New York politics has been rocked by back-to-back bribery scandals. State Senator Malcolm Smith and several New York City Republican Party leaders have been indicted and charged with a scheme to enable Smith, a Democrat, to enter the Republican Party primary for Mayor. And Eric Stevenson, a State Assemblyman, was indicted for allegedly trading the introduction of legislation for cash. Stevenson was “stung” through evidence provided from a wire worn by fellow Democratic Assemblyman, Nelson Castro.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara appears to be conducting himself in a professional manner and without a political agenda in prosecuting these cases. However, the nexus of our elections, our government and the criminal justice system raise profound concerns. It appears that unbeknownst to voters and his fellow legislators, Assemblyman Castro won reelection while under indictment, wired and doing undercover work for law enforcement. What information of no legitimate interest to prosecutors but personally or politically sensitive was transmitted? How will the revelation that your fellow Assembly Member may be wired impact on the legislative process?

The U.S. Attorney is doing his job. The reform of our political process is ours. In my view, the best antidote to corruption is democracy. A political process that is transparent and invites the participation of all the people is less vulnerable to corruption than one which depends on the authority of a handful of people. The process by which the Republican Party determines who can run in its primary is a good example. Under New York Election Law, Smith could run in the Republican primary, despite his Democratic enrollment, only with the support of three of the five Republican county chairs in New York City. These gatekeepers hesitated and vacillated and, as Smith’s prospects dimmed, he is alleged to have resorted to bribery to obtain passage through the gateway.

There are two kinds of reforms being floated: those designed to make apprehension, prosecution and conviction easier and the penalties higher, and those that address the structural weaknesses in our political process that breed corruption. I am wary of the first approach — its claims to deterrence notwithstanding. The U.S. Attorney already has some pretty powerful tools at his disposal. It is proposed that we extend them to elected officials, such as local DA’s or the State Attorney General. That would place them in the hands of people who are much closer to the corrupt process itself and more likely to be tempted to use their power for partisan ends. I like that there is distance between Mr. Bharara and those he is charged with prosecuting.

Governor Cuomo has proposed that in addition to bribery being illegal, it would be a crime for any government employee to fail to report attempted bribery. In other words, every government employee would be required to become a snitch. Mr. Cuomo is quoted in the April 10, 2013, New York Times as stating, “When it comes to public integrity, you can’t have enough police officers on the beat, right? You can’t have enough sets of eyes.” What values are sacrificed to accomplish that? What are the regimes that have taken that approach?

The other set of reforms, restructuring the political process, bear close scrutiny as well. One approach is to focus on the money, for example, a crackdown on lobbyists. And advocates of campaign finance reform are calling for extending the New York City system of public funding statewide, on the theory that if you publically finance campaigns for public office then, somehow, legislators will be less likely to take money in exchange for political favors. I am not sure I understand the logic here. For one thing, the Republican Party scandal took place in New York City. Second, the money used in the alleged bribes likely was intended for personal use, not for reelection campaigns. There is also a renewed call to do away with “member items,” where legislative leaders dole out money to legislators who do their bidding to fund projects in their districts.

These “cures,” in my opinion, do not go far enough and ignore the role of political parties in fostering the corrupt culture in Albany and New York City.

The speaker or majority leader of each house is the leader of his or her party caucus, and has responsibility for advancing the party’s agenda. The withholding of member items is a powerful tool in enforcing party discipline.

Campaign finance reform, as presently constituted, also reinforces party power. The New York City public funding program provides candidates with money to use in a primary and, if they win, they get another infusion of money for the general election. Candidates who do not run in primaries get only one dose of funding. These and other advantages, not available to independent and most minor party candidates, enhance the chances of success of major party candidates in the general election. Any public funding system must treat all candidates (major party, minor party and independent) equally.

The Republican scandal exposes how the role of parties, as gate-keepers in the political process, leads to corruption. There is a solution. If you eliminate the “gateway,” then no one can charge a candidate to pass through it. That’s what nonpartisan municipal elections would do. It is a reform that has been fought tooth and nail by the parties and their networks. Perhaps the single positive thing to come out of the current and still unfolding scandal is a renewed call by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Citizens Union and the New York City Independence Party to do away with party primaries and replace them with a nonpartisan system. In a nonpartisan system, candidates run without the authorization of any party and are not competing for a party line. And all voters make their choice in a first-round primary. The top two finishers, regardless of their party, compete in the general election. This reform allows full participation by the City’s one million voters who are independents and members of minor parties in the crucial first round of voting. The States of California and Washington have adopted a similar system (called “top-two“) for all state offices and for election to the U.S. Congress.

There are other pro-democracy reforms that expand democracy and help break the hold of the party system on electoral outcomes. They are term limits, same-day voter registration and early voting. Reforms that allow more people to vote and make it easier to do so, along with those that reduce the power of incumbency, can break the hold the parties have on the primary outcomes. Turnout is low in party-primary elections (10 to 15 percent of party members, likely 5 to 10 percent of the electorate in New York City) and is skewed toward party activists and municipal union members on the Democratic Party side and Tea Party activists on the Republican Party side. Closed partisan primaries (the norm for state and federal elections in most states) make elected officials beholden to narrow ideologies and powerful special interests. And given the value of a party line under this system, it increases the possibilities for corruption.

