An Election Reformers Network (ERN) report covering a 13-year period has found that state lawmakers and elected officials are increasingly manipulating the ballot initiative process to block or impede citizen-led efforts. 

Ballotpedia reports this week that in 2026, Alaska’s independent voters will have the chance to solidify their role as election reform pioneers by voting on two initiatives.

The Chamberlain Project, an organization I co-founded with Peter Ackerman a decade ago, has been dissolved. The Chamberlain Boards have voted to combine all of Chamberlain’s associated entities, including Americans Elect, Level the Playing Field, the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, and Citizens to End SuperPACs, with the Foundation for Independent Voter Education (FIVE),

Independent voters showcased how critical of a voting bloc they were in the 2024 elections. What's more, they showed that despite the claim that they are "party leaners," they were not committed to candidates of a single party.

A March hearing has been set in the Maryland House of Delegates for a bill that requires special elections if a state lawmaker is appointed to their seat in the first half of their term.

Pew Research Center analyzed historical data going back to the 88th Congress (1963-65) and found that the majority party in the upcoming term, the Republican Party, will have the slimmest majority in the House in modern history.

Nonpartisan election reformers have chosen not to hang their head in defeat after a few statewide losses in 2024. Instead, their mood was surprisingly optimistic when they met in San Diego for the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers’ annual summit.

In 2022, nearly 83% of voters in Evanston, Illinois, approved a city referendum to adopt ranked choice voting. The referendum stated that the first use of the new voting method would be during the city's consolidated elections in April 2025.

The recount in Alaska over Ballot Measure 2 is complete. The state's Republican Party requested it after voters rejected the initiative and chose to keep their nonpartisan election system by a narrow margin. But as predicted on IVN, this margin wasn't narrow enough for the results to change.

The research and data group, FM3 Research, polled voters in Portland, Oregon, to determine how well they understood ranked choice voting (RCV) after the city's first use of it, including the unique use of proportional RCV for city council seats.