Ranked Choice Voting and Drag Queens: Kyle Herman’s Progressive Vision

[0:01] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. Kyle Herman is our guest. He was recently elected to the city council in Stow, Ohio, and has experience with politics at the national level. He’s also visited the Middle East promoting democracy. He tells us why he moved back to Ohio, why he loves ranked choice voting, and why he invited drag queens to march with him in the Stow 4th of July parade this year. Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, building community through compassion and reason for a better tomorrow.

[0:43] Music.

[0:59] All right, our guest today is Kyle Herman. He’s a member of the City Council of Stow, Ohio, which is a suburb of Akron. He also grew up there, and he’s no stranger to politics. He has worked in the White House, worked for a congressional committee, was an executive assistant for the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, and he traveled to the Middle East where he taught school early in his career, and then returned as part of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, which manage pro-democracy and anti-corruption programs in Lebanon and Iraq. I first met him in the midst of the pandemic when we were part of founding Rank the Vote Ohio, which has the goal of having ranked choice voting in Ohio. And Kyle later served as the first executive director. Thank you for joining us today, Kyle. Thanks for having me, Doug. You traveled the world. You’ve worked in the halls of the government. Um, why, what made you decide to come back to Stow, Ohio?

[2:04] So my career kind of followed a weird trajectory in terms of I thought that I was going to go into diplomacy and international democracy. And I applied for the U.S. Foreign Service multiple times, ended up on the wait list, ended up stuck on the wait list during the Trump hiring freeze, and so did other things. And I still got out into the field and was working on these pro-democracy programs abroad. And I saw all this tribalism and corruption. And I realized that we were having the same problems back here in Ohio. And so when COVID happened, I moved back to my hometown, Stow, to work remotely, even though my job was still based in D.C. But I increasingly felt like I needed to be trying to save democracy here in Ohio. And so when I had the opportunity to stay here, I did. So you were elected. You just You just started serving, correct, at the beginning of this year, 2024?

[3:21] Yeah, I was elected in November and sworn in in January, yeah. Okay. And I also wanted to note that you are part of the LGBTQ community, and you were elected as an at-large member of council, which means that everybody in Stow decided your fate. Were you surprised at the non-reaction to you being gay? I wasn’t surprised because I grew up in Stow and went to school here, have many friends in the community, and I knew that people in Stow would judge me based on my merits and who I am as a person. And even though I never hid while I was campaigning that I am gay, I did not make it central to my campaign because even though it is an important part of my identity and that I want to be able to give representation to people who have historically not been represented. And it was a big deal that I was the first to be elected in our community. Yeah.

[4:31] The intent of running for office was about so much more than that. The mayor had asked me to run because he wanted help with his agenda. And I was concerned about these large projects that weren’t getting done by the council at the time that I have now been able to help us move forward on. Things like updating our planning and zoning codes, helping to develop more of a downtown in Stow, making our city more walkable. And also trying to help Stobie on the forefront of green energy instead of falling behind like other cities are doing in Ohio.

[5:09] And do I have the story right that actually the mayor ambushed you at dinner or something like that to get you to run? No, he didn’t ambush me, but I’m friends with the law director We have now he was deputy law director at the time. And he asked me if I would be willing to meet the mayor for lunch. And I said, Yeah, of course. And so we had been talking about trying to get me to be on the city’s planning commission. But then the council rejected me twice. and so uh i went to this lunch thinking that we’re still going to be talking about planning commission stuff uh and so i was a little off guard when uh it was the mayor the law director and the deputy law director all told me it’s been decided that you’re gonna run for council and i was like oh okay uh yeah but uh that’s the kind of community that we have here in stow uh where.

[6:15] Where people who are focused on local nonpartisan issues and we’ll work with anybody who wants to work for the good of our city. And that’s the kind of team that the mayor was trying to build. And what is your favorite part about being on city council?

[6:33] Meeting people throughout the city. And I am lucky that I’ve lived in, like, Stow is the only home that I’ve ever known. And so I have so many lifelong friends here. but going door to door while I was campaigning and now meeting other community leaders while I’m on council has been so fulfilling. And one of the goals that I had for myself right after I got elected was to run every street in Stow. There’s about 400 some streets and there’s the website called City Strides where

[7:12] you can track them with the GPS. And just a couple of weeks ago, I finished that goal of running the entirety of Stow, and so it helped me get out and see every neighborhood, every corner of our city, so that I can represent all 35,000 Stow residents. That’s cool. That’s a good thing. I don’t think many politicians do that.

