Episode 284 - Max Changes the Constitution Part II
Max and Aaron continue their discussion on Max's constitutional proposals, this time focusing on the function of the senate and the possibility of an executive council.
Related Episodes
Episode 126: Condorcet Method
Episode 48: Social Choice
Episode 125: Electoral College
Episode 108: Corporate Governance
Episode 179: Ranked Choice
Transcript
Narration: You're listening to the local Maximum Episode 284. Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the local maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max Sklar: Welcome everyone. Welcome. You have reached another local maximum today. I well, I drove quite a bit yesterday. I drove like, you know, many, many hours to come back from Pork Fest, which is in the northern New Hampshire area of the White Mountains, Lancaster, New Hampshire. Very, very nice time, just an amazing part of the country. And so that definitely included a bunch of talks and lectures and I have a few guest follow ups as there were last year. So that'll be fun.
Quick correction from last time. Got to correct Aaron a little bit. Sorry, Aaron, for singling you out. It was actually the election of 1800 that spurred the framers of the US. Constitution to do the Twelfth Amendment, which changed how the president and vice president were elected, not 1804. So we can correct that in the show notes page. But for now, if you can't tell by the title, this is part two of my proposal to change the constitution, which is still in flux.
If you haven't already, please listen to part one where I kind of go into some background, into my thinking on American politics and the American political system and how the Constitution has evolved and what spurred this project. So go to part one for that. Part two, which we're about to start is going to be — and this is a three part series — this is going to be some of my changes to the US senate. So let's have a listen to that.
Aaron: Okay, so enough of laying the groundwork. All right, what's the silver bullet?
Max: All right, so first of all, we're going to kind of break up the Senate into two different organizations. And the idea is that an organization gets stronger when its purpose is more clear. So the first part is the Senate itself is now going to be completely the voice of the states. That's it. Okay, so it's chosen by the states, not necessarily by the state legislature. However the state wants to do it, they can pick how long the term is.
Your reflection is always bothering me because I feel like someone's coming to get me. They can recall their senator or place their senator whenever they want. I'm also only having one senator per state. I still have an alternate senator in there because the guy or gal has to travel sometimes.
Aaron: I have a question about that, but I'll let you finish your explanation here.
Max: All right. It's now completely under control and of course the state pays them. Okay. Federal government is not allowed to pay them anything. So it changed that because the reasoning for Madison's reasoning there no longer applies. So it's completely under control of the state. And so the senator is the state's bitch, if I could put it in those terms. Okay, but I think they'll choose…
Aaron: He serves at the pleasure of the state, whatever form that takes; he or she.
Max: Right. They'll tend to choose more talented people because it's like, I better get something good out of this. Even if the state themselves has non talented people running it, they'll want someone talented in the Senate.
Aaron: The analogy you've made before to me is that no matter how misguided you may be yourself, you want to hire the best lawyer you possibly can. And likewise, if they're not doing their job right, you want to be able to fire them and hire somebody else.
Max: Yeah, this is my jerk in Washington who's going to be well, I mean, there's a lot of different personality types that can be successful in a legislature, I think, but they get to pick what type of person they want up there.
And I don't know, while we're at it, get rid of the age requirement. Like, who cares at this point? Just tell whatever the state want. Maybe we don't want them sending like, a horse, like a Roman senate style, but maybe keep the age requirement just because why muck with it at this point? 30. It's 30, not 35. So that's pretty reasonable, I think there's that. Okay, so now we still need…
Aaron: A body to handle the stability, longevity, continuity. Yes, and we need some changes for the progressives to sign on to this. So which one do we want to go on first?
Max: Let's go with the new body.
Aaron: Okay, so that's going to be an executive council. It's going to be a much smaller group of people.
Max: Now, would you consider this a fourth branch of government or not quite?
Aaron: I consider this as sort of part of the executive branch now, but remember, in the Constitution, the senate takes on a lot of powers that are kind of executive powers. For example, they have a lot of say over personnel in the government, and so some of those powers will be transferred over to this executive council.
Max: Now, has the confirmation of members of cabinet and directors of various executive agencies, has that always been a senate thing, or was that- it's in the constitution? Okay, so it's in the original.
Aaron: Well, certainly certain things are in the Constitution, so judges are one of them. And honestly, I wrote something in because I think maybe supreme Court judges still needs to be Senate. It still needs to be that representative body that needs to be discussing that. I don't know, but it's also in the Constitution, like ambassadors, approving, treaties, these are all things that belong to a group of people who are thinking about the long term continuity and not just representing their narrow constituency.
