In the United States, every citizen over the age of 18 has the right to vote a congressman or congresswoman into office to represent the interests of his or her district -- except for roughly 650,000 citizens who have the misfortune of living within a 100 square mile grid surrounding the nation’s capitol.

As many readers of IVN may already know, 43% of American voters self-identify as independents, and that number looks like it's going to continue to climb.

A reader on my own blog recently asked me, "what's preventing Independents from uniting and becoming a new majority, perhaps as the Modern Whigs?"

Level the Playing Field, a group pushing to open up the presidential debates to an independent candidate, filed an historic lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court.

The P5+1 nations are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, France, Russia, U.K., and U.S.), plus Germany.

These nations represent an enormous economic and military bloc, creating over one-half of the world's GDP and representing over sixty-percent of the world's military expenditures. The P5 nations also control most of the world's nuclear weapons.

It's not even 2016 yet and the race to be the next President of the United States has already delivered some memorable punchlines. The GOP field is getting longer than a pre-teen's Christmas list and more bodies on the field means there are more chances to fumble the ball. Additionally, the average presidential candidate is over 50 years old, which has proven to be a disadvantage in the Internet age.

Since the movement launched in 2006, National Popular Vote has made significant progress to reform the way Americans elect their president.

It's graduation season and while colleges are advertising pictures of happy graduates in caps and gowns on their websites, there is one distinctive feature about the class of 2015 across the country: they have the most student loan debt in history.

By way of introduction, I’m Jeff Marston, co-chair of the Independent Voter Project.

Starting today and every couple of weeks I’m going to be sending out these short updates with nonpartisan issues that I feel are important for us politicos to start thinking and talking about.

I’m a lifelong Republican, always will be. I was even elected to California’s legislature as one. But I do nonpartisan communications now with a company that includes independents and Democrats.

There has been yet another mass murder using a gun in the U.S., and now we have the inevitable reiteration of the arguments for and against ‘gun control.’ To my mind, all we need to wrap this up is to read the Second Amendment and do what it says.

Here it is:

In 1636, my 11th-great-grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Hooker, founded the colony of Connecticut and contributed greatly to the ideas of constitutional government and universal Christian suffrage in colonial America.

Among his brilliant contributions was the -- at that time -- novel idea that the foundation of authority came from the free consent of the governed --an idea that stuck throughout American colonial history.