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While Congress has twice mandated the use of single-member districts (SMD) for electing members of Congress (once in 1842 and again in 1967), state legislatures are at liberty to determine how their representatives will be elected. According to FairVote, at one time, more than half of all state legislators were elected from multi-member districts (MMD). Fifty years ago, more than two-thirds of states had at least some multi-member districts. Today, that number has dropped to just ten: Vermont

Prominent legal scholar and political activist Larry Lessig has entered the 2016 race for the White House. Joining Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley for the Democratic nomination, Lessig has an unconventional platform. Aiming to become the first referendum president, Lessig has focused his entire campaign on passage of his Citizen’s Equality Act. The act consists of three fundamental electoral reforms that address the increasingly undemocratic nature of the American electoral

As much as Donald Trump called "foul" on tough questioning in the Fox debate, including the Big Question about whether everyone was committed to supporting the Republican nominee, from the point of view of independent voters, the questioners weren't nearly tough enough. Or, put another way, independent enough. Trump was the only one on the stage who refused the GOP loyalty oath, threatening an independent run for the presidency. Since Trump raised that possibility, it is more than fair to consi

The first round of the Republican primary debates will be held Thursday night at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. The field of Republican presidential candidates stands at 17, but only 10 will be included in the primetime debate at 9pm ET, while the other seven will compete in an undercard debate at 5pm ET. The 10 candidates who will appear at the prime-time debate are: Donald Trump, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, retired n

The nonpartisan or "top-two" primary in California is working and the Golden State has more competitive elections, has increased voter access and a better functioning legislature. Those are the key findings released today in a report from called A Quiet Revolution: The Early Success of California’s Top Two Nonpartisan Primary from Open Primaries. The authors of the report are Jason Olson, the president of Independentvoice.org, a San Francisco based organization of independent voters and Dr. Oma

California's existing election system for Congress and state office could be improved with the following ideas. The problem with the status quo is that ever since it went into effect in 2011, there has been very limited choice on the November ballot. So far, no independent or minor party candidate has appeared on the November ballot for statewide office. Each statewide office in November has been between one Democrat and one Republican, with no write-in space. In November 2014, California vote

As Bob Conner reported for IVN in 2014, New Jersey’s independents spent approximately $100 million to pay for primaries in which they could not vote between 2000 and 2013. The obvious question is, how did this come to be? How did taxpayers come to subsidize party primaries? The origin of government-administered primaries begins in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when state governments began to intervene to curb the influence of party bosses and tackle corruption. A series of reforms – including

In June, Bernie Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, made waves in the world of political punditry when he suggested in a letter to the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee that the party should sanction more primary debates, and that some of those debates should even include Republican candidates for the presidency. Paul Singer of USA Today wrote at the time that “Sanders said inter-party debates would show a clear co

Another racist tragedy reminds us that 150 years after the end of the civil war, America still has a minority that it has failed to integrate, with fatal consequences. Although some of the members of this minority are unusually educated and privileged outliers, we rarely see them with their hands on the levers of power; we rarely see them in control of large companies or wherever else there is great wealth; their neighborhoods tend to be poorer than those of the rest of the nation; when its men

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJM8DyjsBU4 It is hard to believe that Karl Rove would openly say something like this, given his history as a pro-gun advocate, but on Fox News Sunday the Republican consultant told Chris Wallace that the only way to fully prevent tragedies like the shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was to "remove guns from society" completely. When Wallace asked Rove to comment on how society could stop violence, here is his response: