What is “One Member One Vote”?

One Member One Vote (OMOV or 1M1V) is a principle which states that each member of an organization can cast one vote on a decision. Labor and parliamentary movements looking to challenge weighted voting systems that gave disproportionate influence to certain candidates, delegates, or constituencies coined the term. Within DSA, “1M1V” refers to a specific method for conducting business that has been used, or at least proposed, at both the chapter and national level. Under this system, every dues-paying member votes directly on key decisions, including leadership elections, campaign endorsements, and resolutions. In chapters that have adopted 1M1V, members typically vote online over a fixed period, commonly 48 to 72 hours, using tools such as OpaVote. Members receive a ballot via email and cast their votes at any time within that window. This approach contrasts with traditional in-person voting, which requires members to be present— either physically or through hybrid options— at a meeting to cast a vote.

Proponents of 1M1V argue that the system embodies accessibility, inclusivity, and equal participation. By removing attendance requirements, 1M1V enables members with work schedules that conflict with meeting times, parents without childcare, chronically ill members, and those with transportation barriers to have a voice in chapter decisions. The underlying philosophy is that all members deserve an equal say in the direction of the organization, regardless of how many meetings they can attend. As Groundwork Caucus member Chris G.H. writes,

“Democratic decisions need to be made by our whole membership, not just a self-selecting group of people who are able to participate regularly enough to qualify for voting rights on Tuesday evenings.’”¹

The name “One Member One Vote” suggests that, in some form, there are some members in DSA who are not given the right to vote in decisions that are made in some sphere of DSA. But in fact, the guiding principle of “One Member One Vote” is already alive and well at every level of DSA’s internal democracy, with members broadly empowered to make decisions within the context of deliberative discussion in their chapters, committees, and working groups. Importantly, the name “One Member One Vote” obscures how Groundwork’s material reform proposals subvert the very principle they’re ostensibly stated to address. We consequently find the name given to this alternative decision making practice to be disingenuous. We will hereafter more accurately refer to this method of decision making as asynchronous voting, the essential function of the reforms being not to expand democracy, but specifically to temporally separate the act of voting from the deliberative process.  

Asynchronous voting, which members of Groundwork Caucus and Socialist Majority Caucus have advocated for on the proposed basis of democracy, accessibility, and inclusion, has drawn substantial criticism from within DSA. We in the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) have led this criticism as the first caucus to publish a critique of Groundwork’s ‘Deliberative Member Engagement’ proposal on April 27, 2024.² Since then, we have been joined by the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), Bread & Roses, and Reform & Revolution in our critique.

The Case Against Asynchronous Voting

 We identify five core problems with asynchronous voting as proposed and implemented in DSA chapters:

1. The problem of identity verification and vulnerability to membership fraud,
2. The erosion of deliberation and member participation,
3. The empowerment of aggressive whipping of uninvolved and under-informed members,
4. The weakening of democratic accountability, and
5. The degradation of member development and organizing skills.

1. Identity Verification: An Open Door to Fraud

The fundamental problem with asynchronous voting is that DSA chapters cannot easily verify that an email address belongs to an individual member, or even an actual person. DSA’s bar of entry is very low and, therefore, open to abuse. Chapters have no reliable way to confirm that an online voter corresponds to a unique, real individual. This creates an obvious vulnerability. Under an asynchronous online voting system, there is little to prevent a coordinated effort to sign up multiple memberships using disposable email addresses, discounted dues, or other low-cost methods. This was one concern we raised in our 2024 statement.³ When DSA last held a member-wide vote in 2019, the resolution set a specific date by which members had to be in good standing. The absence of such a date in subsequent proposals, we argued, “leaves a potential door open to exploitation… it wouldn’t take much for members on either side of the issue to start signing up everyone they know for an extra vote.”

This is not simply a theoretical concern. DSA already has a documented case of this occurring. Ahead of the 2025 National Convention, the leadership of NYC-DSA initially marketed dues waivers as trial memberships to increase the number of delegates allotted to their chapter at convention.⁴ By lowering the barrier to entry, NYC-DSA sought to inflate their membership count and, consequently, their delegate allocation. If the leadership of a chapter is willing to exploit membership rules for delegate advantage at convention, it follows that it will not hesitate to exploit the same vulnerabilities to stuff online ballot boxes. We must also remain aware that this threat is not only internal, with multiple recent instances of conservative reporters registering for DSA membership in their efforts to produce negative media coverage of the organization. When combined with our existing low barrier to entry, adopting an org-wide policy of asynchronous voting will lower DSA’s safeguards against interference and exploitation by bad-faith actors. DSA can easily address this vulnerability by requiring all votes to be held at meetings with OpenSlides, the same platform we’ve used at the National Convention and in many chapters across the country. If DSA cannot guarantee whether each vote comes from a distinct, real human being, then asynchronous voting becomes a farce of democracy. 

