Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

And the winner of the first Democracy Madness is ...

And the winner of the first Democracy Madness is ...
Tristiaña Hinton/The Fulcrum

The Democracy Madness champion has been crowned: Ranked-choice voting bested the Cinderella story of the tournament, a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to win our reader-driven challenge.

The winner, with 56 percent support, emerged over the weekend with the biggest burst of balloting since our contest started two months ago. That's when we asked you to start deciding which of 64 ideas for fixing the system would be the most transformative at ending the dysfunction and putting voters back at the center of things.


Ranked-choice voting is an alternative to the system used for most American elections throughout history — voters picking one candidate and the one with the most votes (even if it's only a plurality) winning.

Under RCV, voters list candidates in order of preference. If no one wins by securing a majority of first-place ballots, the candidate with the fewest No. 1 votes is eliminated and that person's ballots are redistributed based on their No. 2 rankings. These instantaneous runoffs repeat until one candidate emerges with majority backing.


The main benefit, proponents say, is to reward candidates who can capture the broadest coalition of support. Opponents fear RCV holds a high potential to incubate voter fraud.

The irony was not lost on some folks that RCV was fighting for the top prize in a single-vote contest.

The popular vote co mpact, which focuses on getting states to promise their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (not their own), had edged out a pair of No. 1 seeds to make it to the final round of the Democracy Madness tournament, but couldn't conquer RCV.

Read More

A person in a military uniform holding a gavel.

As the Trump administration redefines “Warrior Ethos,” U.S. military leaders face a crucial test: defend democracy or follow unlawful orders.

Getty Images, Liudmila Chernetska

Warrior Ethos or Rule of Law? The Military’s Defining Moment

Does Secretary Hegseth’s extraordinary summoning of hundreds of U.S. command generals and admirals to a Sept. 30 meeting and the repugnant reinstatement of Medals of Honor to 20 participants in the infamous 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre—in which 300 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children were killed—foreshadow the imposition of a twisted approach to U.S. “Warrior Ethos”? Should military leaders accept an ethos that ignores the rule of law?

Active duty and retired officers must trumpet a resounding: NO, that is not acceptable. And, we civilians must realize the stakes and join them.

Keep ReadingShow less
Yes, They Are Trying To Kill Us
Provided

Yes, They Are Trying To Kill Us

In the rush to “dismantle the administrative state,” some insist that freeing people from “burdensome bureaucracy” will unleash thriving. Will it? Let’s look together.

A century ago, bureaucracy was minimal. The 1920s followed a worldwide pandemic that killed an estimated 17.4–50 million people. While the virus spread, the Great War raged; we can still picture the dehumanizing use of mustard gas and trench warfare. When the war ended, the Roaring Twenties erupted as an antidote to grief. Despite Prohibition, life was a party—until the crash of 1929. The 1930s opened with a global depression, record joblessness, homelessness, and hunger. Despair spread faster than the pandemic had.

Keep ReadingShow less