Todd Connor
Submitted photo
By Todd Connor | Co-Founder, Veterans for All Voters
Members of the U.S. military swear an oath to the country and the Constitution — not to a party or a politician. It is countercultural for veterans to be partisan actors, which is why nearly 50% of us are conscientiously registered as independent voters, a number that grows higher among young veterans.
Consider, then, the injustice and moral offense that those who have done the most challenging things in service of this country are also among the most marginalized in our political system, shut out in many states from voting in taxpayer-funded primary elections because they refuse to choose a side.
On Election Day, citizens in six states and the District of Columbia are considering ballot measures to return power to all voters, creating open primary systems. Military veterans who share a passion for the urgent need to restore our political system to some version of sanity are on the front lines of these initiatives.
This is a total watershed moment for election reform — and the potential tsunami is one of the least-told stories of this election cycle.
Veterans’ oath of service to the Constitution does not expire when they take off their military uniform. Today, we know the most significant threat we must guard against is not from an overseas bad actor but domestic divisions. And what’s at the root? The political systems under which we operate.
There is an optimistic story of citizens rising up to reclaim elections from the political-industrial complex, giving voice and agency back to the voters who have been disenfranchised and disconnected. In 2024, 23.5 million voters were shut out of participating in primaries. Many have had enough.
In a record-breaking year for reform, citizen-led initiatives to open primaries overcame well-funded opposition trying to keep them off the ballot in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota and Washington, D.C. If successful, these measures would have profound implications on who runs for office, who wins and, most important, how they behave and govern.
Under this broken system, we are crippled without a sensible minority that can stop the worst and most partisan efforts from moving forward and advance reasonable and bipartisan solutions on the issues where most Americans can find common ground, but our leaders cannot. We take this threat as seriously as we would in a moment like 9/11 or an attack from an adversary. We see our mission to help this country find a path forward consistent with our patriot mission.
Veterans are generally uninterested in entering the partisan fray. System-level solutions are what appeal to most of us who fundamentally don’t do this work because we want a particular team or side to win but because we understand that the workings of the federal government — military, health system and more — benefit from a robust competition of ideas, with a balance of different points of view coming into the conversation.
Today, our system is hyper-polarized — and the establishment wants desperately to keep it that way. The notion of suggesting competitive elections every cycle is not so popular with politicians. Such a change would compel elected officials to be far more attentive to the ideas, concerns and will of the people they represent if they want to keep their jobs.
There is little accountability today under a system where most congressional races are decided in primary elections. In fact, Unite America found 87% of the House this year was effectively elected by just 7% of voters in low-turnout, partisan primary elections.
Three years ago, fellow veteran Eric Bronner and I formed Veterans for All Voters, convinced that election reform is necessary for our country to move forward. Today, we have more than 500 volunteers in 48 states who think there is a better way to give voters a seat at the table. We don’t do this because we want the spoils of winning; a representative democracy is supposed to be just that — different people winning at different times.
Congress can’t do this for itself, and political parties have no interest. Since every state has a different election system, the work must be done there. This is the type of national reform we saw with marriage equality and cannabis: what initially seems impossible becomes the inevitable.
The answer is not to throw more money into this beast of a system and hope for the best. It is to return power to the electorate. When such reform works, we’ll never again need to feel like we’re facing the most critical election of our lifetime.
Editor’s note: Todd Connor is a Navy veteran and co-founder of Veterans for All Voters. Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.
