News & Insights

Redistricting controlled by state legislators or state political party leaders contributes to polarization, decreases competitiveness, and sometimes gives legislative control to the party with fewer votes. As these problems have intensified across the nation, reformers and policymakers in a growing number of states have launched new redistricting models that significantly improved outcomes and provided broader inspiration that American democracy challenges can be overcome.

Extreme partisan gerrymandering is now freely permitted in North Carolina. It may soon be in other states to come, and it has been for federal courts since the 2019 Rucho v Common Cause decision, which reached similar conclusions for similarly flawed reasons. Congress needs to act.

Democracy in the balance: Election and voter issues continue to be of grave concern. Trevor Potter will explore peak pandemic voter access expansion policies, the rise of the “election denier,” as well as election manipulation efforts and post-2020 efforts to roll back voter access. Potter will provide the CLC response. ERN’s Kevin Johnson moderates.

This opinion piece by ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson and Senior Fellow Al Vanderklipp originally appeared on The Independent Voter News Network.

The nation is watching Wisconsin as a state Supreme Court race with major implications for democratic outcomes—at both state and national levels—becomes an all-out spending war on behalf of the liberal and conservative candidates. No one expects the record-breaking spending or heated partisan rhetoric to die down until the race in this crucial swing state is decided.

ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson speaks to the Role of Social Innovation in Democracy Conference hosted by Stanford Social Innovation Review. This conference took place March 16–18, 2023.

Our efforts as part of the redistricting coalition in New Mexico contributed to legislative committee passage of HJR 1, a joint resolution for an independent redistricting commission.

This article, which cites ERN’s policy brief on a replacement system for judicial elections, was originally published in the Wisconsin Examiner.

In 2022, Congress was able to find common ground on an issue that destabilized U.S. politics. This unusually cooperative effort to update the Electoral Count Act of 1887 offers a path to a less divisive election ecosystem nationwide including redistricting reform.

The midterm elections have raised hopes that democracy-distortion fever is breaking at last. Prominent swing state candidates who ran on election lies lost because of it. Local officials trying to block results they didn't like were easily brought to heel. Warnings from pundits about an underground right-wing takeover of local election infrastructure proved wildly exaggerated. In short, a...