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Pope Francis Tasks World leaders On Electoral Reform

Addressing the 70th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday afternoon, Pope Francis has called on all world leaders to ensure electoral reform in their respective countries.

The Pope said he was worried by the insensitivity of some world leaders who fail to fulfill their electoral promises during electioneering campaigns, urging them to desist from the act and always have the interest of people at heart.

He made it known that electoral reform would go a long way to solve some of the pressing problems that the world is having today.

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2015/09/202015/09/17

Eagle: Voting Machines a Mess, $1 Billion Needed

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300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

Report: Voting machines in most states so decrepit they could affect election outcomes in 2016

EXTRACT

Older machines can also have serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today. For example, Virginia recently decertified a voting system used in 24 percent of precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data[.]” Smaller problems can also shake public confidence. Several election officials mentioned “flipped votes” on touch screen machines, where a voter touches the name of one candidate, but the machine registers it as a selection for another.

2015/09/192015/09/17

VotePact: For Sane People Who Want to Bury the Two-Party Duopoly

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Vote Pact

How principled progressives work with conscientious conservatives.

Disenchanted Republicans should pair up with disenchanted Democrats and both vote for third party or independent candidates they more genuinely want instead of cancelling out each other by voting for each of the two establishment parties. This would siphon off votes by twos from each of the establishment parties.

2015/09/132015/09/12

John Steiner: Proposal for an Independent Primary

Access, Cultural Intelligence

Overview of an emerging possibility.

Issue No. 26: “The Antidote to a Broken Political System”

In a piece for the Daily Beast Monday, James K. Glassman, former Under Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration, made an impassioned – and, in our view, logical – case for a separate online national primary contest to choose a single independent candidate to go up against the Republican and Democratic nominees in the three final presidential debates in the fall of 2016.

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2015/09/072015/09/13

Robert Steele: Open Power Electoral Reform — Open Letter to Tom Steyer with Proposed Action Plan for Re-Asserting Public Sovereignty

Access, Cultural Intelligence

MEMORANDUM

Subject: Electoral Reform Possibilities in 2015 for 2016

UPDATE 2: Refined after second meeting of electoral reform activists.

Full Text & Downloadable Document Below the Fold

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2015/09/012015/09/01

Baroness Shirley Williams: American Democracy for Sale — A Warning to Us All …

Access, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

American democracy is up for sale, and it’s a warning to us all

By the end of June this year, $388m had been contributed to the campaigns of presidential candidates in 2016

It is imperative in a democracy that those opposed to the government of the day can cherish the prospect of peacefully changing its leaders and its policies. Otherwise the alternatives are some form of violent action, a revolution or a coup.

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2015/08/312015/08/31

Robert Steele: Death of a Nation — All Crazy, All Black, All Prisoners [Deal with It!]

Access, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Death of a Nation –All Crazy, All Black, All Prisoners

Robert David Steele

Donald Trump, speaking of recent murders, says we do not have a gun problem; we have a mental health problem. As scary as Donald Trump can be in his encouragement of white supremacists who favor “open season” on illegal immigrants,[i] there is a great deal about The Donald that is authentic and relevant to our current situation. He’s right. He has also failed to complete the thought. These are not individual mental health problems; these are part of a national mental health problem. For over a decade I have been sounding the alarm on “cognitive dissonance,” which is what you get when you allow the 1% to screw over 99% of the public at home and abroad, 99% of the time.

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