The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that investigates and exposes waste, corruption, abuse of power, and when the government fails to serve the public or silences those who report wrongdoing. We champion reforms to achieve a more effective, ethical, and accountable federal government that safeguards constitutional principles.
Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Start your day right!
Get latest updates and insights delivered to your inbox.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Maine’s Rick Bennett has championed ranked-choice voting, open primaries, dark money reforms, and voter-first leadership for decades.
Getty Images, sakchai vongsasiripat
Rick Bennett’s Independent Run for Maine Governor: A Legacy of Democracy Reform and Ranked-Choice Voting
Nov 25, 2025
I’ve known Maine State Senator Rick Bennett — now an independent candidate for governor — since high school. His subsequent success has never surprised me. What has been gratifying is reconnecting decades later over a shared passion: strengthening American democracy.
Those of us in the democracy-reform community have long pointed to Maine as proof that structural change is possible when citizens take ownership of their government. From open primaries to campaign-finance reform to the nation’s first statewide adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV), Maine has repeatedly led the way. And Rick Bennett has been a consistent, courageous advocate of that progress.
My own history with Rick in this space goes back to 2016. At the time, Maine was considering a ballot initiative to adopt RCV for state offices. RCV was not widely understood and faced long odds. Rick was then chair of the Maine GOP — a role in which he had no obvious political incentive to support a new electoral reform. Still, I reached out, and Rick graciously agreed to meet over lunch in Augusta. We talked through how RCV works, why it strengthens majority outcomes, and why it reduces the spoiler dynamics that hold voters hostage to party candidates.
Against expectations, Maine voters passed the initiative. After surviving stiff legal challenges, RCV has been used ever since in state primaries and in all federal elections. Whether that lunch years ago influenced Rick or not, what matters is this: over time he came to support — and at times lead — democracy reforms that expand voter power, reduce special-interest influence, and make elections more honest and representative.
Rick helped open Maine’s primaries to the state’s large bloc of unaffiliated voters, enfranchising a third of the electorate. He chaired the successful campaign to ban election spending by foreign governments — a measure that passed with a record-breaking margin. He played a key role in advancing efforts to rein in dark money and strengthen public accountability. And throughout his legislative career, he has consistently defended ranked-choice voting and respected the will of the voters even when his own party pushed to overturn the reform.
Rick doesn’t just talk about reform. He delivers it.
This through-line of independence is what makes Rick’s current run for governor so compelling — and so important for the national reform movement. Rick recently left the Republican Party, not because it was convenient and not because his policy beliefs drifted but because remaining inside the party made it harder to work directly for the people he represents. For anyone who has spent time in politics, that level of courage and integrity is rare.
Rick’s leadership extends beyond democracy reform. As a former president of the Maine Senate — elected unanimously by his peers — he earned a reputation for solving problems by listening first and building coalitions second. He has worked across the aisle to address housing affordability, expand educational opportunity, improve broadband access, and confront the opioid crisis. In his private-sector life, he has helped grow Maine-based businesses, steward difficult turnarounds, and create jobs.
But the thread connecting his work is consistent: accountability to voters, not parties or insiders.
When I hosted a small gathering for Rick this summer, I saw something I’ve rarely seen in today’s polarized environment: people across the political spectrum coming to hear what Rick had to offer. They valued his authenticity, and heard someone who speaks about effective government, not as an abstract academic project but as the foundation for tackling the issues that shape everyday life — housing, healthcare, education, and economic mobility. If the government isn’t accountable to the people, it cannot solve real problems.
Rick and I don’t agree on every policy issue. We shouldn’t have to. What we do share is a belief that the health of our democracy is the precondition for progress on everything else; that reform must be grounded in respect for the voter; and that elected leaders should serve their constituents rather than donors, party bosses, or special interests.
