IVN Editorial BoardMayor Zohran Mamdani's slate swept Tuesday night in New York. In a closed primary state this blue, the election is over.
November's general election is a formality. Three contested House races. Two unseated incumbents. The deciding factor was a small, motivated bloc of activist voters, turned out by volunteers, in low-turnout races where most of the electorate did not or could not participate.
California's nonpartisan Top-Two was designed to give every voter a chance to participate in a meaningful primary and general election. Now, party operatives want to go back to a system like New York. As Steve Peace argues this week, even Bill Cavala knew better than to disenfranchise 6.9 million voters.
Good news from D.C. The Council voted to fund semi-open primaries, giving 85,000 independent voters access to the taxpayer-funded elections that decide who governs them. The architect of that reform, Lisa Rice, joined us on the Independent Voter Podcast this week. Worth a listen.
Check out more stories that go outside the two-sided narrative below.
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The Plan to Strip 6.9 Million Californians of Voting Rights Could Haunt Politicians
Even one of the most partisan operatives in California history, the late Bill Cavala, understood why open primaries matter. A legendary Democratic strategist who spent four decades inside the old closed-primary system - senior aide to Willie Brown, architect behind a generation of Assembly Speakers - Cavala still became a key backer of Proposition 14.
Now, there is a contingent of political operatives attempting to force California back to closed primaries. Undoing Top Two, Steve Peace argues, would tell 6.9 million independents they can't vote in taxpayer-funded primaries unless they join a club they've already chosen to leave.
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Independent Voter Podcast
Lisa D.T. Rice, the driving force behind DC's Initiative 83 to permit ranked choice voting and open primaries, joins the show to explain how a missing ballot turned her into one of the most relentless reformers in the country. She breaks down why closed primaries are really a voting-rights problem, how she took on two fights at once - open primaries and ranked choice voting - in the heart of a 95% one-party city.
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Here's Why Spencer Pratt REALLY Lost in LA: Steyer-Funded Ballot Harvesting
Did Democrats cheat to push Nithya Raman past Spencer Pratt in the LA mayor's race? No, says IVN's Cara McCormick - what happened was legal, and in her words "better than cheating." Watch the full clip for more:
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IVN Joins Forces with Latino News Network & The Fulcrum to Expand Voter-First Journalism
Independent Voter News (IVN) has entered into a collaborative partnership with the Latino News Network (LNN) and The Fulcrum, bringing together three outlets whose editorial missions converge on a shared conviction: that American democracy is best served by journalism that reaches the people most often left out of the conversation.
