Discussions on gerrymandering often call for the creation of independent redistricting commissions to draw electoral maps. But in this episode of the Democracy Works podcast from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Christopher Fowler explains that plan is just part of a bigger solution to gerrymandering.
With the stroke of a pen, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham enfranchised almost 350,000 independent voters recently by signing a bill for open primaries. Just a few years ago, bills to open the primaries were languishing in the state legislature, as they have historically across the country. But as more and more voters leave both parties and declare their independence, the political system is buckling. And as independents begin to organize and speak out, it’s going to continue to buckle in their direction.
In 2004, there were 120,000 independent voters in New Mexico. A little over 10 years later, when the first open primary bill was introduced, that number had more than doubled. That bill never even got a hearing. But today the number of independents in New Mexico and across the country is too big to ignore. Independents are the largest group of voters in ten states and the second-largest in most others. That’s putting tremendous pressure on a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.
Independent voters in the United States are often overlooked or disregarded. That is, until their votes are needed, because independents often decide most close elections in November. The problem is that most elections in America aren’t decided in November anymore, as fewer and fewer seats, from Congress to County Sheriff, are competitive. That means primary elections are our country’s most important elections. Millions of independent voters are shut out of many of them. They are finding themselves increasingly represented by politicians whom they were never able to cast a meaningful ballot for or against.
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For too long in New Mexico, where calls for equality and democracy are part of everyday conversation, the silence from the political class on these issues was deafening. However, something interesting began to happen. Independents began speaking out about the injustice of paying taxes for public elections that excluded them from participation. The media and many party members themselves began questioning the premise. Closed primaries are so unfair, so antithetical to American democracy, they are hard to defend for anyone but the most rabid partisans.
There were various attempts to obfuscate the issue, though. In equal terms, officials questioned whether independents wanted to vote and how they might cast their votes. The same questions have been asked about every disenfranchised group of voters since the fight to extend the franchise beyond white male landowners began.
Officials then sought to enact policies they claimed would serve the same interest, such as same-day voter registration. However, these policies had little impact on independent voter participation because they still required them to join a political party, and voters continued to demand a fair shake. They adopted automatic voter registration, only to find that when given a choice, new voters were overwhelmingly choosing to register as independent.
As independents began to stand up, their full diversity was on display. A 21-year-old Navajo voter, Rodzaiah Curtis, declared in an editorial that “Native voters are almost three times more likely to register as unaffiliated with a political party than non-Native voters.” Many of the legislature's representatives were hard pressed to oppose reform after finding that 42% of Hispanic voters are independent in a state with one of the largest populations of Hispanic voters in the country.
The youngest female representative to ever serve, Representative Cristina Parajón, declared in an editorial that “young people are registering as unaffiliated voters at an increasingly overwhelming rate. Young people in New Mexico vote at some of the lowest rates in the country. It’s not because they don’t want to participate, it’s because there are barriers to participating — like closed primaries.”
New Mexico is far from alone. And independents are just the tip of the iceberg. Americans of all stripes are questioning why our political system is increasingly at odds with the views of ordinary voters. When the first round of voting is restricted to narrow party bases, we get a system that prioritizes party loyalty over the public good. Partisanship is poisoning our great democracy and leaving voters with the false choice of playing along or sitting it out.
But independents are no longer playing along or sitting it out. They are beginning to organize and flex their muscles. Fellow independents and party members alike are standing with them and demanding a more perfect union. Political leaders, at least the ones smart enough to want to build bridges with the fastest-growing group of voters in the country, are starting to listen.
And New Mexico is just the beginning.
Jeremy Gruber is the SVP of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization. He was part of the coalition that passed open primaries in New Mexico.
"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.
President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.
Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.
The Constitution is very clear: the states and Congress determine the time, place, and manner of elections, not the president. Trump’s decree will almost certainly be overruled in court. If not, America is in deep trouble.
Last week, Republicans in the House voted unanimously to pass the SAVE Act, which contains key elements of Trump’s order. The Act requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, meaning significant hassles for citizens who lack passports and birth certificates. The goal is to prevent voting by noncitizens even though many studies have found it’s vanishingly rare.
