Some Starter Sites for Sharing

• How to find and track your representatives, legislation, and money in politics
• Links about the priority issues of open primaries, ranked-choice voting, gerrymandering, National Popular Vote initiative, and mail-in and mobile voting

Congress has a 20% approval rating, but incumbents get re-elected about 94% of the time (see why). To get the reps you want in Congress, start with your state’s laws: support the national popular vote, open primaries, ranked-choice voting/instant runoffs, and ending gerrymandering in your state. These issues are the starting place for making Congress work for us again. They remove obstacles to voting out members who work for corporations instead of their voters.

GovTrack.us. An excellent site for finding your reps in the US Congress, learning what legislation is on deck, and much more.

Congress.gov Another place to search for national-level legislative bills, by keywords or text. Set the first dropdown menu to either Current Congress or for All Congresses (for when you want to look for say, the text of a previously introduced bill that should be re-introduced).
You can sign up for alerts so you can track action on a bill. See the Be heard page on this site for tips on making sure your reps in Congress know how you want them to vote on the bills that matter to you.

Find How Your Representative Voted at Voteview (Voteview has an AWESOME beta site replacing an older one). Search for a rep’s name, then click on their entry to load their voting record. Open some bills in the list to see what they’re about. On balance, is this person representing your best interests, or just feeding at the trough?

Follow the money with OpenSecrets.org.

Working at the state level to support open primaries and ranked-choice voting/instant runoffs, and end gerrymandering:

• Get familiar with your state’s official legislature site: In your browser’s search window, just type in the name of your state and the words “state legislature”. Example search: Idaho state legislature. Find your reps, see how they voted, search for keywords to bring up legislation you care about.
• Ditch the Electoral College. Support a National Popular Vote. The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC. This site makes it easy to find your state, see whether it has passed the National Popular Vote Bill, and best of all, to directly access a form to reach out to your representatives about it.
• The Primary Problem is an excellent article from Unite America describing how closed, party-centric primaries result in a 94% and higher re-election rate for incumbents in Congress, despite a 20% approval rating. BOTH major parties have closed primaries in some states, that have to be opened to all voters.
• Solving the Primary Problem in Our Democracy is a terrific 13m video by Nick Troiano, who ran for office in Pennsylvania and hit a series of obstacles including gerrymandering and closed party primaries. The video has timestamps so you can jump around.
• Forward Party candidate Andrew Yang and veteran Mike Escobar make the case for open primaries and ranked-choice voting in this NBC news clip.
• Alaska has both open primaries and ranked-choice voting at the state level. They like it.
• Make sure to vote in primaries, open or closed, at every level of government. Only 10-15% of voters take the time, and they are the best place to make candidates work hard and commit to you!
• Learn more about ranked choice voting.
• Is your state one of the worst for gerrymandering? Check out Princeton’s Redistricting Report Card map (from the end of 2023).
• How to tackle gerrymandering in your state with a well-designed Independent Redistricting Commission. Read about what makes an effective independent redistricting commission at Campaign Legal Center here.
• “Do Independent Redistricting Commissions Really Prevent Gerrymandering? Yes, They Do.” Campaign Legal Center.
• Why not test out mobile voting in some local elections and see how it does? You know who doesn’t want mobile voting? People who don’t want you to vote.
• We try not to make issues about individual parties, but in this case it can’t be helped, because of the scale of the Republicans’ efforts at voter suppression. The Trump administration and the GOP are trying to take away mail-in voting, says Democracy Docket. “The GOP made big gains in mail-in voting in 2024, after mounting a high-profile campaign to tell supporters to take advantage of it. But the actions of the party’s lawyers told a different story. The GOP — including the Republican National Committee (RNC) — filed 24 lawsuits in 2024 to restrict mail-in voting in battleground states, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker.” In other states, representatives have introduced legislation to prevent voting by mail. Some states don’t allow mail-in voting even now, unless you have an excuse. It’s like being a kid who has to take a note to school. Make sure your state gets and keeps early voting and mail-in voting, and counts all ballots that are postmarked by election day.

Some pro-democracy organizations worth a look (this list is a work in progress)

GenZ for Change. Young and energetic? Maybe check in with them and see if they have any action items going.

Common Cause. There are lots of useful pages at the Common Cause site.

Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.

Unite America. Country over party.

Some Laws that Have to Go

Brennan Center for Justice: Addressing Citizens United. About the odious Supreme Court ruling that (falsely) declares corporations to be people and money to be speech, allowing the ultra-wealthy to buy and hold Congressional seats. The how-to-fix for Citizens United seems to be a Constitutional Amendment. Difficult, but eventually possible.

Brian Lehrer interview with Elie Mystal, about his book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws that are Ruining America. This is a must-hear interview, unless you’re an unapologetic bigot. Mystal explains that he’s not trying to persuade people who don’t agree with his perspective on civil rights and social justice: “The point of my book and the point of my career is to get people who already agree with me, to get people who are already trying to pull the rope in the same direction that I’m trying to pull it, towards a more fair, more equal and more just society. To get us all to pull the rope maybe a little bit more efficiently. Maybe a little bit smarter. Maybe a little bit harder.”