaching out to us at the Center for Election Science, we recommended a voting method called approval voting.
  • 01:52
    • Approval voting is a very simple voting method that allows you to choose as many candidates as you want.
  • 01:58
    • The candidate with the most votes wins.

• 2nd minute (02:00 - 03:00)
  • 02:01
    • There's no ranking or anything complicated, you get results immediately, no special software.
  • 02:06
    • This was very appealing, and so Jed took this information back with him to the task force  and the task force was on board with it.
  • 02:15
    • They recommended it to the commission.
  • 02:18
    • What did the commission do with this information?
  • 02:21
    • They sat on it for about a year, and remember that race earlier that we talked about? The one with the 22% winner?
  • 02:31
    • Well, that commissioner was on the commission when they made this decision not to do anything.
  • 02:40
    • But we can't forget about our main hero in this story, Jed.
  • 02:45
    • And Jed was not going to take this lying down.
  • 02:48
    • Jed decided that he needed to do something.
  • 02:52
    • If the commission wasn't going to act, he needed to.
  • 02:55
    • So what he did, he got everyone he knew and started gathering signatures and made it so that approval voting got on the ballot in Fargo.

• 3rd Minute (03:00 - 03:06)
  • 03:06
    • But getting it on the ballot isn't enough, you have to make sure that people know about approval voting.
  • 03:11
    • After all, approval voting at this time hadn't even been used anywhere.
  • 03:15
    • So, Jed literally went to the airwaves, telling everybody that he could about approval voting.
  • 03:25
    • After telling people about approval voting, what did the people of Fargo think?
  • 03:30
    • Jed had an organization, Reform Fargo, where he did outreach, getting people to learn about approval voting.
  • 03:36
    • He had teamed up with us at the Center for Election Science at this point.
  • 03:39
    • We were educating people about approval voting, and the people in Fargo, they were enthusiastic.
  • 03:46
    • After all, there is this very simple voting method that addressed vote splitting and gave people a nice consensus candidate.
  • 03:55
    • It just made sense.
  • 03:59
    • But now that you have all these people on board, what do you do?

• 4th minute (04:00 - 04:59)
  • 04:02
    • You have to have people coming out to vote, and that's when the next phase went into play.
  • 04:08
    • That was gathering an approval voting army.
  • 04:12
    • Jed, with his organization, and identifying key stakeholders in the community, was able to get them to go door-to-door telling people to go out to vote, to vote for this solution, this simple solution of approval voting.
  • 04:27
    • And it didn't hurt that we had a secret weapon of cute kids like this among our volunteer team to get people to go out to vote and persuade people over the media.
  • 04:40
    • Given that, it's little surprise the outcome. 63 and a half percent win.
    • [applause]
    • Thank you.
  • 04:50
    • And this made Fargo, North Dakota, the first city ever in the United States to use approval voting.
  • 04:57
    • And here's our take away: Be like Jed.

• 5th minute (05:00 - 05:59)
  • 05:01
    • Don't let others sit on their hands when there's a simple solution.
  • 05:06
    • And now there's only one question left:  Who will be the Jed to bring approval voting to it's next city?
  • 05:13
    • Thank you.
  • 05:14
    • (applause) (upbeat music)