First of all, it's going to be a group of seven people, which is kind of the ideal size of like, a board of directors or something like that, an ideal team size. If you ever work on a team project at work seven people is a good amount.
Aaron: There's certainly a point of diminishing returns.
Max: If you've ever been on a team at work with like, 15 people and you all have to update each other every day, it's like, give me a break. Research has shown, I think in the private sector, that seven is a good number for this type of working group. So it includes the president himself or herself, and then the other six are elected in a national election once per year to serve six year terms. So like the Senate, it's going to change slowly, it's going to revolve. In fact, it's going to change much more well, equally as gradually as the Senate because I guess one third-
Aaron: It's more granular. So there'll be one seat being elected, reelected, determined every year rather than two thirds every two years. Excuse me, one third every two years.
Max: Yes. And all of these people will represent will be will be elected through a national election. Which is interesting because it would mean that they all have the same constituency. Right.
Aaron: So that's one of the big distinguishing factors is that the senator from Connecticut represents the interest of Connecticut, whereas a member of this executive council, regardless of what maybe they're from Maryland, but their constituency is the entire United States, all of the citizens. And so they have a duty not to represent the interests of themselves or where they're from, but everybody as a whole that makes for better long term big picture thinking.
Max: Exactly, exactly. And also, I fully expect these people and by the way, these people are not going to if you're hoping these people are going to be like ideologues, they are definitely not. They're probably going to be for better or for worse. Yeah, for better or for worse. And it's not like they're not going to disagree with each other. It's like the Supreme Court. They're going to have different approaches. They're going to have different thoughts on how to do things. But it's very different to be like, okay, here's a policy. It hurts Massachusetts or it hurts Connecticut or whatever. So the Connecticut senator is probably going to be against it and has to fight against the person from the state who it helps. It's not going to be like that.
Aaron: Much like you're partially modeling this on a corporate board of directors of a corporation, something that works in the private sector, they have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders at large. They're not representing BlackRock investors who hold a 20% stake in the company. They are representing the shareholders at large.
Max: Exactly. And the common shareholders, they might be chosen by preferred shareholders and there might be some decisions that are better for preferred shareholders, but they're not supposed to do that.
Aaron: Yeah. Well, there is a theory and reality diversion there, which I don't think we can get away from, but we're trying to minimize that kind of drift.
Max: Yeah. So the national election that these candidates have to come from, it has to be an election where each state has an equal vote. And first of all, there's something in the Constitution that says you can't change the Constitution to every state has an equal voice in the Senate. And there's actually something in the amendment clause that says you can't amend the Constitution to change that. So that was in there for the Connecticut. Now, I'm sure if it's unanimous, we could change that.
Aaron: But you can't have an amendment process and put something in that says you can change anything except for this part that says you can't change this part.
Max: Well, we did exactly that. We did exactly that. And so I take that to mean if you're going to transfer some of the powers of the Senate to another body, then that also means that that body has to be that same way. And also, there's some good reasons to do it this way as well, as we'll see in a second. So I came up with an interesting electoral system for that.
Aaron: Interesting. Sounds complicated.
Max: It could be a little bit complicated, yes. So, essentially, have you ever heard of the Condorcet Method?
Aaron: I have, and I could have sworn we talked about it on the show in a previous episode, but I couldn't tell you which one.
Max: Okay.
Aaron: Check the show notes later.
Max: I wish I knew his full name. He was a French person around the time of the French Revolution.
Aaron: Let's call him Pierre.
Max: Yeah, I believe it is Pierre, actually. Let me look him up. No, his name is even more French sounding than that. It's Jean Antoine Nicola de Caritat de Condorcet.
Aaron: Bonjour.
Max: Yeah. So he was a mathematician who was elected during the French Revolution. He was kind of one of those-
Aaron: That doesn't happen very often anymore.
Max: No, he was one of those sort of like moderate liberal types who the Constitution who the Revolution eventually turned against. But he was very interested in electoral systems, and he said, look, if a candidate is preferred by an absolute majority to every other candidate, then that candidate should be the winner. That seems simple enough. The problem is that's not always the case. Well, sometimes there's a tie, of course.
