The COVID pandemic and the protests following the barbaric killing of George Floyd highlight the urgent need to elect leaders who demonstrate the core values of accountability and transparency and the ability and desire to work on common sense solutions to issues that are critical to Connecticut residents. Such elections, unfortunately, will not occur consistently without a radical restructuring of our election processes and systems.
The SAM CT Task Force, part of SAM (the Serve America Movement) is steadily building a group of concerned voters throughout the state’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas who are committed to strengthening candidate competition and to providing voters with genuine choices at the polls through the four legged stool of open public primaries, ranked-choice voting, term limits, and the vote-by-mail option.
Many states have established or are aggressively pursuing one or more of these reforms, but SAM CT believes that achieving the comprehensive combination of all four is necessary to drive the type of competition and voter choice that will strengthen the principle of “we the people” in Connecticut, the principle that is the fundamental foundation for the political actions needed to address the imbalances and inequities found in too many of our policy and fiscal decisions.
Last month, SAM CT launched a five statement survey asking people to take 60 seconds to share their views of Strongly Agree – Agree – Disagree – Strongly Disagree- Don’t Know on whether Connecticut should:
- Open its primary elections, which are funded by all taxpayers, to all unaffiliated voters (41% of all registered voters) and not be restricted to the members of the two major parties.
- Move to a single, taxpayer-funded, nonpartisan primary in which all candidates and all voters participate.
- Adopt ranked-choice voting to ensure that winners of elections are supported by the majority of voters and not a simple plurality.
- Adopt term limits for the offices of Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Treasurer, and all State Senate and House seats.
- Adopt a vote-by-mail option that is secured against potential abuse and fraud for all federal and state elections.
More than 300 people have responded to date, and SAM CT welcomes the participation of all Connecticut voters in the Survey. To include your thoughts, answer the questions on this questionnaire.
Oz Griebel, a former candidate for governor, chairs the SAM CT Task Force, a nonpartisan effort to enhance candidate competition and voter participation and choice via the establishment of open public primaries, ranked-choice voting, and term limits.