OM DENNE EPISODE
In a moment when the democratic project feels genuinely imperiled, it helps to hear from someone who has been in the fight for four decades and still wakes up ready for more. The latest episode of This Old Democracy features Miles Rapoport — community organizer, state legislator, Connecticut Secretary of the State, former president of Demos, former national director of Common Cause, and current executive director of 100% Democracy, an initiative he co-founded to promote universal voting.
Over the course of an expansive conversation with host Micah Sifry, Rapoport traces an arc from the antiwar movement to the ballot box to the boardrooms of national advocacy, and explains why — despite everything — he remains an optimist.
Rapoport pulls no punches about where we are:
"There are zero guardrails on what Donald Trump and the Trump administration and the movement behind him would like to do to restrict and take over our democracy. So that's the worst of times."
But he balances that assessment with a characteristic refusal to despair:
"[A]s the song goes, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Because I do think that there are lots of ways in which people are working, as you are, Micah, to make democracy better. And I think that's a really important thing. I am an optimist on this question, because I think that the forces to preserve and improve democracy will ultimately prevail."
Rapoport's path from Vietnam War protester to Connecticut state legislator was not a straight line, but it had an internal logic. After years of community organizing — working to empower people and make government more responsive — he watched the Reagan revolution demonstrate, with painful clarity, that electoral power could undo in months what organizing had won over years. The answer, for him and for many in the community organizing world at that moment, was to enter the arena directly.
He ran for the Connecticut state legislature in 1984, won, and was assigned almost immediately to the elections committee — which he would eventually chair. Ten years of immersion in election law and voting rights policy followed.
"It's not a super straight line, but there is definitely a through line... the idea that there is tremendous inequality economically and socially and racially in the country, and at the same time, our democratic institutions are failing to deal with it."
Rapoport's run for Secretary of the State in 1994 offers one of the most compelling real-world demonstrations of what fusion voting actually does. Rapoport, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by A Connecticut Party, the independent, centrist party that ex-Republican Lowell Weicker had created in 1990.
When the votes were counted, Rapoport had received 365,000 votes on the Democratic line — and 125,000 more on the "A Connecticut Party" line. He won the race by 2,237 votes.
"Absent A Connecticut party, no way I would ever have been elected."
That experience didn't just help him win. It shaped how he governed. One out of every four of his voters had come to him on a third-party line — moderate, old-line Republicans who crossed over based on shared values around the income tax fight and civic reform. He knew who they were and felt accountable to them.
"I definitely was more bipartisan than I might have been — more conscious of making sure that the people who voted for me on the Connecticut Party line felt good about it."
To critics who argue that fusion is too complicated for voters or too difficult to administer, Rapoport has a direct response:
"It's not only not rocket science, it's not even algebra. It's just third grade math. You can vote for a candidate on one line and on another line, and at the end of the night you add the two votes together to get a total."
He adds, with characteristic directness: "I'm urging any secretary of state who's thinking about it to give me a call. I can give you a hands-on lesson. It's easy."
As Secretary of the State, Rapoport oversaw elections in a state where fusion had been practiced continuously and understood the nuts and bolts of running it well. He and Micah also discuss what was achieved beyond fusion: implementing the National Voter Registration Act ("Motor Voter") aggressively and thoughtfully; expanding access to the primary system; and thinking of the office itself as, in Rapoport's phrase, the "advocate in chief for democracy and participation."
After leaving office, Rapoport continued pushing the frontier. At Demos, which he led for 13 years, he helped drive the national expansion of election day voter registration — from six states when he started to 25 today. The goal was always the same: close the gap between who is eligible to participate and who actually does.
But at some point, that incremental approach confronted its own limits. Rapoport describes the moment of clarity:
"I had been working for all the democracy reforms — same-day registration, early voting, mail-in voting, restoration of voting rights — and all of those moved the needle of expanding voter participation, but not very much. I said, is there anything that could really move the needle?"
The answer came from an unexpected quarter: a paper by E.J. Dionne and William Galston for the Brookings Institution, which made the case for treating voting as a required civic duty. Rapoport learned, to his admitted embarrassment, that 25 countries already have mandatory voting — and that Australia has had it since 1924, achieving 90% turnout in every election since.
"I said, wow, this is something that needs to be discussed in the United States."
The result was a book co-authored with Dionne and the creation of 100% Democracy, which advocates for what Rapoport calls "universal voting" — mandatory participation, but without mandating a vote for any particular candidate (you can leave a ballot blank or mark "none of the above"). And crucially, this doesn't require federal legislation or a constitutional amendment. States set the time, manner, and place of elections. They can do this themselves. Bills are currently moving in Connecticut and Illinois.
Rapoport has continued to build relationships with elections officials around the country, attending the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference and speaking with counterparts from both parties. He finds real openness — both to fusion and to universal voting:
"I spent some time in Washington at the [NASS] conference and had great conversations with Secretaries of State, both Democrats and Republicans."That cross-partisan dialogue matters. Rapoport's own career is proof that fusion works best when it transcends party lines — and that the voters who use third-party lines are often precisely the voters politicians need to understand and speak to.
At the end of the episode, Micah asks the question he poses to all his guests: how do you cope? How do you keep your head up? Civic faith, says Rapoport.
"What gives me hope and keeps me going is the sense that there really are — and I believe a majority of people in this country who want to participate, who care about making our country a better place, who are willing to push back. I mean, you look at the incredible civic pride that has come over Minneapolis since the ICE raids. I just think there's a lot of ⁓ really, really good things happening. If I can be part of that and maybe even bring some new ideas to it, that's a good reason to get up in the morning."
