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Amid all the divisive ugliness inside the Beltway, here is some good news: 2018 may well be the best year in a half century for election reform. Today’s narrative laments a crumbling democracy, alienated voters, and a political culture spiraling ever downward. While true, that narrative is incomplete. It misses the remarkable energy building across many states to confront these problems, shore up our democracy, and rebuild our political culture. Nowhere is that energy more apparent than in the

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol ordered the state of South Dakota Tuesday to pay $612,045 in legal fees, and travel expenses of $7,539 for the plaintiffs who won a ballot access trial against the state in February. Judge Piersol ruled in late February that the state signatures requirements for minor parties to access the ballot were onerous, and that the late-winter filing deadline was too early. In March the state complied with the February court order by repealing the ballot access requi

I. The State of Self-Driving Car Technology and The Possibilities In the 1990 film, Total Recall (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone), the protagonist played by the now former governor of California hails a self-driving car with a humanoid, robotic attendant sitting where a human driver would. What makes the surreal scene eerily prophetic is how Schwarzenegger asks the AI cab driver questions like one might ask Alexa, Siri, or Google's voice assistant, and the "Johnny Cab" sasses

Early voting has changed the game in modern politics, and that means snail mail is winning. On Friday, absentee voting kicked off in three states: Minnesota, Virginia, and South Dakota, and it signals the final phase of ‘midterms 2018.’  Sort of. It has slowed down the maneuvers of a campaign culture that has always prized speed and power, forcing it to now meet the wants of an electorate that has threatened a formerly predictable timeline by lengthening it. And if the recent past is any indic

Political reformers across America are paying close attention to key elections on November 6. But their focus is not on candidates or political parties. It’s about how Americans vote on ballot measures to unrig the system. Here are some highlights: Voters Not Politicians (Michigan) In Michigan, an anti-gerrymandering measure is on the ballot after Voters Not Politicians gathered more than 425,000 petition signatures with only volunteers within just 110 days. The measure creates an independen

It's been called The Year of the Woman, the apex of the #metoo movement, and the height of #timesup. And the sheer number of female candidates running for Congress is commonly referred to as the ‘pink wave'. But as it turns out, the ‘pink wave’ is actually a shade of deep blue. Just take a look at the playing field we face in the run-up to November. According to the latest numbers 2,634 people are running for US Congress in 2018 and females comprise 23 percent of all nonincumbents. If we break

For the politically informed, the punditry on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC has gone on ad-nauseam. Partisan dialog so wholly permeates our news media these days that it can be challenging to find good information about topics outside of the constant GOP vs. Democrat slugfest. An inquisitive person might think to escape the noise by avoiding the world of Washington and searching for something tangible in city politics. Unfortunately, even small-town mayoral elections can’t necessarily escape the pola

“We spend most of our time focused on what’s wrong with our government and talking about the dysfunction or breakdowns in a critical way. With all that attention on what we DON’T want, we spend little time focused on what’s working and what we DO want. #HealthyGov is about shifting our focus to what we want and taking action to make it so.” - Debilyn Molineaux, co-director of Bridge Alliance Bridge Alliance, a coalition of over 80 civic action organizations, launched the #HealthyGov education c

On February 27, the South Dakota Senate unanimously passed HB 1012. The bill is now on its way to the governor. No legislator in either house voted against this bill. It says that a party must meet the vote test every four years. Current law says it must pass the vote test every two years. The bill has an urgency clause so assuming it is signed by the governor, it will go into effect immediately. For many years the vote test only had to be met every four years, but could only be satisfied by th

A measure proposed by Republican State Rep. Drew Dennert to open all primaries in the state to independent voters died in the State House Monday. South Dakota currently has a semi-closed partisan primary system where the parties get to decide whether or not to allow independent voters to participate in their taxpayer-funded primary elections. Democrats and Libertarians open their primaries to independent voters, while Republicans and the Constitution Party restrict participation to members onl