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The nonprofit reform group Open Primaries hosted its first Primary Buzz Discussion of 2025 last week. But this conversation worked differently as Open Primaries President John Opdycke was the one being interviewed.

Monday marked the kickoff of the 2025 legislative session in the Iowa General Assembly. However, several bills had already been prefilled for consideration. Among them: a ranked choice voting ban. 

Indiana lawmakers will consider a bill filed in the state's House of Representatives that seeks to the close the state's primary elections and condition full voting rights on joining one of two major political parties. 

With two post-census election cycles in the books, congressional district maps are mostly set for the remainder of the decade – which means we will know the outcomes of the vast majority of House elections before voters even cast ballots in November 2026, 2028 and 2030.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters (LVW) of Tennessee and a bipartisan group of voters that challenged a 2023 law that some plaintiffs said intimidated them out of voting in the August primaries.

Tennessee technically has open primaries in which party registration is not required to participate. However, it would be hard to tell under current state law.

Ballotpedia released a report on the increased efforts in various states across the US to ban ranked choice voting, a popular nonpartisan reform that continues to gain momentum.

Last week, I recorded a podcast interview with Gabe Hart. Gabe lives in western Tennessee and is a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging voter suppression signs that are hung at every poll site in Tennessee on primary day.

Gallup has found that even as the US gets closer to November, the percentage of Americans that identify as independent has remained unchanged – at around 45%