Maine is no stranger to independent leadership. The state has twice elected independents to the governor’s office in the modern era, and few public servants have Rick Bennett’s depth of experience to follow in that tradition. But let’s be honest: running outside the major parties means forfeiting the funding advantages and institutional infrastructure they provide. Reformers across the country know this story well. If you choose the harder path — the path aligned with voter power rather than entrenched power — you need the movement at your back.
Rick Bennett has long advanced reforms that put voters first. Regardless of who holds office, what matters most is that citizens continue to demand integrity, independence, and innovation in our democracy.
John E. Palmer is chairman of Rank the Vote and a member of the board of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or endorsement of The Fulcrum, its staff, or its parent organization. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, The Fulcrum does not endorse or oppose any candidates for public office. Publication of this piece is intended to foster civic dialogue and does not constitute organizational support for any political campaign.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
Community foundations across the U.S. are proving that local collaboration can unite neighbors, strengthen communities, and drive real change. This Community Foundation Week, and beyond, grassroots initiatives are improving lives, fostering civic engagement, and inspiring hope.
Luis Alvarez/Getty Images
Community Foundations: Fueling Positive Change at the Local Level
Nov 25, 2025
In a country riven by political divides and a world rife with conflicts, it’s easy to feel helpless and disconnected.
Yet there’s a lesser-told story quietly playing out across America that offers another vision infused with hope, unity, and progress: local people working together to make a positive difference in their home communities.
As leaders of two community foundations separated by nearly 1,200 miles, we see this dynamic in action every day. And we are far from alone. Community foundations serve more than 900 U.S. communities, from small rural towns to major metropolitan areas. While each of these institutions is unique, we all share an unwavering commitment to bettering the lives of our neighbors and fellow citizens.
Each year, Nov. 12 to 18 marks Community Foundation Week, which is dedicated to raising awareness of the vital role of community foundations to inspire civic progress through supporting local nonprofits, encouraging productive dialogue, and making tangible investments in parks, libraries, and other community assets.
While this week brings welcome recognition to community foundations, we see it as representing something more — a chance to spotlight the power and potential of community.
Even when neighbors and fellow citizens don’t agree on big national issues, we all share a common concern for the places we call home. And when we invest our time and resources in working together to improve those places, we can light a new path forward for our divided nation.
That’s happening right now in Colorado Springs, where Pikes Peak Community Foundation is leading a regional visioning initiative called Our Spacious Skies, which has captured insights from more than 4,000 residents in two counties to discern what issues matter to them most.
The foundation is now working to align government, philanthropy, business, and the nonprofit sector around the priorities lifted up by their residents. As this effort moves forward, it has the potential to protect, promote, and preserve what residents love about the region and guide, motivate, and inspire the public and community leaders to work together, creating the desired future.
Greater Cincinnati Foundation has embarked on similar efforts that have led to investment and innovation in early childhood literacy, affordable housing, and cultural vibrancy. The partnerships developed through such initiatives allow for swift pivots to direct resources to emerging issues, such as partnering with local organizations to address immediate needs related to the recent disruption of SNAP benefits, while also developing a sustainable strategy to tackle food insecurity.
Community foundations also play a central role in helping communities rally when disaster strikes by swiftly establishing relief funds that donors can feel confident about supporting. And by tapping into existing relationships with local nonprofits, leaders, and citizens, community foundations can quickly distribute those funds to agencies prepared to address the most pressing needs – both in the direct aftermath of a storm, or another catastrophe, and in the necessary recovery efforts long after the national media has left town.
It's no accident that productive, community-led efforts are happening under the banner of community foundations — nonpartisan organizations that are uniquely positioned to foster a big, welcoming tent. We focus on understanding and listening to our local communities and then bringing people together around a shared vision for how to move forward around shared goals.
At a time when improving community conditions is unlikely to come through top-down approaches, solutions will rise from the grassroots, one community at a time.
They will come from people who see the common sense of working with their neighbors to improve lives in their neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
They will come from people who bring together their personal resources and shared spirit to tackle local challenges and who contribute their time to help others.
