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Hladick is the policy manager at Unite America, which promotes an array of electoral reforms and helps finance other advocacy organizations, and political candidates, with a commitment to cross-partisanship. (It is a donor to The Fulcrum.)

Unprecedented and unforeseen disruptions to democratic processes the coronavirus pandemic is only the most recent and profound require innovative problem-solving. This is especially true of political party conventions, which serve the important role of congregating parties in-person, but are hard to carry out traditionally while practicing social distancing.

Republicans and Democrats in Utah didn't let the spread of Covid-19 delay their conventions at the end of April. Instead, both parties convened their first-ever virtual conventions and then used mobile apps and ranked-choice voting (also referred to as the "instant runoff" system) to award nominations for governor, Congress and state attorney general.

Under Utah's unusual rules, both major parties emphasize a pre-election endorsement process in picking their nominees. Candidates advance directly to the November general election ballot if they receive 60 percent support at a party convention. If no candidate reaches that threshold, the top two face off on the primary ballot. Candidates who choose to forgo the convention process may still get on primary ballots by gathering petition signatures.

This time, ranked-choice voting meant delegates could rank multiple candidates in order of preference on one ballot. Ballots were counted in rounds. When no candidate was ranked first by three-fifths of the delegates, the least popular candidate was eliminated. Whenever the eliminated candidate was a delegate's favorite, the second choice on that ballot was counted in the next round and so on.

The instant runoffs ended when one candidate cleared the 60 percent support threshold, or else the top two finishers were identified.

Valuing the full range of voter preferences is important, especially when there are more than two candidates in the race. Typically during a Utah convention, delegates sit through rounds of voting and counting ballots, which can take hours.

With delegates scattered across the state, using their phones or laptops for ranked-choice voting, the process was simplified and shortened considerably this spring. Candidates' speeches were uploaded to online platforms for delegates to watch, and mobile voting platforms such as Voatz and ElectionBuddy were made available for voting virtually.

Eight GOP contests required multiple rounds of counting, but all preferences were expressed on a single ballot. The most competitive race featured a dozen candidates vying for the nomination in the 1st congressional district. (GOP incumbent Rob Bishop is retiring after 18 years.) No candidate commanded 60 percent support, but 11 rounds of counting produced the two who will now square off in a June 30 primary.

Though most races at the virtual Democratic convention determined a winner after the first round of counting, the contest for the 1st District also yielded a pair of solid finishers now headed to the primary.

This wasn't the first time either party had used so-called RCV, but the all-virtual convention was new. Despite the process change, turnout skyrocketed and set new records for both parties: 93 percent of Republican delegates and 85 percent of Democratic delegates participated.

In a poll of 1,100 delegates by the state GOP, nearly 90 percent said they were very satisfied or satisfied with the online format while 72 percent said they liked the instant runoff better than multiple rounds of repeated voting. More than half said they'd prefer an online convention in the future, or a new hybrid combination of an in-person and online system.

Utah uses ranked-choice voting in other elections, too. A state law, enacted with bipartisan support two years ago, allows municipalities to pilot RCV systems through 2026. Election officials in two cities that experimented last fall said the system saved taxpayers money, contributed to a more positive campaign atmosphere and was received favorably by the electorate.

RCV is gaining significant traction in other local and state elections, and was used in presidential primaries for the first time this year. Combined with voting by mail or early and in-person, Democratic primary turnout doubled in Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming and just about tripled in Kansas.

The alternative election format helped Republicans and Democrats alike to innovate this primary season while keeping candidates and voters safe. In addition to being nonpartisan, it has the added benefit of being a commonsense and effective solution in the middle of a global pandemic.

Balancing health and democracy for the rest of this election year will require continued creativity from party and election officials. Utah proved that RCV is worth being central to the solution.

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As protests continue to erupt in our cities and the coronavirus persists, a profound soul searching is taking place across our exhausted land. It first seizes us as confusion and anger, underscored with pain and mourning. Then it emerges as an understanding that the path forward cannot look like the one behind us, but it is unclear how to pave the new path. What is clear is that we are all aching to begin anew. It is time for a great reset.

