PLAINFIELD – Twinfield Union School Senior Hazel O’Brien was selected as a finalist in Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) fifteenth annual State of the Union Essay Contest, Wednesday, March 19. His essay, selected from the 475 students at 25 Vermont high schools who submitted entries, evaluated ranked choice voting, demonstrated the public is in favor of it and suggested that momentum can be used to demand Congress take action.
Sen. Sanders annual contest gives Vermont high school students the opportunity to describe a major issue facing our country and propose what they would do to solve it.
O’Brien, who splits his time between Plainfield and Marshfield, said he knew about the contest last year, but was too busy to write an essay. He pulled this year’s entry together the weekend it was due, he said..
O’Brien said he found out he had been selected while he was at a friend’s house. He finally listened to a voicemail message he’d received the day before, but hadn’t yet taken the time to listen to it. He called back to learn more and received an email with all the details soon afterward.
A panel of nine Vermont educators served as volunteer judges, ranking the essays and selecting 12 finalists and three winners.
Since Sanders started the contest, over 6,600 students throughout Vermont, representing almost every high school in the state, have written essays about critically important issues, including climate change, access to mental health care, immigration reform, the housing crisis, political polarization, and the cost of higher education.
“In difficult times, what makes me most hopeful is seeing young people engaged, thinking critically about the challenges we face as a country,” said Sanders. “Thank you to all the students who participated in this year’s contest. I look forward to hearing from the finalists and discussing their ideas about how to move forward on some very important issues.”
Sanders hosted the finalists at the Vermont State House, March 29, for a roundtable discussion about their essays. O’Brien attended the 90-minute gathering where each finalist gave a quick summary of their essay, after which other finalists and Sen. Sanders shared their thoughts about it, said O’Brien.
The subjects covered a wide range of issues that included health care, obesity and election reform, said O’Brien. It was “pretty interesting to see because he [Sanders] was really on top of his stuff”
“Overall, I didn’t expect to be selected as a finalist. It’s a valuable opportunity because I hope to be involved in politics in some way,” said O’Brien, adding he would like to work in government and maybe run for office some day. He said he’d found interacting with Sen. Sanders “very enriching.”
Sanders has entered the finalists’ essays into the Congressional Record, the official archive of the U.S. Congress. The contest is timed to coincide with the President’s annual address to a joint session of Congress, which took place on Tuesday, March 4.
Read the essays of the winners and finalists at sanders.senate.gov/wp–content/uploads/State–of–the–Union–Essay–Contest–Packet-2025.pdf
Learn more about opportunities for Vermont students through Sanders’ office by visiting https://www.sanders.senate.gov/vermont/students/.
Hazel O’Brien’s State of the Union Essay Contest Entry
On November 5th, 2024, California held elections to determine the representation of their state in the U.S. House of Representatives. Fifteen million voters across 52 congressional districts pledged their ballots, and when the results became clear, the Democratic Party won 60% of the popular vote while the Republican Party won 40%. Despite this result, the seat share of the Californian delegation will be 43 Democrats to 9 Republicans, approximately 83% to 17%. This is the plurality voting system in action, a process that left 6,000,000 Californian Republican voters grossly underrepresented.
Most elections in the U.S. use a plurality voting system, which drives political polarization as the party duopoly becomes entrenched, and demonization becomes a tactic to prevent spillage of voters between the parties. Though this system is deeply embedded in contemporary American democracy, there are paths to improvement. For one, we can look to the proportional systems that successful democracies implement abroad. A great example of a proportional election system is the use of multi-member districts. This method takes the idea of a congressional district and essentially lowers the threshold of popularity a party must receive to earn representation by increasing the number of seats held in the district; this way an accurate reflection of the entire voting public can be achieved as opposed to just the plurality opinion.
Multi-member districts were once permitted in the U.S., but due to threats of misuse by segregationists in response to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it was banned in 1967 under the Uniform Congressional District Act (UCDA). The UCDA had the aim of eradicating bloc voting, a system that utilizes multi-member districts to neglect minority representation. It unfortunately also set single-member districts as the only legal means to host elections for the House of Representatives, a major cause of our plurality system. The solution here is relatively uncomplicated on its face, the process by which laws are passed mirrors very closely the way in which they are repealed. With a simple bill intended to counteract and nullify the UCDA, a breakthrough is possible. if that bill included clauses detailing how to mandate standards of proportionality and representation, such as specifically banning abusive practices like bloc voting, then we could see significant changes with the successful installment of multi-member districts.
Many in Congress will likely be resistant to the idea of an alteration considering it is directly tied to their positions of power. However, we can already see the movement necessary to make progress. Maine passed Measure 5, an act to establish ranked choice voting on the federal level, via citizen initiative in 2016. Alaska in 2020 also passed a similar measure through referendum. This demonstrates electoral reform is something the voting public considers a priority and by harvesting this momentum we can demand Congress to finally take action.
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