Aaron: Yeah. Unless you're artificially imposing, basically like a two party system, it's very easy to have a situation where you have multiple candidates and nobody has a clear majority.
Max: Right. It could be that a majority prefers A to B, a majority prefers B to C, and a majority prefers C to A. There's also the question of if you have lots of candidates. If you have ten candidates, 20 candidates, average voters aren't going to be able to do their research and rank all of them.
Aaron: Which is one of the complaints we've heard of ranked choice voting when some states and cities have tried to implement that recently.
Max: Right. And so I realized when you have an electoral College. And in this case, it's a Senate-based electoral college. So every state gets a single elector. You could have those electors do the research or have some system where the state has an election and some kind of ordering comes up with and then the elector kind of respects that, but also has the ability to kind of rank in the right way to figure out what's best for us.
And so now if you have an election of 50 people, possibly 51, if you want to include the equivalent of the Vice President in that, then you have a system where you can have a ranked Condorcet election. And then there's also the question of what you do if there's a tie. In this case, I said, well, there's a bunch of different ways to do that.
Mathematically, at this point, it's not clear if there's a way that is optimal. So I'm saying, okay, we could write laws to fill that in, or in the absence of laws, it just swings to the Senate in that point. But at least we'll know where the cycle is.
Aaron: Now, when you say it goes to the Senate, would it be just…the Condorcet method results in a tie right.
Max: Or a cycle.
Aaron: And so those two or the number that are in the cycle goes to a vote in the Senate. I assume they throw out everyone that doesn't make it to the tie cycle level.
Max: Yes. So I won't write that into the Constitution. But in election theory, in social choice theory, there's something called the Smith set. And this is true for every series of rankings that occur. Every time you have a ranked choice election, there is a Smith set, which is the smallest set of candidates, that all of them will beat every other candidate.
So you might say A, B, and C are at the top. Maybe they're in a cycle, but all three of them would beat every other candidate in a majority. So you take that Smith set, that smallest set, and then that's the one they have to choose from. Exactly.
Aaron: That makes sense.
Max: Yeah. So that's the system. I actually think that a tie or a cycle, it would happen, but not that frequently. And when it does happen, you get a very clear view into what the divisions of the country are.
But also this system is preferable, way preferable to the instant runoff voting system that's used currently in ranked choice, because what's currently used is that the bottom candidate gets struck out and then their votes get reallocated bottom by who made them first choice.
Aaron: Exactly.
Max: What this one will do is it will make it a lot easier for a strong independent candidate to win, like a strong, talented independent candidate. So imagine if there's a very partisan Democrat running against a very partisan Republican running against a talented independent.
Now, in our current electoral system, I mean, just throwing out numbers here, the Democrat gets 48% of the vote, the Republican gets 48% of the vote and then 4% go to the Independent. In this system, the Independent could actually, under IRV, the one I said that we use that shouldn't be used. The Independent would be struck out and their votes would be allocated to one of the two and either the Democrat or Republican would win.
In this case, it could be that the Independent actually beats both the Democrat and the Republican in a head to head match because all of the Republicans prefer this Independent to the Democrat and all of the Democrats prefer this Independent to the Republican. And so it incentivizes the selection of this type of candidate, which I think would be a very good thing.
Aaron: So it could be a case where 40% choose the Republican as their first choice, 40% choose the Democrat as their first choice. 20% am I doing my math right? Yeah, choose the Independent as a first choice. But of those that selected the Democrat or the Republican, their second choice among a significant number is that third party candidate, the Independent.
And so it allows yeah, you get what I'm pointing at when we get to that initial stalemate rather than throwing out the third, that we see this as a viable compromise. There I don't know the terminology for what that effect is called other than we're doing this Condorcet rather than IRV, instant runoff voting. But yeah, it should be, in theory, a system that leaves well, would it be leaving more people satisfied or fewer people dissatisfied?
Max: I think both. Yeah, I think both, but I really think this would work a lot better.
Aaron: So slight sidetrack, but why is that not being done in the places that are implementing voting systems that allow multiple choices?
Max: Okay, so first of all, it's a lot more difficult to calculate. Okay. And it's unclear what to do in a tie. And also it's a lot of research you have to do because your 3rd, 4th choice could be- remember this also incentivizes those independent candidates to run.
And another thing that I put in there that's also going to be controversial, particularly among Libertarians is these guys on the council pay them really well. Even if you have a billionaire running who doesn't care if you pay them really well, it's going to encourage really talented people to run for these offices and then the electors can kind of figure out who those people are.