They will come from local elected officials who listen to their constituents and are willing to partner with community-based institutions to create better lives.
Join us. You can get involved in your community and start making a difference now – in the lives of others and your own.
Whether it be through volunteering, donating to a local cause, or taking steps to create a lasting legacy, your local community foundation is ready to help make it happen.
Margaret Dolan is Chief Executive Officer for Pikes Peak Community Foundation.
Matthew Randazzo is President and CEO of Greater Cincinnati Foundation.
Keep ReadingShow less
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for U.S. Senate, speaks at an event in Lubbock on Oct 7, 2025. Paxton is seeking to shut down Jolt Initiative, a civic engagement group for Latinos, alleging that it's involved in illegal voter registration efforts. The group is fighting back.
Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune
Jolt Initiative Hits Back at Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in Fight Over Voter Registration
Nov 25, 2025
Jolt Initiative, a nonprofit that aims to increase civic participation among Latinos, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block his efforts to shut the organization down.
Paxton announced Monday that he was seeking to revoke the nonprofit’s charter, alleging that it had orchestrated “a systematic, unlawful voter registration scheme.”
This is not the first legal back-and-forth between Jolt and Paxton’s office. Last year, the organization successfully sued to stop the state’s investigation into its voter registration efforts. In the new suit, Jolt’s lawyers argue Paxton’s efforts to shut it down are retaliation. The attorney general’s office has also in recent years targeted other organizations aiding Latinos and migrants, such as the effort to investigate and shut down El Paso-based Annunciation House.
“Jolt is simply the latest target of his unlawful campaign to undermine and silence civil rights groups in Texas,” said Mimi Marziani, a lawyer representing the nonprofit.
The origins of Paxton’s investigation of Jolt
In August 2024, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo said on X that a friend had seen organizations registering immigrants to vote outside state driver’s license facilities in Fort Worth and Weatherford. But local officials, including the Parker County Republican chair, said there was no evidence backing the post or showing that anything illegal was happening.
Bartiromo’s debunked claims still prompted an attorney general investigation into whether organizations including Jolt were involved in registering noncitizens to vote.
Jolt then sued for a temporary restraining order, saying that Paxton’s probe would harm the organization and put its workers and volunteers at risk. In October 2024, both sides agreed to pause their legal fight, and Jolt was allowed to continue its work, while the courts addressed a different lawsuit involving the legal tool used by Paxton to investigate the group. The attorney general’s office said in its recent court filing that it has agreed to not issue another subpoena, instead opting to launch a new lawsuit.
In addition, Paxton announced earlier this year that his office is investigating cases of “potential noncitizens” casting more than 200 ballots in 2020 and 2022, which would be around one-thousandth of 1% of the votes cast during these periods.
Meanwhile, Texas counties are looking into more than 2,700 people on the voter rolls who were flagged as “potential noncitizens” after a search through a federal database. At least six of them have confirmed that they are U.S. citizens. Others were mistakenly added to the voter rolls by election officials, but had never voted, counties found.
Voters also recently approved a constitutional amendment adding language to the state’s constitution saying that a person who is not a U.S. citizen cannot vote in Texas. Noncitizen voting was already illegal under state law.
Why Texas sued Jolt
Following Bartiromo’s claims, the attorney general’s office sent an undercover agent to a Department of Motor Vehicles location near San Antonio to investigate by attempting to register a fake daughter — who wasn’t physically with him — to vote, according to Paxton’s Oct. 23 court filing. It said a Jolt volunteer deputy registrar instructed the agent on how to register his daughter, despite her absence.
But when the agent asked for a form to take his daughter, the Jolt volunteer said he could not let the agent have one. The agent said the volunteer then implied that he could register his daughter to vote, according to the filing.