But how does that reset start? Where do we begin rebuilding the nation? How do we include everyone in the process? When a house is collapsing, the first thing to do is shore up the floor joists, upon which everything rests. In our country, those joists are our democracy, the political system by which people have power, and policy is made on their behalf.

Indeed, those joists have been mercilessly hacked at in the last three decades. We have all seen it happen, and much of it has been intentional. The gerrymandering, which carves people, and often communities of color, out of districts so that those in power can continue to hoard it. The overwhelming dominance of money in politics, which hands the policy process to the wealthiest and leaves almost everyone else behind.

The intentional disenfranchisement of black and brown voters through dirty tricks and crafty laws that echo Jim Crow. The autocratic control of both chambers of Congress by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader. The executive branch aggregating power as the legislative branch loses its limbs. The decline of civic learning and the loss of our sense of common purpose as fellow Americans. The creation of two very different narratives about current events through the tribalization of the media.

The result, of course, is the situation we have all come to hate today. It is one marked by gridlock, division, resentment, and legislation crafted by special interests sailing through the legislative process while the public interest drowns in the wake. As hard as it might be to imagine today, there is a venn diagram overlap between certain supporters of President Trump and all those marching in the streets to protest on behalf of Black Lives Matter, a political system that keeps powerless people powerless.

Unless our leaders begin the process of reconstructing and reinventing that political system, we should not expect anything to fundamentally change in the coming years. That is why democracy reform is the most important precondition for national progress at this point in history.

Reverend William Barber, one of the great civil rights leaders of our time, spoke of the death of George Floyd over the weekend. Barber addressed not just the direct physical violence that had killed him, and kills so many like him every year, but also the violence of policy that undermines poor communities across the nation every day. They face a lack of health care, decent incomes, and affordable housing. Unless we fix the violence of policy, Barber said, then we will continue to be a divided and a deadly and a distorted society. Unless we fix the violence that has been done to our democracy, the violence of bad policies will not end.

About a year ago, the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked what it will take to rebuild the middle class in the country. He said, If we are going to actually achieve the kinds of changes that we need, we are going to have better politics. A concern which I raise is that we have been engaged in processes which entail disenfranchisement, weakening the power of ordinary individuals in the political process, both through gerrymandering and through the power of money, and then weakening some of those systems of checks and balances.

What makes our nation great is, in large part, our grand experiment in government by the people. Getting that experiment right in a way that brings all to the table is the first step on the path to national recovery. It requires the passage of laws that strengthen voting rights, reduce the influence of political money on the policy process, end gerrymandering, and rebuild the institution of Congress. Skipping such an important step means we are bound to stumble with the subsequent ones.

The repercussion of stumbling again could be as high as the cost of losing our country to the darkest undercurrents of human history. But if we can muster the strength and the camaraderie to apply ourselves to the task of reforming and reinventing our democracy, we will have the tools needed as a people to begin fixing the many other problems we face.

Nick Penniman is the founder and chief executive officer of Issue One.

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America has to rebuild democracy amid recovery from national crisis | TheHill - The Hill

On the surface, the coronavirus pandemic seems to have driven already-divided Americans even further apart.

Police brutality has triggered violent protests in dozens of cities. In a split that's been dubbed the "lockdown left" versus the "reopen right," Democrats are bickering with Republicans over whether public health or the economy should come first. In the House, GOP lawmakers have sued Democrats for permitting proxy voting during the pandemic. And President Trump is stoking all these divisions as the defining strategy of his reelection campaign.

"The unity that was created during and after world wars for America lasted years, the unity after 9/11 lasted months and the unity during this Covid crisis might be days," says former Rep. Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat who helped spearhead a recent bipartisan letter signed by 110 former lawmakers, top government officials and governors urging Congress to respond with more strength, unity and cooperation.

But the rancor and bad blood roiling government officials are not the whole story.