Aaron: Yeah. I have very mixed feelings on the compensation of politicians because there's the school of thought that it shouldn't be a field that you go in to make money. I'd rather there's the counter thought that, well, we need to make sure that we're paying them well enough so that they're not susceptible to bribery. And then there's the third hand that says, well, no matter how much we pay them, they're going to take bribes. Can't be overcome.
Max: There's also the fact that if you pay them more, it will attract a higher talent pool. So even if you don't care about the payments, you're going to have to put on a better campaign.
Aaron: But you're envisioning that this executive Council, well, we can't say what it's going to be like compared to Senators because Senators are now no longer compensated by the federal government.
But that this executive council would be paid by the federal government and that it's going to be now, when you say very well compensated, what is it? The President of the United States makes something like 400k a year. Now, are we talking like on the order of that or are we talking greater compensation?
Max: I'm thinking like executive compensation.
Aaron: Okay, so we're talking CEOs. Well, and that's tricky because how do stock options?
Max: I haven't filled in the gaps.
Aaron: Do you get a GDP kicker?
Max: Do you pay them bonuses? And I'm like, I think we need to let Congress yeah, you can't fill that in.
Aaron: You don't say what the compensation here is, much like the Constitution does not say what the salary for senators is currently. That is handled by law, but not in the Constitution itself.
Max: And I think if we put in the Constitution, they should be very well compensated. That would probably get followed is my guess. Possibly. I also wanted to put something in there about they should get bonus based on benchmarks. But I feel like would that work? Maybe that would work. Maybe that would not work. There's a little trial and error.
Aaron: And not explicitly putting in there doesn't prevent that. So well compensated is open ended enough that it could include that.
Max: I'm okay with that being, basically like Congress votes on that and the President approves it. That should be able to be changed. And I'm also okay if they want to change the schedule, like what day of the year does the new term start, I don't care. Do something most convenient. Or we could make it April 15 or something. But that's just an idea. So you've got these people and it's been kind of unclear what powers to give them.
Aaron: So before we get to that, we talked about how they're voted on by electors, but you had a little bit about how the electors, why electors? And not just there are 50 votes but one from each state. But why electors?
Max: Right. They're supposed to be elected the same way as the Senate. And the first thing is, well, why not just have the states come up with the list themselves? However they want to do it, they come up with a list and they send the list to the federal government, to the Senate to be read in front of everybody like the presidential electors are. And so I thought about that.
So the Electoral College was founded as, oh, these are wise men who are going to figure everything out. I don't really care about that. That's not really what I'm looking for. I think the benefit of actually having an elector, the list go through an elector, is the elector might be a rubber stamp like the Electoral College is today, but these electors will be used to fill vacancies in the term.
And I think that's an important innovation because it would mean that if a Counselor has to resign or is impeached or is assassinated, then the same people who chose that person is going to choose the replacement. So you can't do a political impeachment or you can't do a political assassination. It disincentivizes all of that.
Aaron: You could and it's possible that the electorate will change their mind based on the performance of the person in question, but it's less likely to be susceptible to that. Exactly.
Max: So that's the idea. Again, this is kind of a work in progress, so I'm open to hearing. I certainly changed my mind on some of these things after talking to you. And now that I put it out, I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of feedback and I might change my mind on this either. But I think it sounds like a good idea at this point.
Aaron: Now with Electors in the current Electoral College, like you said, it's mostly a rubber stamp. But there have been what's perhaps derogatorily or pejoratively referred to as faithless electors, people who have taken action when it comes down to the wire other than what they've been directed to by their state. Right. Similarly, when it comes time to replace a Senator or a Representative, I believe it varies state by state how that process is handled.
Some require a special election, some the Governor or the state legislature can appoint a temporary one until they can have the next regular election cycle. Just interesting that this codifies that at the federal level because these are federal positions rather than representing at the state or local level.
Max: You still have to have your day job if you're an elector because you pass on your list once and there's nothing to do and then you're not getting paid for it. So I'm kind of worried what happens if there's a vacancy? Are these people going to be around? How do you track them all down?
I haven't filled in the gaps on that yet, but hopefully they would choose someone who they think is going to be around available and can choose the next person because then their next choice is kind of more their reappointment is way more free and consequential than their first.
