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Meet the change leaders: Rob Richie

Rob Richie
FairVote
David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsAug 28, 2024
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

Rob Richie is senior advisor at FairVote, an organization he co-founded in 1992 and led as CEO from 1992 to 2023. He has helped advance major electoral reforms, including the Fair Representation Act in Congress, a national popular vote plan, ranked-choice voting in Alaska, Maine and more than 50 cities, and voter access changes like preregistration, automatic voter registration, and remedies in voting rights cases.

His thought leadership contributions include invention of the partisan voting index to project federal elections and Alaska’s top-four primary that combines all-candidate, open primaries with ranked-choice voting.

He is a frequent media source and has been a guest on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “On the Media” and “Fresh Air,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Fox and NBC. His writings have appeared in numerous major daily newspapers and in 11 books, including as co-author of “Every Vote Equal” and “Whose Votes Count.” He has addressed conventions of the American Political Science Association, National Association of Counties, National Association of Secretaries of State and National Conference of State Legislatures. He is a graduate of Haverford College, where he serves on its Corporation. He and RepresentWomen CEO Cynthia Terrell are parents of Savanna, Lucas and Rebecca.

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Richie a few weeks ago for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of his democracy reform work:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com


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Fire Pete Hegseth to help GOP in midterms

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The politics of exclusion is the deliberate use of power to push certain communities out of the American story through fear, cruelty, erasure, and unequal treatment. It is what happens when leaders abandon constitutional ideals and replace them with grievance, retaliation, and division.

The late John McCain warned that we weaken our greatness when we confuse patriotism with tribalism. Liz Cheney cautioned that no one should support a leader who uses fear and division to hold onto power. Adam Kinzinger called it authoritarianism. Mitt Romney said plainly, “He has caused fear and division.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez observed that “the cruelty is the point,” and the late John Lewis reminded us that “democracy is not a state; it is an act.” Together, these voices describe the elephant in the room. America is confronting a pattern bigger than corruption and bigger than authoritarian drift. It is the social, racial, and moral dimension of democratic erosion — lying, cheating, cruelty, intimidation, erasure, and exclusion masquerading as patriotism.

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After Senator Lindsey Graham died in office, South Carolina’s governor appointed his sister, Darline Graham, to serve out the remainder of his term. Just over a month later, campaigning for a full term of her own, when asked at a debate whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are national security issues for the United States, she said she was “not that informed on national security.” The President has endorsed her candidacy. Call me old-fashioned, but I want a Congress that is informed on national security. The founding fathers seemed to agree: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution hands Congress the power to declare war, “raise and support Armies,” “provide and maintain a Navy,” and “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” That’s the job description, and I want a president who doesn’t endorse someone for that job who can’t handle that responsibility.

Our Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defense have turned away from Taiwan and the South China Sea. When I was a Navy pilot, the spoken and unspoken adversary of our future was China. I don’t mean to make a judgment about whether that was the right call, but just to say that in my 14 years affiliated with the Navy, of every potential adversary we discussed, China was always the most formidable. As I trained to be a mission commander, most of the simulations I flew and the scenarios I hashed out on oral boards revolved around the South China Sea. That’s the fight we trained to fight. Then, a few months after I separated from the Navy, Secretary Hegseth announced our priorities were shifting away from the Pacific to “restore U.S. military dominance in the Western Hemisphere.” That didn’t stop us from starting a war with Iran we can’t seem to get out of, but the promise to take focus away from the Pacific does seem to have held.

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