News & Insights

Originally published by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. By Steven Rosenfeld. As 2022's primaries approach, an unprecedented wave of public and private efforts are underway to foster trust in election operations and election officials in response to ongoing claims by Donald Trump and his supporters, including many officeholders and candidates, that...

Tina Peters says she was just looking into potential election fraud. Prosecutors say the county election official in western Colorado was involved in an illegal election security breach. Even as she faces criminal charges, Peters is continuing to spread falsehoods about the integrity of the 2020 election, which experts have said was the most secure in U.S. history...

In the last three years, election administration and election officials have been pulled into the political fray. Most election systems are designed to be led by nonpartisan experts with the best interests of all voters in mind. But today, these systems and experts must contend with growing partisan polarization, political vitriol, and misinformation.

ERN is proud to announce that we have joined the Bridge Alliance, a coalition of ~100 organizations working together to promote healthy self-governance in our democratic republic. This group of allies works across and outside of established ideological boundaries to support the democracy ecosystem. This move reaffirms a key tenet of ERN's theory of systemic...

This post by ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson originally appeared on The Fulcrum. It points out that elections in 2022 for secretary of state featured well-funded "stop the steal" candidates who appeared ready to undermine elections to help their side win.

Here in America we don’t have the same range of parties as in the U.K. — in part because our Congress is undersized, with only one-seventh the number of representatives per citizen. But we do have political groupings that have trouble gaining representation in proportion to their share of the population.

With partisan loyalists aiming to control election administration, it's clear that America's antiquated system of politically affiliated election officials needs reform.

This post by ERN Executive Director Kevin Johnson originally appeared on The Hill. With Jan. 6 dominating headlines last week, Senate Republicans raised a topic they are not often associated with: election reform. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) and others proposed fixing the Electoral Count Act (ECA), the archaic law governing the count of...

Julie Anderson, who is vying for the role of Washington State's secretary of state, says she likes "a challenge." But even in a state that's elected independent-minded secretaries of state in the past, Anderson said, trying to get elected as a nonpartisan candidate within the US's two-party political system is inherently an uphill battle...

This post by Kevin Johnson and Al Vanderklipp originally appeared on The Fulcrum. Johnson and Vanderklipp are, respectively, the executive director and research fellow for the Election Reformers Network and the co-authors of Nonpartisanship Works: How Lessons from Canada Can Reestablish Trust in U.S. Election Administration. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has repeated the call for his states legislature to seize...