It is easy and helpful!  

Throughout most of its history, politics in the United States has been dominated by two major political parties.  It is time to change that.

The two major parties have changed a bit – Federalists and Whigs, Republicans and Democrats – but the country has always been dominated by two major parties at a time. While this system has long been the norm in this country, concerns have been raised for just as long. President John Adams considered a two-party system to be the most serious of threats:

“THERE is nothing I dread so much as the division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.”

Today, the warning voiced by a founding father is amplified because neither major party is especially healthy. The Republican party is hardly recognizable in the Trump era, and both parties seem motivated primarily by money (is your text inbox during election time filled with messages that beg not for your engagement but for your money?) And the way our elections are run – from gerrymandering to party primaries that promote extremism – seems only to exacerbate the dysfunction. This should be no surprise. Power tends to want more power.

But what can we do? A third-party candidate is a ‘spoiler’, right? And to vote for them is to ‘throw away’ your vote?

Fortunately, there are actions we can take. One such action is to affiliate with another party.  We propose that you consider affiliating with the Colorado Forward Party.

Changing your party affiliation helps our democracy in several basic ways.  One, it (however slightly) lessens the stranglehold of the two major political parties. These parties increasingly demand – but do not necessarily earn – our loyalty. Changing your affiliation reduces their influence.

Second, changing party affiliation is like investing wisely. It keeps your political power working even when we are not in an election cycle. It promotes fresh voices, empowering parties working to increase the effectiveness of our elections. It also helps the major parties recognize that they are not offering what people want.

(Of course, come election time, you still have one vote and can vote for a candidate from any party you like. If you want to vote in a specific party primary, simply affiliate with that party temporarily prior to primary elections which occur every two years. *)

Changing party affiliation has no implications for the typical voter and is simple. Go to the Colorado Secretary of State website, look up your voter registration record, and edit your party affiliation using the form. If, at some point, you want to change your affiliation again, you can return to the site and submit the form again. There is no limit on the number of times you can do this. It typically takes less than five minutes.

There are other implications depending on a person's level of political activity, so if your political activity extends beyond voting in elections (e.g., working at a polling station on election day), please consider the additional implications of changing your party affiliation *.

Of course, we encourage you to change your affiliation to the Forward Party, which only recently became a minor political party in Colorado. Currently, the Colorado Forward Party’s platform is focused on a set of values and improving our elections to make them more fair, effective, and representative of the electorate. Hopefully, you want this. The Forward Party is promoting an agenda focused on improving our election process: Open up our primaries to everyone*, limit gerrymandering, and adopt a system of ranked-choice voting to reduce the influence of extremists.

* If you want to vote in a major party's primary election, you must unaffiliate or change your affiliation before the primary election in every even-numbered year. You can find deadlines here. (For example, the 2024 election calendar said that June 3rd was the "Last day for voters who are affiliated with a political party to change or withdraw their affiliation if they wish to vote in a different party's primary election for the June 25th Primary Election.")

NOTE:  If you plan to run for office, you should check with the Secretary of State for the implications of changing your voter registration. In some cases, a candidate must be affiliated with the party nominating them by January 1 of the election year.  In rare cases, the candidate must have been affiliated with the party for as many as 5 years.  The Colorado Forward Party has ballot access in Colorado, so we can put qualified candidates on the ballot. 

If you are not registered to vote, you can register here.