Okay, so there's that. And then this Council, so it's based off of the New Hampshire Executive Council, which during my time in New Hampshire, I learned works exceptionally well to keep the state from spending too much, from making big maybe. So give them some personnel stuff that the Senate has. Give them perhaps the line item veto, the ability to reduce appropriations after those appropriations have been passed
Aaron: So before we move on from that or as a note to be revisited, line item veto, clarify exactly what that is because that's a term I've heard kicked around since at least the Clinton administration. But I don't think I understand exactly what the scope of what it really can do is.
Max: The idea behind the line item veto is if I'm the President and I get a bill and it says we're spending money on this this I could cross some of it out and then sign the bill that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court because it said no. The President doesn't get to pick and choose what's in the bill. They could either sign it or they could send it back. That's what it says and that's what you got to do.
So there have been some calls for a constitutional amendment to have a line item veto. In this case, I'm saying they're not going to have a line item veto but they could still block appropriations after the law is passed.
Aaron: Okay.
Max: So like the New Hampshire executive council can do it.
Aaron: It would have to be very clear how granular they can get in what they are rejecting or blocking.
Max: Right. I'm still a little bit uncertain as to what we can do with that.
Aaron: Because obviously the two extremes would be that on the one end, like that Supreme Court ruling, it's an up or down vote on the bill as a whole, take it or leave it. The other end would be you can take a red pen and you can mark it up however you want.
Maybe you say you can't add any words but you can cross anything out you want and you can get pretty creative with that to make it do things. And obviously that's not the intent. No. It would be to take kind of contiguous chunks, things that would be considered an item and strike those out as a whole. That can be separable from the bill in its entirety. But I think you would need some pretty clear legal language on what that is otherwise people are going to abuse it.
Max: Right. And some other ideas I had for this group is they could repeal old laws. So there's some period of time, I had four years there, I'm open to kind of arguments as to how long that should is, where that should be. But it's like okay at this. Yes, the Congress voted for it but it's been a while and it's unclear whether they would vote for it again. And so maybe you could go back and repeal old laws because Congress can't get to it.
Aaron: So this is like not a time delay veto. Can they overturn it themselves? No.
Max: It’s like a vacuum cleaner just wipe away all the crap that's built up over the years.
Aaron: So I did have a question on that in my notes here. So you say that they can recommend for repeal legislation that's greater than four years old. And then the follow up action is that it must be confirmed by Congress within 90 days or the repeal goes through. Now, confirming by Congress, is that a straight majority? Is it like how the Senate basically needs 60 votes to get anything through?
Max: The way I have it now is a straight majority, but I'm open to- look, maybe we would love to have it a higher bar because we hate all the laws that are passed, but I'm trying to come up with something.
Aaron: I have inclination towards that that may be the antithesis of the compromise here.
Max: Yeah, I'm trying to come up with something that people would find reasonable. And then the second part is with, like a supermajority, maybe like two thirds, they could declare a current law, like, unconstitutional.
Aaron: That's two thirds of the executive council.
Max: Yeah. So they could declare it unconstitutional and then it gets heard by the Supreme Court, essentially, if the President or someone wants to bring it to the Supreme Court. Or they could just say, yeah, all right, I agree with the President. Might be one of the ones who voted for that.
Aaron: Right. I keep forgetting that I'm thinking of it as a six member council. It's really seven because the President has a seat on the Council.
Max: Yeah. So something like that. So they're going to be somewhat powerful. They can't stop laws from going through. So that's nice. So if you are worried about them being kind of undemocratic and too powerful, there's sort of a limit there as to how powerful they can be. I didn't give them any check on the President or anything like that because ultimately the President is the national election. That's more from the people. So let's get back to that. Let's talk more about what progressives get, unless you have more questions.
Aaron: So I did have one question going back to the Senate. You mentioned a single senator for each state with the ability to appoint an alternate for logistical reasons. Why limit the number of senators in the delegation as long as you limit it to one vote per state? Is there a reason to have them designate a single senator and an alternate rather than if Massachusetts wants to send six people as part of their senatorial delegation, as long as they still only get the one vote that they have to exercise at the end of the day, does that matter?
Max: Well, it has to be clear how to calculate that vote. And it also has to be clear who is allowed to speak in the Senate and what the rules are .