[7:36] For the recent, for this year, for the 4th of July parade, you invited some drag queens to march with you. What brought that about? How did that idea come about? So I was actually talking with another leader in our community at a gathering for a group we have in Stow called Citizens for Nonpartisan Politics. And she was talking about how she had recently attended a wedding for her friends who happened to be a gay couple. And one of them performs as a drag queen and they had drag queens at the wedding and uh we have a a small but you know growing scene in in the akron area and uh as i was thinking of the fourth of july parade i was trying to figure out how can i help show that Stow is patriotic and inclusive and try to advance uh inclusion in our community because when i was growing up in Stow uh.

[8:43] Didn’t feel very inclusive and I was scared and closeted. And I still hear from so many friends who grew up here or parents of kids who have moved away that they didn’t feel safe in Stow and they still don’t feel safe in Stow. And drag queens are an international symbol of inclusion. And i invited them to wear uh you know patriotic costumes just to show that hey we are american too we love this country because uh this country was based on the idea that we are all created equal and you know maybe we were born this way and so like we’re here we’re queer and we weren’t doing doing anything that could be perceived as sexual at all. We were just walking and waving. And so it was an extremely positive response that we got for the whole two miles of the parade. And it was only afterwards that some people started lying and claiming that they were stripping and things like that. And so it was just some weird online backlash. But the response we’ve gotten from within the community has been overwhelmingly positive. Yeah, usually when you get negative comments like that, it’s usually people who weren’t even there. Exactly.

[10:07] So they don’t know how it actually worked. I do remember, though, that in 2023, there was a protest in Wadsworth, which is another suburb of Akron, but it’s on the west of Akron, that that became quite nasty and there were some physical confrontations. Were you worried that that might happen during the parade?

[10:29] I was, and that was a very personal event for me of what happened in Wadsworth, because when I grew up running cross-country in Stow schools, we would go every year to an invitational at that park in Wadsworth. And so when I saw in the news about how literal neo-Nazis shut down an event there with their threats of violence, that spooked me. And so that’s part of why I didn’t make a big deal or publicly announce before the parade that I was going to have this symbol of inclusion was because I didn’t want to attract that kind of negativity. But I think that it’s even more important to show that we are standing up to the bullies, that we aren’t going to let the neo-Nazis silence us, that we’re going to be brave enough to stand up for inclusion, even when there are, unfortunately, people who are trying to terrorize us into silence.

[11:39] And that brings us to house bill 245 which was introduced by state representative josh williams whose district happens to be in my area um and uh do you think that he is correct that drag shows are always obscene and children should not even be in the same vicinity, Because that’s his argument, that they’re always obscene. Right. It’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that drag is inherently obscene because there have been men dressing as women since the beginning of recorded history.

[12:20] Look at the ancient Greeks and Romans with their plays. Look at Shakespeare. It was always men who were playing women’s roles and vice versa. And fashion changes over time. The language of this House Bill 245 is so subjective that it criminalizes anyone who is in public who is wearing clothing or makeup that just does not fit their gender assigned at birth. But if you look back to our founding fathers, they wore powdered wigs and high heels and stockings, and those would be considered feminine nowadays, but that wasn’t considered that back then. And so it’s just such an arbitrary law that could be easily weaponized to suppress people. Yeah, and it really, it was really telling when they were having the testimony for the proponents for that bill. The Representative King, who was the co-sponsor, is from over from Clyde, I think, over in the St. Mary’s area. She was literally crying tears that drag queens are out in public. Literally crying.

[13:44] And I just, I don’t understand that mindset. I really don’t. I mean, I’m afraid of clowns, but I wouldn’t be crying real tears if there was clowns marching down the street.

[13:58] I don’t understand it either. And drag queens often are simply performing as clowns, basically. That’s part of the history of drag is that queer people are so used and bullied for being effeminate or whatever. And some drag queens have basically said, well, if you’re going to say I’m effeminate, I’m going to show you how feminine I really can be. I’ll dress up as a woman and, and they perform comedy. It’s, it’s not, uh, inherently something that is sexual. It is the, those lawmakers are trying to make it sexual, which is weird.

[14:45] Yeah. And some people think that because they’re doing that is it’s kind of projection or something. So maybe that’s something to investigate.

[14:58] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Political conservatives here in Ohio have had a series of bills introduced or passed that have banned abortions, banned gender-affirming care.

[15:22] They’re attempting now to ban ranked choice voting. And, of course, the House Bill 245. Why do you think these legislators are hurting so many people with their bills?

[15:34] I think that the extremism that we are seeing in the Ohio State House is a symptom of our current voting system, because when we have these two parties where the lawmakers are mostly running in safe districts, they don’t have to care about what a majority of their constituents want. They only care about running to the extremes in these partisan primaries in order to then be a nominee for a safe seat.

[16:11] And that’s why a reform like ranked choice voting could help in addition to the citizens, not politicians effort to have independent redistricting. That will help with the gerrymandering. But in order to make sure that all districts are more competitive and actually reflect a majority of the people, we need instant runoffs with ranked choice voting so that more parties and candidates can run and so that we actually require a majority to win. Because under Ohio’s current system, if more than two candidates run, someone can win with 30 or 40% of the vote, which happens a lot. But with ranked choice voting, if you make them actually win more than 50% of the vote and from the entire voting base, not just from one party, that actually gives the politicians an incentive to come together to solve problems, unlike our current system, which incentivizes them to cause problems to win their party nomination. Yeah.

[17:06] And then we have people like Senator Teresa Gavirone. She’s the one who introduced the ban on ranked choice voting. She does it, and I see this pretty frequently, people that oppose ranked choice voting, they just don’t understand how it works or they think it’s too complicated, falsely think it’s too complicated. I had one critic, I think it was in a comment section in the Toledo Blade or online something. They said that it prevents the person who gets the most votes from winning.

[17:40] Can you give us just a brief idea or just a brief rundown how rank choice voting actually works? Yeah, because it’s weird that they say the exact opposite. They point out that these are actually problems with our current system. So right now, our elections prevent people from winning, even if they have support from a majority of the population. Because if more than two candidates run, several candidates split the vote, in our current system, people win with 30 or 40%, which is anti-democracy. With ranked choice voting, instead of just picking one candidate, you rank your choices first, second, third, so forth. And if someone does get more than 50%, they win. But if no one gets more than 50%, the last place candidate is eliminated. But instead of those votes being wasted, those votes can just count for those voters’ next choices. Choices and so it’s like having a runoff election like they do in georgia where but instead of having to go back to the polls to vote again we already know who your backup choices are and so we can use the instant runoff process to see who really has the support from the most voters an actual majority yeah i even think that she even said that it takes no it was somebody that was in the committee said that it takes too long and i’m like no it doesn’t it’s computerized right Right.

[19:07] Yeah. And so they’ve been telling so many lies that we have corrected multiple times where we asked them to cite their sources, but they will misconstrue things by saying, oh, well, it took so many days in Alaska to get the results. But they won’t tell you the reason is because Alaska has to fly planes in with ballots from far flung parts of the state. And so that’s why they have that extra time before they even count the ballots for any election that had nothing to do with ranked choice voting. But once you have the ballots, it’s very simple to tabulate. Yeah, they also tried to talk about New York City. And I think what it was is they had to count the absentee ballots or something like that. And that took some time. Yeah, so New York City allows, I think, up to 10 days for absentee and mail-in boats to arrive. And so they wait to count them until after that. Unlike Ohio, which counts its mail-in and absentee ballots on Election Day. Yeah, and they keep trying to slice that time closer and closer. Pretty soon we’re going to have to turn in our absentee ballots 10 days before the election for it to count. Yeah.

[20:34] A lot of people that I know, and you probably know some as well,

[20:38] they tend to complain about government. government but they never get beyond complaining. Can you offer some advice for someone who maybe wants to run for elective office to make change?

[20:52] Yeah, the best way to learn is by doing. And so I would encourage people to find someone locally who shares your values, who you would like to help support. And by helping them with their run for office, you can learn how to do it yourself. And that’s what happened with me. I first got inspired to get involved in politics by President Obama when he was first running back in 2008. I was at Ohio Wesleyan University and just started volunteering to go door to door and talk with voters. And because of that experience, I learned a lot about how the system actually works. And even though I thought that my life was going to be about international relations and sort of trying to advise the policymakers, it kind of feels like destiny in a sense that I ended up back home and became a policymaker myself. Then back, I’d say back in August, it was just this month, wasn’t it? Was it just this month that you showed up in the New York Post?

[22:12] Yes. And it was for a joke that you had made at the expense of Bernie Moreno, who is running for the U.S. Senate against Sherrod Brown. And you were taken to task by the New York Post and many conservatives because you made light of the fact that Moreno is a Republican, but immigrated to the U.S. with his family from Columbia.

[22:36] To me, I thought that some of the negative responses to it was just classic projection and conservatives holding liberals to a higher standard than themselves. Do you regret the joke now or are you standing by it? Oh, I definitely regret it. Like, it was poorly worded, but I think, like you said, you have to look at the context of I was responding to a post by The Rooster, who is a satirical blogger here in Ohio who’s well known for doing a better job than most media outlets of trying to hold legislators accountable. And so I was just mocking the racist language that is used by the Republicans all the time. And so I never would have thought that this comment, my own satirical response to this satire account would have been retweeted by the National Republican Senate Committee claiming that I was a surrogate for Sherrod Brown just to try to make me and him look bad. And then the next thing I know, the Rupert Murdoch tabloid, the New York Post.