“I stated in a question format that I couldn’t have one, and (the volunteer deputy registrar) replied that since I have her information, I could register her to vote, alluding to being a parent and that I had that right,” the agent wrote. “This was inferring that I could sign her voter registration card, and while (the VDR) made this statement he overtly looked away. This is not only incorrect but illegal per election code.”
Jolt disputed this claim about legality in its court filing.
Paxton’s filing didn’t provide evidence of Jolt registering noncitizens to vote. Instead, it said the group’s decision to hold voter registration drives near DMV locations “illuminates its unlawful motive.”
“This is because U.S. citizens can already register to vote at any DMV with proof of citizenship,” the court document said. “Thus, there is no need for a VDR at such locations.”
Paxton brought the lawsuit in Tarrant County, saying that a “substantial part of the events” underlying its claims took place there.
“JOLT is a radical, partisan operation that has, and continues to, knowingly attempt to corrupt our voter rolls and weaken the voice of lawful Texas voters,” he said in a news release. “I will make sure they face the full force of the law.”
What Jolt says in its lawsuit
The nonprofit filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday, asking a judge to stop Paxton’s state lawsuit on the grounds that it infringes on its rights under the First Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.
In particular, Jolt said in a court filing that its volunteer didn’t do anything wrong because Texas’ election code does allow for a person to appoint their parent as “an agent” to “complete and sign a registration application” for them. The parent must also be a qualified voter or must have submitted a registration application and be eligible to vote, according to the code.
“Here, the State provides very few particularized factual allegations in its Petition to support its Motion for Leave, instead relying upon sweeping but unsupported claims about Jolt’s motives, beliefs and activities,” the group said in its initial response to Paxton’s lawsuit.
Jolt also said it will fight to defend its mission, adding that Paxton is “abusing his authority” in order to stop its voter registration drives.
“This is a systematic effort to dismantle the infrastructure of Latino civic engagement in Texas,” Jackie Bastard, Jolt’s executive director, said in a news release.
Jolt Initiative Hits Back at Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in Fight Over Voter Registration was originally published by The Texas Tribune and is republished with permission.
Keep ReadingShow less
Participants of the seventh LGBTIQ+ Political Leaders Conference of the Americas and the Caribbean.
Photograph courtesy of Siara Horna. © liderazgoslgbt.com/Siara
We Are Not Going Back to the Sidelines!
Nov 25, 2025
"A Peruvian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, a Colombian, and a Brazilian meet in Lima." This is not a cliché nor the beginning of a joke, but rather the powerful image of four congresswomen and a councilwoman who openly, militantly, and courageously embrace their diversity. At the National Congress building in Peru, the officeholders mentioned above—Susel Paredes, Carla Antonelli, Celeste Ascencio, Carolina Giraldo, and Juhlia Santos—presided over the closing session of the seventh LGBTIQ+ Political Leaders Conference of the Americas and the Caribbean.
The September 2025 event was convened by a coalition of six organizations defending the rights of LGBTQ+ people in the region and brought together almost 200 delegates from 18 countries—mostly political party leaders, as well as NGO and elected officials. Ten years after its first gathering, the conference returned to the Peruvian capital to produce the "Lima Agenda," a 10-year roadmap with actions in six areas to advance toward full inclusion in political participation, guaranteeing the right of LGBTQ+ people to be candidates—elected, visible, and protected in the public sphere, with dignity and without discrimination. The agenda's focus areas include: constitutional protections, full and diverse citizenship, egalitarian democracy, politics without hate, education and collective memory, and comprehensive justice and reparation.
They Don't Just Want to Erase Progress; They Want to Erase Our Very Existence
After years of progress in terms of inclusion, the anti-rights backlash in the Americas is not only rolling back hard-won rights but also directly threatening LGBTQ+ populations with erasure and criminalization. For example, in May 2025, under the guise of protecting children and adolescents, the Peruvian presidency enacted a law that prohibits "the entry and use" of public bathrooms by people whose biological sex does not match "the sex for which the service is intended." Policies to erase diversity from sex education programs—and the elimination of sex education itself from school curricula—have also become a constant threat at the national and subnational levels throughout the region. Further enforcement of these types of policies has spread to social media and the internet, with governments mandating the removal of online resources, as in the US, and the penalization of LGBTQ+ content on commercial platforms.
