Are the polls representative? The case of independent voters

In a year of disillusion with the two-party system, many Americans believe that the next president should arise from a third party. To gain exposure, Governor Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and Dr.

In an interview for Colorado Public Radio, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said he supports most of the state initiatives that will appear on the November ballot, including two initiatives that would bring back presidential primaries and open state and federal primaries to independent voters.

It's now been 169 days since President Obama nominated Chief Judge Merrick Garland to fill Justice Antonin Scalia's vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

The waiting game to act on Garland's nomination has become status quo in the headlines. It's just assumed now that action on the nomination will have to wait until after November's election.

According to the Constitution, in order to become president a person must meet three requirements. None of these requirements are to belong to a political party. Yet, the two major parties have a stranglehold on the government and no one outside the Republican and Democratic Parties has been elected president in over one hundred and fifty years.

The impact of President Franklin D. Roosevelt dying in office -- then the subsequent revelations that his 'decisions' were often being made by the First Lady while incapacitated -- left a profound mark in our views of the presidency.

What was once considered private health information was now front-and-center in the information that Americans wanted to know about their president -- even more important than their finances.

We won’t know until November if voters in Maine approve the use of ranked choice voting becoming the first state to implement that process state-wide. Whether Maine voters approve Question 5 or not, Nevada could be the first state whose legislators implement such a system when they convene early next year.

Breaking the Frame of Respect

To solve societal problems, we need civil discourse, and effective reasoning. Reasoning and civil discourse cannot be had without respect.

In order to function with respect, a discourse requires two things: personal dignity, including personal space and freedom from dehumanization (or the devaluation of one's inherent worth), and acknowledgement of the positive attributes in others' positions.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has suggested that they will give Gary Johnson or Jill Stein "an inch" if they get close enough to the required 15 percent polling threshold to be included in the presidential debates. However, at least one debate sponsor in Colorado is apparently not so lenient.

Lily Tang Williams is running for U.S. Senate in Colorado. However, she is being excluded from a televised Senate debate because her party's registration missed the mark by 0.023% -- barely a fraction of one percent.

Last week the Illinois Supreme Court rejected an appeal that may have ended the current campaign to reform legislative redistricting. The ruling further illustrated the arduousness of instituting a citizen-led proposal in Illinois.