The fight against corruption and the fight to expand democracy go hand and glove. If we do not recognize this, we allow those who seek greater control and less democracy to increase their power and the power of the parties they lead. This creates possibilities for corruption on an even larger scale.

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The Obama campaign team did everything right. That’s the consensus among journalists, consultants, and the political class. I’ve watched some of them literally swoon over maps of the 50 states showing how the President’s campaign surgically identified pockets of “blue voters”, marooned in “red territory” and drew them to the polls in sufficient numbers to carry a battleground state.

An impressive operation, surely, even if it reminds me—in a spooky way—of the satellite imaging that helps our military track terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Amazing technology and our obsession with data, fused with the time-tested political machinery of the political parties, has produced a slice-and-dice culture of campaigning where the “micro” rules and where the geeks are inheriting the earth. Or, at least they’re helping the parties maintain control of it.

I am an Obama supporter—one of the independents who voted for him both times. (Our numbers dropped from about 20 million in 2008 to about 16 million in 2012.) I’m very glad he won re-election for many, many reasons. And the methodology of the “micro” surely enabled Obama’s political victory. But I worry that the reductionism of micro-targeting—such as making sure that the 200 voting-age Latinos who moved to Broward County in Florida got the right mailer-obscures the political meaning of the macro. In the old days, we used to call this not being able to see the forest for the trees.

In this election, one forest that was missed was the 40 percent of Americans who disalign from the Democrats and Republicans and call themselves independents. Independent voters were an indispensable part of the Obama coalition in 2008. He carried 52 percent of independents nationwide—an 8-point margin over Republican John McCain. That post-partisan coalition provided both the numbers and the heart of the 2008 campaign.

But after the election the Democratic Party, the senior partner in this new and fragile coalition, established its own set of terms for future collaboration with independents. Post-partisanship was simply not their agenda. For obvious reasons—namely that it thrives on partisanship—the Democratic Party was not about to open up a process that they, together with Republicans, currently control.

While leaders of the progressive wing of the independent movement—myself among them—attempted to show the Obama team that this anti-independent posture would cost them support, party stalwarts held their ground and ran the table. The idea that President Obama should appoint some independents to the Federal Election Commission, or authorize a task force to consider ways to remedy the second class status of independent voters (who are locked out at many levels of the election process) was a non-starter. Instead, independents had to hew to the Democrats’ framing of what is troubling America.

Not surprisingly, independents’ support for Obama diminished by 7 points. Overall, Obama polled 45 percent of the independent vote; Romney, 50 percent. Of the 30 states where exit polling on political identity was conducted, Obama carried independents in 14, almost half, including the crucial swing states of New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Florida and Iowa. In Michigan, Obama and Romney virtually split the independent vote. Independents as a whole did not abandon Obama, even if the Democratic Party preferred to win the election on its traditional demographics, rather than by sustaining a new kind of anti-partisan coalition.

Notably, Romney was not able to mobilize independent support sufficient to alter the outcome, though towards the end of the campaign, in a last ditch effort, he ardently promoted the need to transcend partisanship and bring change to America. Two years ago, in the 2010 midterms, independent voters broke by almost 60 percent for GOP congressional candidates, giving Republicans control of the House. Thus, in 2012 the Republicans dropped nearly 10 points among independents. (Word to the wise: independents are not especially drawn to major league capitalists unless they are independent, anti-establishment, and pro-reform. Romney was none of these.)

With the Presidential election now behind us, the unseen forest—the more historical macro forces—resurface. Among these, of course, is the growing gap between rich and poor. Another is the growing disaffection with partisan politics-as-usual. And another is the seeming inability of the system to adequately address either.

The Democrats have settled on an electoral strategy based on appealing to Americans on the basis of identity (ethnicity, gender, etc.) and the fear that the Republicans will shred the safety net. But sheer demographics and maintaining the status quo is not enough. Creative and innovative approaches to social and economic problems that are desperately needed, and are being worked on in the nonprofit sector, outside the party dominated governmental apparatus, can only thrive in the fresh air of a non-partisan political culture.

Will second-term President Obama, free of the constraints of running for re-election and thereby free of the partisan norms imposed on him by his own party, become the independent President he was first elected to be? The answer turns, in no small part, on his reaching out to the independent movement and to its progressive wing.

Independents, the 40 percent—the forest—are both the opposition to and the product of the current gridlocked state of affairs, the tool and the result. They are slowly becoming organized, not as a party, but as a bottom-up force for post-partisan change.

In Act IV, Scene I, the Third Apparition tells Shakespeare’s Macbeth he will never be vanquished “until Great Birnam wood … shall come against him.” In other words, until the forest itself comes to Macbeth’s fortress. Macbeth is comforted because he believes that could never occur. Of course, it eventually does. Which is one reason why it’s never a good idea to take your eyes off the forest.

