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Editor's Note: Please see the corresponding number in the "Notes" for the source of the information. Introduction Now more than ever, police misconduct has rocketed to the forefront of our national conversation. Unfortunately, the current system has proven unequipped to handle this misconduct and hold police accountable for their actions. (1) After all, an outsized number of police officers who violate their duties are never tried for their offenses, and those who are fired often “police ho

Voting is a right; This shouldn’t be a controversial statement but it is. The struggle to ensure that every adult United States citizen has the right to vote has been going on since the founding of our country. Right now, our right to vote is threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic and by apathy in some state legislatures. I am an intern for an organization called "The People.” We are proudly nonpartisan with members from all walks of life and different backgrounds. To quote our website, "The Peop

We know it can be hard to see past all the troubling news coming out of 2020. Yet, even in these trying times, we do have something to celebrate: Reform is WINNING. In the past month, our members broke signature records in Massachusetts, won monumental court victories in Alaska, and overcame the duopoly’s barriers in Florida, and so many other places. The momentum remains on our side and we are not slowing down. From San Diego to St. Louis and beyond, we have set the stage for a big November

Nebraska, landlocked deep in America’s heartland, has paradoxically set itself apart as an anomaly in the US political ecosystem -- from the way it allocates presidential electors, to the makeup of its legislature, to how state policymakers are elected. Some reformers even look at it as a potential model for what a better representative democracy looks like, and it is because of the nonpartisan manner by which legislators are elected, and the impact that has had on the legislative process. “

A group supporting nonpartisan open primaries in Florida recently released a new ad urging voters to vote "Yes" on Amendment 3 in November. Amendment 3 would replace the state's closed partisan primary system with a nonpartisan top-two primary similar to the statewide primary systems in California and Washington. "There are 3 and a half million voters in Florida like me who don't belong to a political party, and we can't vote in the primaries," says one Florida voter in the video. "Ninety perce

Alaskans have an opportunity to level the playing field in elections, give voters more choice, and end secret money in politics with one vote in November. All they have to do is vote “Yes” on Ballot Measure 2. Ballot Measure 2 is a comprehensive better government measure that combines a nonpartisan primary system with ranked choice voting in the general election, and requires stronger finance disclosure rules to end the practice of dark money spending by special interest groups. The campai

The exact opposite of what the Framers originally intended has now been made the Law of the Land. John Jay wrote in Federalist 64 that the virtue of the Electoral College is that it can dampen “the activity of party zeal.” Hamilton, in Federalist 68, envisioned Electors as sophisticated people, who could be the free thinking representatives of the common folks in the President/VP election process. Leading Framers, such as Washington and Madison, feared and abhorred “factions,” or parties. They

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in The Fulcrum, and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that states may require presidential electors to cast their ballots for the candidate chosen by popular vote. The decision, written by Justice Elena Kagan, appears to end the quixotic pursuit of a legal endorsement for "faithless electors" — Electoral College delegates who want to follow their own conscience instead o

2020 is already a year to remember – a world-wide pandemic, militant Black-led protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer, and a presidential election. It is fair to ask what the election has to do with the other two. Will it bring anything more than efforts by both major parties and their less than inspiring candidates to use these devastating events to their advantage? Those who call themselves reformers cannot ignore this question. At a minimum, we n

There is a good deal of mention of the Constitution on social media these days; frequently, in short, declarative sentences that express with certainty what the document means. Oftentimes these comments are directed at the Supreme Court, accusing a justice or justices of willfully violating the obligation to impartially interpret and administer the law. Although both liberals and conservatives have engaged in this sport, conservatives do it a lot more, in part because of a legal theory called “T