The cross-partisan group VoteSafe announced Tuesday that leaders in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have answered the call to ensure all voters have a safe and secure voting option in November. 

The newly-formed state-based coalitions are led by GOP House Majority Leader Dave Reed and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy in Pennsylvania, and Attorney General Josh Kaul and former Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen in Wisconsin.

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

‍

Proponents of expanded voting by mail during the pandemic won victories Monday in three states, two of them solid blue but one of them reliably red.

Voting is a right; This shouldn’t be a controversial statement but it is. The struggle to ensure that every adult United States citizen has the right to vote has been going on since the founding of our country. Right now, our right to vote is threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic and by apathy in some state legislatures.

In the wake of Bernie Sanders’ loss of the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, the Left has cried out, as it has in the past, for the creation of a third party. There is some merit to this idea, given that repeated attempts to fashion the Democratic Party into a force for progressive change have failed and likely always will. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The Left has been fooled many more times than once, most recently by the faux progressivism of Barack Obama.

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.

‍

Good-government groups are launching a new push for campaign finance transparency during the presidential campaign.