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Update 8/30/20: Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap has appealed the superior court's ruling on an emergency basis. The clock is ticking as in 5 weeks, absentee ballots will be sent out in 5 weeks. Stay tuned for more updates. ‍ Maine was set to be the first state in the US to use ranked choice voting in presidential elections. That has all changed after a recent ruling by a superior court judge. Superior Court Judge Thomas McKeon reversed the determination by Secretary of State Matthew Dun

This is an independent opinion. Want to respond? Write your own commentary! Email hoa@ivn.us. The primary path to the middle class for American families is through property ownership. However, for many African Americans, Latinos and other minorities, the opportunity has been out of reach because of discriminatory housing laws and economic inequality. It’s alarming that a measure on the November ballot would make this lack of access worse and simultaneously threaten relatively recent gains made

Come November, California voters will determine the fate of affirmative action… again. What they decide will have a huge impact on higher education. In 1996, voters passed Proposition 209, banning public agencies from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in hiring, admissions and contracting. This year, if Proposition 16 passes, it will undo the ban on affirmative action. Proponents say doing so could greatly affect the ethnic diversity of faculty at public colleges and

Over 150,000 Arkansas voters signed a petition to put a nonpartisan top four primaries with ranked choice voting in the general election amendment on the November ballot. Not long after Open Primaries Arkansas submitted 59,000 of those signatures the amendment was certified to go before state voters. Arkansas joins Alaska and North Dakota in the growing list of states turning to the reform combination of nonpartisan primaries with ranked choice voting, as well as Florida and St. Louis who have

Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t want it to happen. Neither do powerful leaders in the state Legislature. Tenant groups desperately want to prevent it, and landlord associations say they also want to avoid it so long as they don’t bear an unfair portion of the cost. Seemingly all of the important actors trying to find a solution to the so-called “eviction wave” looming over California have a strong incentive to strike a deal. As the novel coronavirus pandemic has shuttered wide swaths of the econo

This is an independent opinion. Want to respond? Write your own commentary! Email hoa@ivn.us. “Suffrage is not a right. It is a privilege that may or may not be granted. Politics is no place for a woman, consequently the privilege should not be granted to her.” So wrote California State Sen. J.B. Sanford in June 1911, objecting to the proposal that the state Constitution should be amended to allow women to vote. By a slim margin, California voters rejected his arguments and approved women’s su

The US Senate race in Maine is expected to be highly contested as Democrats seek to unseat Republican Susan Collins. However, before voters make a decision, they will have an opportunity to hear from all 4 candidates running in the race. The Bangor Daily News, the Portland Press Herald, and News Center Maine will host the televised and streamed Senate debate on September 11. Sen. Collins, Democratic State House Speaker Sara Gideon, and independents Lisa Savage and Max Linn have all agreed to p

The election shenanigans surrounding Kanye West should be the poster-child for our need to fix an easily-manipulated and broken voting system. Soon after the revelation that the GOP had its operatives collecting signatures for the famous rap star, Kanye himself admitted that his “candidacy” for president was all about siphoning votes from Joe Biden. Experts opined that this GOP strategy was to offer up Kanye as an alternative to black voters and others who would otherwise vote Biden in high pe

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher. ‍ The Postal Service is warning the two biggest Midwest presidential battlegrounds, Pennsylvania and Michigan, that much of their election mail won't get delivered on time because the states' absentee ballot deadlines are too tight. That sounding of the alarm bells preceded President Trump's explicit declarations this week that he wanted to deny the USPS an emerg

This is an independent opinion. Want to respond? Write your own commentary! Email hoa@ivn.us. There are three groups of people who have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. First, there are those who choose to hunker down and make all attempts to avoid even minimal interactions. Second, there are those who choose to not maintain social distancing and, therefore, are exposing themselves and others to becoming infected with COVID-19, either because they feel the risks of social i