It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc, I'm Bridget Bergen filling in for Brian today.

Good morning again, everyone.

There's a new documentary that debuted at the Angelica East Village this past weekend

and it's quite timely given the current election cycle and

ongoing conversations about the health of our democracy. The film is called

majority rules and it's about ranked choice voting in the United States. That's of course an

electoral system in which voters can rank their candidates in order of

preference. Some listeners might be familiar with this system because we adopted a version of it here in New York City in 2019,

just for primaries and special elections.

So if you voted in that last Democratic mayoral primary in 2021, the one where Eric Adams beat out,

other Democrats like Catherine Garcia and Maya Wiley, you've done rank choice

voting. But that's only here in the city and it's only for primaries and special elections,

not for state-level races or federal elections.

At least not yet.

Joining me today is A.J. Schnach, the director of majority rules, and Tim Dunn, the

executive director of Unite New York, an organization which advocates for election

reform and supports expanding the use of ranked choice voting.

Tim, A.J, thank you both for coming on the show.

You bet, thank you.

Thank you. So A.J, your documentary focuses on the congressional elections that took place in Alaska back in

2022. How did that version of rank choice voting come to exist and how did it exactly

work?

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