Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher.

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked several hundred thousand Florida felons from exercising their new voting rights in next month's primary.

The decision was the first from the high court in one of the past decade's most important, impassioned and complicated stories about expanding democracy.

We know it can be hard to see past all the troubling news coming out of 2020. Yet, even in these trying times, we do have something to celebrate:

Reform is WINNING.

In the past month, our members broke signature records in Massachusetts, won monumental court victories in Alaska, and overcame the duopoly’s barriers in Florida, and so many other places.

Nebraska, landlocked deep in America’s heartland, has paradoxically set itself apart as an anomaly in the US political ecosystem -- from the way it allocates presidential electors, to the makeup of its legislature, to how state policymakers are elected. 

Some reformers even look at it as a potential model for what a better representative democracy looks like, and it is because of the nonpartisan manner by which legislators are elected, and the impact that has had on the legislative process. 

The Maine Secretary of State reported Wednesday that the campaign to repeal ranked choice voting for presidential elections in Maine failed to get enough valid signatures: 


RCV advocates maintained that the people’s veto campaign was illegal to begin with since it targeted a bill, LD 1083, that had already become law. They also claimed that the campaign used out-of-state signature gatherers to collect signatures.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on The Fulcrum and has been republished on IVN with permission from the publisher.

Three months ago, Gov. Chris Sununu used his executive power to declare that fear of catching the coronavirus is a valid reason to vote by mail in the Sept. 8 primary and Nov. 3 general election. But on Friday he vetoed a measure that would have eliminated the excuse requirement and allowed all voters to cast ballots by mail indefinitely.

A group supporting nonpartisan open primaries in Florida recently released a new ad urging voters to vote "Yes" on Amendment 3 in November. Amendment 3 would replace the state's closed partisan primary system with a nonpartisan top-two primary similar to the statewide primary systems in California and Washington.

This November, St. John’s County Florida elects a sheriff. It’s an important race as law enforcement culture and training is the subject of local and national debate--except 47.2% of voters in the county will be denied the right to vote -- how could this be? This is the land of the free and home of the brave, where the voice of the people stands above all. They are electing a sheriff and excluding half the county?