Kenai Peninsula Votes, a non-partisan organization promoting voter education, is starting a new series of discussions beginning tonight, in conjunction with the Homer Public Library, surrounding voter education.
Alex Koplin spoke with KBBI’s Jay Barrett about tonight’s event and the series.
Koplin: We’re beginning a series twice a month, series called community engagements. Where we want to talk about voting and elections. And part of it's going to be educational like tomorrow, we start at 5:30. We're gonna cover ranked choice voting for about five or ten, about ten minutes, and then we're going to, just go into a general conversation so people can ask questions or make comments about this issue, and we're gonna do it in a very safe area. We're also doing this with Homer Public Library.
KBBI: Excellent, one of the courts recently upheld ranked choice voting, tell us about that.
Koplin: Okay well Jay, okay it did pass. There was a ballot measure, it passed, it was actually recounted. The court held up the citizens' initiative, but we're gonna talk about ranked choice voting. We don't expect anybody, you know, we're not going into all the aspects and then we're going to go into more general conversations. But ranked choice voting has a lot of positive things going for it, and, but there's some people against it. But we're doing it because we voted for it. So we'll have like, I've got a couple slide things showing them, reiterate, and then go out, Heath Smith is gonna facilitate it with me. He's a city councilperson. But this one programmed event we're doing, community engagements, is definitely one of the things that we have been working on.
KBBI: Oh, excellent, excellent. Okay so, once again, where and when?
Koplin: This presentation is Zoom only. When we're able to meet in public we'll, we'll start, we'll start that going. So you can go to Homer Public library's website and register. you have to register for this, and you go on their site and you'll register and then you'll get an invitation and it's easy to follow the link. Also Kenai Peninsula Votes Facebook page has a link, as well, to go to this community engagement. So we're doing them twice a month, the first Tuesday of the month and then the last Saturday, so we're also going to open up a weekend time so people, you know, we can try to be more diverse. We'll see, right now I have sixteen attendees and usually, you know, seven might show up and we might know them all. But what we're trying to do is get a more diverse group, and I think over time if we develop this, you know, twice a month and three or four months we do it, that might work.
KBBI: Alex thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you explaining all this to me and I, I'm gonna send you an application now to register right away.
Registration information is available on the Homer Public Library website, and on the Kenai Peninsula Votes Facebook page. Tonight’s first meeting is at 5:30 p.m., and is held over Zoom video conference. Koplin says he plans to continue them twice a month.
