Ranked-Choice is Having a Moment. Andrew Yang Has Thoughts.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

 

It comes as no surprise to anyone tracking the news in recent years that America has become distressingly polarized — with voters increasingly retreating to their partisan corners — while lawmaking has ground to a halt. (Just look at the struggle to pass Biden’s Build Back Better plan.)

It's no wonder that three-quarters of Americans say they don't trust the government to do what's right.
 

While the weight of democratic dysfunction in the U.S. may feel tremendous, there are simple and evidence-based solutions to address the structural drivers of polarization. One idea that is getting a great deal of traction is ranked-choice voting.
 

What's Happening: In ranked-choice voting elections, voters get the opportunity to rank their candidates. If no candidate receives a majority of first place votes, RCV elections enter an instant runoff until a majority winner emerges. The concept of RCV has been debated since at least the 1850s, but in the past two decades RCV has seen a resurgence with two states — Maine and Alaska — and over 50 cities adopting it via ballot initiative.

RCV recently faced one of its highest profile tests when New York City used it for its Democratic primary election. The results of the New York City election were largely positive, with higher turnout and more diverse representation, showcasing how RCV can level the playing field as it expands nationwide.

Dive Deeper: As voters took to the polls this week to cast their ballots in a range of elections, our Co-Founder and Co-Chair Laura Arnold released her latest podcast featuring a conversation with Andrew Yang and leading democracy scholar Larry Diamond. Arnold examines the structural drivers of polarization and chats with Yang and Diamond about the real-world evidence from RCV elections.  

You can listen to the latest episode of Deep Dive with Laura Arnold here, or subscribe to the show wherever you get podcasts.

Related: If we're serious about saving democracy, it's time to address the “primary problem,” write Katherine Gehl of The Institute for Political Innovation and Jonathan Haidt of New York University’s Stern School of Business in this Time piece. Also: Gehl discussed the issue on a recent Deep Dive podcast episode, "Democracy in Crisis." 

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

Criminal justice reform was yet again on the ballot this Election Day, and the result was neither a tidal wave for change nor an aggressive rollback in the face of an ongoing increase in violence. Instead, voters supported measured calls for police accountability. 

“Even as partisan barriers block popular policing reforms in Congress, voters stepped up and said they want basic reforms that will hold police officers accountable to the public,” said Caitlyn Morrison, Arnold Ventures advocacy manager. “Extreme efforts to unilaterally expand or cut police simply weren’t popular. But initiatives aimed at specific, targeted ideas won at the ballot box.”

Why It Matters: Political observers had worried that the spike in homicides would result in a total backlash to the criminal justice reform movement. That didn’t happen. Yes, voters rejected a plan to repeal and replace the Minneapolis department, and a prison abolitionist lost her race for city attorney in Seattle. But in Austin voters also shut down a proposal to create mandatory staffing minimums for local law enforcement at the expense of other city services. Meanwhile, Cleveland and Albany voted to bolster civilian oversight of police. And Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has become the national face of reform prosecutors, easily won reelection while a slate of pro-reform judges won in Pittsburgh.

“The DA race was over when Krasner won the primary, but man, the ‘criminal justice reformers in trouble’ storyline really got written out quickly,” Washington Post reporter David Weigel said.

What’s Next: These results point a way forward on how policymakers can craft politically popular ways to make law enforcement more transparent and accountable to communities. Even opponents to some of the more sweeping changes used election night to call for systemic reforms to the criminal justice system. 

“Tonight Minneapolis voters have made clear that we want a planful approach to transforming policing and public safety in our city that needs to include meaningful consultation with the communities that are most impacted by both violent crime and by over-policing,” said Leili Fatehi, manager of the All of Mpls campaign, which opposed plans to repeal and replace the city’s police department.

 

Read the story >

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

 

Police in California are more likely to search Black people during traffic stops than white people, with ramifications throughout the rest of the criminal justice system, according to researchers behind a new analysis of nearly 4 million traffic stops in the state. The study, “Racial Disparities in Law Enforcement Stops,” was released last month by the Public Policy Institute of California with support from Arnold Ventures. Even when researchers accounted for contextual factors — things like location and reason for the stop such as knowledge of an outstanding warrant — they still found evidence of racial disparities. 

 

Why It Matters: This research shows that, despite efforts by the state of California, more reforms will be necessary to fully address racial injustice within the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, even as traffic stops serve as one of the most routine interactions between police and residents, there is a growing body of evidence that this enforcement does little to promote community safety.

 

“We know that, basically since cars have been on the road, police have been doing traffic enforcement, and I think now is a moment to step back and think about what they are enforcing, and why,” said Anita Ravishankar, AV director of criminal justice research. “I think what we get from actually digging into these numbers is a real moment to pause — to say, it doesn't have to be like this, this is not making us safer. And we're actually spending a lot of public resources doing it.”

 

What’s Next: This research should inspire policymakers to listen to communities that have spent decades calling for policing reform. “The data most definitely supports concerns voiced by communities of color about inequities and different experiences within law enforcement,” said Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at PPIC who worked on the report. 

 

Some elected leaders are already stepping up. In 2019, the City of Berkeley formed a working group to address police problems such as use of force and disparities in traffic stops. Officials there passed a package of reforms this winter that included a plan to no longer make traffic stops for minor offenses such as expired license plates or broken lights. At the state level, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in September a set of bills aimed at increasing police accountability and curbing excessive use of force.

 

Read the story >
 

Related: The New York Times investigates the deadly consequences of using police to generate local revenue through minor traffic violations, such as busted taillights, missing plates, and tinted windows. (free link for our readers) We’ve written previously about how this revenue-motivated policing model undermines the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Learn more in this Q&A with Mike Makowsky of Clemson University.

By Torie Ludwin, Communications Manager

 

As Marina Awed was finishing her law degree at Western State College of Law at Argosy University, she found out the school was about to close — and with it her opportunity to graduate after nearly three years of hard work at the university. So, the third-year law student took matters into her own hands. She used her legal expertise to file a motion to force the school to stay open until she could graduate.

 

What Happened: The Department of Education had revoked Argosy’s eligibility for federal student loans and Pell Grants, citing the mismanagement of more than $16 million in financial aid funds owed to students. Awed quickly drafted a motion to intervene in the receivership case to represent herself and her fellow third-year law students. She demanded that the school pay students what they were owed and remain open so they could graduate. “I attended three of the court sessions, two by phone, and one I flew out to Ohio to be there in-person.” Awed was as surprised as anyone when the judge granted her motion.

 

Why It Matters: Most cheated students don’t have a background in law. The U.S. Department of Education this week held another session of negotiated rulemaking, or NegReg, where a committee determines the rules governing how federal student loans are disbursed to students, accessed by schools, and forgiven. These rules have the potential to protect students from predatory colleges that take federal loan money from student borrowers but do not provide accredited degrees or in some cases, do not even remain open.

 

What’s Next: The committee will continue to hold rulemaking sessions in December and January; if the committee cannot come to consensus, the Secretary of Education may determine the rules. Awed’s story is part of a series of stories showing how these rules impact real students. 

 

Read the story >

Criminal Justice

• “Locked Up and Left to Die,” a months-long investigation by the Texas Observer, shows how deaths in Texas jails are “par for the course,” often going ignored and unresolved.
   
• Is it time to rethink the "American way of punishment"? The Crime Report covers an AV-supported webinar on our nation's harsh sentencing polices over the past three decades, which have condemned individuals to lengthy prison terms that offer little opportunity for rehabilitation.
   
• Opponents of bond reform use misinformation and false narratives — and often rely on bias in the media — to portray reform as a threat to public safety, write Elaine Hennig and Benjamin Greaves in a new paper from the Texas Center for Justice & Equity. 
   
• Authorities dropped felony charges against a homeless Pennsylvania man arrested after a gross misunderstanding, but the offending policy that would have put him in jail remains, Reason reports.
   