Americans are also reporting heightened public unity and trust as communities draw together in the crisis. A survey last month by More in Common found 90 percent saying "we're all in it together," compared to only 63 percent in 2018. The number who described the country as unified jumped eightfold in the same period.

The Trump administration's chaotic response to the crisis has created a leadership vacuum that all sorts of smaller players have stepped in to fill state and local leaders, nonprofits, foundations, CEOs, small businesses, neighbors helping neighbors. The pandemic has intensified inequities and political divisions around the globe, say scholars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. But it's also created the kind of disruption, or major shock, that can lead to new political alignments, as happened in Japan following the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima.

But the public health emergency in the United States has added energy and urgency to several "centers of gravity" in the movement to revive democracy and civil society, argues Kristin Hansen, executive director of the Civic Health Project, which promotes reducing polarization.

These include organizers working to bridge ideological divides at the individual and community level what Hansen calls the "social aspect" of civic health and activists seeking structural democracy reforms, from bolstered voting rights to more regulated campaign financing. The latter have coalesced around a broadly bipartisan movement to save the election, principally by greatly expanded mail-in voting.

A rallying cry for the "bridging divides" camp is to counter the prevailing social media and cable news narrative that Americans are hopelessly divided, with a more positive message about the caring and connections that are bringing communities together. Two powerhouse groups in the "bridging divides" movement the Aspen Institute's Weave: The Social Fabric Project, and the Listen First Project recently teamed up to form a Weaving Community initiative to build unity amid the pandemic.

"I think a lot of the power and importance of this campaign is that we are serving up a counter narrative to the dominant narrative that America is likely to experience over the next six months as we head into a critical election," says Hansen.

The Weaving Community initiative has drawn a long list of influential partners and sponsors, and describes its goal as ensuring that "the pandemic drives us together, rather than apart."

The "structural reform" camp of the democracy movement continues to wage legal and policy battles on multiple fronts, but the mandate to protect mail-in balloting during the pandemic has taken center stage. Its latest alliance is a new cross-partisan coalition, dubbed VoteSafe, led by one prominent former governor from each party, Republican Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Democrat Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. VoteSafe is promoting both access to absentee ballots and public health at polling places, and has partnered with such leading groups as RepresentUs and the League of Women Voters.

The divisions pitting Americans against one another rage on, of course. Governors under pressure to open non-essential businesses with little federal guidance have faced ugly protests by armed extremists. Congress passed three economic relief bills in the early stages but lost little time bogging down yet again. The pandemic could spell years of economic and political instability, both at home and abroad.

Yet even on Capitol Hill, some see rays of hope. The recent letter to Congress that Roemer helped organize spotlighted the work of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which has worked across party lines to recommend dozens of institutional reforms to modernize and strengthen the House. These include measures to make the House more transparent, efficient and accessible, and in the long run more capable of working across partisan differences.

"You can't fix things on the economy or on our health pandemic without a functioning legislative branch, and a branch that can solve problems," says Roemer, who was ambassador to India after leaving Congress.

For now, average Americans appear to be doing a better job coming together than federal officials. But at all levels, the pandemic is simultaneously pushing Americans apart and drawing them together. For advocates of restoring a functioning democracy and bolstering civic health, the question is whether these disruptive forces will lead to more chaos and division, or create an opening for greater unity and change.

Carney is a contributing writer.

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A step back: Could the pandemic help save democracy, not trash it? - The Fulcrum

The democracy reform movement is full of scores of ideas for improving the American political system, many of them compatible with one another. But we have challenged readers of The Fulcrum to pick their favorites from among a field of 64, narrowing the options as we go. And now we're down to the Final Four.

It's time now to vote in the two semi-final matchups of the Democracy Madness tournament, which features the winners of our "regional" brackets: Voting, Money in Politics, Elections and the Best of the Rest.

