Nick Troiano

It's one of the only deep South, it is the only deep South state that's expanded Medicaid, for example, and was one of the first states to really lean into charter school reform.

And when you think about the purpose of government and is it representing people, in Louisiana, more citizens have access to healthcare and to education

than a lot of other peer states.

And the reason for that is they have a more functional political system with leaders who are intended and focused on solving problems rather than just these partisan squabbles every day.

And so reforming our elections, improve incentives, which ultimately improves governance so that we can solve problems that matter to people.

So Alaska is a great success story for primary reform because after the state adopted it through the ballot initiative process in 2020, it's now gone through two election cycles where more voters than ever before have been able to cast what we call a meaningful ballot, which is a ballot in an election that's truly competitive in which their vote matters.

And what's that that resulted in, Chuck, is the state House and the state Senate now have bipartisan governing majorities.

It's not just one party that's in charge.

There is a coalition of members, Democrats, Republicans and independents, by the way, that are working together to address the problems important to the state, most recently overriding a governor's veto to increase education funding.

And so Alaska has been a success story of how better elections result in better governance.

And it's produced a backlash from those who used to be in power and liked elections when it only represented a handful of people.

And so they've been trying to repeal this system.

They were unsuccessful in that last year.

A majority of voters in Alaska voted to defend the system.

And opponents are going to likely try again next year.

And I suspect that support for the system is going to continue to grow over time, not just because people in theory like the concept of the freedom to vote for whomever they want, but now they're getting real and better results from the system that they voted in a few years ago.

I don't think it's a surprise that every action has an equal opposite reaction.

There's the forces of trying to make government better, fighting against the forces that are trying to protect the status quo.

I think that the period of defense is most important in the immediate years after the adoption of reform, but that it gets better over time because the new incumbents there are those elected under this system who

actually like it and want to defend it.