Welcome New Visitors. This is an exciting and challenging time for independent voters and for the independent movement. Independents are now 40% of the electorate. Polls show that 41% of college students consider themselves indies as do 35% of African Americans under the age of 30.

Top Two Open Primaries Initiative on the Ballot in Arizona.

Congratulations to Arizona's Open Elections, Open Government Coalition for filing over 365,000 petition signatures (259,000 required) with the Secretary of State to put a top two nonpartisan election initiative on the ballot in November. Despite it's defeat in the election, the initiative was quite controversial and a precursor for things to come. The initiative survived a legal challenge after the state supreme court overturned a lower court ruling, saying that the citizen initiative is in

compliance with the Arizona Constitution and should move forward to the November ballot.

Independentvoting.org submitted an Amicus Brief. The Arizona League of Women Voters , one of the initiators of the suit, had published a "Pro/Con Report," which was largely a "con" statement. Independentvoting.org director of national organizing Nancy Ross and lead counsel Harry Kresky and Ted Downing of Arizonans for a Top Two Primary responded to the report in an Open Letter to the League. 

Listen here to Independentvoting.org President Jackie Salit in an interview with Communications Director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy on Top-Two Proposition: What Nonpartisan Elections Could Mean for Arizona.

Pew

Research

Center

Beyond Red vs. Blue

Independents are not Moderates.  Pew Research Center released a survey last month which was encouragingly called “Beyond Red vs. Blue.”  Encouraging, that is, for the growing number of Americans eager to find a way out of the partisanship which has come to dominate public policy making at nearly every level of government.  Read more

Jackie Salit appeared  on "FOX & Friends" where she gave an independents perspective on the budget negotiations.

Salit's view that the budget crisis further exposes the need for structural political reforms, have recently been echoed by Mickey Edwards in The Atlantic  and Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post . 

"Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations."

Mickey Edwards
"How to Turn Republicans and
Demcorats into Americans,"

The Atlantic, July/August 2011

Coverage of the
2011 National Conference of Independents is available online:

• Jackie Salit's Keynote Address
• Live edition of TALK/TALK
• Panel Discussion: Breaking in on a Partisan System

EDITOR'S NOTE:

"What we tend to see as historic are the dramatic, the explosive--as the world bears witness to events unfolding accross North Africa and the Middle East. Historical transformations, however, take (and have taken) other forms--less perceptible in their intensity, with equally uncertain outcomes."

—Dr. Omar Ali

No issue has more popularity among independents than open primaries. Open primaries allow all voters, regardless of their party affiliation, to participate in each round of voting. Learn more about the fight open primaries in the video below.

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Tea Party activists: Don't confuse them with independents. Jackie Salit documents the history of the independent movement and how its goals are not just divergent, but diametrically opposed to that of the Tea Party movement.

Urge President Obama to Fill Vacancy on FEC with an Independent. The call for President Obama to appoint an independent to the FEC is getting louder.  In December, the New York Times published a letter to the editor from IV.org president Jackie Salit and attorney Harry Kresky in which they responded to a Times editorial, "The Election Sabotage Commission."  Read their letter here. And here to read the letter sent to President Obama by IndependentVoting.org and contact the White House and your Senators.