On one side of the brackets, we have a matchup between the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (which won upset after upset to rise from the 11th seed in the Elections region to Final Four participant) versus always using paper ballots, which was seeded No. 1 in Best of the Rest. The compact is an agreement among states to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of each in-state winner. Paper ballots are widely seen as the premier method of guarding against election hacking.

The other half of the bracket features another top seed, undoing Citizens United as the best way to fix Money in Politics, facing off against ranked-choice elections (No. 2 seed), which made a dominating run through the Voting region. The Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC opened the door to unlimited campaign spending by corporations, unions and wealthy individuals and has since become a premier cause among campaign finance reformers. Ranked-choice voting is the most popular form of alternative voting among change advocates. It uses an instant runoff system to guarantee majority support for the winner of an election.

The final round begins Wednesday.

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Democracy Madness reaches the Final Four - The Fulcrum

H

ere we go again. Another black person killed by the US police. Another wave of multiracial resistance. Another cycle of race talk on the corporate media. Another display of diversity with neoliberal leaders, and another white backlash soon to come. Yet this time might be a turning point.

The undeniable barbaric deathof George Floyd, the inescapable vicious realities of the unequal misery of the coronavirus, the massive unemployment at Depression levels and the wholesale collapse of the legitimacy of political leadership (in both parties) are bringing down the curtain on the American empire.

The increasing militarization of US society is inseparable from its imperial policies (211 deployments of US armed forces in 67 countries since 1945). The militaristic response to the killing of Floyd tells a storyof oversized police presence, unprovoked assaults and excessive force. Ironically, the misleading debate over rioters v protesters and outside agitators v legitimate local citizens turns attention away fromhow heavy law enforcement presence fuels disrespect for the police. The stark contrast of the police response to rightwing provocateurs who show up inside and outside state capitols with guns and loaded ammunition looms large.

I recall my own experience of protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia, against hundreds of masked, armed Nazis with live ammunition in which the police stepped back and remained still and silent as we were mercilessly attacked. Without the intervention and protection of antifa, some of us would have died. Sister Heather Heyer did die. I believe the attack on any innocent person is wrong, but the focus on the protesters assaults on persons or property takes our attention away from the police killing of hundreds of black, poor and working-class people.

It also obscures the role of the repressive apparatus in preserving an order so unjust and cruel. The rule of big money, class and gender hierarchies and global militarism must be highlighted in our profound concern with anti-black police murder and brutality.

The four catastrophes Martin Luther King Jr warned us about militarism (in Asia, Africa and the Middle East), poverty (at record levels), materialism (with narcissistic addictions to money, fame and spectacle) and racism (against black and indigenous people, Muslims, Jews and non-white immigrants) have laid bare the organised hatred, greed and corruption in the country. The killing machine of the US military here and abroad has lost its authority. The profit-driven capitalist economy has lost its glow. And the glitz of the market-driven culture (including media and education) are more and more hollow.

The fundamental question at this moment is: can this failed social experiment be reformed? The political duopoly of an escalating neofascist Donald Trump-led Republican party and a fatigued Joe Biden-led neoliberal Democratic party in no way equivalent, yet both beholden to Wall Street and the Pentagon are symptoms of a decadent leadership class. The weakness of the labor movement and the present difficulty of the radical left to unite around a nonviolent revolutionary project of democratic sharing and redistribution of power, wealth and respect are signs of a society unable to regenerate the best of its past and present.Any society that refuses to eliminate or attenuate dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, mass incarceration, massive unemployment and underemployment, inadequate healthcare and its violations of rights and liberties is undesirable and unsustainable.

Yet the magnificent moral courage and spiritual sensitivity of the multiracial response to the police killing of George Floyd that now spills over into a political resistance to the legalized looting of Wall Street greed, the plundering of the planet and the degradation of women and LGBTQ+ peoples means we are still fighting regardless of the odds.

If radical democracy dies in America, let it be said of us that we gave our all-and-all as the boots of American fascism tried to crush our necks.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and leading member of Democratic Socialists of America

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A boot is crushing the neck of American democracy - The Guardian