Problems

The Problems section of My Vote Forward examines the structural problems in how people in the United States take part in public decisions and are represented: polarization, distrust of elections, unequal and low participation, misinformation, money, district lines, agenda control, primaries, gridlock, the loss of local news, and the gap between the public and its representatives. Each page defines one problem precisely, sets out dated evidence with denominators, presents competing explanations and the strongest arguments from across the political spectrum, and states honestly what an educational framework can and cannot do about it.

In plain words: many people feel that politics is not working. They are not imagining it. In a July 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 8,480 adults, 65% said they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, and 86% agreed that “Republicans and Democrats are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems”.⁠¹ But “politics is broken” is not a diagnosis. These pages break the feeling into specific problems that can be measured, argued about, and, in some cases, changed.

How the Problems pages are built

Every Problems page follows the same structure so that readers can compare problems on equal terms and critics can check each claim.

• The problem, defined precisely. Terms are defined before they are used, because many public arguments about these problems are arguments about definitions. “Turnout,” for example, means something different when the denominator is registered voters, eligible citizens, or the voting-age population.
• Scale and evidence. Numbers carry dates, jurisdictions, and denominators, and come from sources opened and checked for the exact claim. Where a number comes from an advocacy organization, it is labeled as such. Where a source could not be retrieved, the claim is cut or marked as open.
• Causes and competing explanations. Contested causal claims are attributed to the researchers who make them, not stated as fact.
• Who is harmed. Harms are stated as specifically as the evidence allows.
• What has been tried elsewhere. Reforms are reported with their failures as well as their successes. A reform that passed is not evidence that it worked.
• The strongest arguments across the political spectrum. Each side is stated in the form its own advocates would recognize. No page argues for a party or candidate.
• What My Vote Forward can and cannot do here. Every page states the limits of the framework.
• Unresolved questions and sources. Every page ends with what is not known and a numbered list of sources. All claims are also recorded in a public claim ledger that feeds the Sources page.

The problems, grouped by what they affect

The problems in this section fall into four groups. The grouping is a reading aid, not a theory; many problems belong to more than one group.

Who takes part

Participation in U.S. elections is uneven in who votes and in which elections draw voters at all.

• Unequal participation examines who votes, contacts officials, and donates, and how that differs by income, age, education, and other characteristics.
• Low turnout in local elections examines city, county, and school board contests, where turnout is often far lower than in national elections even though local governments make many decisions residents feel directly.
• Primary elections examines the contests that decide most seats in practice. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimated that 21.3% of eligible voters took part in 2022 primaries,⁠² while Pew Research Center counted about 45.1% turnout in the 2022 House general elections.⁠³

What people know and believe

Shared information is a precondition for disagreement that leads anywhere.

• Misinformation examines false and misleading claims, how their reach and effects are measured, and the hard tradeoffs between correction and free expression.
• The collapse of local news examines the loss of local reporting. Northwestern University’s Medill School reported in October 2025 that 213 counties were news deserts and 1,524 had only one remaining news source.⁠⁴
• Trust in elections examines confidence in vote counting and administration, how it varies, and what evidence does and does not move it.
• Polarization examines ideological distance and partisan hostility, which researchers measure in different ways that do not always agree.

How institutions translate votes into decisions

Rules shape outcomes before any individual votes.

• Gerrymandering examines how district lines are drawn and who draws them.
• Money in politics examines campaign finance, its measured effects, and the constitutional limits on regulating it.
• Gridlock examines legislative deadlock. Pew reports that since the current budget process began, Congress has passed all its required appropriations on time “only four times”.⁠⁵
• The representation gap examines the distance between the public and its representatives, in policy and in background. Each House member now represents an average of 761,169 people.⁠⁶

Who sets the agenda

Before any vote, someone decides what is on the table.

• Agenda capture examines how issues and questions reach, or fail to reach, public decision, and who controls that gate.

Additional Problems pages, covering topics such as voter intimidation, ballot access, election administration funding, and the tyranny of the majority, are being added on the same standard.

How the problems interact

The problems in this section are not independent, and a reform aimed at one often affects others.

Several causal chains recur across the pages, each supported by some research and disputed by other research. Safe districts, whether produced by line-drawing or by where people choose to live, make primaries decisive; low-turnout primaries may select more ideological candidates; more ideological legislatures may deadlock more often. Hall’s study of U.S. House primaries found that when an extremist narrowly wins a primary, the party’s probability of winning the seat “decreases by 35–54 percentage points,” which suggests that competitive general elections act as a check.⁠⁷ Where general elections are not competitive, that check is weaker. Each link in this chain is examined on its own page, and each is contested.

A second chain runs through information. The closure of local newspapers has been linked in specific studies to fewer candidates, lower turnout, and less split-ticket voting (see The collapse of local news). Less local information may increase reliance on national partisan cues, which connects to polarization and to trust.

A third chain runs through participation. If some groups vote, contact officials, and donate more than others, representatives hear from them more, and policy may follow. This links unequal participation to the representation gap, and both to money in politics.

A fourth pattern concerns measurement itself. Many of these problems are reported with a single headline number, and the same phenomenon can look very different depending on the denominator. Turnout can be counted against registered voters, eligible citizens, or the voting-age population. A share of seats “decided in the primary” depends on how competitiveness is defined. A count of news deserts depends on what counts as a local source and on county boundaries. When two credible sources disagree about the size of a problem, the disagreement is often about these choices rather than about the facts. The pages therefore state each denominator next to each number, and flag where an estimate comes from an organization that advocates for a particular reform. The Measurement chapter explains the general method.

Hypothetical example. Two reports describe the same city election. One says “only 15% voted”; the other says “a quarter of registered voters took part.” Both can be accurate if many eligible residents are not registered. Neither number is misleading by itself; each is incomplete without its denominator.

These chains are hypotheses with evidence, not established laws. One purpose of these pages is to show where the evidence for each link is strong and where it is thin.

Why the pages present every side

The problems in this section are politically charged, and every one of them is described differently by people with different values.

A problem that one reader sees as a failure, another may see as a safeguard. Gridlock is the clearest case: Hamilton defended the presidential veto in Federalist No. 73 on the ground that “The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws” would be “amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones”.⁠⁸ Others see the same friction as a failure to address urgent problems. The pages do not resolve that disagreement. They present both positions at their strongest and show which parts of the dispute are empirical and which are about values.

The same discipline applies to evidence. Where research findings conflict, as in the debate over whether ordinary citizens influence policy, the pages report both findings and the reasons they differ. A reader of any political view should be able to find their own strongest argument stated fairly, and the evidence most uncomfortable for it stated plainly.

Unresolved questions across the Problems section

• Which of these problems are causes and which are symptoms of the others?
• How much of measured dysfunction reflects genuine disagreement among the public rather than institutional failure?
• Can reforms be evaluated quickly enough to inform decisions, given that most effects appear over several election cycles?
• Which problems are best addressed by changing rules, which by changing information, and which by changing who takes part?
• Can a framework that separates priorities, opinions, and private votes reduce any of these problems in practice, or does it only make them easier to see? That question is open, and the Evaluation chapter describes how it could be tested.