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In a bipartisan vote, the Maine Legislature passed a bill Wednesday that implements a semi-open primary system, which will allow voters registered independent (32% of the registered electorate) to choose between a Republican or a Democratic primary ballot in future elections. “I am thrilled that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle joined me in supporting semi-open primaries,” said bill sponsor Senator Chloe Maxmin (D-Lincoln). “Enacting this common sense reform will align our democratic sy

SAN DIEGO, CALIF. - The most important story not being told by the mainstream press today is the many movements that have emerged to give voters an electoral system that is truly “of, by, and for” the people. It has not, however, been overlooked by some independent filmmakers. Represent San Diego is hosting a free online screening of the PBS film, Democracy Rebellion, on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, at 6 PM PDT. The film explores this missing story of voter empowerment by focusing on the solutions

It has become popular on the Left to ascribe Republicans’ recent attempts to change voting laws as anti-democratic, even potentially criminal.  There are those, such as Paul Waldman at the Washington Post, who have gone so far as to suggest that the Right has descended into madness. One common thread is that Republican legislators, either in Congress or at the state level, have willfully and cynically renounced the sacred principles embodied in the United States Constitution, the core of which,

With S1 going to markup before the U.S. Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday, May 11, the inherent hypocrisy behind HR1/S1 - the ‘For the People Act’ must be called out. But it won't happen as part of the public hearing process, because there won’t be any one present that will raise it. From the Democratic Party side, the Rules Committee hearing is expected to focus on responding to concerns from election officials about requirements and timelines related to HR1/S1’s mandates for early voting, vo

We all know the system is broken. It’s rigged. It does not work. How do we know? Because our leaders are not producing solutions to the issues we care about. No one is listening, just talking past each other. But what if the system is working the way it was designed to work? What if politicians are operating very rationally and logically based on incentives of the political system in place? That is what many of the smartest observers of our dysfunctional mess of a political system think. So we

Editor's Note: This update originally appeared in The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. ‍ Now that the Census Bureau has finally announced which states have gained or lost congressional seats, attention turns to the legislative bodies and commissions that will be drawing new maps for the next round of elections. We already know the delayed data release is having an impact on states' abilities to meet their own deadlines for drawing new maps. It's onl

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. ‍ Iowa is already seeing the effects of the year's first Republican-driven curbs on voting. The state's elections administrator has told 294,000 Iowans they've been targeted for an eventual purge from the registration list — simply because they did not vote last year. GOP Secretary of State Paul Pate's office revealed this week that postcards have been mailed to

‍ Demographics in the American electorate are shifting, the needs and priorities of voters are changing, yet politics in the US hasn't changed much in the last half century. In fact, the only thing that has changed is that the government has gotten less and less responsive to voters. I discussed some of the driving forces behind this in a previous examination of what it means when reformers refer to the US political system as a two-party duopoly. Two private political organizations, the Republ

Editor's Note: This piece by Larry Diamond, Kevin Johnson, and Miles Rapoport originally published on The Hill, and has been republished with permission from the authors. ‍ Two secretaries of state were honored recently by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico’s Democratic secretary of state, and Kyle Ardoin, Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state, received the organization’s prestigious Patriot Award on behalf of all U.S election officials, in recog

Just a few weeks after the storming of the Capitol and the impeachment trial, Gallup found for the first time that 50% of voters identify as independents.  Registered independent voters are now the largest or second largest group of voters in half the states and will be the largest or second largest group of voters in almost every state in the country within a few years at current rates of growth. More significant than the raw numbers--which are impressive--independent voters are participating