2. Deliberation and Collective Decision-Making

Asynchronous voting creates a second major problem: it replaces collective, in-person deliberation with isolated, individual voting. Francis R, a Detroit DSA member, describes her experience in her article for Bread and Roses’ The Call, “Democracy Dies in Inbox: Detroit DSA’s Experience of 1M1V”:

“It’s hard to express how demoralizing and anticlimactic it feels to hold a meaningful debate in person at a DSA meeting, to feel the room moving and shifting and a majority sentiment developing and excitement building towards a shared decision, only to be told at the culmination of the discussion, ‘okay, look out for an email from Opavote in the next 24 hours so you can vote.’ You are instantly transformed from an active member of a collective finding its way together into an individual alone behind a screen. You may never know how, or if, your neighbor votes, or learn if you changed someone’s mind — and they may never learn if they changed yours.”⁵

Asynchronous voting also breaks basic parliamentary procedure. Under Robert’s Rules, used (and now required) across our organization, members need real-time debate to amend a motion. But when a chapter sends an email ballot with 72 hours to vote, no one can offer a single amendment, nor provide any procedural checks other than voting the proposal down. Even Socialist Majority Caucus, while a proponent of the underlying proposal, concedes that the opposition to asynchronous voting rests on the value of live, in-person debate as a mechanism for building consensus and testing arguments.⁶ When voting is asynchronous, members lose the social process of engaging and persuading one another. Members cannot watch a room shift. Members cannot educate themselves adequately on the positions of members on either side of an issue, apart from occasional written statements that may not even engage with one another. Members cannot respond to a counterargument in real time or interact with the person making it. Members cannot see hands rise and fall.

Academic research on digital parties confirms our concerns. Marco and Vittori find that online participation platforms bring about a “fragmentation of the base and an ‘atomization of internal relations… [which] isolates members from each other’.”⁷ Gerbaudo similarly argues that what these platforms offer is not genuine deliberation but a “plebiscitarian reactive democracy” where members have little say over the process and are mostly left to ratify decisions taken by the party leadership. Members’ participation, he instead concludes, “mostly takes the form of ratification, a binary for/against or like/unlike reaction to proposals that have largely been pre-packaged by the leadership.”⁸ Biancalana and Vittori describe this phenomenon as “pseudo-participation”: digital tools are used “to give the impression to members to participate in the party’s decision-making, but in reality, they can neither question the pre-eminence of the leadership nor have a say on the ‘rules of the game.’”⁹ Our comrades in Reform & Revolution make this same point:

 “Groundwork’s many proposals along the lines of ‘one member one vote’ (1M1V) seek to undercut the extensive democratic participation in DSA in the guise of expanding a limited decision making power to more members. While proponents of this massive change to our democracy have argued this will expand participation, the reality of the change will be that it silences member’s voices in large debates, disincentivizes the existing involvement of membership, and will prove unable to expand meaningful democratic participation to a significantly larger membership. In short: it undermines member organizing and democratic control over the organization.”¹⁰

This is the illusion of democracy: asynchronous, reactive, and designed for ratification, not participation.

The evidence from chapters and digital parties that have implemented asynchronous voting is damning. Participation is low, and the quality of that participation is even lower. In Metro Detroit, approximately 150 people voted online to implement asynchronous voting. Fewer than 10 of them watched the debate that preceded the vote. About 50 people attended the meeting in person, meaning the majority of voters made up their minds alone or through one-on-one conversations, never hearing the arguments that members prepared and delivered from the floor. This low turnout extends beyond just one chapter. In Greater Baltimore DSA, online votes often drew fewer voters than meeting attendees. Low turnout, alongside the complexity of amending asynchronous ballots, convinced Greater Baltimore DSA to shift away from this voting method.

