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New York state cannot cancel the Democratic presidential primary, according to a ruling by a federal judge on Tuesday after top Democratic leaders tried to remove presidential candidates from the June primary ballot. The state’s Democratic leadership reportedly used concerns over Coronavirus as the reason for dropping the presidential contest, yet still planned to move forward with down-ballot races. This prompted an outcry, claiming Gov. Andrew Cuomo was just trying to help presumptive Democra

‘Anger.’ ‘Frustration.’ ‘Controversy.’ ‘Chaos.’ Those were among the words used to describe Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary as voters were given a choice: Risk their health to vote in-person or have no voice in the 2020 primaries. Approximately 2,500 National Guardsmen were called in to man the polls Tuesday as voters lined up, most wearing face masks as they tried their best to practice social distancing while they waited to cast a ballot. https://twitter.com/OmarJimenez/status/12475002029210787

With a lot of primary left to go, the Democratic presidential candidates have raised and already spent a small fortune on their White House aspirations. So much for keeping money out of politics, right? As long as the there's politics in money, there will be money in politics. But there are a few good non-partisan political innovations that could improve the way money flows into political campaigns to make the system more transparent and fair to candidates and voters. In the meantime, looking

It was nearly four years ago that voters did the unthinkable. They rejected the party establishments’ favored candidates. And they did so to pick literally Donald Trump as America’s next president. That decision by the electorate completely blindsided Washington political operatives and the mainstream media analysts. How could Donald Trump have beat Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination in the first place? And then Hillary Clinton for the Oval Office? Trump was a total political outsider.

Voter Choice Massachusetts is proposing a ballot initiative to implement ranked choice voting statewide. The group has filed language with the state attorney general ahead of Wednesday's deadline. Independent Voter News was at the forefront of the historic passage of ranked choice voting in Maine in 2016 and then again in 2018 when it was used for the first time in statewide and non-presidential federal primary elections and US House and US Senate general elections. It decided one of the two US

I first heard the news that Ross Perot had died last Tuesday afternoon and it didn’t take long for the major media obituaries to appear. In public life in America, your obituary is written long before you die – literally and figuratively. Those of us who had been part of and partners with the Perot rebellion knew that the official “branding” of Ross Perot was already set in stone. The two-time independent presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996, whose millions of supporters sent a shockwave thr

For the last several years, I’ve been spending time in rural Wisconsin in a small farmhouse set on 130 heavily-wooded acres on County Road T, Polk County. This is the northwestern Wisconsin of hardscrabble dairy farming, bitter winters and luminous springs. I’ve come here because my companion — a Minnesota-born outdoorsman of Swedish extraction who lived much of his adult life in Alaska and wears a thin fleece jacket in the cold while I layer up in Canadian Goose — inherited this property from

A Roadmap to A Better Democracy By: Wes Messamore Reform activists from around the country gathered in the Country Music Capital of the World –– Nashville, Tennessee –– over the last weekend in March to celebrate an absolute tidal wave of policy victories in 2018; listen to inspirational speeches; share and learn the nuts and bolts of policy reform; and even to air fierce differences of opinion over the best way to reform elections in America and over other areas of public policy. How they buz

It’s 2019 and the United States of America still has a democracy problem. A few powerful studies have summed it up differently, but the heart of the problem is that despite Lincoln’s claim that we ever had a government of, by, and for the people, we have always had unrepresentative and unresponsive government. In recent decades it has only gotten worse. Over that same time period, the Democratic and Republican parties have worked hand-in-hand to build up a powerful fortress of protection over

The 2018 midterms ended up being the biggest year in political and election reform in half a century, yet these efforts to unrig the elections and political process got mostly overlooked by traditional and mainstream media outlets. New voting methods were put to use and approved for the first time in US history, gerrymandering reform passed in a handful of states, anti-corruption measures were adopted throughout the country, and the momentum for this movement reached new heights. Though 2019 i