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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 Delaware County, Pennsylvania, a third candidate, Lisa Esler, has emerged in a special election that will take place on August 4 to fill a vacant seat representing the 161st House District in the state's General Assembly. In April, recently elected Republican Joe Hackett announced he would be leaving office to return to serving as a detective for the county's Criminal Investigation Division. In late May, the Delaware County GOP announced that it had nominated Paul Mullen to represent the Re

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," host Chuck Todd raised an issue that is getting more and more attention from the media: the record proportion of voters who call themselves independents - and their lack of a voice in the upcoming presidential election. Here is part of the transcript... CHUCK TODD: The growing number of voters who don't affiliate with either major political party is reshaping our political system perhaps more than you may realize. How? Let's take a look at this. The largest polit

As the June 30 deadline for passing a budget approaches in Pennsylvania, faith group leaders and advocates from around the state are holding events at the capitol in Harrisburg as part of the #MoralTakeover campaign to demand adequate funding for the state's public schools. Since June 20, hundreds of citizens have held rallies, fasted, and even broken into song inside the legislature to bring attention to the state's education funding crisis. Calling for a "moral budget that funds our schools

Perhaps the Export-Import Bank is a relic from the New Deal era, but that doesn't mean that Republicans are opposed to it. The Ex-Im Bank has served a purpose for around three quarters of a century and has benefited small as well as big businesses and it is about to expire at the end of June if the Democrats and Republicans can't agree on how to pass a reauthorization. For the political layperson who may not be familiar with what the Ex-Im Bank does, it does what a typical bank does: lend money

By way of introduction, I’m Jeff Marston, co-chair of the Independent Voter Project. Starting today and every couple of weeks I’m going to be sending out these short updates with nonpartisan issues that I feel are important for us politicos to start thinking and talking about. I’m a lifelong Republican, always will be. I was even elected to California’s legislature as one. But I do nonpartisan communications now with a company that includes independents and Democrats. All my life, I’ve enjoye

A bipartisan panel released a set of recommendations Wednesday with the goal of overhauling presidential debates during the general election. The panel, known as the Annenberg Debate Reform Working Group, was created by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center and tasked with finding ways to increase the value and viewership of presidential general election debates, taking into account new factors such as early voting, social media and new media, changes in campaign finan

On Wednesday, the Annenberg Working Group on Presidential Campaign Debate Reform -- a bipartisan group of officials from past presidential campaigns -- released a report with a number of recommendations to help "democratize" the presidential debate process ahead of the 2016 election. The group's recommendations include: * Expanding the role of social media and including more diverse media outlets to host the debates, as well as enlarging the pool of moderators to include print journalists, re

As the pressure mounts to open up the fall 2016 presidential debates to an independent candidate, Bloomberg Politics reporter Emily Greenhouse has written an excellent piece headlined: "Group Seeks to Break Two-Party Stranglehold on Presidential Debates." The piece follows similar coverage by the Washington Post's David Ignatius. As Greenhouse writes, that group, Level the Playing Field, has been running full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal headlined, "TWO MEN AND THEIR FRIENDS...crush any

"Now we'll be stuck with Goldwater," quips  Roger Sterling of AMC's Mad Men, referring to recent news of Republican candidate Nelson Rockefeller's marriage to a divorcé 18 years his junior. Roger's statement is a reference to a popular narrative that is used to describe the demise of the former New York governor. What is incomplete about this perception, however, is the impact that race relations had on Rockefeller's viability in the increasingly volatile South. At a point when both the Mad Men