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When Floridians vote in primaries, only member of political parties may participate. Ashburn hopes to create change — there and across the country.
Why Gen Z needs to fight for the right to be both politically independent and potent
Ashburn is a high school junior in Broward County, Fla., and a founder of two nonprofits, Students for Open Primaries, which will be launched nationwide next week, and Bloom: Empowering the Military Teen. This piece was originally published by Independent Voter News.
Ever since I accompanied my mother to vote about a decade ago, I have been anxiously awaiting my 18th birthday. I remember walking with my mother into the polling place one sunny afternoon, listening as she explained what we were about to do. I watched her fill in her ballot and stood on my toes to try to catch a glance at the candidates' names. I was envious of the "I voted" sticker she got when she was done, and I couldn't wait to get my own sticker someday.
As I grew older and began to form my own political beliefs, the desire to vote became stronger. I watched the news and political satire, researched candidates and read about the hot-button political issues of the day — all of which influenced my political alignment.
I was staunchly pro-Republican for a while, then staunchly pro-Democrat. Eventually I realized my beliefs did not fully align with any party, so I decided I wouldn't be a part of any party.
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But I didn't know at the time that the decision to become independent would deny me the right to vote.
In Florida, where I live, we have a closed primary system. Independents (also called non-party affiliates, or NPAs) and third-party voters are shut out of primary elections based on their political affiliation (or their lack thereof), even though their tax dollars are used to pay for these elections. Talk about taxation without representation!
There are 3.7 million independent voters in Florida, which is about a third of the electorate. Independents come from all walks of life and political ideologies, but closed primaries disproportionately affect young voters like me. The younger generations are more politically independent than ever before. About half of all Millennials and more than one-third of Gen Z voters identify as independent, making the next generation of the electorate the largest and most independent in our nation's history.
In Florida, and many states, our general elections have become so uncompetitive that most real choices happen in the primary. Many general elections are predetermined. Partisans tell us just to get out and exercise our right to vote in the general election, but we're not stupid. We see the fix is in right before our eyes. We need to abandon the partisan systems we have in place that are keeping us apart and build institutions that actually reflect us.
I had the opportunity to start a student campaign for open primaries last summer. Along with my partner Dariel Cruz Rodriguez, we launched Students for Open Primaries in my home state. Florida had a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would have let all voters vote in a top-two open primary system. We advocated for the amendment and organized fellow students to speak out for reform.
We tirelessly campaigned for four months. We ran a social media campaign, we called young voters, we spoke at virtual town halls, we did media interviews and, yes, we even wrote op eds. We dedicated our summer and much of our fall to the cause. But when Election Day came, the amendment, unfortunately, failed to pass — falling 3 percent short of the 60 percent supermajority required.
Because of that loss, I will not be able to cast my first-ever ballot in next year's primaries as an NPA.
But here's the thing, I'm still independent. And there are millions of young people across the country who, like me, can't vote because of closed primaries. We are American citizens, and we have a right to vote!
That's why Dariel and I have teamed up with the Open Primaries Education Fund to take our group national — because young voters are ready for change.
We are committed to educating students and organizing student leaders in every state to speak out for democratic reform. We are launching a comprehensive education program that teaches students about America's primary systems and equips them with the knowledge they need to bring open primaries to their state. We hope to cultivate a community full of passionate students ready to create real change in their communities.
Even though I will not be able to vote as an NPA in my first election, I am still fighting to have my voice and the voices of all my fellow young independents heard. Students for Open Primaries is ready to aid in that fight, advocating for the rights of every voter regardless of political affiliation.
Visit IVN.us for more coverage from Independent Voter News.
- Q&A with co-founders of Students for Open Primaries - The Fulcrum ›
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- How Florida's open primaries amendment failed to pass - The Fulcrum ›
- Gen Z is our best hope for peaceful politics - The Fulcrum ›
There's one democracy reform best suited to stopping Trump's comeback
Kresky is counsel for Independent Voting, which works to promote the political clout of unaffiliated voters. An earlier version of this piece first ran in Independent Voter News.
Democrats, if they acted out of more than pique and the need to feed red meat to their base, hoped that their second impeachment would end up preventing Donald Trump from running for president again — by legally disqualifying him from holding future public office. If anything, the Senate's acquittal has kept Trump's base engaged and in sympathy with their leader.