These issues further extend to our college-aged comrades, in the form of YDSA chapters. At the University of Florida chapter, a total of fourteen people voted in the asynchronous elections for convention delegates, which for the first time ever were done via emails. Less than three weeks after the elections, a group of members decided to call to redo the election again, this time over WhatsApp instead of email, and they initiated a vote to do so, with no substantial debate, in the form of a poll on the messaging app. This callous approach to the democratic process commonly leads to slates of candidates advancing with minimal debate or presence, and when mistakes are made, the same mistakes are used as “attempts” to correct them.

Members who sparsely attend meetings seldom encounter the information and relationships needed for informed judgment. Asked to vote on complex organizational questions, members may vote based on limited information or simply follow the direction of the person who contacted them first. Does this disengaged member learn anything about democracy through doing so? Do they learn to see themselves as a political actor?

We can turn back to academic research to confirm that this pattern is not unique to DSA. Marco and Vittori document that in the Spanish left party Podemos, turnout for internal consultations plunged from 54% to just 4% in thirteen months. The average turnout across all votes was only 26%. Of over 8,000 debates listed on the party’s platform, only twenty featured more than one hundred comments. In the vast majority of discussion threads, only one or two members expressed an opinion. Of nearly 2,400 member-initiated proposals, none reached the required threshold to become a binding vote.¹¹ Gerbaudo finds similar results in the Italian Five Star Movement: turnout in online votes averaged 33% between 2013 and 2014, but dropped to 14% by 2017. Participation consistently lagged behind growth in party membership. In both parties, online ballots “have almost invariably yielded supermajorities (>80%) results, looking more like rubber-stamp elections than genuine choices among competing options.”¹² The pattern is unmistakable. Asynchronous voting produces low turnout, shallow deliberation, and plebiscitary outcomes.

3. Unequal Access, Aggressive Whipping

The claim that asynchronous voting is more democratic or more representative fails under scrutiny. In practice, asynchronous voting empowers those with access to resources at the expense of those without. Under asynchronous voting, the number of online voters can be two or three times the number of meeting attendees. Winning requires aggressive vote-whipping by political insiders: texts, calls, and messages reaching isolated members, most of whom tend to have little to no context on the matter at hand. This fundamentally changes the nature of organizational democracy. 

As Francis R puts it in The Call:

“If you are among the majority of chapter members who are not in a large caucus formation, you simply will not have the resources to run a vote-whipping operation that can beat the minority of people who are. This means only well-connected members can hope to shape the action and trajectory of the chapter.”

Members without caucus backing lack the infrastructure to reach online voters. As Francis noted, “since we started 1M1V there has not been a single meeting resolution brought forward by anyone who is not in a caucus (the majority of members).”¹³ This imbalance is not accidental. Chapter leadership has access to full membership lists, including email addresses and phone numbers. General membership and opposition caucuses do not. This structural asymmetry transforms asynchronous voting from a level playing field into a rigged game.

LSC identified this problem in our 2024 response to Groundwork:

“Used alone, those mediums turn direct democracy into a farce, making decisions less about who can put an effective argument to membership and more about who has the deepest contact lists or best whipping methods. No ideas are exchanged, no agreements about program and strategy are reached; all that matters for the end result is that one score is higher than the other.”¹⁴

Vote whipping is not inherently antidemocratic. But when the system demands whipping at scale, and leadership hoards membership data, the result is not democracy. The lack of transparency in both deliberation and the voting process makes the problem worse. Many chapters use anonymous ballots with OpaVote for asynchronous votes, meaning members cannot see how their comrades voted. This stands in stark contrast to voting in a deliberative assembly (whether at a chapter meeting or at Convention), where votes are often made public by show of hands, clicker, or recorded ballot. The process itself builds accountability: members know who voted for which resolution, and they can ask questions or challenge results.

Anonymous asynchronous voting has none of this. It isn’t simply that members can’t see if a bloc voted together to push through a resolution– the deeper problem is that anonymous ballots prevent the formation of an opposition. In a transparent system, members can see who voted with them and who voted against them. They can identify allies, build coalitions, and organize for the next fight. Anonymous asynchronous voting shuts down that possibility. Each member votes in isolation, and the results reveal nothing about political alignments. The system is designed not just to produce a winner, but to ensure that no opposition can ever cohere and make change happen. The process becomes a black box: votes go in, results come out, and members are asked to have faith in the outcome. Asynchronous voting does not distribute power evenly. It hands power to those who already have access to membership records and mass communication tools, and allows existing leadership to set the rules of political engagement, while leaving the majority of members no recourse but to simply click a button, left unable to organize for a different outcome.