Visibility alone does not guarantee rights, so it has become essential to resist and denounce the lip service to the LGBTQ+ agenda and demand real protections. For example, the presence and participation of the queer community is sometimes manipulated to serve commercial or political interests with tactics such as "rainbow-washing," which many companies carry out during Pride month. Businesses may feature products in rainbow colors, but they are not committing to any substantial support or contribution to these communities. Evoking the rainbow is of little use when it does not translate into inclusion. As Carla Antonelli, a trans deputy in the Madrid Assembly in Spain, noted a few months ago during debates on the far-right's initiative to repeal the local trans law: "We are the perfect smokescreen to avoid talking about the housing crisis, poverty wages, or the increase in poverty." She then defiantly declared, "We are not going back to the sidelines!"
If We Don't Remove Violence from Politics, Participating in Politics Will Continue to Cost Us Our Lives
Legislating to guarantee LGBTQ+ rights and political participation is also an act of memory. Marielle Franco, Michelle Suárez Bértora, Ociel Baena Saucedo, and Jonier Quiceno were some of the pioneering political actors who denounced, confronted, and became victims of various forms of political violence. "Being the only transvestite in parliament is a process of daily violence. But I come from the social movement and that is why I continue to resist," emphasized Juhlia Santos, counselor of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
It is also necessary to recognize the tensions within movements. The LGBTQ+ community is not a monolithic entity. It can also rely on patriarchal practices and privilege access to political opportunities for gay men or draw on binary thinking to exclude, subordinate, or use the rest of the rainbow agenda as political bargaining chips. It is possible to be pro-LGB but anti-trans. The process of moving from activism and movements to more formal political parties also tests the persistence and resilience of those who decide to run for public office.
They Used to Call Us "Faggots" Now They Have to Call Us "Your Honors"
In Democracy Demands Equality, the LGBTIQ+ Political Participation Observatory in the Americas and the Caribbean documents the election of 61 openly LGBTQ+ individuals to national congresses between 1997 and 2024, with a total of 73 terms. It is worth noting that 49 percent of these positions were won between 2021 and 2024 and that 56 percent of those elected were lesbian, bisexual, and trans women. This report also identifies seven main obstacles to LGBTQ+ political participation: the presence of hate speech in political advocacy spaces, the proliferation of regressive laws that perpetuate discrimination, the lack of legal recognition of gender identity, exclusion from political parties, physical violence and threats against LGBTQ+ candidates, hostility towards LGBTQ+ officeholders, and state impunity regarding political violence. "Overcoming these barriers is urgent for democracy to be truly inclusive," the Observatory concludes.
The meeting in Lima focused on respect for diversity as a crucial aspect of democracy. There can be no democracy without discussions about race, Afro-Indigenous peoples, women, and all nonconforming identities. But in the future, it is necessary to open the agenda to the climate crisis and the rights to land, housing, and comprehensive health care "because these are the issues that keep us marginalized," noted Juhlia Santos.
Hope can be found in community and togetherness, and in the possibility of connecting movements and building coalitions in the struggle for life. The seventh LGBTIQ+ Political Leaders Conference of the Americas and the Caribbean closed with a call to build an empathetic democracy, with intersectionality, with respect for difference, and with the inclusion of all of us.
Jenny Zapata López is the communications coordinator for the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Mexico City. She specializes in climate, environment, and human rights. In 2009, she was a civil society fellow at the Kettering Foundation.
Resilience & Resistance is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that features the insights of thought leaders and practitioners who are working to expand and support inclusive democracies around the globe. Direct any queries to globalteam@kettering.org.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More