It was certain from the start of this month's proceedings that there would be nowhere close to the 17 Republicans necessary to join all the Democrats for conviction. While the House Democrats' vote to impeach helped their party shape the narrative about the Capitol incursion, it left the party's Senate leaders essentially all dressed up but with nowhere to go — except to conduct a "trial" many viewed as wasting energy and political capital needed to address the pandemic, the economy and all the country's other challenges.
As for Republicans, it is clear they are not done with Trump. Their political viability depends on his base and for now, at least, they cannot hold that base and dump Trump — Mitch McConnell's desires notwithstanding. Moreover, many of the early 2024 presidential aspirants view Trump's base as their own.
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There are surely good reasons to prevent a second Trump presidency. And there is an approach that can both impede Trump and improve our democracy.
For it to become more than an abstract argument, however, will require buy-in by elements of both major parties — or sufficient funds to take it directly to the people.
The approach calls for defending and expanding open primaries. Open primaries can take several forms. Most common is the top-two version, where all candidates and voters participate in a first round and the top two vote- getters go on to the November election. Most top-two systems allow candidates to list a party preference or affiliation. California, Washington and Louisiana use this system. In other states, partisan primaries remain, but all voters are allowed to choose which party's primary to vote in. This is used in such nonpartisan registration states as South Carolina, Wisconsin and Virginia.
Trump's immediate strategy appears to be to remain in the Republican Party and seek to support as many winning candidates in the 2022 congressional primaries as possible. Such a strategy is most effective in a closed primary system where only registered party members may vote. And already, pro-Trump Republicans in Missouri, New Hampshire, Virginia and South Carolina are working to close their states' primaries. The success of Trump's strategy will provide a measure of his strength in the GOP and the prospects for those aligned with him.
Reform advocates — particularly those aligned with Independent Voting and Open Primaries — are fighting these efforts. Can they convince anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats to join with them to keep the primaries open? This is not the ideal scenario for partisans on either side. But if they are sincere about stopping the previous president's comeback, they would be hard-pressed — or at least exposed — if they failed to do so.
If "anybody but Trump" is the cause that elected President Biden in 2020, can "anybody but Trump" be so easily rejected ahead of 2022?
Open primaries would force Trump, and other candidates, to demonstrate broad appeal to the overall electorate in order to advance to the general election. It makes it much more difficult for a candidate to do what Trump did in 2016, which was to assemble a solid core of 30 percent or so of his party's voters and ride that through a crowded field to the nomination. Trump used this divide-and-conquer strategy to best 11 other Republicans who survived into the primaries. That allowed him to advance from being the plurality choice of one party to winning the White House with 46 percent of the popular vote.
The best antidote to Trump and Trumpism is more democracy. The impeachment route was anti-democratic and bolstered the partisan status quo. Its advocates sought to block Trump while they maintained top-down partisan control of our electoral process. Does this play into Trump's hands? Is this what is best for our country?
- Push for open primaries in St. Louis is good for the country - The ... ›
- Q&A with co-founders of Students for Open Primaries - The Fulcrum ›
- Alaskans switch to open primaries and ranked elections - The Fulcrum ›
- How Florida's open primaries amendment failed to pass - The Fulcrum ›
- A bipartisan alliance could disenfranchise black Louisianans - The Fulcrum ›
Voters in San Diego will soon have easier access to campaign finance data for candidates in local races.
Coalition brings transparency to San Diego campaigns
Rocco is a freelance writer. A version of this story first appeared on Independent Voter News.
Determining who's footing the bill for political campaigns and has long been a challenge for voters. But the people of San Diego will soon be able to track and analyze the campaign contributions and independent expenditures of local political campaigns with an online dashboard created by a coalition of nonpartisan political reform organizations.
While campaign finance information has long been available to the public, it is hard for a non-tech-savvy individual to make sense of the numerous spreadsheets and PDF files, said Amy Tobia, co-leader of Represent San Diego, a local branch of the national anti-corruption organization. This difficulty effectively prevents the public from accessing the available information.
Hence, the San Diego Campaign Finance Dashboard.
"Without transparency there can be no accountability, and distrust grows," Tobia said.
The dashboard, which currently shows data from the 2020 election, gives anyone easy access to financial information stored in the city's public records. Scheduled to launch this spring, it will display the financial information candidates report as they ramp up their 2022 campaigns. The organizations behind the dashboard are Open San Diego, RepresentUs, League of Women Voters and Common Cause — which together form the Voters' Voice Initiatives.