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The parade of luminaries is over, confetti and balloons swept away, the parties and the presidential candidates having defined themselves for the American people. Both parties told us that America is at a crossroads, a hinge moment for the future of our country. And yet, the language, the themes, the issues and the framings — even the confetti — were all echoes of the past, echoes of a time when rational men (and a few women) could provide rational answers to serious questions.

The problem, however, is that the world in which we now live and in which America more or less thrives is a world that seems increasingly irrational. We’re the richest society on the planet but jobs are scarce. Technology is extraordinarily advanced but the human capacity to prevent violence is diminishing. Every fact known to man is available on a handheld device, but our educational models are antiquated — based on training kids in knowledge acquisition — not on the development of their creativity and critical thinking. What’s more, we seem to be unable to create a national consensus on the burning question of how to develop America’s economic strength in the face of serious adversity. A friend and unorthodox supply side economist Jude Wanniski once asked, “How can there be so much poverty when we have so many Nobel Prize winning economists?” A sensible question, to be sure. Maybe we should question the Nobel standards, or the brute vicissitudes of capitalism. Either way, rationality and coherency seem to have made a sweeping exit from the world stage.

No wonder 40 percent of Americans are neither Democrats nor Republicans but are Independents. They feel the waning of traditional political categories and do not trust that the political parties know what to do.

The American political parties persist, nonetheless, in offering their respective truths. For Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, a restoration of the prosperous America we once knew is just around the bend. Really? Given the instability of the financial markets, and the one-sidedness of wealth creation where the gap between rich and poor keeps growing, that’s not so easy to believe.

I liked Bill Clinton’s “country boy” soliloquy on the lies and logical inconsistencies of the Republicans at the Democrats’ convention, and his appeals to being “in this together” rather than everyone being on their own. But I couldn’t erase the memory of his White House having repudiated the entreaties of the independent political movement of the 1990s — ignited by Ross Perot — which culminated in the left/right coalition that became the Reform Party. This unorthodox movement opposed Clinton’s opening the floodgates of globalization and deregulation. It called for political reforms to ‘de-partisanize’ the electoral and governmental process. If the Independents of that decade had prevailed, perhaps the economic collapse of 2008 would not have been so extreme and the partisanship which engulfs us would not be so paralyzing.

During the recent decade, Independents have become the largest bloc of voters in the country, and the power of their collective “swing” rivals that of baseball’s most famous sluggers. Independents gave Barack Obama the Democratic nomination in 2008 in 33 open primary and caucus states where non-aligned voters were permitted, and then backed him by an eight-point margin over Republican John McCain in the general election. Obama was not only America’s first black President; he was America’s first independent president, as John Heilemann, the co-author of Game Change, wrote shortly after the election.

Time has passed since then. The Barack Obama we saw at the Democratic Convention was a president trying to apply his considerable talent, intelligence and commitment to bring order and coherence to an incoherent time, a time in which the dysfunction of our political process is more exposed than ever. But Independents, and many other Americans, are not necessarily looking for order. They’re looking for re-order. They want something other than strict party politics, something other than parties-as-we-know-them. Something Independent.

As the head of a national organization of independent voters, IndependentVoting.org, I am frequently asked which candidate independents will vote for in November. I honestly don’t know. What’s more, it’s hard to tell whether independent turnout will match 2008, when Independents were 29 percent of the electorate. Why? Because the parties are dead set against recognizing the Independent 40 percent who have, in a very personal way, made a statement about the depth of dysfunction and partisanship by declaring their independence, irrespective of who they vote for.

Pollster Frank Luntz put it well in a conversation with Charlie Rose last week when he said, “The problem is neither candidate is speaking to them in the way they want to be spoken to or talking to them with the words they want to hear.” That may be because the parties don’t understand us. Or, because they prefer to win the election without us. Perhaps both.

Luntz’ admonition echoes my own and should be particularly resonant for President Obama. He came to Washington as an Independent. Though it might unsettle the parties, the partisans, and the political order — he can still lead as one. But to do so, he has to defy some conventional wisdom and connect with these more unconventional and independent times.

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There’s an unanalyzed section of Mitt Romney’s remarks at the Florida fundraiser last May — the ones that were captured on video and have been the subject of a campaign and media mega-frenzy.

Toward the end of the now infamous statement that he’ll never get the votes of the 47 percent of Americans “who are dependent upon government,” Romney added, “What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center, that are independents, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon, in some cases, emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what he looks like.”

Poor Mitt. The number of misconceptions, misunderstandings and miscalculations about independent voters contained in these 47 words rivals his negation of the 47 percent.

First, Romney suggests that at least some independents vote on the basis of whether they like someone. I won’t argue that on the merits, because likability is a rare commodity in politics. Doing what it takes to win often involves doing destructive things that make you unlikeable. But, if you accept Romney’s premise that likability is an outsize factor for independent voters, he should be concerned. A Washington Post-ABC News national poll last week found that 56 percent of independents think Obama seems more likable, versus 28 percent for Romney.

