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News broke Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump will tap former Texas Governor Rick Perry to head the Energy Department, a move that has the mainstream media recalling the 2011 Republican presidential debate where Perry blanked on naming Energy as a department he would eliminate. Sure, there is a bit of irony there, and the mainstream media likes to focus on this irony. However, there is something crucial many media pundits are missing: Perry's legacy as Texas governor was helping grow the

Keep up with the reform efforts building on the post-election momentum. Big change starts small, and these organizations have been hard at work to fix our broken system, little by little. With so much negativity in the media, it is nice to catch up on some of the encouraging efforts of hardworking Americans, fighting for reform. The following summaries have been provided by the organizations themselves: Open Primaries Open Primaries launched a new petition asking the incoming chairs of the R

It’s called Score Runoff Voting, and it’s about to take Oregon by storm. SRV is a relatively new concept from the minds of Mark Frohnmayer, political scion and founder of the Equal Vote Coalition, and score voting advocate Clay Shentrup, Co-Founder of the Center for Election Science, who were inspired by ranked choice voting advocate and executive director of FairVote Rob Richie's concept of a single approval voting primary/ranked choice runoff ballot. In some ways, the idea for SRV started wi

There's a lot that American voters may be divided over, but there's one issue that hopefully we can all get together on and embrace a nonpartisan, obvious, and sane position. Demonstrators who have been blocking traffic on streets and highways as part of your protests: please stop! Stop the madness now. The vast majority of the 63 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election have not been out blocking traffic, which is why this is something that we can hopefully all

Editor’s note: This article was co-authored by Chris Micheli and Michael Daft. This article was originally self-published by the authors and has been republished on IVN with their consent. California voters on November 8 approved Prop. 64, which is an initiative statute that legalizes marijuana and hemp under state law, with specified limitations. The ballot measure designates state agencies to license and regulate the recreational marijuana industry and it imposes a state excise tax on retail

This election was historic for the movement to break big money’s grip on our political system. On November 8, 2016, voters in South Dakota passed the first-ever statewide Anti-Corruption Act. This ballot initiative was led by Represent.Us volunteers and members. In San Francisco, a Represent.Us volunteer-led coalition passed a new law to stop lobbyists from bribing politicians. It passed by one of the widest margins of any law in San Francisco history. In two Illinois counties, conservatives a

In a watershed electoral victory for drug policy liberalization in the United States, an astounding eight states voted to legalize marijuana for recreational or medicinal purposes Tuesday. That’s an especially resounding win for marijuana legalization considering that nine states had marijuana on the ballot, putting marijuana reform at an 88% success rate on Election Day. In four states—Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Montana—voters passed medical marijuana initiatives, and voters in four

Estamos a menos de una semana del Día de las Elecciones, dando cierre a una contienda presidencial que ha dado a los votantes dos de los candidatos más rechazados y desconfiados en la historia moderna de los Estados Unidos. Es un ciclo electoral que ha revelado que tan roto se encuentra el sistema electoral en el país. Sin duda alguna, los votantes están cansados del status quo. Sin embargo, la buena noticia es que muchas personas y organizaciones están trabajando para arreglar el sistema y ha

Some reporters recently have reported on research that, based on only a few elections and without factoring in election competitiveness, suggests voter turnout has been adversely affected by introduction of ranked choice voting (RCV) in local elections. FairVote's research does not support this conclusion. Nor do the findings from a much more extensive research project led by University of Missouri-St. Louis professor David C. Kimball and presented at the September 2016 American Political Scienc

Like so many other Americans, I too have become frustrated with the unbridled lack of civility, crippling partisanship, and dysfunctional gridlock that prevent our country from solving the serious problems we face on a daily basis. Yet despite the demagoguery and rampant dysfunction that is so prevalent in today’s political process, I believe a unique opportunity exists to create a political movement based on civil discourse and critical thinking. There is a historical shift underway in our po