The Free State Project‘s wintertime convention, Liberty Forum, happened this weekend and they had the good fortune of having the talented Vin Armani perform a broadcast throughout the event.
Vin is the host of “Destination Unknown” a weekly podcast with co-host and FSP early mover Dave Butler. Both Vin and Dave headed up the epic live video feed that aired for over fifteen hours spread across the three day event in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The broadcast featured various interviews of speakers at Liberty Forum including Lyn Ulbricht, Stephan Kinsella, two-time Liberty Legislator of the Year winner Mark Warden, Derrick J Freeman, and Free State Project founder Jason Sorens. They also interviewed movers to NH both new and old. It’s a lot of content.
Are New Hampshire’s representatives finally taking a closer look at alternative voting systems? For years, the state elections committee in the state house has rejected any proposed changes to NH’s voting system, regardless of how much sense they have made. However, now that Maine has adopted “ranked choice” voting, perhaps NH’s reps are taking the issue more seriously.
I was surprised recently to receive a call from Keene Sentinel reporter Jake Lahut asking me for my opinion on ranked choice voting for an article that appeared last week. As someone who has been a longtime libertarian, I’ve seen how the “vote for one” system we have in place hurts third parties, so I definitely support ranked choice and its competitor, the easier “approval voting”.
Both systems solve the “wasted vote syndrome” where voters, afraid of the worst of the two evils winning, will vote for the “lesser evil” of the two major party candidates. They will do this even though they may better agree with a third party candidate, like a Green or Libertarian, simply out of fear of their least favorite major party candidate winning.
Ranked choice allows the voter to rank their favorites on the ballot while approval voting allows the voter to simply vote for all those candidates they’d be alright with winning the election.
Last week in the state house, HB 505 was heard that would allow for approval voting to take hold in New Hampshire’s elections. Here’s the bill’s full hearing in front of the house elections committee:
Last week, liberty activists testified in Concord in favor of HB 567 which would move us to Atlantic Standard Time year-round, so long as MA and ME also do. This would end the stupid, dangerous, and annoying clock shifting we currently have to do twice a year. I’m happy to announce that all signatures on the blue sheet in the committee room were in favor of this bill!
Here’s full video of all the house testimony on the bill:
