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Jeremy Gruber

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    Voting

    Reform in 2023: It’s time for the civil rights community to embrace independent voters

    Jeremy Gruber
    December 28, 2022
    The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

    "So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote, I do not possess myself," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1957. "I cannot make up my mind – it is made up for me."

    Henryk Archive/Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

    As 2022 draws to a close, The Fulcrum has invited leaders of democracy reform organizations to share their hopes and plans for the coming year. This is the seventh in the series.

    Gruber is the senior vice president of Open Primaries. He previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and several other civil rights organizations.

    Independent voters decided nearly every outcome in the midterm elections and sent many “election deniers” packing. Their reward is that 20 million of them – including millions of voters of color – will be shut out of voting in the 2024 presidential primaries. That number could double if efforts to close the primaries accelerate in 2023.

    The civil rights community, which has long insisted that ours is a democracy in progress, has always been at the forefront of the fight for justice in the United States. But it has continued to remain silent on the question of full voting rights for independent voters.

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    reform in 2023

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    Threats to democracy

    The threat to democracy that no one’s talking about

    Jeremy Gruber
    Harry Kresky
    October 04, 2022
    Tennessee primaries

    Tennessee is one of three Southern states to pass a resolution requiring party registration and closed primaries.

    J. Countess/Getty Images

    Gruber is the senior vice president of Open Primaries. Kresky is counsel to Independentvoting.org. They, along with Michael Hardy, are the authors of “Let All Voters Vote: Independents and the Expansion of Voting Rights in the United States.”

    Few people would characterize the conservative South as enlightened when it comes to electoral politics. But the truth is that in some respects it is more advanced than many Democratic strongholds. While states like Oregon and New York continue to employ closed party primary elections, even as the electorate becomes more independent and more demanding of real choices at the polls, states from Alabama to Missouri have dispensed with party registration and employed open primaries for years.

    These states may lean Republican at the ballot box, as key Northern states lean Democratic, but they have carved out the space for voters to define themselves and their voting choices. These systems are now under attack all across the South and, if successfully repealed, could spell a descent into authoritarian rule that we’ve barely begun to grasp.

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    open primaries
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