For a special Veteran’s Day Batten Hour on Monday, the UVA Batten School hosted two veterans groups whose mission is to lessen political polarization.  

The speakers were Tony Haas, director of development for Veterans For All Voters, and Ellen Gustafson, co-executive director and co-founder of  We the Veterans and Military Families. They explored solutions-oriented approaches to working across lines of difference and empowering all votes by de-bunking misinformation campaigns and encouraging voting reforms such as ranked-choice systems.

“We want to create structural, systemic change,” Haas told students, explaining that as it stands, the current political system fails to hold elected leaders accountable to the majority of their constituencies. “This is not a new concern that we have this toxicity in our politics.”

In 2022, approximately 83% of the House of Representatives was elected in “party-safe” districts, Haas said. “What that means is it’s expected that either the Republican or Democrat will win that election by 10% or more every year. It’s a trend that happens all the time.” Also that year, more than one-third did not face another candidate in their race.

By logical extension, Haas argued that 83% of elections are effectively decided during a party’s closed or semi-open party primary, with less than 10% of voters participating in those primary elections. Those that do are typically more partisan, “and when the representatives win these seats, they govern based on those incentives,” Haas said.

Ranked choice voting

Batten BA ‘25 student Andrew Chand, worked with Veterans For All Voters this year to help enact ranked choice voting in Charlottesville, which will use the alternative system on a pilot basis for its June 2025 primaries for city council. It was Chand’s suggestion to bring the group to Garrett Hall for the Veterans Day Batten Hour.

Veterans For All Voters wants to change the system by changing the political incentive structure through fully open primaries and ranked-choice voting. In general, open primaries allow voters from any political affiliation to vote in any primary in their state. In a ranked choice system (in a primary or general election), voters rate their preference of multiple candidates in order, instead of just choosing one.

Although Virginia’s current governor, Glenn Youngkin, was nominated through a ranked-choice-style system during his party’s primary, the movement is not particularly popular with either party in general elections, Haas said.

Alaska is a good example. In 2022, during the state’s first ranked-choice election, voters chose a Trump-endorsed Republican for governor and a moderate Republican to the Senate, but a moderate Democrat for an open seat in the House — a surprise election of Alaska’s first indigenous female to Congress in an upset to the RNC-backed candidate Sarah Palin.

“We do get pushback, and we get just as much pushback from Democrats,” Haas said, “because it threatens the duopoly.”

Media influence in elections

Gustafson presented to students from the perspective of a Virginia Beach-based Navy spouse, representing one of the roughly 43 million Americans that are a part of the military/family community.

“We touch a lot of people, and we are more likely to be an independent voting block. We’re also one of the most pluralistic communities in America,” she said.

In other words, military families live and work together and, often out of necessity, rely on each other regardless of race, class, religion, geographical background or politics in ways that other communities don’t.  Also, as public trust in many institutions wanes, research shows that a majority of people inherently trust service members and, by extension, their families.

In Gustafson’s view, these two factors make military families prime targets for misinformation and extremist campaigns on social media. “Foreign influence operations work really well on us and we’re the arbiters of that on our phones,” Gustafson said. “If you can get a veteran or military spouse to retweet a random thing… you’re allowing the most trusted American to do your bidding,”

Gustafson noted that right up until last Wednesday when the presidential election was called, social media feeds across America were blaring content about fraudulent elections and potential political violence “like a fever pitch” and there was “an unbelievable fear in the elections community.”

Nonetheless, she said that military families were working the polls and doing their best to counter that misinformation as an extension of the service-oriented mentality inherent to adopting a career in the armed forces.

For both Gustafson and Haas, the work of encouraging voting reforms and accurate information starts with education at the local level.

“(Change) starts slow and then all at once, building the base of support,” Haas said. “Our biggest obstacle, I think is education – what reform is and why it’s needed.”