Staples High School Class of 1976 alum Jan Carpenter is a retired financial executive. She graduated from Boston College, and spent her career working in the consulting and advertising business in New York and San Francisco.
She has been an active civic volunteer, and recently became involved in political efforts to improve how we govern ourselves and improve our democracy. Jan writes:
Feeling stressed from the toxic political news of the day? Here is a bit of stress reduction.
I am a co-state leads for America’s new Forward Party. We don’t take a position on traditional party platforms like gun control, etc.). Rather, we believe that our political system is broken and we need to fix it.
We will not run a candidate for president in 2024. Instead, we are trying to get regular folks elected at local and state levels who want to work together with grace and tolerance, advocate for compromise and civility, and want democracy reform.
That reform takes many forms, including voter reform (ranked choice voting, for example), open primaries, and independent redistricting.
As part of this work, I am lucky to have been exposed to many grassroots organizations fighting for these sorts of reforms that few have ever heard about.
I want to share with Westport 3 of them that I found especially interesting and promising, in the fight for reform and a better future.
Citizen Assemblies. The concept involves taking a thorny community issue and, in an effort to move in a positive direction, bringing together everyday citizens by lottery to work together over a period of time to come up with a recommendation.
Participants attend a set number of days/meetings (and typically get paid for doing so), get to know each other, hear from experts on both sides of an issue (also typically paid), then vote on a decision, which must be a supermajority (2/3) vote.
Their decision (in writing) goes back to the legislative body that needs to vote on the topic. That body could vote against the recommendation of the CA, but would need concrete reasoning. (Click here to learn more.)
Citizen Assemblies:
- Get citizens involved in helping make decisions for the community
- Help provide information for elected officials to assist in decision-making
- Offer information to defend decisions; takes “political maneuvering” and (in many cases) vitriol out of politics.
Citizen Assemblies have been used in a variety of places, including:
- Ireland to decide same-sex marriage
- Petaluma, California during debate on the use of park/farm land
- Michigan to review the response to COVID.
Westport might be a great maverick/leader, by using CAs to address difficult problems (there is no shortage of them these days).
It’s probably too late for Long Lots (though if thought about earlier, might have worked beautifully), but maybe not too late for discussions surrounding downtown.
Open Primaries. Connecticut’s closed primaries means that only Democrats get to vote in Democratic primaries, and Republicans in theirs.
Yet these are not “clubs” that we think of when we think of closed memberships. These are public primaries, which we all pay for.
Most Connecticut voters identify as independent — yet most voters here do not get to participate in primaries. Some say this results in more extreme candidates, less competition, and less incentive to appeal to a broader part of the electorate.
A group is trying to fix that. Click here for details; view the video below:
The Good Party. It’s incredibly difficult to run and get elected as an independent candidate today. This is particularly frustrating since (as noted above), most of us are independent.
This group is trying to fix that. The Good Party is not actually a party at all; rather, it’s a group that has come together to help people at local levels to run as independents.
They are building a movement (and offering free technical support) to end America’s 2-party political dysfunction. Click here and also here for details.
I hope “06880” readers find this interesting and encouraging. To learn more about the Forward Party, click here.
Readers: Would the Forward Party work in Westport? Click “Comments” to discuss. As always, please use your full, real name. And be civil!
(“06880” is your source for all local politics: Democratic, Republican, independent and Forward Party. Please click here to support our work. Thank you!)