• A New Hampshire town is using data collection to address police reform, the Concord Monitor reports.
   
• Want to improve policing? Hire more women, argues Slate.
   
• Only one Black juror was chosen in the trial against three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery. “There appears to be potential discrimination in the panel,” the judge said in response to prosecutors’ objections, before ultimately siding with the defense, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. 

Health

• The Biden administration is cracking down on hospitals that don’t make their prices public or ​​use special web coding that make prices hard to find and access, The Wall Street Journal reports. 
   
• San Francisco has launched Street Overdose Response Teams (SORT), mobile units made up of paramedics and nurses to deliver a broad range of support and care directly following an overdose, NPR reports.
   
• New resource: Altarum’s health care affordability scorecard takes a state-by-state look at where states are doing well in policy and where they can improve. 

 

Higher Education

• Shifting resources to intensive college advising, a model seen in impactful programs like Bottom Line, is the best use of limited resources and can level the playing field in college completion, write Ben Castleman and Andrew Barr in The Hill.
  
  Related: Bottom Line gets “blockbuster” results in helping students ‘Get in, graduate, and go far,’ study shows.
   
• Will that college degree pay off? The Washington Post looks at the data, including a Third Way study showing almost 6,000 programs do not provide any financial return on the investment in tuition based on the time it takes graduates to earn the money back. The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that a quarter of college programs leave students financially worse off than if they’d never enrolled. (free link for our readers)
   
• Evidence-based support for college completion, as seen in the College Completion Fund, is essential, explain Michelle Dimino and Alyssa Ratledge in Higher Ed Dive. “We've seen the results of funding access but not completion, and they're not pretty.”
   
• A final paper from The State Higher Education Officers Association (SHEEO) looks at the correlation between state policies and predatory colleges. It finds that more stringent state policies are associated with fewer total college openings — suggesting that additional resources for authorizers could help prevent predatory colleges from opening in the first place. 
  
  Related: Two of the researchers participating in the project published an op-ed in the Hechinger Report underlining the importance of state action to stop predatory for-profit colleges.

Also...

• Nonprofit ProPublica publishes an unprecedented analysis and mapping of the toxic air in neighborhoods across the U.S. (including my own). Read more and view the map.

"The Vanishing Trial," an award-winning co-production between Families Against Mandatory Minimums and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Every day in America, defendants are forced to make a harrowing choice: Plead guilty and get a shorter sentence, or exercise their constitutional right to trial and risk what’s called a “trial penalty” — more time behind bars if found guilty. This film follows four people facing this impossible choice and highlights how the trial penalty has led more people to forgo their rights — and led to a boom in mass incarceration. Filmmakers also talk to former federal judges and prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, constitutional law experts, and criminal justice reform advocates. "The Vanishing Trial" is available to stream on Kanopy. All you need is a library card.

• In a fit of pandemic-fueled home improvement (hey, we relate), David Olson set out to demo his crumbling backyard steps. He unearthed 162 bowling balls instead. Then it got weird.
   
• This heartwarming moment is what so many parents have been waiting for — two brothers, Paxton and Patrick, became the first kids under 12 in Houston to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Paxton, a kindergartener and a cancer survivor, gave an adorable thumbs up after his jab.
   
• More in cute kids: Watch this interview between very enthusiastic 11-year-old reporter Jazlyn and rapper/criminal justice reformer Jay-Z.
   
• Check out the new words being added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, from dad bod to copypasta (and no, those two aren’t related).
   
• We have a Slack channel devoted to memes at AV. It is a constant source of delight, and according to science, good for lowering our stress levels. 

The Complex Care team is funding research into how to improve the systems that deliver care to a population of more than 12 million people who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Learn more here.

The Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy teams at Arnold Ventures are teaming up to learn more about what works in criminal justice reform in an ongoing request for proposals for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that will test programs and practices. There is no deadline for submissions.

The Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of social programs in any area of U.S. policy. Details are here.

View all of our RFPs here.