VotePact is a voting strategy that advocates that people vote for their actual preferences by pairing up with someone on the other side of the Democratic-Republican divide. So people can strategically vote for the candidates they most like without fear of helping those they most fear. Instead of effectively cancelling out each other -- one for Trump and one for Biden, they can both vote Libertarian or Green or whatever they want.

On October 21, US billionaire businessman Mark Cuban tweeted that the duopoly he would shut down “in a nanosecond” if he could was the Republican and Democratic Parties, asserting that their anti-competitive collusion was detrimental to the American people every single day:

California is either about to right decades of inequality between rich and poor defendants by eliminating cash bail, or it’s about to turn over its justice system to robots.

The question of what to do about the system that decides whether people should be free while awaiting trial will be determined by Proposition 25. The stakes, as explained by each side, are either ending an unjust system or relinquishing judicial authority to a pretrial assessment tool run on an algorithm.

This is an independent opinion. Have one of your own? Email it to hoa@ivn.us

California’s 116 community colleges receive a fraction of the per-student spending compared to public universities in California even though they are the largest provider of higher education and workforce training in the nation and serve far greater proportions of low-income students, first-generation students and English learners.