Washington, DC; December 13, 2019. Election Reformers Network has received an 18-month grant to support its work to address conflicts of interest at the state chief election officer level. “This is an important but complicated and neglected area of reform, so we are thrilled to have the support of an organization with the sophistication of…
Published in The Fulcrum, November 13, 2019 Americans have long been talking about different reforms to our election system, but it’s a young upstart — ranked-choice voting — that is rocketing to center stage. In New York City, most people had never heard of ranked-choice voting when the city’s Charter Commission announced in April that the reform…
Thank you Jeff, and thank you to Nancy MacLean and Neal Simon for these critically important insights. As Jeff said, here are two people with very different starting points and very different methodologies arriving at the same conclusion: that we need fundamental structural reform. Fundamental change is what the organization I lead, Election Reformers Network,…
Published September 4, 2019, by American Promise It is tempting to see fate in David Koch’s passing away the same week that the CEOs of the country’s largest companies announced that corporations should have a purpose beyond just profit. David and his brother Charles have done more perhaps than any other corporate titans to create…
Ever since we started Election Reformers Network, I’ve been using the email tagline: “Fundamentally, we are not a divided people, but we do need to fix our rules.” So I was very pleased to see a New York Times Opinion piece today by law professor Tim Wu pointing out how much Americans agree on key policy questions….
SKINNING THE DEMOCRATIC CAT We Americans find our ourselves today in a crisis of democracy. Our institutions don’t seem to work. They produce polarizing results. Gridlock and political stasis are prevalent. Visions of the future are bleak, featuring continued and increased stressing of our democratic institutions and traditions until they risk reaching the breaking point….
Five years ago, during a previous government shutdown, I used my downtime to research one of the most frequently cited quotes about democracy, which I then shared with a small group of friends and colleagues. Given the seeming “no way out” of the current predicament and the growing frustrations with the dysfunctional U.S. political system,…
by Kevin Johnson in Opinion Dec 11, 2018 Among the many moments of President Bush’s life celebrated last week, I have a particular reason to focus on November 3, 1992, when Bush delivered what to me were the most important words of his presidency: “The people have spoken, and we respect the majesty of the democratic system.” When I…
Research we conducted this week provides further evidence for the core argument of Election Reformers Network: that our rules themselves are a source of political dysfunction and partisanship. Political scientists measure partisanship with a tool called the NOMINATE score, which ranks elected representatives based on their roll call votes (with +1 being extremely conservative, and…
KEVIN JOHNSON and ROB RICHIE A ballot designed to show first, second, and third choices can lead to more mainstream candidates and less cantankerous politics. Regardless of who wins in November, the 2018 House elections are already making history. The House primaries, which started on March 5 in Texas and will continue into September, rank…