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The full impact is hard to assess but certainly some citizens—of both parties—will lose their ability to vote. In other words, Republicans have chosen fealty to their leader’s false narrative over the rights of their own voters.
The Senate will likely stop the SAVE Act, just as the Supreme Court will likely overturn Trump’s decree. But it won’t be so easy to contain the downstream impact of what’s going on in Washington on state elections and the people who run them.
The oversight and management of state elections are in the hands of secretaries of state, county clerks, and state and county election board members. In nearly every state, these people are deeply connected to—and exposed to pressure from—one competing party or another.
America has long been able to trust that these individuals will abide by the norm of country over party and act with neutrality, even when laws don’t explicitly require they do so. But they now face major political pressure—and political incentives—to put their party first, not their country.
We’ve already seen the downstream impacts on this vulnerable election system of dangerous ideas at the national level. Following Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was stolen, local officials in eight states baselessly refused to certify election results. Counties imposed deeply flawed ideas like hand-counting all ballots.
The secretary of state position, now a magnet for the politically ambitious, is most deeply vulnerable to the new distortions arising in our politicized election world. In 2022, thirty candidates ran for secretary of state while refusing to accept lawful presidential results. In 2023, eight secretaries of state took their states out of ERIC, the interstate data-sharing system critical to election integrity, just to win points with partisans and conspiracy theorists.
On both sides of the aisle, some secretaries of state have completely abandoned the neutrality their job requires. Ohio Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose probably changed the result of an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative by imposing deeply deceptive ballot language. Colorado Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold acted with such overt partisanship during the presidential campaign that an impeachment resolution was filed against her.
Next year, elections will take place for secretary of state in 26 states. We shouldn’t be surprised if Republican candidates insist that elections can’t be legitimate without documentary proof of citizenship for registration, deeply undermining trust in the laws of their own states.
We need a huge neutrality campaign to ensure that secretaries of state and others in charge of elections act with strict public neutrality toward all candidates and referenda they oversee and with strict obedience to the rule of law. For the time being, this campaign will need to rely on voluntary commitments—but with enough persistence, maybe the question of “Are you committed to neutrality?” could factor into press coverage of secretary of state campaigns.
Next, we should move beyond voluntary commitments to enact state laws that explicitly require neutrality and enact state constitutional amendments that restructure key positions like chief election officer, election board member, and canvass board member to be less exposed to political pressure. Bipartisan public support is there to make this happen: voters on both sides strongly support impartiality from the people who run elections.
The bottom line is clear: we don’t need banana republic diktats from President Trump or banana republic loyalty from state election officials. But we do need a recommitment across the election ecosystem that puts our country before a party.
Kevin Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization.
New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.
“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”
Unite America’s new meaningful vote metric combines election turnout and competition data to reveal not just how many votes were cast but how many votes actually mattered in determining election outcomes. For example, earlier this month, there was a special election in Florida’s First Congressional District (FL-01) to replace former Rep. Matt Gaetz. Because FL-01 is a “safe” Republican district, none of the more-than-170,000 votes cast in the special general election were meaningful. The only meaningful votes were the 51,297 cast in the January primary—which is just 8% of all eligible voters in FL-01.
As the FL-01 example illustrates, the main driver of the lack of meaningful votes is a lack of competition. Nearly 90% of U.S. House and state house races were uncompetitive in 2024, meaning one party’s primary—where turnout is dismally low—is the only election that mattered. It gets worse: In 64% of state house races, zero meaningful votes were cast because both the primary and general elections lacked competition.
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When elections are essentially predetermined, lawmakers are incentivized to serve a narrow, unrepresentative faction of voters rather than the broader public. This helps explain why voters feel unheard—and why politicians fear being “primaried” more than losing a general election.
While the meaningful vote findings present a grim picture of the state of American democracy today, it also presents a potential solution. States that have adopted open, all-candidate primaries see more than double the share of meaningful votes compared to those with traditional party primaries. After Alaska implemented its all-candidate primary in 2022, its share of meaningful votes surged by nearly 60%. Post-election, lawmakers formed a cross-partisan governing majority—making progress on issues like education and the budget.
