Welcome to the online home of New Jersey Coalition For Democracy Reform! Our goal is to make New Jersey better for everyone by improving how we do politics and elections. We’ll improve the website as we go but we need to get started so let’s go!
How many times have you heard about how corrupt New Jersey is? Or about how high our taxes are or about how one political party or the other is responsible for all of our problems? USnews.com ranks New Jersey’s ‘Natural Environment’ as #33 in the United States, we are #44 for ‘Infrastructure’, and #49 (almost last!) for “our “Fiscal Stability”! Is it that we just can’t govern ourselves or is there a much larger problem that we’ve been overlooking?
New Jersey generally does better in areas that are non-partisan or private sector. USnews.com ranks New Jersey as #5 for ‘Crime and Corrections’, #4 for ‘Healthcare’, and #1 (Gold star!) in the country for ‘Education’. The good news is that we have a lot to be proud of, the bad news, there is a lot of room for improvement.
And that is where we are going to begin.
The problems we are going to be talking about have existed in New Jersey for a very long time. These are problems that stand in the way of how our state and local governments function, problems that concentrate and abuse control over who gets elected to public office, and problems that interfere with our state government’s ability to find the best solutions to our most challenging issues. New Jersey’s broken democratic systems are the biggest reason why our environment is #33 in the United States, our infrastructure is #44, and why we are almost the worst state in the country for how we handle our long and short term financial obligations.
I’m not the first person to reach this conclusion, a lot of very dedicated people are already trying to fix these problems. What has been missing though is YOU,
NEW JERSEY NEEDS YOUR HELP.
We need you to do one thing to help fix how we do democracy in New Jersey, WE NEED YOU TO VOTE.
With these posts, we are going to methodically review how we do democracy in New Jersey and where the problems are. We are going to discuss why these problems prevent our state and local governments from being able to effectively solve problems while encouraging corruption. We’re also going to explain how we (that includes you!) are going to reform our democratic systems and return some of the control of our politics and elections to New Jersey voters!
Having said all of that, let’s establish a few important points for how we’re going to work together to fix New Jersey;
- Your political party doesn’t matter and the other people helping us to fix New Jersey, their political party doesn’t matter either. This is what is called being ‘non-partisan’. Party doesn’t matter since the work we’re going to do to fix New Jersey is going to help everyone equally.
- We’re going to refer to facts when we talk about how we’re going to fix New Jersey. Everybody has an opinion but it’s the accuracy of our facts that gives our opinions value so we need you to really understand and appreciate the importance of facts and stick to them.
- Our email list will be our only official communications channel so please keep an eye out for our emails and please do what you can to read and share them. In New Jersey, the ONLY way to change how things work is organize an enormous group of supporters and then VOTE for candidates that will support that change. We have to be able to share our message and stay in touch with every voter in New Jersey that we can reach so we are going to do that with emails.
- Not everyone is going to agree with us so we have to focus on sharing our message with people that are interested in what we have to say. These ideas are not a hard sell! I repeat, these ideas are not a hard sell! The only thing that will determine how quickly we can convert our enthusiasm into legislative action is how quickly we can transport our message to voters throughout New Jersey.
- Please, as Patrick Swayze’s character Dalton said in the not-so-critically-acclaimed movie ‘Road House’, “Be nice.” At all times, let’s speak to each other with respect and in a way that encourages people to participate. Success is going to require that a whole lot of us come together to support fundamental changes to the way we do politics and elections so it will be very important that we build relationships with each other by just being nice!
We have a lot of work to do so I ask that you please stay subscribed to this list and keep an eye out for our next entry where we’ll start to unpack how exactly it is that we do politics and elections in New Jersey and how some of these practices are unique in the United States.
Thank you for reading!
Bart