But setting likability aside, when Romney characterizes independents as “in the center” he repeats a fundamental error made by many partisan politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle. Independents are not “in the center” — that would put them in between the two parties. They are instead “other than” the two parties. They’re independent because they don’t like parties, or the gridlock and partisanship they foment.

The policy views of independents range from right to left, and they often mix and match viewpoints in unorthodox ways. To categorize them as “in the center,” is to miss the essential point of why independents are independents. They’re a swath of Americans who believe the parties distort political discourse, limit political thinking and cater to special interests.

What’s more, the number of independents in this country isn’t 5 to 10 percent. It’s greater than 40 percent.

That number is growing, and no party or politician has a lock on this anti-partisan force. Independents want a less partisan system, which is why they consistently support nonpartisan reforms that downsize the power of political parties. Pollsters rarely ask about that.

Pollsters, however, do ask whether voters favor a government that emphasizes individual responsibility over shared responsibility. In the latest Quinnipiac University poll in three swing states — Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin — independents favor individual more than shared responsibility. Yet, in Colorado, where the sentiment in favor of individual responsibility was highest among all voters, independents favor Obama over Romney. Go figure.

Independent voters have made their presence felt in recent political cycles, including the midterms in 2010 and the 2008 presidential race, when independents propelled Barack Obama to the Democratic nomination via open primary and caucus states. Then, in November, they backed Obama over John McCain by 8 points. Obama is not only America’s first black president. Many regarded him as America’s first independent president.

He could do more to lead like one. Last week, Obama gave a candid assessment of the politics of governing. “The most important lesson I’ve learned is you can’t change Washington from the inside,” he said. “You can only change it from the outside.” He’s right, of course. And independents are America’s political outsiders.

With Nov. 6 on the horizon many questions remain about this crucial voting bloc. Who will independents back in the 2012 presidential race? Will the turnout by independents match 2008, when nonaligned voters were 29 percent of the electorate? One thing remains clear: The parties don’t understand independents, and they might prefer to win the election without us.

Ironically, the firestorm last week over Romney’s remarks center on his accusations that a culture of dependency on government has eclipsed half the nation. In the opinion of most independents, there is a culture of dependency in America, but it’s not the one that Romney described. It’s the culture of dependency on the political parties, where the parties define the issues, make the rules and pursue partisan power no matter the cost to the country. That’s the dependency that independents want to transform.

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Michael Lewis is an imposing man. Six-foot-six, 340 pounds, barrel-chested, he looks like someone who could crush an opponent without even a sideways glance. Lewis played semipro football in his younger days. Today he is married, with two young daughters, and has worked as a prelitigation specialist in the financial credit industry. It’s a business that Lewis feels uncomfortable about. “It’s hard to make a living off of other people’s misfortune,” he says in a gentle voice that seems at odds with his physical stature. He’d like to change careers. But the economy being what it is, it’s hard to make that change especially in a place like Kentucky, where jobs are scarce and wages are low.

Michael Lewis is an independent. When you talk with him, you realize that it’s as much an attitude, a posture, a sensibility, as it is a political position. He doesn’t like political parties; he feels they have too much control. He wants independent voters to have more political power. Kentucky is a “closed primary” state— meaning candidates are nominated through primary elections in which only party members can vote, not independents.

Lewis took up the cause of open primaries in 2008, after he met a group of local activists working with IndependentVoting.org to introduce a bill into the Kentucky legislature to allow independents to vote in primary contests. The bill was defeated in committee, but its sponsor, Representative Jimmy Higdon of Lebanon, a Republican, took notice of the voice independent voters were gaining in the state. When a special election was called for an open state senate seat in the 14th District, Higdon decided to make a run and reached out to Lewis for his help in delivering a campaign message to the district’s 3,500 independent voters. Lewis agreed, on the condition that Higdon would introduce the open primaries bill in the next legislative session. Higdon pledged that he would. Lewis mailed personal letters to several thousand nonaligned voters, promoting Higdon’s support for open primaries that would end the independents’ exclusion from first-round voting. Higdon won the special election and credits the support from independents with putting him over the top.

At the GOP victory party, where Republican luminaries and good ol’ boys hung out at the bar, Lewis was the man of the hour. A friend asked him afterward whether he was recognized at the event. “I’m kinda hard to miss,” he said. But it wasn’t his size that got him noticed. It was that Lewis, a grassroots independent, had stirred up a base around a political reform issue. They’d sent Higdon to the state senate on that basis.

Local Republicans were busy slapping Lewis on the back, buying him beers, and inviting him to join the GOP. “Why don’t you come with us?” they asked. “No thanks,” said Lewis. “We’ve got other things to focus on right now.”

And he did. He founded Independent Kentucky together with Alexander Kemble and several of their friends. They affiliated with IndependentVoting.org, and Lewis soon called Higdon, asking him to deliver on his campaign promise. Higdon introduced the bill on January 6, 2010, and Lewis traveled to Frankfort in February to walk the halls of the state capitol and drum up support.

