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With the governor's veto of a bipartisan effort to alter existing drug laws, the Illinois marijuana reform movement is left to consider its options. Calling the "criminal prosecution of cannabis possession" a "drain on public resources," Governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican, vetoed House Bill 218, amending the Cannabis Control Act. Although saying, "I support the fundamental purposes of this bill," Rauner still issued his veto, but offered his own amendments for the General Assembly to consider

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

Every politician has a promising career. Unfortunately, most of them do not keep those promises Jokes about politicians are funny, usually because of the glaring kernel of truth they contain. To most who follow politics, our leaders have become stereotypes -- almost cookie cutter images of the people we'd expect to have as a politician. But to social scientists, politicians are a bit more of a quagmire.Take any given profession and there are hundreds, if not thousands of large-scale studies do

The movement to reform Illinois redistricting has faced numerous hurdles in recent years, but may be getting new life. One of those movements came in 2014 when the amendment of a group called Yes for Independent Maps was struck down as unconstitutional by a circuit court judge and by the Illinois State Board of Elections for lack of admissible signatures. Independent Maps, now called the Independent Map Amendment, was organized in late April to engineer a new campaign for reforming the redistri

In response to How State, Federal Courts Are Working to End Partisan Gerrymandering, published July 13, I received several emails and Facebook messages questioning the statistic that the United States is now over 80 percent urbanized by population. While this seems like a huge number, it came from the 2010 Census, which found that: The urban areas of the United States for the 2010 Census contain 249,253,271 people, representing 80.7% of the population, and rural areas contain 59,492,276 people

When it comes time to vote in the 2016 congressional primary elections, will you be allowed to vote in the primary of your choice? We’ve updated our analysis on every state’s rules for its primary elections: open primaries, closed primaries, “semi-closed” primaries, and the handful of states that do something else entirely. Click here to see the updated page. The use of publicly funded primary elections to nominate candidates who then appear on the general election ballot is common in the U.S.

On July 1, Kathryn Steinle was shot and killed on a popular pier in San Francisco. Her murderer, 45-year-old Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had taken sleeping pills he found in a dumpster hours before the shooting. He claims he found a gun wrapped in a T-shirt on a bench and accidentally let off a shot, not realizing he had struck Steinle until he was apprehended an hour later. San Francisco has drawn criticism since the discovery that Sanchez was in the country illegally and had a long criminal

The Illinois special election primary to fill the seat of a resigned congressman is scheduled for Tuesday. Despite being the only election occurring in the country, there has been little enthusiasm or attention for the race. Former U.S. Rep. Aaron Schock resigned his seat for Illinois' 18th congressional district amid controversy partly created by his own hand. The elaborate decoration of Schock's congressional office in the style of the show Downton Abbey raised questions about the congressman

Since the movement launched in 2006, National Popular Vote has made significant progress to reform the way Americans elect their president. The group's plan involves a state-by-state approach. States that join the National Popular Voter Interstate Compact (NPVIC) agree that rather than having their electors cast their ballots for president according to whichever candidate won the most votes in their respective states, the electors will instead vote for the candidate who won the most votes natio

Historically, when an election has a wide-open field of candidates, both inside and outside of the two-party system, it's a symptom of America facing a major crossroads. Sometimes it's a party ideological battle, like in our third presidential election of 1796 -- where the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans struggled with the new identity of the nation they helped create. Even more radical, when social change issues stress the election process, strange things start to happen -- like in the