On Monday, a bipartisan group of Virginia Senators voted against a bill on the floor to effectively close the state’s primary elections. It was the second time in less than 12 months that an effort to close Virginia’s primaries had made it to the floor. The 29 to 11 vote on Monday, however, was much broader than the 21 to 19 defeat in last year’s legislature that largely broke along party lines, and was only successful when two Republicans joined a unified Democratic opposition. The difference...

With teams of canvassers on the ground in ten communities the past week, the endorsements of every daily newspaper that voiced an opinion, and key support from influential Republicans, independents and Democrats, the Vote Yes on Amendment V ballot committee rides significant momentum into the pre-election weekend. “Over 40,000 South Dakotans signed a petition to put a Nebraska-style open primary on the ballot. Since then Republicans, Democrats and independents from West River to East River and ...

Amendment V is modeled on the Nebraska system, that is among the most competitive in U.S. Most voters would like to believe that their votes on Tuesday will decide the outcome of state legislative races. Unfortunately, they’re wrong. According to a recent study, 92% of state legislative elections were actually decided in the June 7 primary, with only 8% to be decided in the general election. Joe Kirby, a Republican supporter of Amendment V, says that locks out most voters: “Most of our electi...

While no longer operative in the presidential election, the voter rebellion witnessed during the primaries is alive and well. South Dakota is now the epicenter, where Amendment V for Nonpartisan Elections gives voters the chance to reclaim their elections from the political establishment and send a message to Washington. To many around the country, South Dakota would seem an unlikely place to be leading the voter rebellion. But the state best known for Mount Rushmore has a famous and historic i...

Proclaiming that California voters now have the tools to take on a government broken by partisanship, IndependentVoice.Org a statewide association of independent voters, announced its “Post-Partisan Candidate" endorsements. The group endorsed candidates Marc Levine (Democrat, 10th Assembly District), Bill Bloomfield (No Party Preference, 33rd Congressional District), Chad Walsh (No Party Preference, 28th Assembly District), and Abel Maldonado (Republican, 24th Congressional District). The candi...

Proclaiming that California voters now have the tools to take on a government broken by partisanship, IndependentVoice.Org a statewide association of independent voters, announced its “Post-Partisan Candidate" endorsements. The group endorsed candidates Marc Levine (Democrat, 10th Assembly District), Bill Bloomfield (No Party Preference, 33rd Congressional District), Chad Walsh (No Party Preference, 28th Assembly District), and Abel Maldonado (Republican, 24th Congressional District). The candi...

The San Francisco Chronicle ran this headline across their front page yesterday: It's a little hard to believe that in April of 2010, I sat in a meeting with their editors and then Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado to pitch them on endorsing the “Top 2” open primary (Proposition 14). They did and their article today begins, "The potentially dramatic effects of two landmark ballot measures approved by California voters in recent years began to emerge Tuesday with a primary election that could lead to shif...

Even before the first vote is counted, Tuesday’s Statewide Primary Election had a big winner: California’s independent voters. For the first time in over a decade, the votes of the state’s 3.6 million independent voters (now called “No Party Preference”) actually mattered in State Legislative and Congressional elections. The political impact on the state’s elections has been dramatic. Independent voters are not unified by an ideological agenda. Polling done by the Public Policy Institute of Cal...