Aaron: So one thing that we haven't talked about is that the Senate is often referred to as the deliberative body of the legislature, and that's part of why the filibuster is even a thing there. There are much stricter rules in the House about. Who can talk when and for how long, where the Senate is a place where sweeping speeches are intended, expected to be made. So that's something that we haven't really talked about, but is probably worth taking in consideration.
Max: Right. So I think it would be more orderly if there's one. I suspect that a lot of people are going to go through this. No, we're used to having two, keep it as two. But there were people at the Constitutional Convention who were like, there should only be one vote per state, or there were people who were saying, I think the reason why they wanted two Senators was because they were worried that there'd be too many absences and states not showing up.
Aaron: Isn't that how it works? And this is weird electoral stuff, but if there's like a tie in the Electoral College, then it gets thrown to the House. But each state gets one vote. It's not based on how many representatives they have.
Max: Right, but that's like a one time thing with specific rules for that vote.
Aaron: But that's kind of what was kicking in the back of my mind, that you could have a delegation with multiple members, but they get the one vote.
Max: Exactly.
Aaron: I can see a good reason for why you would have a single Senator and an alternate rather than a delegation that can be of size to be determined by the state, but they still only get the one vote.
Max: Right. So we've covered that. It's possible that some sort of certain type of conservative, like a Constitutional conservative or like a Tea Party type is probably going, yeah, I support all this right now because there's going to be a lot more fiscal responsibility, but what's the progressive going to get out of this?
Aaron: Right.
Max: All right. I'm going to stop it there before I get into my proposals. Changes to the House of Representatives and the Presidential Electoral College before we keep going. And actually, as this thing is still in flux as a result of my conversation with Aaron, I actually have updated the document over the last couple of weeks, and I clarified a few things on the Executive Council. First of all, I believe the Executive Council of New Hampshire can't whatever just stop whatever spending is passed by the State House.
So I think they can just stop kind of this discretionary spending that just kind of happens that's not necessarily passed by Congress. So that's kind of a more moderate position to take. And then if they want to reduce any appropriation by Congress, I think that if you just allow them to do that by a straight majority, that kind of mucks with the ability of Congress to do its job, perhaps. So maybe a more moderate position there would be to require a supermajority to reduce Congressional appropriations.
That's just an interesting then, you know, after talking to know why can't states send however many people they want to the Senate? And so I kind of agreed, all right, we'll allow them to have any number of alternatives that they want, but there has to be a clear line of succession as to one person is speaking and voting at a time, and then when they're out the next person, the line of succession go in. Otherwise there could be craziness. You don't want to hold a vote and then have two people from the same state voting. I think that will be crazy.
So anyway, by the way, I passed out a lot of papers related to this at Pork Fest. I printed like ten pages worth of this stuff. And so a lot of people have it, a few people will be commenting on it. I got some positive feedback. Some people don't care. Some people are really fascinated by it. And so if you're fascinated by it, definitely check out the Locals, maximum.locals.com, or if you've just been a fan of the podcast, because we're going to get off this subject sometime and go back to math and probability.
But if you're as interested in this as I am, please check out maximum.locals.com and then check out my proposal for yourself. I'm also trying to figure, where do I post this? Would it be strange to post it both on the website and then on GitHub of all places? I know GitHub is usually not where someone who wants to publish a constitutional law journal or political magazine would put something, but that's not who I am.
I'm used to using GitHub, and also if I put it on GitHub, it'll stay there forever, unlike my website, which hopefully will stay for a very long time. But GitHub, it's not reliant on payments from me or me making sure that my credit card is up to date and all that. I think that's probably a good idea, but hopefully I'm trying to find someplace that's a little bit more professional to put this up when all is said and done.
All right, so if you have any ideas on that, let me know. I look forward to putting out part Three next week so that I can finish the proposal. It's really interesting how this proposal brings together a lot of the previous episodes that we've done. The Local Maximum, even though this has been mostly a technology podcast, we've talked about how corporate boards worked, we've talked about the mathematics of rank choice voting, we've talked about the Electoral College, we've talked about social choice theory, and we've talked about comparative electoral systems.
So I'm glad we kind of been able to bring it all together and put this stake in the ground. And so I think maybe I'll give my thoughts next time as to what use of this, even if there's a very small chance this thing passes. What can we do with all of this work and this information? Because I feel like it is helpful for a lot of it to think about a lot of different situations in the world. All right, hope you have a great week, everyone.
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Narration: Feel the power.