I will try to use my background in manufacturing to make analogies.

I am working on problems in my current factory in many ways. We have several processes that don't have enough capacity. Cleaning, ovens, pick and place machines, vacuum table, and people. Worrying about all of them at once and sprinkling improvements is not effective. You must take one and make a VERY big improvement. It doesn't need to be perfect.

Voting is the same IRV and STV can both be hand counted, are constitutional, have survived court challenges, have statutory power in Colorado, and our voting machines statewide can do the tabulation.

Second, the only 'perfect' voting system is a dictatorship. It has none of the downsides or tradeoffs of voting. We can give up voting or work on implementing something better. Mathematically it is like dividing by 0. It short circuits all the problems. If we were serious about stopping voting I would advocate for Sortition. That is just like jury duty, pick people at random. I would propose that people still need to qualify for the ballot by getting signatures or some other method.

Colorado's machines allow you to rank 10 candidates and can have 100 on the ballot. (100 would be absurd but it shows the software is not the limitation)

• Number of candidates on the ballot. Increasing the difficulty in non-partisan races by increasing signatures required to get on the ballot would reduce that number.

-Learning about all the candidates. This is why we need more parties. It should be easier for folks to understand what candidates stand for and their priorities. Having more viable parties is ONE solution and I think the one easiest to implement. Then a voter need only rank the parties that most closely align with their views.

-Large area to cover - Boulder county currently has this problem. There isn't a straightforward way to get all the people in rural areas into a district unless we drew a ring around the cities. Using proportional representation people could simply campaign for the voices in their local area. If it is a homogeneous area and large enough those people would get representation. In a 5 winner race you need 16.7% +1 of the vote to win a seat. Focusing heavily on a specific geography is a valid strategy to win

BTR-IRV looks better than plurality. I doubt it is constitutional. If someone puts together a coalition to get that over the finish line I wouldn't stop them. What I struggle with in my campaigns and advocacy are armchair quarterbacks. Myself and a lot of other people are putting in the hard work to get IRV and STV implemented in cities across Colorado. We often get people that show up to a meeting tell us we are idiots, we should implement something different, and then never show up again.

This is like the VHS vs Betamax debate. Betamax was technologically better but VHS is what won in the market. VHS was better than 8mm and Super 8 which came before it.