Demos, the New York-based group, began monitoring North Carolina about a decade ago because it spotted a drop-off in public assistance registrations. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, was eager to attract more voters, said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with Demos.
“He was as dismayed as we were about the low rates,” Naifeh said. “He wanted to work with us to improve that.”
Voting matters. Though many Americans believe that voting is either useless or merely a civic duty, in reality it carries huge consequences for the decisions of politicians.
This is not the first time North Carolina has fallen out of compliance with the NVRA. Dēmos, the New York-based group that has put North Carolina on notice, also monitored the state about 10 years ago after seeing a drop in voter registration applications processed by public assistance agencies. Gary Bartlett, the State Board of Elections director at the time, worked closely with Dēmos to get the state back into compliance.
Vermont will allow voters to cast ballots the same day they register to vote, effective January 2017. It used to be that voters would need to register close to a week before casting a ballot, but that’s changing.
Republicans claim voter ID laws aren't racist, but numbers don't lie.
Sean McElwee, a researcher for progressive think tank Demos, compared measures of racist sentiments among white people in each of the 50 states (such as whether they believe blacks are trustworthy or intelligent) to dataon voting laws in each state, including when they were introduced and how strict they are.
President Obama's recent comments on universal voting have spurred a debate about how such a policy would influence elections. On the Monkey Cage blog, John Sides examines the partisan consequences and argues that turnout would generally benefit Democrats, but that the effect would be modest.
Last week, Massachusetts became the latest state to either settle or lose in litigation over complaints that it wasn’t providing adequate voter registration services at welfare offices.
The settlement is part of a broad effort by voting rights groups to reverse the decline in voter registrations at public assistance offices, which Congress intended to serve as a mechanism for signing up low-income voters. National voting rights groups argue that the decline in registrations is because of improper implementation by staff at government welfare offices. (...)
On Thursday, a day on which many New Yorkers were squinting in what seemed like the first full sunlight in months, New York Mayor de Blasio announced at Gracie Mansion that he, along with a number of other leading progressives, was putting forward a vision for how to address income inequality. Speaking first, de Blasio said that the group had come together to formulate a template for how best to conquer income inequality, which, he said, is worse today than it was at the height of the Great Depression.
We wanted to study how Latinos are changing American politics. So we explored multiple datasets which collectively include thousands of Latino respondents. We found that Latinos are more supportive of Barack Obama’s progressive agenda than non-Hispanic whites, and that Latinos are more supportive of action on climate change and immigration.
[...] How can Democrats maximize their chances? First, they need to get the basics right. They should target widely because it’s impossible to know where the floor is for Trump. They don’t want to be in a situation where new terrain opens up and they’re unprepared. They need to start winning back state-level and county-level positions that feed into higher office. They’ll need money and an aggressive recruitment strategy to get good candidates to run. But, ultimately, the 2018 election, like all others, will be determined by who shows up.
[...] In short, our analysis indicates that Donald Trump successfully leveraged existing resentment towards African Americans in combination with emerging fears of increased racial diversity in America to reshape the presidential electorate, strongly attracting nativists towards Trump and pushing some more affluent and highly educated people with more cosmopolitan views to support Hillary Clinton. Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics. [...]
