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The Equal Vote Coalition announced Monday that a historic new bill has been introduced in the Oregon State House that would establish STAR (Score, Then Automatic Runoff) Voting as the default voting method in Oregon. Oregon would be the first state to adopt the voting method’s use. STAR Voting is different from alternative voting methods that have gained traction across the country, like ranked choice voting and approval voting. Voters can think of it as scoring candidates the way they would r

Photo Credit: Ahmed / Unsplash The general perception of young voters is that they are largely detached from politics and thus have no interest and don’t participate. Yet, the largest segment of the voting population -- Generation Y -- and the generation that follows, Gen Z, could completely change the way elections, and by extension politics, are conducted in the US. Public opinion polling shows broad dissatisfaction with the current two-party political structure: An overwhelming majority of

“It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.” - Independent voters have been in the forefront of a movement to change the rules of the political game in the United States. We have led efforts to open the primaries to all voters, establish independent non-partisan redistricting commissions and introduce reforms like Ranked Choice Voting to the voting process itself. However, d

U.S. democracy is in existential crisis. The country already suffers from unrepresentative winner-take-all, single-seat-district legislative elections, a two-party duopoly, partisan gerrymandering, the corrupting influence of big money in politics, and an Electoral College and US Senate that give vastly outsized influence to some voters over others. In the case of the Electoral College, it can also prevent the presidential candidate receiving the most votes from being elected. But now even w

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Forever, and ever, and ever...

2020 was a weird year. Can we all agree on that? Here’s something weird about 2020 that you may not have noticed amid all the shouting and freaking out: Democrats nominated and successfully fielded a presidential candidate who is the exact same as Donald Trump in a curiously suspicious number of ways. And they’re not trivial. At least not to the Democrats who maligned Trump for four years in a furious and inexhaustible frenzy of partisan political note writing over hours, days, and weeks no

When representatives from the League of Women Voters, RepresentUs, and the Independent Voter Project first met in 2019, political insiders said it would take a miracle to bring an innovative election reform to the City of San Diego that would allow voters to “rank” four candidates in the general election, instead of choosing just one. In 2020, while COVID was putting the brakes on much of the world, more than a dozen organizations and thousands of local residents formed the More Choice San Dieg

Americans want options. They don't want to have to pick just between Coke and Pepsi. They don’t just want to have to pick between McDonald’s and Burger King. And, in higher numbers than at any other point in modern history, they want more than just Republicans and Democrats. Gallup recently found that nearly two-thirds of Americans (62%) believe the Republican and Democratic Parties are doing such a poor job that a third party is needed, while 33% of voters believe the two major parties are do

Editor's Note: This article originally published on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. ‍ A new study suggests some voters in Wisconsin, particularly members of minority communities in that perennial tossup state, may lose their voting rights thanks to flaws in the state's process for maintaining registration lists. At least 4 percent of Wisconsin voters' registrations were incorrectly flagged as out of date in 2018 because they were suspected of h

The United States has never seemed more divided. The political landscape seems like a perpetual powder keg -- one spark will ignite the flames and consume the nation. Some have even suggested that the country could be on the verge of another civil war. This is, at least, how the press and the major players of the political process want people to view America. But are the people of the United States really this divided? Are we really a breath away from chaos across the country? The short answ