“Every time I talk to someone about running for office, the first thing they say is, Eric, you have to pick a team,” confides Navy veteran Eric Bronner, COO of the non-partisan group Veterans for All Voters. 

“And something didn't sit right with me. So the pump was primed, as my parents would say, for some kind of awakening.”

That awakening occurred  listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode with former Purple Principle  guest Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry. In that episode, as in our own 2021 interview, Gehl  highlighted the lack of incentives our elected officials have to govern effectively.  

To tackle that  problem, Eric and his co-founders are forming a nationwide network of veterans to volunteer on behalf of state level election reform initiatives like opening primaries to the large percentage of registered independent or unaffiliated veterans unable to vote in primary elections and also to advance Final Four or Five voting as detailed in The Politics Industry. 

“The last thing we need is more partisanship,” says Bronner who now works full time coordinating  hundreds of volunteers in forty states and counting. “We can have differences of opinion, right? But the system itself is broken.”

Tune in to meet three other veterans behind this effort and find out how Bronner and Veterans For All Voters hope to mend the system in this 2024 election cycle and beyond. The Purple Principle is Fluent Knowledge production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.  

SHOW NOTES

Our Guests

Eric Bronner: Bio, X (Twitter)

Co-founder and COO of Veterans for All Voters

Additional Resources

Show Me Integrity 

Freakonomics: America’s Hidden Duopoly

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter

Find us online!

X: @purpleprincipl

Facebook: @thepurpleprinciplepodcast

Instagram: @thepurpleprinciplepodcast

Our website: https://bit.ly/2ZCpFaQ

Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/2UfFSja