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"The thinking is the more information that voters have on candidates, the better choices they can make," Dominic Gerace, lead user-experience designer on the project, said. For example, there is data comparing donations from sources inside San Diego and beyond the city limits.
The dashboard offers information about campaigns for mayor, city council and city attorney. Users select the office they are interested in and drill down to see information about the candidates for that office. The data includes money raised vs. money spent, donations by group and total number of contributors.
Further plans also include data visualizations that display information about which parts of the county contribute the most in elections, which industries fund campaigns most and where money originates and is spent.
It was developed at minimal expense by a revolving team of volunteer software engineers, data scientists and designers. Voters' Voice hopes the city will eventually take over managing it.
Additional development will make it easy for other cities and states to adapt the platform to their own use. "We want to make sure that they can take what we've built and make it fit their local needs," Gerace said.
The San Diego dashboard is one of only a handful of platforms to provide voters easy access to campaign finance information. Oakland, Calif., Seattle, San Francisco and New York City have similar platforms.
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Best electoral advantage is party, not incumbency, new study underscores
Griffiths is the editor of Independent Voter News, where a version of this story first appeared.
A new report reinforces something political reform advocates and experts have been saying for years: Partisan identity is becoming the primary determinant in nearly every election.
The "Monopoly Politics" study, a biennial project of the electoral reform advocacy group FairVote, predicts the results of all 435 seats in the House long before Election Day. The 2020 version, released last week, predicted 357 "high confidence seats" with a 99.7 percent accuracy rate. The group bases its predictions on prior voting patterns, not on polling results, a methodology that has worked since FairVote began the project in 1997.
The predictions were made fully two years ahead of time, in November 2018, a startling reminder of how little competition there is in congressional contests and the consequence this has on the nation's politics. The authors say a central takeaway is the increasing role partisanship plays in the outcome of such elections.
FairVote uses a metric it calls the "incumbency bump" to gauge performance of incumbents and so-called "crossover candidates," members of Congress who represent districts that supported the other party's presidential candidate in the previous election.
In other words, it is widely assumed there is an inherent advantage to being an incumbent. FairVote measures the strength of this advantage for Democrats and Republicans who were elected in areas that traditionally vote for the "other side."
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According to the report, this advantage is shrinking, which means all the things that used to give incumbents a leg up on the opposition — money, name recognition, experience, etc — do not mean as much as the partisan-leanings of local voters.
After the 2018 midterm, 38 Democrats and just three Republicans were crossover members. And 29 of them won again this year, a further decline in an incumbency bump that has gradually dropped since peaking in 2000.
"An increase in the predictability of partisanship at the expense of incumbency advantage, even for incumbents who maintained moderate voting records, means something troubling: the identity of candidates and their campaigns are mattering less and less," the report states.
Many know the adage that "all politics is local." This means politics is more consequential to a person's daily life the closer it gets to home. It also used to also mean local values and issues shaped how voters selected candidates.
To various extents, that still holds true. But for several years now, the divide between Republicans and Democrats at the national level has seeped down to shape trends at a local level.
This nationalization of politics is another warning sign that, as the divide between the parties expands, the state of elections will worsen: more candidates favoring divisive behavior to the detriment of their constituents and the country, and a further reduction in the number of candidates pledged to bipartisanship and moderation.
"If Americans feel as if they are split into red and blue camps more than ever, or that there's no room for cross-partisan dialogue, there's a very clear systemic reason for that," said FairVote President and CEO Rob Richie. "Our elections fundamentally reward partisanship. We will not be able to clear this hurdle and come together as a nation until we are able to enact the reforms ... that ensure Americans are more truly represented."
He pointed to legislation that's a top goal of his group, which has so far gone nowhere in Congress. Dubbed the Fair Representation Act, it seeks to end hyper-polarization in Congress by remaking the way the House is constituted: five or six members each representing a fewer number of congressional districts, and chosen in ranked-choice elections.
"Multi-winner districts allow more voters to participate in meaningfully competitive elections, and the vast majority of voters of both parties would be able to help elect candidates from their districts who share their views," FairVote states. "This change would roughly triple the number of voters able to participate in competitive House elections."
Visit IVN.us for more coverage from Independent Voter News.
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