4. Weakening of Democratic Accountability

Asynchronous voting does not just produce bad processes; it produces bad outcomes. It severs the link between members and their elected representatives, turning accountability into a symbolic gesture rather than a mechanism for real dialogue and change.

The limits of asynchronous accountability are nowhere clearer than in DSA-LA’s February 2024 censure of City Councilmember Nithya Raman. Raman had sought and accepted an endorsement from Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles, an organization whose unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza placed it in direct opposition to DSA-LA’s commitment to Palestinian liberation. Members voted. They censured Raman. They also crucially maintained her endorsement. The letter of censure made clear the damage Raman had caused: “These actions have driven a wedge between this chapter and allied Palestinian liberation groups.”¹⁵ But the letter also revealed the limits of the chapter’s response. As we in Libertarian Socialist Caucus wrote in April 2024, responding precisely to this kind of scenario:

“If this attitude toward oversight is applied only toward certain decisions, and not others, then it serves no purpose other than to further the immediate political goals of a faction, and not the long-term ability of members to decide for themselves the direction of their organization.”¹⁶

At the national level, asynchronous voting for NPC elections would sever the connection between DSA’s highest governing body, the Convention, and its day-to-day leadership. Under the current system, the Convention elects the NPC and charges it with executing the Convention’s decisions between meetings. If the full membership directly elects the NPC by email ballot, no political connection links the Convention’s decisions to the NPC’s actions. NPC members could theoretically run against Convention-passed proposals, win, and then gain the political power to overturn the will of Convention. Asynchronous voting would reduce Convention from a governing body to a conference, like those advocacy nonprofits hold for their volunteers.

5. Failure to Develop Members as Organizers

One of DSA’s most important functions is to train a layer of socialist organizers who can operate confidently in workplaces, unions, and communities. Asynchronous voting undermines this mission.

Again, Francis R writes:

“One of DSA’s most important tasks is training a mass layer of socialist organizers who can operate confidently in communities and struggles outside of the organization. DSA meetings should be a proving ground where we learn how each of us can best argue for our politics, with all the immediate feedback of cheers, groans, and voting cards shooting up (or failing to shoot up). When we lose, we practice to get better because if we can’t convince a room full of comrades to agree with us, how can we expect to win over our families, coworkers, and neighbors?”¹⁷

Under asynchronous voting, a member’s primary political action becomes clicking a button, replicating the passive, indirect form of democracy that socialists criticize in liberal politics.

Francis R continues:

“The beginning and end of most peoples’ experiences of democracy in the United States is casting a vote for something… We all know this kind of participation is a sham. That’s why for generations, socialists have met to practice actual organizational democracy in the time-honored form of a meeting.”¹⁸

Amy W of the Marxist Unity Group makes the same point succinctly:

“Voting only by mail (or email, etc) ceases to be parliamentary procedure — it ceases to enable participation in the democratic process. It loses the ability of participatory democracy to develop members, to execute on the philosophy that every cook can govern.”¹⁹

Asynchronous voting does not teach members how to persuade, how to debate, how to lose gracefully and come back stronger, or how to build collective action. It reduces members to voters rather than developing them as political actors. It inhibits the push for paper members to engage further in DSA. Instead, members are placated into passivity, leaving the organization’s reins with an immutable core of political insiders. While this is plainly beneficial for leadership cadres seeking to cut out their potential opposition, it stunts DSA’s ability to mature as an organization and prevents its politics from evolving alongside its membership. This inevitably extends to the movements DSA shares a hand in; if its core organizers can’t mature beyond the politics of its current leadership, DSA as we know it will lose its potential as a mass political force and retreat into self-serving insularity.

We’ve seen this exact dynamic play out more recently with the anti-Zionism question, a topic which various chapter and national leadership cadres had continuously, and successfully, forced out of members’ hands, even as calls outside DSA continued to mount against it from the rest of the anti-Zionist left. Only through careful organizing on a national scale– and importantly, access to live deliberation by DSA members– has this issue been resolved by the passage of R22 at the National Convention. The underlying undemocratic causes, nonetheless, continue to exist within DSA chapters around the country. We as a caucus will continue to fight for organizational democracy in DSA until those causes are properly addressed, by giving membership a genuine ability to properly deliberate on the organizational questions before them.

