Nancy Plencner (The Fountain Hills Times, April 12, 2023) describes Independents as a mystery. Let’s pull back the veil a bit.

A third of Arizona’s voters register as Independents. Nationally, that figure is around 45% and growing – larger than either major party.

Most Independents believe: 1) Voters should not have to choose a party to vote; 2) Parties would serve better by working across differences to resolve major issues; and 3) Prevailing partisan acrimony is mainly destructive.

Major parties are losing members. The effectiveness of our governance and return on investment in its institutions are declining. Increasingly, voters are choosing to think for themselves rather than hew to party dogma.

Ms. Plencner rightly criticizes a “holier than thou” mentality. She would also do well to reject the demeaning “our party is always right and everyone else is wrong” mentality.

Our civics teachers taught that we are a democratic republic based on a Constitution that makes no mention of political parties. They came about after we became a nation – Democratic in the 1830s and Republican in the 1850s. Each continues to evolve, as in the past.

Believing there are only two sides to important questions is inaccurate. Far more often, there are multiple “sides” within a range of possibilities. An “either/or” approach sells us short. A nation as diverse, robust and complex as ours benefits from a richer range of options. Parties could help this process along if they chose to, as they have on occasion.

Applying a singular description to Independent voters is also inaccurate. We are gaining attention because we have recently decided close elections. Americans are unavoidably interdependent as a society. Governance must respect that reality. That is a civic principle worth voting for. We do.