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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Kentucky, it’s this: local journalists know what’s up. These reporters are writing the stories that inform voters and hold power to account — and the stories that national journalists should be using to inform their work. This was clear in Kentucky Monday night, as a national (somewhat maligned) furor began, leaving local journalists, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Phillip Bailey to defend the truth. 

The truth is that Kentucky officials did work to put voters first. They created early voting for the first time ever in the state in an effort to protect voters from coronavirus. Obviously there are major lessons to be learned from Kentucky — polling locations will always be necessary, and voters shouldn’t be shut out due to traffic or other menial concerns. 

If you want to know what’s going on in your state or city, subscribe to your local paper. These reporters and their stories may not get as much attention as national stories, but their stories are just as important.

Ma, we made it.

Election reform got a major boost this week, after The Patriot Act on Netflix highlighted ranked choice voting as a key reform that can fix our elections. Instead of voting to ensure that our least favorite candidate doesn’t get elected, RCV allows voters to vote their conscience, and vote based on what they do like about a candidate. 

Host Hasan Minaj pulls from a study published earlier this month by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that analyzed the key ways that we can fix American democracy. Ranked choice voting, campaign finance reform, and national service were also on their list.

Political dysfunction is a direct output of a poorly designed system. Politics, it turns out, is a lot like a business in that way. At least that’s the conclusion of Unite America board member and Democracy Found Co-Chair Katherine Gehl, who was interviewed this week by the Harvard Business Review. 

Along with her co-author, Harvard professor Michael Porter, Gehl talks on the podcast about how a business framework helps to discern and identify the blockers that are preventing genuine policy progress in our country. For the American people to get a better product (like a functioning Congress) we have to first disrupt the system with a series of reforms that can change the incentives that drive politicians to the extremes. 

Interested in learning more? You’re in luck. Their new book came out this week. Check it out.