Along the way, he ran into Senator Julian Carroll, a Democrat and former governor of the Bluegrass State. Lewis pressed him about the open primary bill, about making sure that everyone in Kentucky, regardless of their party affiliation, would be admitted to every round of voting. Carroll, now 80 years old and once part of a circle of upstart Democratic legislators called the Young Turks, was incensed beyond reason by Lewis’s appeal. “Well, if you don’t like it, then move to another country,” he told Lewis in the capitol hallway. A CNN crew following Lewis’s campaign captured the encounter on video. Lewis was astonished. With the help of IndependentVoting.org’s national organizer Gwen Mandell, the exchange went viral.

That day the Republican-controlled state senate, at Higdon’s urging, passed Lewis’s open primary bill. It was defeated, however, in the Democrat-controlled house. CNN’s David Mattingly pressed Senator Carroll about the issue on camera while the voting was underway. “If they want a party,” said Carroll, “fine, we’ll create them a party, and then they can have their own party that believes in their own principles.” Mattingly wasn’t satisfied. He told Carroll: “Independents don’t want to have their own party. They want to vote for Republicans or Democrats.” Carroll was unperturbed. “I don’t care what they want. I’m telling you how we operate a democracy in America. We operate a democracy in America with the two-party system.”

Lewis’s battle is far from over. In 2011 Higdon again introduced an open primary bill. This time it failed to pass by one vote. Lewis understands that reforming the process and building a movement take time. “We continue to gain momentum,” he says. “The independent voters of Kentucky are gaining ground.” Lewis is, in effect, fighting two causes. One is challenging the Kentucky closed primary system—in place in numerous other states, too—that permits parties to exclude voters from the nominating process. The other cause is to organize independent voters to become a force for changing the political structure without having to form a third party. Unfortunately, Carroll’s notion that if independents want to be recognized, they need a party of their own is conventional wisdom in the political establishment. For Carroll, that no doubt translates into Get them out of the way and over to the sidelines.

But for Lewis, and now for many hundreds of grassroots independent activists leading state and local challenges to the hardwired partisanship of the system, the goal isn’t to create a new party. It’s about making the process itself a cause; it’s about new forms of political expression that allow independents and all Americans to move the country away from partisan politics.

There is no real third-party movement in America today, in spite of the recent ABC News/Washington Post poll showing that 61 percent of Americans would like to see an independent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans in the upcoming presidential election. But there is an anti-party movement, one that is being organized and shaped by diverse influences. The emerging conflict over closed primaries, open primaries, and nonparty primaries, in which the rights of the people are pitted against the rights of the parties, embodies a uniquely twenty-first-century question. Are political parties the vehicles through which the American people want to self-organize and self-govern?

Today, 84 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Congress. This Congress? Surely. Any Congress? Maybe. Which raises another question. Given the partisan nature of the system, is it possible for Congress to behave differently? Many feel it’s impossible without structural changes to the party system itself. Mickey Edwards, who served in Congress for 18 years from Oklahoma, put it this way when he proposed a set of structural reforms to the electoral and congressional process: “The problem is not division but partisanship—advantage-seeking by private clubs whose central goal is to win political power.”

The political parties are the vehicles to which Americans turn to exercise their political will. But that exercise seems increasingly futile. A clear majority of Americans, for example, believe (and experience!) that income disparity is getting wider, but they have no power to do anything about it. The Occupy Wall Street events of 2011 are a reaction to that, and so are the polls showing many Americans sympathetic to those protests. No matter who is elected, the special interests, the elite, and the insiders still run the show.

Thus, reform of the process is becoming strategically important and popular among the American people. Michael Lewis’s battles in Kentucky are no mere local affair. They signify activities of an emerging anti-party movement with a new social and political fabric. And there is no better place to pick up its thread than inside the jacket pocket of a California state senator, Abel Maldonado.

It was February 2009. The California state legislature was under lockdown in Sacramento. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Assembly majority leader Karen Bass, a Democrat, had reached an agreement on the long-stalled state budget. But legislative leaders couldn’t cobble together the two-thirds majority required to pass it. Late into the night of February 18, entreaties and offers were made to the holdouts. The $143 billion budget deal hung in the balance…

From “Independents Rising” by Jacqueline S. Salit. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

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The future is harder to see than the past. The Wisconsin recall campaign was, in many respects, a story about the past — the century-long clash between labor and capital, which surely has a 21st-century post-modern form, but is nonetheless still framed as a battle between competing ideologies and organized interests. Is there a way out of that deadlock?

For my money, the most interesting feature of the Wisconsin results was what happened with independents. Exit polling showed 53 percent of them backed Republican Governor Scott Walker, resisting the pleas of organized labor and Democrats to use their vote to repudiate the attacks on public-sector employees. At the same time, though, 56 percent of independents say they plan to vote for President Obama in November. In partisan terms, these results might seem contradictory. But contradictions are often signs of a new politic taking hold. In this case, independents — largely unorganized but frustrated with partisanship on both sides — are the force behind the drive to find, or create, something new.