II. Responding to the Arguments for 1M1V

Proponents of asynchronous voting, chiefly members of Groundwork, make several claims in favor of 1M1V:

1. Accessibility: The current system excludes working-class members who cannot attend meetings.
2. Redistribution of power: Direct member voting redistributes power to the rank and file.
3. Democratic legitimacy: When members vote directly, they feel more invested in organizational decisions.
4. Alignment with socialist values: DSA should practice the direct democracy it preaches for society.
5. Proven success in labor: The UAW adopted 1M1V and elected militant reformer Shawn Fain.
6. Fairness: Without 1M1V, members who cannot make meetings cannot vote.

1. Accessibility

Proponents of asynchronous voting assume that any vote is better than no vote. A vote without debate, without amendment, without response to counterarguments. Is that still democratic participation? 

Groundwork correctly identifies real accessibility problems in the current system. Second shift workers, parents without childcare, members with disabilities, and members with transportation barriers cannot easily attend in-person meetings. But abandoning deliberation is not the answer.

Chapters already have better options. Remote conferencing tools like Zoom allow members to call into meetings. Proxy votes with a hard cap of one let a member designate another member to vote on their behalf without creating vote-buying blocs. Some chapters run child-watch programs where members take turns watching children so parents may attend and vote in person. Chapters can rotate meeting times and locations. Each of these solutions preserves deliberation while expanding access. Asynchronous voting does not.

Consider also Groundwork’s cynicism: they invoke disabled members to argue for asynchronous voting. Yet, they have concretely opposed critical issues like mask mandates and a hybrid option for convention attendance. These policies would actually allow for disabled and immunocompromised members to participate safely in deliberation. Given Groundwork’s staunch and well-documented opposition to these measures, their claimed concern for accessibility appears selective and opportunistic.

2. Redistribution of Power 

This point is addressed in Section 2, Subsection 3. Proponents argue that direct member voting redistributes power from a small elite to the rank and file. But as shown above, power under asynchronous voting shifts not to ordinary members, but to those who already control contact lists and the whipping operations. The rest of the membership merely gets a button to click. 

3. Democratic Legitimacy

This point is addressed in Section 2, Subsection 2 (low turnout, shallow deliberation) and Section 5 (failure to develop organizers). Proponents argue that when members vote directly, they feel more invested in organizational decisions. But as shown above, asynchronous voting produces the opposite. Members who vote in isolation do not deliberate. They do not persuade or get persuaded. They do not learn to organize. 

4. Alignment with Socialist Values

Proponents argue that DSA should practice the direct democracy it preaches for society. It would be hypocritical to demand one person, one vote for the nation while denying it to our own members.

But what kind of direct democracy do we preach? Do we want a society where citizens click a button in isolation every 48 to 72 hours? Do we want a society where debate happens only in private messages and votes are cast without ever hearing a counterargument? 

We preach a democracy of deliberation, assembly, and collective action. We criticize liberal democracy for reducing citizens to voters who show up, cast a ballot, and trust that someone else will govern. Asynchronous voting reproduces that model inside DSA.

The problem is not the principle of one member, one vote itself. DSA already operates under principle. The problem is replacing collective deliberation with isolated ratification. 

5. Proven success in labor

Proponents point to the United Auto Workers, which adopted 1M1V and elected militant reformer Shawn Fain. If it worked for the UAW, they argue, why not for DSA?

The UAW is not DSA. Union members vote on contracts, wages, healthcare, and the right to strike, decisions with immediate, material consequences for their daily lives. When a union member votes, they know that the outcome will affect their paycheck, their safety, their ability to feed their family.

DSA members vote on resolutions, endorsements, and leadership at the local level, and delegates at the national level. These are important, but they are not the same. A member who skips a vote on a resolution will not lose their health insurance. A member who votes against an endorsement will not be fired. Material conditions drive participation. When the stakes are high, members organize, debate, and turn out. When the stakes are low, they do not. Asynchronous voting does not create investment. It assumes that any vote, on any topic, with any level of deliberation, is equally meaningful. That assumption is false.

The UAW’s success came from militant organizing, from shop-floor debate, from workers who knew that their votes mattered because their lives depended on them. Asynchronous voting did not create that. Asynchronous voting cannot replace it.

