Daily Resource Highlight - 1/31/2022

Posted by on January 31, 2022 at 4:17 PM

Below are the highlights and featured resources of this past week’s Daily* Resource.

January 25, 2022 - Podcasts Worthy of Your Time While [Insert Routine]

Back in October, I mentioned how I love listening to podcasts on long drives. Of course, this isn’t the only time and place to listen to podcasts. You might, for example, listen to podcasts while cooking, cleaning, working out, gardening, or while doing one of a million other mundane tasks.

Regardless of when or where, though, there’s a good chance that you do listen to podcasts. That’s why we’ve inserted a new section below specifically for “Podcasts.” Bridge Alliance members are routinely producing high quality, informative podcasts, and we want to make sure you know about them!

For instance…

And of course the Democracy Group, which is a project of the McCourtney Institute at Penn State, continues to host podcasts from throughout the healthy self-governance movement.

Be sure to check them out!

January 27, 2022 - Election Reform We Can All Get Behind?

A group of prominent think tanks, including Bridge Alliance members R Street Institute, Issue One, and Unite America, claim to have done the seemingly impossible! They have developed a set of election reforms that can achieve bipartisan support. 

The new report, entitled “Prioritizing Achievable Federal Election Reform,” sets forth a wide array of recommendations at the federal and state levels on voter registration, voting, vote counting, and cybersecurity / physical security. It also surveys state election laws and shows widespread adoption of many of the measures, including complete or near complete adoption by politically diverse states such as Colorado, Georgia, Arizona, and Hawaii.

 Given that list of states, I know that many of you will be skeptical of this report, and we encourage that skepticism! As I’ve said many, many times, we are not here to tell you what you should / should not support, but rather to empower you to make those decisions yourself as an American. That’s why we’ve also encouraged you to learn about alternative voting systems like Approval Voting (presented as a solution to crowded primaries) and Ranked Choice Voting (reviewing NYC’s implementation), as well as the various other reforms being adopted nationwide (The Fulcrum).

At the same time, we want to recognize the significance of what these organizations have created. By working together, they have potentially accomplished two significant goals: (1) identified a broad set of reforms that could strengthen our democracy and have cross-partisan support and (2) agreed on a method of enforcement that could attract support from both progressives and conservatives (i.e. heavily incentivizing, but not forcing, states to adopt the measures). 

And on an entirely separate note, we would like to welcome SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins to the Bridge Alliance! Be sure to check out their work and sign up for their upcoming event tomorrow at 4 PM ET “Making Your Voice Count: Activism, Voting, and the Democratic Ideal.”

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