That same day, June 6, Californians went to the polls in the first full-scale election since the adoption by referendum of the Top Two primary system. Under this new nonpartisan system, all voters and all candidates, regardless of party affiliation or non-affiliation, participate on an equal footing. The top two finishers go on to compete head to head in the November election. Washington State has a similar system, and an effort is underway to bring Top Two to Arizona. Independent voters and candidates who are newly empowered in this system emerged as crucial players in this nonpartisan system. And here we get a glimpse of the political future.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle’s post-election headline, “Top 2 Shakes up State.” The results of California’s first Top Two primary saw some small happenings that express a fundamental shift that is taking place in the U.S. electorate, where 40 percent of Americans now self-identify as independents. The possibilities latent in that shift have so far been contained by the closed primary system in effect in most states, where party members choose the candidates who appear on the November ballot and partisan redistricting assures that the winner of the primary of the majority party wins, thus deciding the election before most voters, including independents, get to vote. In these circumstances, the influence of independent voters has been minimized, except in competitive statewide races where these “swing” voters can still determine which of the two partisan candidates will win.

Top Two changes that dynamic. Under a Top two system, independent voters become an important factor in the first round. As a result of primaries in four of California’s 53 Congressional districts, one of the two candidates on the general election ballot in November will be an independent. The other will be a Democrat or Republican. Will we see coalitions of independents and voters who identify with the party (or parties) not on the ballot block to win the general election? Perhaps. In a state where over 20 percent of voters are independents, every candidate must try to appeal to independent voters.

In the 15th Congressional District (which includes Oakland, a Democratic Party stronghold) 40-year incumbent Pete Stark, a hardcore Democrat, faced off against insurgent Democrat Eric Swalwell. In round one, Stark got 42 percent, Swalwell, 36 percent and independent Christopher Pareja, 22 percent. Under the old system, Stark’s success in the Democratic Party primary, no matter how close, would have assured him of success in November. Independents now have a role to play in a choosing which Democrat will win. In the 24th Congressional District, Republican Abel Maldonado, a key leader in the effort that brought Top Two to California, will face off against a Democrat. The support of independents helped propel him to round two.

Jason Olson of California’s IndependentVoice.Org, who worked to mobilize independent voters in several congressional districts, had this to say:

“Under the Top Two Open Primary independent voters played a significant role in shaping the choices in the November election. And we have seen the emergence of organized forces of independent voters working to leverage our agenda. Independents are no longer forced to choose between candidates selected by the partisan Democrats and Republican who vote in closed primary elections. And the fact that the general elections will now be competitive, even in areas where one party is dominant, means that independents will have even more clout.”

The Los Angeles Times deadpanned after the primary, “Tuesday’s election made clear that the promised political earthquake will have to wait.” An earthquake? Perhaps not. A sea change? You bet.

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The recent Supreme Court health care decision was striking in many ways, but perhaps most of all, for its dramatic separation of constitutional and policy questions.

If the decision was in any way a bellwether, it might be that in these times, the best outcomes are produced when process and policy are distinguished from one another. As was evident in the outcry over Justice John Roberts’ unexpected turn, making this distinction can disrupt partisan convention–and that’s a good thing!

The independent movement and independent voters value that distinction. Now 40 percent of the country, independents are as concerned with the process as they are with the policy. They became independents because parties and partisanship have driven policy making to the brink of dysfunction.

Independents increasingly feel that the political decision-making structure must be substantially reformed as a means of engaging our social and economic crisis.

Open or “Top Two” primaries, putting independents on the Federal Election Commission, establishing benchmarks for nonpartisan governance, and reducing the hegemony of the parties over the people are examples of this kind of approach.

Though the parties have demanded First Amendment protections in controlling the primary process and excluding independent voters, California and Washington State have already shifted to a “Top Two” nonpartisan system to solve the constitutional problem. Other states, like Arizona, are in the process of following suit.

Though in 2008 independents were permitted to vote in presidential primaries and caucuses in 33 states and made full use of that opportunity, elections for public office below the presidency are far more restricted.

Only 25 states have laws permitting independents to vote in non-presidential primaries, and that permission is often dependent on the parties agreeing to accept nonaligned voters.

Currently, there are efforts underway to roll back open primaries in states that have them. Independent voters are challenging that regression in court. This has given rise to a new set of constitutional controversies over party rights versus voter rights. Efforts at nonpartisan reform of the closed systems have met with fierce hostility from the political parties—both major and, surprisingly, minor.

Some might say that independents, the 40 percent of voters not fully integrated into the political system, are simply the next group of Americans to be unfairly excluded.

In other words, independents’ demand for equality should be seen as a classic civil rights issue. But there is a difference worth noting. The diverse interests that fought to win inclusion in political affairs and thus came to be represented by political parties were largely defined by existential factors.

Black people did not choose to be black (not to mention slaves). Women were excluded because of their gender. The poor and workingmen and women could not escape their economic and social status for most of history. These interests were defined by a combination of biology, economics, and fortune or misfortune.

