These policies are living documents—starting points for ongoing improvement and community collaboration. We welcome your feedback as we shape them together.

We envision a California that continues to lead the nation in legislative reform, while driving electoral reform at every level. We envision these combined efforts producing a thriving multiparty democracy that solves its problems through the collaborative, iterative participation of all voters.

The Problem:

(Jump to solutions)

At the core of our state are our legislative and electoral systems, those in which officials are elected to office and laws are passed. When these systems don’t accurately represent the diverse political views of our state, don’t encourage collaboration, transparency, and consensus, and don’t adapt to the needs of its communities– they don’t work. Forwardists in California believe that our state – and America as a whole – is at its best when new ideas are given the opportunity to be tested and critiqued. We believe in experimentation, entrepreneurial thinking, and healthy skepticism of the status quo, and this includes our electoral and legislative systems. A multiparty democracy is critical to cut through the partisanship dividing Californians and make our state work as we need it to; voting system reform, proportional representation in our electorate, campaign finance reform, lobbying activity reform, and independent legislative review commissions are a few ways to make this happen.


Paths Forward:

These policy recommendations are not all-inclusive.


To have a functioning, competitive democracy, the Forward Party believes a multiparty system is required. Some of the obstacles that currently hinder our state from moving forward include primaries, party retention and ballot access barriers, and our voting systems. In order to achieve a multiparty democracy in our state, widespread reform is needed across our legislative and electoral systems, to include:

  • Proportional Representation: an electoral system that allocates legislative seats in proportion to the number of votes each party or candidate receives. This system ensures that the composition of the legislature better mirrors the overall preferences of voters, as opposed to winner-takes-all systems. PR can be implemented through methods like party-list representation or single transferable vote (STV), promoting a more inclusive and diverse political landscape.
  • Campaign Finance Reform: limits on Super PAC spending, which is closely tied to lobbying activities and special interest control in our elections, and transparency requirements for all political advertising.

Examples:

    ✅ In NYC, voters recently used RCV for the 3rd time, and a new survey from SurveyUSA finds that 96% of NYC voters find RCV simple and easy to use, with 76% saying they want to keep and/or expand RCV to more elections. Source: FairVote

    ✅ Proportional representation is the most popular form of democracy for countries in the world today, with 130 countries using a form of Proportional Representation to elect officials, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, and Spain. Source: Electoral Reform Society

    ✅ The Justice Workshop is a coalition to replace our outdated, dysfunctional election system with CHOICE VOTING—a method that ensures fairer representation, stronger accountability, and a voice for all voters.

Additional Sources:

The predominant voting mechanism used across America at the federal, state and local levels is first-past-the-post or plurality voting, a system in which voters select a single candidate as their favorite and the candidate with the most votes is elected, even if they do not have a majority. We believe this system is fundamentally flawed in numerous ways:

  • Spoiler Effect: Similar candidates split the vote, allowing less popular candidates to win.
  • Minority Rule: A candidate can win even without 50% of the vote if votes are divided among many candidates.
  • Strategic Voting: Voters often choose the "lesser evil" instead of their true preference to avoid "wasting" their vote.
  • Disproportional Outcomes: Results often don’t reflect the overall distribution of voter preferences.

There are many ideas for improving our voting system, and Forwardists support experiments of many kinds: ranked choice voting, approval voting, top 4 voting, STAR voting, and others. A combination of methods appears to work well in many cases, such as combining traditional ranked-choice voting (RCV) with top 4 characteristics.

Beyond the mechanisms voters use to indicate their preferences, electoral reform that ensures all Americans can vote easily and securely is also imperative:

  • Mail voting, early voting, and absentee voting are proven to increase accessibility, and claims of increased fraud with these methods have been repeatedly debunked.
  • Gerrymandering in all of its forms is un-American and should be explicitly illegal; we support independent, nonpartisan commissions for districting and election administration
  • Eligible voters shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to make their voices heard, and we believe automatic registration of all eligible voters would help remove barriers
  • Voting should be accessible to all eligible Americans, including those whose employers make it difficult to exercise their rights; we believe that voters’ ability to vote should be guaranteed and we’re open to moving Election Day to a weekend, making it a multi-day event, or making it a federal holiday
  • While most claims of electoral fraud are politically motivated, we do believe that the security of our elections is important; Forwardists support the requirement of transparent, nonpartisan reporting on electoral fraud and timely post-election audits
  • At the most extreme end, we believe there are lessons to learn from countries that require citizens to participate in the democratic process; the 100% Democracy initiative makes a powerful case for instituting compulsory attendance on Election Day

Examples:

    ✅ Fargo, North Dakota adopted approval voting for city elections in 2020. It’s seen as a simple reform that helped broaden candidate support.

    ✅ Oregon’s Lane County ran a non-governmental pilot election using STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), and advocacy continues for its broader adoption.

    ✅ France holds elections on Sundays, helping reduce workday barriers and improve turnout.

    ✅ Colorado offers a strong early voting system with universal mail-in ballots and drop boxes. It ranks among the top states for voter access and turnout.

    ✅ Arizona established an Independent Redistricting Commission via ballot initiative in 2000. It removed redistricting power from the legislature and has survived legal challenges.

    ✅ Australia requires all eligible citizens to attend the polls (or vote by mail), achieving consistently high turnout (90%+).

    ✅ Washington State’s Vote-By-Mail method has been successfully utilized for more than a decade:

Reforming California’s legislative system goes beyond implementing term and age limits at the state level. Limits on lobbying activities, through limiting Super PACs’ independent expenditures spending, and limiting revolving door lobbying by mandating a 3-5 year “cool off” period after an official leaves office, would help even the playing field of special interests in our political system. With such a complex and convoluted system of laws in place, and limited time for lawmakers to address issues, loopholes, and unintended consequences in our laws, a better system for adaptation must be carefully implemented. In order to address these issues in our laws, legislative review commissions, made up of independent citizens, should be put into place to help recommend statutes to sunset or overhaul to our governing bodies. Additionally, loopholes that allow lawmakers to participate in unethical practices should be closed, like allowing indefinite bill tabling and loose wealth disclosure laws.

Examples:

    ✅ Since the US Supreme Court passed Citizens United, political influence has shifted further toward wealthy donors and corporations. With overturning Citizens United as the goal, there are smaller ways to regulate campaign finance in the meantime. This can be done by enforcing stricter rules on independent expenditures, through expanding the definition of "coordination" and strengthening coordination laws:
    • Expand coordination laws to cover IEs that make any reference to any identified candidate within 60 days of an election (seen in Maine, New York)
    • Define broader ranges of conduct beyond explicit communication (for example, relational factors between a campaign and an outside spender) that would be considered "coordination"
    • Make sure that coordination laws are air-tight, free from loopholes, streamlined, and easy to enforce

    ✅ Unintended consequences frequently occur when legislation is passed in a vacuum, without an amendment system in place to make adjustments. As is the case for SB1383, a climate bill passed in California, requiring food generators to donate excess food to organizations like food banks. This bill has placed an undue burden on small food pantries, and iterative change to enforcement methods are needed.

Additional Sources: