Nonpartisan news and updates on legislative, legal, and grassroots efforts to open primary elections nationwide.
California voters should not have to choose between their right to vote and their right to associate (or not associate) with a private political party. Yet, the Independent Voter Project (IVP) is arguing in court that this is the exact choice the state is unlawfully forcing on millions of citizens.
Andrew Yang was the guest of a special virtual event Wednesday hosted by Open Primaries and IndependentVoting.org’s Politics for the People book club. Yang is a former Democratic presidential candidate and the founder of the Forward Party, which prioritizes the need to reform the US electoral and political processes.
Maine has long been at the forefront of political innovation, from the way its ballots are designed, to its clean election funds program, to same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee voting, to implementing ranked choice voting. Yet, it bolstered its reputation even more when it passed semi-open primary reform in 2021.
Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in the Portland Press Herald and has been republished on IVN by request and with permission from the author.
Depending on what news station you watch, you might think that one party is the savior and the other, the enemy, of our sacred right to vote.
But what if a larger battle is being waged to secure our right to vote? A battle that threatens insiders on both sides of the partisan political aisles? A battle ignored by a mainstream media that has embedded itself in partisan rhetoric? A battle that would expose the hypocrisy of both parties?
Within a year from now, Maryland voters will head to the polls to elect their party candidates for the 2022 elections. While voters from the Democratic, Republican, and other third parties will choose their candidates in the primary, independent voters will not be able to choose the candidates they want. This is because, in Maryland, independents are not allowed to vote during the primary.
In a bipartisan vote, the Maine Legislature passed a bill Wednesday that implements a semi-open primary system, which will allow voters registered independent (32% of the registered electorate) to choose between a Republican or a Democratic primary ballot in future elections.
We all know the system is broken. It’s rigged. It does not work. How do we know? Because our leaders are not producing solutions to the issues we care about. No one is listening, just talking past each other.
But what if the system is working the way it was designed to work? What if politicians are operating very rationally and logically based on incentives of the political system in place?
Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in the Rapid City Journal and has been republished on IVN with permission from the author.
Just a few weeks after the storming of the Capitol and the impeachment trial, Gallup found for the first time that 50% of voters identify as independents. Registered independent voters are now the largest or second largest group of voters in half the states and will be the largest or second largest group of voters in almost every state in the country within a few years at current rates of growth.