Their integration into the political process was part of America’s social and economic growth, as the expansion, distribution, and redistribution of the fruits of American labor and enterprise were continually negotiated. Political parties—including third parties—played a vigorous role in that.

Fairness and economic strength were thought to be intrinsically intertwined. Today, the dominant parties seem incapable of synthesizing these things. And the structural partisanship they have engineered forms, if anything, an insurmountable obstacle to progress.

Independents, while a vast underrepresented community of Americans, are not a political class that forms as a matter of destiny. They have chosen this identity, and thereby made a small but distinct declaration of noncompliance. Arguably, they are a social engine for political reform that goes beyond parties, partisanship, and traditional ideology. In this respect, independents are, by their choice, radicals—nonideological radicals, but radicals just the same.

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Americans Elect, the group aiming to create an alternative nominating process for a centrist “unity” ticket in the 2012 presidential elections, announced in May it would not field a presidential candidate.

Founded by financier Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect had raised and spent $35 million in pursuit of 50 state ballot lines and a database of non-aligned delegates who would choose presidential and vice presidential nominees. But despite deep pockets, significant media exposure, and pollsters galore pointing to extreme dissatisfaction with politics-as-usual, Americans Elect fell flat. What went wrong?

I first met Peter Ackerman in 2009, before Americans Elect was up and running. He had been involved with its predecessor, UNITY ’08, which had hoped to “shock the system” back into functionality by running an ideologically divergent president/vice president slate in 2008. Though it also enjoyed considerable media attention, it never achieved political traction. Its founders left the organization to form Draft Bloomberg for President, and it was hobbled by a Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruling that categorized it as a political committee subject to strict federal contribution limits.

Ackerman took over UNITY ’08, led it through litigation against the FEC, and won an important decision in the Court of Appeals whereby the FEC was forced to recognize the enterprise as a process, not a party or candidate committee.

Ackerman was extremely energized by the ruling, and properly so. However, though the value of the court decision was that it empowered Ackerman to organize (and fully capitalize) Americans Elect as a process, they based their entire 2012 strategy on finding a candidate.

In this, Ackerman and company misread independent voters, the self-declared engine for a new direction in American politics. Independents want to root out systemic partisanship. They don’t want to ameliorate it with appeals to centrism, bipartisanship or a better brand of candidate.

They also misread the American public. Though projected as a conduit for an up-from-the-bottom political revolt, Americans Elect was designed in such a way to determine the nature, the extent and the leader of the revolt — before it even happened.

Is it any wonder that the American people, including independents, did not buy in? Pre-packaged revolutions do not sell to the American people.

In our early conversations, it was explained to Ackerman that the idea of channeling mass discontent into a unity ticket (a Republican and a Democrat or an independent plus one) would not automatically appeal to independents — now 40 percent of the country and the voters most likely to revolt against the system. After 2000, when the implosion of the Perot-inspired Reform Party and the controversial impact of Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy set the third party movement back on its heels, independent voters turned their attention away from third party candidates and began to focus on restructuring the political process itself.

By 2008, independents were practicing “fusion” politics by participating where they were permitted to, in open primaries and caucuses. Barack Obama, campaigning on a vision of a post-partisan America, became the Democratic nominee because of the support of independents in the 33 states that allowed them to vote. John McCain, still thought of as a maverick, won the Republican nomination because independents backed him. In the general election, a significant majority of independents supported Obama.

Influenced by organizations such as mine — IndependentVoting.org — independents were pressing for non-partisan reform of the process (open primaries, non-partisan redistricting, etc.), not for a third party or a third party-style candidate.

Americans Elect, however, was convinced that creating ballot lines in 50 states, launching an interactive website, and holding an Internet-based primary would become the instrument that Americans, including independents, would use to redress their grievances.

The design raised difficult questions for his team. How could Americans Elect guarantee their slate be composed of major (and only major) players given that was Ackerman’s goal? Answer: Set criteria for the candidates that required them to be prior officeholders of major jurisdictions or CEOs of major corporations. Empower a select board to approve (or disapprove) candidacies. Limit full access to the Americans Elect database and thereby control the campaigning.

In other words, the Americans Elect model was profoundly self-contradictory. It preached the doctrine of up-from-the-bottom democracy. But its design precluded everything but the predetermined scenario.

Americans Elect’s non-viability was made all the worse by fawning media, which love to attend to the dreamscapes of billionaires while largely ignoring the bricklaying of ordinary Americans who are creating the foundation for a post-partisan political culture. Here’s hoping that Ackerman and company re-invest the infrastructure they created in supporting the independent movement for sweeping structural political reform. That’s where the next American revolution is already under way.

Jacqueline Salit, the president of IndependentVoting.org, is the author of Independents Rising: Outsider Movements, Third Parties and the Struggle for a Post-Partisan America, to be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in August.

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California’s minor parties — Green, Libertarian and Peace & Freedom — have brought their third lawsuit, Rubin v Bowen, seeking to overturn Proposition 14, the referendum by which the non-partisan “top-two” primary system was adopted in June, 2010. The core issue being raised is federal in nature, that their constitutional right to have a ballot line in the general election has been infringed.

