March 2019 Newsletter
A Vote of Confidence for Voting Reform
In case you missed it, we received a huge vote of confidence last month when Open Philanthropy Project awarded us a $1.8M grant to continue our advocacy of approval voting. This funding will help us run approval voting education campaigns through 2021. We are so thankful for Open Philanthropy’s confidence in our ability to effect change through voting reform!
However, there’s still much more work to do to make approval voting a reality—including conducting peer-reviewed research to show voters how approval voting would improve their lives. Want to help us fund the polling research we need to make a compelling case to voters? Make a donation today to support this important work.
Join us for an event!
CES will be in Seattle in early May, and we’d love to meet you in person! Come chat with us about voting methods at one of our two scheduled Seattle social events:
– Happy Hour at Wayward Vegan Cafe on May 5
– Social Dinner at Broadfork Cafe on May 8
Do you live in Boston? We’ll also be attending EAGx Boston April 27 – 28. Let us know if you’ll be attending and we can schedule a time to meet up!
For all of our supporters outside of Seattle and Boston, please take our event survey so we can bring you engaging programming that aligns with your interests!
Volunteer Spotlight: Designing for Better Elections
You may have noticed recently that we added a new Media Mentions page to our website. This page was created by CES volunteer Kyle Decker, a product designer who is passionate about voting reform.
“So many people treat vote splitting, two-party domination, and ‘the lesser of two evils’ as facts of nature, when in reality they’re just the result of a poor design choice—First Past The Post,” said Kyle. “The great thing here, the thing that excites me the most, is… if it’s just a design choice, we can fix it.”
Thanks to Kyle’s expertise in design, we now have a page where we can add all of the articles we’ve been featured in while we fight for a better voting method. Thank you, Kyle!
Do you have skills and expertise that you’d like to use to advance better voting methods? Complete our volunteer survey and send us a quick email to introduce yourself! We’d love to find ways that you can get involved.
Approval Voting: Better than Ranked Choice?
CES executive director Aaron Hamlin was recently featured on The David Pakman Show to discuss the limits of ranked choice voting and the benefits of approval voting. Check out the segment on YouTube!
A Million-Dollar Snapshot of What Better Elections Look Like
Curious about our future plans and how we’ll be using our grant funding from Open Philanthropy? Check out this blog post to learn how we will put those dollars to good use advancing better voting methods!
