PLEASE DONATE: A Historic Democracy Opportunity for LA

LOS ANGELES
21.11.2025
PLEASE DONATE: A Historic Democracy Opportunity for LA
By Joe Mathews

A Plan to Have a Sortition-Lottery Based Assembly of Everyday Angelenos Rewrite the City Charter Lacks the Money to Go Forward

Friends, I don't ask for money.
 
But I'm making an exception now on behalf of LA, our city in crisis.
 
I'm a volunteer lead of the loose coalition called Rewrite LA (rewritela.org) seeking to bring democracy--via a lottery-selected, representative group of everyday Angelenos--into the rewriting of the city charter. This would be the first such assembly in our local history (though a second one is brewing in Culver City).
 
LA elites & philanthropies have yet to back this (though we've asked). We need your help now, or the assembly won't happen, and the council, mayor and their appointees will decide this themselves.
 
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LOS ANGELES

Joe Mathews is founder and publisher of Democracy Local, a planetary publication dedicated to stories, ideas, data, and questions about everyday people governing themselves. He is a Future of Democracy fellow at the Berggruen Institute. For Democracy Local and other outlets, he writes the Democracy Column.  Based in Los Angeles, Joe is best known as author of the popular syndicated Connecting California column at Zocalo Public Square, where he is also democracy editor. He is also author of three books; The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy (2006); The California Crackup (2010) and The California Recall: Its First 20 Years (2023). He has served as co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy; as a reporter for the LA Times, Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal; as board member of Democracy International; as a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University; and a youth baseball coach.