Opening primaries to independent voters also increases the potential for meaningful votes. Last week, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a law abolishing its closed primary system, giving more than 300,000 independent voters the right to vote in often-determinative primary elections. While the overall trend is toward states opening their primaries, 16 states still have fully closed primaries that bar 16.6 million independent voters from participating.
Ross Sherman is the Press Director for Unite America.
As American politics polarizes ever further, voters across the political spectrum agree that our current system is not delivering for the American people. Eighty-five percent of Americans feel most elected officials don’t care what people like them think. Eighty-eight percent of them say our political system is broken.
Whether it’s the quality and safety of their kids’ schools, housing affordability and rising homelessness, scarce and pricey healthcare, or any number of other issues that touch Americans’ everyday lives, the lived experience of polarization comes from such problems—and elected officials’ failure to address them.
But what if there were tools to change that? And what if they worked in places as different as deep-blue, urban Portland, Oregon and the rugged, reddish state of Alaska?
Good news: there are.
In Alaska, voters have opted to elect their state leaders using open, all-candidate primaries and ranked choice voting. This system was implemented in 2022 and, from its start, has delivered a mixed slate of winners who better match Alaskans’ own political makeup. The system has returned more power to voters rather than parties, with more than half of midterm voters opting to split their tickets between candidates from across the political spectrum; a majority felt their vote “mattered more” than in previous elections.
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But what about more tangible outcomes for Alaskans’ everyday lives? The 2024 election delivered a similarly mixed slate of winners—who instantly formed bipartisan coalitions in both state legislative chambers to get to work on the challenges their constituents care about. The House just passed a long-term education spending increase; a Senate panel has proposed a new formula to help balance the state budget while preserving the popular Permanent Fund Dividend; and lawmakers joined together to preserve federal funding for subsidized rural internet and phone service—all on a bipartisan basis and all promising real benefits for Alaskans.
A world away, in Portland, Oregon, residents voted to change their system, too. They expanded their council from just five citywide members to 12 councilors, divided equally among four districts, with their mayor and council elected by ranked choice voting.
So, what did that deliver? In short: the city’s most representative council ever. Eighty-four percent of voters saw at least one candidate they ranked on their ballot win a seat. The resulting council looks strikingly more like the city itself, with homeowners serving alongside renters, pro-business moderates alongside progressives, more women and people of color, and members from age 28 to 70. For mayor, voters chose Keith Wilson, a trucking company CEO who built a wide-ranging majority coalition, including residents from business, labor union, and environmentalism sectors.
New polling found that most Portlanders prefer the new system. Overwhelming majorities felt it would better represent their part of the city and that ranked choice voting let them better express their preferences. As in Alaska, more than half said they felt their vote mattered more than in prior elections.
But what matters most is change on the ground. While it’s early days for the mayor and council who just took office in January, they’re already making moves on homelessness, high housing costs, and infrastructure. Even the “real Ted Lasso vibes” of the new mayor are contagious, with residents of one long-underserved neighborhood voicing optimism after a recent local repair: “It shows neighbors that this new form of government is going to work. That’s my optimism. It’s going to work.”
There’s no mystery here. Voters in Alaska and Portland got more and better candidates in their ranked choice elections. And the winners of those elections, their newly elected leaders, are working together across party lines to get things done for their constituents. Because ranked choice systems reward candidates who can win—and serve—a majority of us, these leaders can focus on governing rather than grandstanding.
The real winners, of course, are Alaskans and Portlanders whose daily lives can benefit from the outcomes of a more collaborative and less performative politics. These promising reforms are also a win for the democracy we so treasure as a society. At a time when many are feeling disconnected from their government, places like Alaska and Portland offer inspiration.
So, will your state or city be next?
Meredith Sumpter is the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections.
Alan Durning is the founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, a nonpartisan think tank on democracy, housing, and energy issues in the Pacific Northwest.
