Vote Nevada Supporters,

The National Archives is leveraging technology to provide more online programing.  A recent online event featured a scholar who is researching participatory democracy in early American history. Daniel Carpenter has discovered that many people who lacked voting rights used petitions to exercise a right to be civically engaged beyond what even I imagined.  You can watch his fascinating presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNs0UtDD0hU

Speaking of participatory democracy, now that we are nearing the end of our every-other-year dalliance with representative democracy, instead of immediately preparing to finish unfinished business from this session in the next legislature, let’s spend some time reviewing what failed this time to see if there is enough popular support for discarded policy ideas to achieve similar outcomes through different means.

In other words, let’s spend some time seeing if we can get things that are vitally important done now.

That is the underlying theme of the Vote Nevada Summer Civics Festival.  Our state constitution establishes direct democracy rights beyond the right to vote for someone else to address issues, yet we rarely look to Nevada’s founding document for answers.

So, we are kicking off our Civics Festival with a presentation from Nevada attorney Daniel H. Stewart, who practices constitutional law.  Mr. Stewart served as Governor Sandoval’s general counsel and he is now in private practice.  In a recent op-ed for The Nevada Independent, Mr. Stewart wrote about his admiration for our state’s constitution, so I reached out and extended an invitation to host the kickoff event for our Summer Civics Festival.  He graciously agreed, so his presentation is on June 12^th, via Zoom, 9-10:30 am. RSVP here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rcu2sqz4pEtyqrgDcySXoyAtiHAKw2Fx8

Mr. Stewart’s op-ed is here: https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/honor-thy-state-constitution

A full description of each Summer Civics Festival event is here: https://vote-nevada-blog.org/dates-rsvp-links-for-the-summer-civics-festival/

I have most of our Civics Festival events scheduled on this page, if you are interested in RSVP’ing https://vote-nevada-blog.org/dates-rsvp-links-for-the-summer-civics-festival/

Once the legislative session finishes on Monday, May 31^st, I will be able to schedule the few remaining events, so stay tuned.

Thank you for being Nevadans with me,

Sondra

Vote Nevada: Solving Problems with Civics

Please consider selecting Vote Nevada as your preferred nonprofit on Amazon Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_se_uspo_laas_aas

Vote Nevada is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit civic engagement organization.  Anyone can become a supporter by emailing info@vote-nevada.org, we have no membership dues.  We do, however, accept donations Here