Ballotpedia reports this week that in 2026, Alaska’s independent voters will have the chance to solidify their role as election reform pioneers by voting on two initiatives.

The Chamberlain Project, an organization I co-founded with Peter Ackerman a decade ago, has been dissolved. The Chamberlain Boards have voted to combine all of Chamberlain’s associated entities, including Americans Elect, Level the Playing Field, the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting, and Citizens to End SuperPACs, with the Foundation for Independent Voter Education (FIVE),

Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt sat down with former RNC chair and MSNBC commentator Michael Steele to talk about the difference between the partisan politics in DC versus the more pragmatic outcomes at the local level.

Indiana lawmakers will consider a bill filed in the state's House of Representatives that seeks to the close the state's primary elections and condition full voting rights on joining one of two major political parties. 

While all eyes are on the speakers vote Friday, a bipartisan coalition of US lawmakers plan to re-introduce legislation that would represent the largest expansion of voting rights in modern US history.

This was a big year for the open primaries movement. Seven state-level campaigns and one municipal. Millions of voters declaring their support for open primaries. New leaders emerging across the country. Primary elections for the first time at the center of the national reform debate.

In 2024, a historic number of statewide initiatives appeared on the ballot to open primary elections to all voters and candidates. Most of the initiatives failed, but reformers were successful in Washington DC. 

The recount in Alaska over Ballot Measure 2 is complete. The state's Republican Party requested it after voters rejected the initiative and chose to keep their nonpartisan election system by a narrow margin. But as predicted on IVN, this margin wasn't narrow enough for the results to change.

In 2024, Gallup found for the first time in the history of its polling that more than half of the electorate identified as independent. The biggest driver of this political shift are young voters, who enter voting age more independent than the generation before them.

The Alaska election results have officially been certified and despite calls from Measure 2 supporters for a recount of the ballot initiative's loss by 664 votes, the Alaska Division of Elections re-checked its work before certification and found worse news for them.