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Editor's Note: The following piece was originally published as a "Letter to the Editor" for the Portland Press Herald and has been republiched on IVN by request and with permission from the author. ‍ Maine voters still live in a darkened room called the closed primary. In a 2014 New York Times op-ed, Sen. Chuck Schumer urged America to adopt a top-two open-primary system. Sen. Joe Baldacci is sponsoring a top-two open-primary bill in Maine, L.D. 1121. It's truly democracy in action! In an op-

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

If you’re a young voter like us, you’re probably tired of politics as they are now. Tired of every aspect of your life being a political issue. Tired of the restrictive grip of the two major parties making you jump through hoops to vote in critical primary elections or barring you from them entirely. It’s no secret that the major parties have been taking advantage of the way we engage with politics to guilt and scare us into their camp. But what you may not know is that 40% of Americans refuse t

“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

January 6, 2021 was — to borrow a line from a famous speech by former president Franklin Roosevelt — a day which will live in infamy. Two days later, Twitter announced that it had permanently banned @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter account due to violations of its “Glorification of Violence” policy. Other social media companies were quick to follow suit. Within a matter of days, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat, Shopify and YouTube all either banned Trump’s accounts or (in YouTub

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. ‍ The premier of ranked-choice voting in New York City appears to have gone smoothly as exit polling shows most voters found the new system easy to use. Voters in Queens used ranked ballots for the first time in last month's special elections for city council. Advocates for RCV are sure to lean on the voter survey, released Thursday, as they prepare for a far big