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I. Independent Voters Are Disgusted With The Relentless Negativity of Partisan Gutter Politics Independent voters make up over 40 percent of registered voters in the United States today, while fewer than 30 percent are either registered Republicans or Democrats. Voters are leaving the parties in droves because they are disgusted by the fever pitch level of animus in partisan politics, the unrelenting negativity, the unscrupulous smearing, the cynical gutter politics into which American faction

As Brett Kavanaugh proceeds through an FBI investigation, a partisan war, and a scathing court of public opinion, the world seems to have forgotten the institution he is headed toward - the Supreme Court. Shorthanded by one, with a bench of eight, the court started its 2018-’19 session Monday. Its current roster of cases may not sound very exciting to some (the fate of an endangered frog vs landowners), but three major partisan gerrymandering cases hit the Supreme Court during its last session

I. The State of Self-Driving Car Technology and The Possibilities In the 1990 film, Total Recall (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone), the protagonist played by the now former governor of California hails a self-driving car with a humanoid, robotic attendant sitting where a human driver would. What makes the surreal scene eerily prophetic is how Schwarzenegger asks the AI cab driver questions like one might ask Alexa, Siri, or Google's voice assistant, and the "Johnny Cab" sasses

In a move that many believe will disenfranchise third party, independent, and even Republican candidates in the majority-Democratic state of New Mexico, the NM Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, announced Wednesday that she will include a "straight party" voting option for the 2018 general election ballot. Straight party, or "straight ticket" voting, which was discontinued in New Mexico in 2012 by then-Secretary of State Dianna Duran, is a ballot option that allows voters to simply pic

Lately, I’ve been glued to my laptop watching CNN news clips from 1999, when Donald Trump was weighing a possible presidential run in the Reform Party. “Everybody wants me to run for President …” he told the media at the time.  The media smirked, “What vanity!” as they turned their attention to more serious matters. But the tragedy-to-farce (or is it farce-to-tragedy?) story gets even more byzantine. At the time, Trump’s possible candidacy was being promoted by some leaders of the Reform Party

Three siblings from Austin, Texas are set to make cash off of gerrymandering. No, they're not running for office; they're creating a board game called Mapmaker that educates people about the very serious political game of manipulating voting district boundaries. It's not a sexy topic for many or one that is easy to understand. But if a game will do it, then why not? "First and foremost, we want to teach politicians that gerrymandering is not a game and politicians should not be choosing voters

Earlier this year, Utah and Washington quietly joined 14 other states that have eliminated the use of registration deadlines as a final cutoff to be able to vote. The congruent actions of a red state and blue state bring the number of states that allow voters to register or update a registration when they go to vote to nearly one in three. It’s a critical threshold that could spell the end of voter registration deadlines as we’ve known them for 100 years. Enabling voters to address and fix reg

The Supreme Court refused to weigh in on the issue of partisan gerrymandering in two cases out of Wisconsin (Gill v. Whitford) and Maryland (Benisek v. Lamone). The justices sent Gill v. Whitford back down to a lower court, while Maryland was dismissed unanimously. In Benisek v. Lamone, the justices upheld a lower court's decision not to issue a preliminary injunction to block the 2011 congressional maps drawn by the Democratic-controlled state legislature. The high court is sticking with a dec

On the Saturday a week before Mother's Day, I participated in the 34th Annual Harlem Mother's Day Parade. I was there on behalf of the Committee for Independent Community Action (CICA), founded by Dr. Lenora Fulani. The CICA consists of public housing residents, citywide activists, community organizers, and grassroots leaders fighting to protect public housing in New York City from the privatization that threatens to displace hundreds of thousands of public housing residents from their homes.

Neal Simon is running for United States Senate. The successful businessman is an affirmed independent, and he is competing in bright blue Maryland against incumbent Democratic Senator Ben Cardin as Cardin seeks a third term. Simon threw his hat in the ring at an interesting time in political history: Republicans are ‘retiring’ in droves, the House of Representatives appears broken, the Senate seems to be kind of holding it together, the White House is unpredictable, and the Supreme Court has Ma