The legal issues raised in Bowen were rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in litigation challenging the State of Washington’s top-two system, which is probably why this new case was filed in state, rather than federal court. A lawyer would call the move to state court “forum shopping.” When you have a weak case, you look for a friendly judge in a friendly location and hope he or she will ignore existing precedent and give you “a second bite at the apple,” so to speak.

Legally speaking, there is no right for a party, major or minor, to have a place on the general election ballot. In fact, cities in California and across the country have had non-partisan municipal elections (where candidates, not parties, are on the ballot) for a century. All the constitution requires is that candidates have an equal chance to access the ballot, and that the rules not unduly burden a particular candidate. Top-two meets that test. All candidates play by the same rules. And California’s ballot access rules are liberal. A candidate can obtain a line on the ballot in the first round by paying a filing fee or collecting a specified number of signatures of registered voters. (For State Assembly, for example, a candidate can pay a filing fee of $952 or collect 1,500 signatures.)

At a time when Americans are deeply disturbed by partisanship in Washington and state legislatures, the minor parties are, to put it frankly, acting just like the major parties in that they seem to be putting their narrow interests ahead of enhancing democracy and bringing new players and new coalitions into the political market place. Their California lawsuit, if successful, would return the state to the closed primary system in which each party was guaranteed a line on the ballot in November. But the State’s 3.5 million independent voters would be denied the right to first-round voting. Is that what third parties should be fighting for?

For decades, the minor parties spoke out forcefully against “two-party tyranny” and the unwillingness of the major parties to lead the way to radical reform, whether it was the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the needs of poor and working people, or the abolition of the Federal Reserve. And they played an important role in demanding action on these fronts. Reform came when one or the other of the major parties made the issue theirs or, in the case of slavery, a new anti-slavery major party — the Republican Party — emerged. The failure of the Whig Party to take up the cause of abolitionism in the decades before the Civil War resulted in its demise.

Now, when the issue being raised is the controlling role of parties altogether, the minor parties remain trapped in the party paradigm. Under the party paradigm, politics can only be done through parties, and elections are more about allocating power among the parties than electing the best public servants.

In the current situation, where the issue of the day is one of process, Americans understandably see minor parties as smaller versions of the major parties. They are declaring their independence from parties of all kinds. Forty percent of the electorate now self-identify as independent. In the past twenty years, the percentage of Americans who register to vote without party affiliation has gone from 18.3 to 24.4 percent. Minor party registration during the same period has gone from 1 to 2.2 percent.

Are the minor parties open to blocking with independent voters to create new challenges to the two-party tyranny? I, for one, hope so. But that would mean challenging not just two-party politics, but party politics altogether.

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Recently I appeared, along with fellow independent Franz Bauer, as a guest on the popular local TV program “Between the Lines.” Despite a luxury of time — a 10-minute segment — we barely scratched the surface of an important and timely discussion: how to fix our broken political process.

It is no secret that partisanship and gridlock have come to characterize policy making at so many levels of government. In the interview, we talked about the rights of independent voters and discussed the structural reforms needed to address the barriers to full participation that independents face.

Left unsaid was how much structural reforms would empower the 40 percent of Americans who now identify as independent voters and how necessary these reforms are to making our political process functional again.

Without reforms to the process itself, we can’t effectively address the major issues facing us as a nation: the economy, health care, education.

Many of us independents see the exodus from the political parties as a protest against partisanship and gridlock.

Elected officials are compelled to put the concerns of their party first or be subject to discipline by their party. They can be denied committee seats and deprived of campaign funds, leaving them unable to effectively do their job and run a viable re-election campaign.

Independent officeholders have no such constraints and are best situated to lead the work of meaningful reform to our political process.

TAKING ACTION

For years, I have related to a national network of independent voters, IndependentVoting.org. and have this year started an affiliate state organization, Independent Ohio. We are participating in three major activities that would limit partisanship and allow a stronger voice for independents and more ordinary people.

We are joining with independents across the country to advocate for congressional hearings on the barriers that independent voters face to full participation in the political process.
We are gathering signatures in a show of support for top-two nonpartisan open primaries, in which all candidates for an office appear on one ballot and voters can choose the best candidate for each office regardless of party affiliation. The top two vote getters go on to the general election. At some point, the work on this petition could form the basis for undertaking to get an initiative on a statewide ballot to change the primary election process.
We are part of a coalition that is conducting a statewide petition drive to place an amendment to the Ohio Constitution on the November ballot. The amendment would establish an independent citizens commission to create legislative districts, taking this work out of the hands of politicians with partisan interests.

These reforms would more fully enfranchise the plurality of voters who identify as independents and would open the way for broader discussion, for an easing of gridlock and for putting more power in the hands of voters, not political parties.

So what do independents want? We want a government that can successfully create and pass legislation that addresses the serious issues that our country faces. We want a government that the American people experience as representing them and having their interests in mind.

We want a government that works. And we believe that breaking down the barriers that independents face to full participation in the electoral process is where that starts.

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