[23:55] Is calling me and then writing about it. And it’s kind of ironic that me mocking the Republican racism is what finally got them to acknowledge that their rhetoric is racist. Racist and i don’t understand how jd vance can like cut ads about like are you a racist do you hate mexicans and talk about how immigrants are supposedly stealing jobs and that they aren’t real americans and stuff like that and then for me to like mockingly use a little bit of that rhetoric and then they’re all pouncing and saying it’s racist yes that’s the point it is racist why Why don’t they call it out in their own party?

[24:43] Right. You were just you were just restating what we’ve heard in public now for the last few years. Yeah. And look, look at Trump riding down his golden escalator when he first announced that he was running, saying that all Mexicans are rapists. And even now, he doesn’t understand that when people come here seeking asylum, they’re seeking protection. He thinks that they are people from mental asylums and jails yeah who are who are trying to get into our mental asylums and like how is it that he that that why are trump and vance and the republicans never held accountable for their racism and yet i get attacked by a tabloid because I’m just mocking their own racist rhetoric. And I like their headline too. Former Obama staffer.

[25:42] And then they had a picture of you with with President Obama. I’m like, yeah, they use a good photo, right? Yeah, they used a good photo. But it’s like you knew I just knew that they were misrepresenting it when they had that that headline. Well, they’re so desperate. I mean, I think back to 2016 when the New York Post headlines were all about how Hillary Clinton was dying from some mysterious illness and she wasn’t going to be able to survive to be president. And just the fact that she’s alive and well eight years later shows that the New York Post is trash. And what what did you do for the Obama White House? I was a writer in president obama’s correspondence office and uh yeah all right ironic so i mean that that even puts it just makes it that headline even more gross that yeah you know they they are making it out to be like you were a top advisor or something like that and here you just worked in the office you know with the correspondence i was shifting through his mail and trying to help respond to it and trying to get people help. Yep.

[26:56] All right. Well, I do appreciate that you talked about that because that’s one of the things that I see or try to take care of is showing how things like what happened to you, how that gets blown out of proportion and they remove the context just for cheap political shots, basically. Yeah. And and so, you know, when they talk about, well, you know, this country is divided and and there’s tribalism, it’s like that’s why that’s why because they do that specifically to divide people. I am going to put you on the spot again. I’m sorry.

[27:38] But what have you enjoyed more, traveling and working in the Middle East, working in D.C., working to get ranked choice voting in Ohio or being on city council in Stow so far? I see it all as part of the same mission like I’m trying to help defend democracy abroad and at home to try to make the world better and I’m trying to make a positive difference in my community and so I don’t see them as separate efforts like the the.

[28:19] I was volunteering for Rank the Vote Ohio while I was working on the pro-democracy programs in Lebanon and Iraq. And so I was doing both at the same time. And then once I moved back home during COVID, it gave me the opportunity to make the switch to focusing full time on Ranked Choice Voting here and also running for local office to to help my community. And so whatever platform I have, I’m using to try to help our democracy. So it’s all interconnected.

[29:02] Yeah. You’re saying. Okay. Well, as we wrap up here for today, what I like to do is when I have a guest on is go ahead and give you the mic. And if you want to just, you know, if there’s just something you want to restate that you talked about that you think is important, or if you want to promote something, feel free. So the microphone is yours.

[29:25] Well, given that this is the Glass City Humanist, I would love to just give another plug for Rank the Vote Ohio. If you want to learn more about rank choice voting or sign our online petition to show that we have enough support in Ohio to get the investments that we’ll need to help bring Ranked Choice Voting here, you can go to rankthevoteohio.org.

[29:53] And you guys are still opposed to that bill that wants to ban it. Are you still trying to do a statewide effort, or are you still trying to do individual municipalities?

[30:07] So there are about a half dozen cities where we think there is going to be an effort to pass charter amendments in 2025. And so a lot of our focus is preparing for that while we are currently supporting the Citizens Not Politicians Amendment. And we don’t want to steal any attention or resources from them before November because it’s so important. And because ranked choice voting is such a complementary reform to independent redistricting to end gerrymandering. And so we are preparing to try to make a pivot after this November. Hopefully we’ll have a big win with citizens, not politicians. And then ranked choice voting can be the next big pro-democracy push in Ohio. We would love to see it on the ballot in 2025 or 2026 statewide, but that’s going to depend on how quickly we can increase our supporters and our donations.

[31:11] It costs millions of dollars to get all the signatures that are needed to qualify for the ballot. And so the faster we can raise that money, the faster we’ll see a ballot initiative for ranked choice voting in Ohio. Yeah, see, that’s why we need a tech billionaire to cut us a check. Right. All right, Kyle, I really thank you for your time today, and I really appreciate it. And good luck in your future endeavors. Thanks for having me, Doug. Good to see you again.

[31:40] Thank you for listening. For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. Surely can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time.

[32:24] Music.