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© 2016 by Hedrick Smith. Republished with permission from the author. Smith is the executive editor of reclaimtheamericandream.org. WASHINGTON — In this tumultuous election year, little attention has focused on the groundswell of support for political reform across grass-roots America. Beyond Bernie Sanders’s call for a political revolution, a broad array of state-level citizen movements are pressing for reforms against Citizens United, gerrymandering and campaign megadonors to give average vot

Ted Cruz’s infamous “vote your conscience” speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention raised a flag for “Never Trump” Republicans to rally around nationwide. This group of disillusioned Republicans, who still have not embraced the new face of their party, have already started an exodus from their beloved Grand Old Party. Primary exit polls indicated the inevitability of this migration. Before Trump received the nomination, four out of ten non-Trump voters stated that they wouldn’t back h

“Americans vote for their president.” Well, yes and no. America’s presidential election system relies on the Electoral College, a group of men and women chosen by state parties to vote in their favor. When Americans go to the polls, they choose their candidate of choice, and trust that the party electors will vote as the citizens have chosen. Each state has a certain number of electors: California has the most, with 55; other states, like Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska, have as few as three. The

To date, seventeen Democratic State Conventions, one legislative district convention, and one county convention have voted to either abolish or reform superdelegates. Following frustration voiced by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, Maine was the first state to pass a resolution at their convention in early May, followed closely by Alaska.Delegates Awarded to Democratic Candidates | InsideGov Since then, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, We

Rapid City, SD - June 14, 2016 – In an Op-Ed published in the Rapid City Journal on Sunday, June 12, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a longtime proponent of nonpartisan open primaries, outlined his case for supporting proposed Amendment V - Nonpartisan Elections which will be decided by the voters of South Dakota on November 8. Schwarzenegger, invoking the urgency of the national political environment where 76% of Americans feel their elected representatives “no longer care ab

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both rather unpopular. How unpopular? According to one recent poll, 52 percent of the public views Clinton unfavorably, and 55 percent views Trump unfavorably. Because of this disaffection, a large sector of the electorate is eager for an independent candidate. According to a survey by the firm Data Targeting, more than half of voters are in favor of seeing an independent on the November ballot, and the firm estimates that an independ

Republican presidential candidate John Kasich is often plain spoken, even about his own party's flaws. In a meeting with the Washington Post's editorial board, Kasich gave a brutally honest reason for his party's opposition to D.C. statehood: What it really gets down to, if you want to be honest, is because they know that’s just more votes in the Democratic Party. Looking at any red/blue county map, you can instantly see what Kasich is talking about. Most of the urban areas in and around Wash

South Dakotans for Nonpartisan Elections announced this week that it is launching a statewide campaign to educate voters about nonpartisan primaries in the hopes that Amendment V, an initiative to implement nonpartisan open primary elections, will pass in November 2016. Amendment V, if passed, would implement nonpartisan primary elections for state races, similar to the nonpartisan primary systems in California, Nebraska, and Washington state. “People in this country are increasingly suspiciou

With the vote virtually tied with 99 percent returns, Hillary Clinton is holding the slimmest of leads in Missouri--by about 1,500 votes out of almost 620,000 votes statewide. This is a huge win for Clinton (if it holds), especially in a state with an enormous college population, including the University of Missouri system with over 77,000 students. Sanders usually thrives in these settings, and he took Boone County, where the Columbia campus is located by 61 percent. However, Clinton's leads

Anyone who has ever supported a third-party presidential candidate in an election has likely had to defend their decision from partisans who endorse the lesser-of-two-evils voter theory. By the logic offered by proponents of the theory, anyone who votes for an independent candidate is at best wasting their vote, and at worst handing the election over to their least-favorite major-party candidate. With as many as four potential Supreme Court replacements looming during the next presidency, parti