6. Fairness

Many ask whether 1M1V is more democratic. Don’t we want to include as many people as possible in our democracy?

It is true that in-person voting disenfranchises certain classes of members. Some examples include late-shift workers, parents, or members who may be unable to attend every meeting. And it is true that as socialists, we should be striving for increased participation in our democracy.

But that doesn’t mean we should contort our democracy into something much less meaningful for the sake of including as many people as possible. There are alternative solutions, such as limited proxy voting, that allow people who can’t make it to a general meeting to participate in some form without destroying the deliberative aspect of our democracy.

In addition, many other options exist to make our meetings as accessible as possible to our membership, some of which we have done, including the use of remote conference technology like Zoom to allow people to call into a meeting without having to be at the physical venue. But deliberation is core to democracy. It is something we cannot and must not go without. A democracy without deliberation is not a democracy at all.

Conclusion

Asynchronous voting is not democracy. It is a hollowed-out imitation in the tradition of the bourgeois liberal democracy: a system that cannot verify voters, does not foster deliberation, empowers the well-connected over the many, produces symbolic accountability, fails to develop organizers, and demobilizes the membership it claims to empower. We must reject it, and strive for something better. DSA should instead build the democratic, deliberative, in-person structures that train organizers, build solidarity, and hold leaders accountable to our membership.

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Footnotes

1. “What Kind of Democracy Do You Want in Metro Detroit DSA?,” Groundwork, accessed May 18, 2026, https://www.groundworkdsa.com/building-up/democracy-in-metro-detroit-dsa. ↩︎
2. “For Direct Democracy Without Caveats: LSC Opposes the “Deliberative Member Engagement” Proposal,” Libertarian Socialist Caucus, April 27, 2024, https://dsa-lsc.org/2024/04/27/for-direct-democracy-without-caveats-lsc-opposes-the-deliberative-member-engagement-proposal/. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4.  “This is not how we should recruit members,” DSA Discussion Forum, accessed May 18, 2026, https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/this-is-not-how-we-should-recruit-members/41641. ↩︎
5. Frances Reade, “Democracy Dies in Inbox: Detroit DSA’s Experience of 1M1V,” The Call, August 7, 2025, https://socialistcall.com/2025/08/07/democracy-dies-in-inbox/. ↩︎
6. “Boxes and Tools,” Socialist Majority, accessed May 18, 2026, https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/1m1v-and-the-trot-box. ↩︎
7. Deseriis Marco and Davide Vittori, “The Impact of Online Participation Platforms on the Internal Democracy of Two Southern European Parties: Podemos and the Five Star Movement,” International Journal of Communication 13 (November 2019): 5696-5714. ↩︎
8. Paolo Gerbaudo, “Are Digital Parties More Democratic than Traditional Parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s Online Decision-Making Platforms,” Party Politics 27, no. 4 (2021): 730–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068819884878. ↩︎
9. Cecilia Biancalana and Davide Vittori, “Cyber-Parties’ Membership Between Empowerment and Pseudo-Participation: The Cases of Podemos and the Five Star Movement,” in Digital Parties, ed. Oscar Barberà et al. (Springer International Publishing, 2021), 109-126, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78668-7_6. ↩︎
10. Emma Buckley, “No Shortcuts: Against Groundwork’s Spectacle of Democracy,” Reform & Revolution, July 22, 2025, https://reformandrevolution.org/2025/07/22/no-shortcuts-against-groundworks-spectacle-of-democracy/. ↩︎
11. Marco and Vittori, The Impact of Online Participation Platforms, 5705-5710. ↩︎
12. Gerbaudo, “Are Digital Parties More Democratic than Traditional Parties?,” 8-10. ↩︎
13. Reade, “Democracy Dies in Inbox.” ↩︎
14. LSC, “For Direct Democracy Without Caveats.” ↩︎
15. DSA Los Angeles Steering Committee, “LETTER OF CENSURE – Nithya Raman,” DSA Los Angeles, February 4, 2024, https://dsa-la.org/letter-of-censure-nithya-raman/. ↩︎
16. LSC, “For Direct Democracy Without Caveats.” ↩︎
17. Reade, “Democracy Dies in Inbox.” ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. Amy Wilhelm, “Democracy Is More Than Voting 1&2,” Light and Air, accessed May 18, 2026, https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/democracy-is-more-than-voting-1. ↩︎