Park University held its annual Constitution Day Lecture featuring Larry Bradley, an election reform advocate and author. Bradley presented his lecture, “The Culprit is not the Constitution: Why the Majority of Voters are dissatisfied with Government,” on September 20 in Graham Tyler Memorial Chapel at the Parkville campus.

Bradley began with a joke that made the rest of his lecture seem light hearted, but also serious. His lecture focused on teaching students at Park University to fix voting problems in the United States.

The point of the lecture was to inform the community of the role United States citizens have in an election. Citizens could fix the issue of plurality winners in elections by, as Bradley said, “going to ranked choice voting because ranked choice voting will always give you a majority winner.” This winner would then influence public policies to reflect the will of the majority of the voters.

He believes this system would work in the United States because, “it’s already working other places, it’s just that we don’t know to ask for it.”

Bradley gave a few examples of this system working in other places, most notably, in San Francisco, Calif. He provided detailed graphs and charts showing the process by which an election winner would be chosen using the ranked choice voting system.

After the lecture there was a short question and answer period where students, faculty and community members could ask questions. One question regarding the effect of ranked choice voting for minority groups piqued attention and interest.

“I like that it brought up some interesting questions,” said Maggie Turner, political science senior. “There were a lot of questions about minority rights with the right choice voting, and how minorities would be affected and how they would be represented.”