Most election reform debates focus on how we vote: ranked choice voting, open primaries, the electoral college, etc. But what about who runs elections, and whether they can be trusted to do so impartially?
In our latest Democracy Lab episode, we sat down with Kevin Johnson, founder and executive director of the Election Reformers Network, to talk about one of the most underleveraged problems in American democracy: the structural conflicts of interest baked into how we govern elections.
Kevin brings a rare lens to this work. With decades of building democratic institutions in post-authoritarian countries and a read on what those new democracies chose not to replicate from the US system. We cover partisan secretaries of state, local election boards, the ballot initiative battlefield, and why crisis has historically been the price of reform.
🎧 Listen here now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify