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Rand Paul, once considered the GOP’s savior after two grueling presidential election losses, has fallen on some hard times. Paul was labelled by the media as a front-runner or top-tier candidate months before he officially entered the presidential race on April 7. Now nearly at the 6-month mark, the early stages of the Republican presidential primary changed the game and showed some chinks in Paul’s armor. Paul had two remarkable filibusters to blast drone use and NSA spying, stances that buck

"When an election law reduces or forecloses the opportunity for electoral choice, it restricts a market where a voter might effectively and meaningfully exercise his choice between competing ideas or candidates, and thus severely burdens the right to vote." - U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals On September 9, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower district court's ruling that the Partisan Balance Statute in Indiana election law limited voter choice in judicial elections in

I have been writing for IVN since the summer of 2014. Though my academic background is in political science, I can confidently say I have learned more about American politics in this one year of researching and writing for you (the readers) than I have in my six years in higher education. Over this time, I must confess, many of my beliefs have remained the same. I still believe that America, despite its history of having committed many unjust actions in its foreign policy, is and can be a posi

The latest headlines on nonpartisan voting rights are from California, Oregon, New Jersey, Florida, and more. Enjoy. Groundbreaking Report Released on the Transformative Effects of Primary Reform Source: Kellie Ryan, Business Wire An article from Business Wire on a report by the election reform group, Open Primaries, discussing the impacts the changes in California election law under the Top Two Nonpartisan Primary have produced. My Take: The results of this study were widely reported, incl

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

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. -- California legislators, public affairs representatives, and reformers of all stripes attended the first-ever California Nonpartisan Primary Summit on Wednesday at the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento. The event, co-hosted by the Independent Voter Project (IVP) and California Forward (CA Fwd), featured a series of discussions on nonpartisan primaries, voting rights, and the future of election reform. Proposition 14, better known as California’s nonpartisan, top-two primary, was

FairVote and The Center for Competitive Democracy (The Center) have filed an amici curiae brief with the Supreme Court in a case that challenges the constitutionality of New Jersey's closed primary system. A coalition of 7 individual plaintiffs and nonpartisan organizations, including the Independent Voter Project (a co-publisher of IVN.us), filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court in July, arguing that the current election system in New Jersey gives the Republican an

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

This week, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told residents in states where recreational marijuana use is legal to smoke their weed now because when he is president he will enforce federal laws. In a town hall meeting in Newport, New Hampshire, Christie told users of legal marijuana, "If you're getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it." He continued, "As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws." Christie believes marijuana use alters the brain and is a gateway drug to harsher substances

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