Media

NEW YORK – National public policy organization Demos is joining hundreds of non-partisan groups for National Voter Registration Week, beginning September 24, to help counter attacks on the freedom to vote and ensure that the nation’s elections are free, fair, and accessible. Next week, for the first time ever, concerned citizens across the nation are coming together, pulling out all the stops, to make sure that every eligible voter is registered and able to vote in this critical election year.

The afternoon before early voting began in the 2010 midterm elections, a crowd of people gathered in the offices of a Houston Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots. They soon formed a line that snaked out the door of the Patriots’ crumbling storefront and down the block, past the neighboring tattoo parlor. The volunteers, all of whom had been trained by the Patriots to work as poll watchers, had come to collect their polling-place assignments.

Is there a “state of emergency” over voting rights in America? That was the declaration of a coalition of civil rights, faith-based and social justice organizations and groups representing communities of color in a conference call on Wednesday, just in time for National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 25.

You’re going to hear “both sides do it” on this issue and that’s not true, so I thought I’d compare what voter protection lawyers and others actually do on the ground in Ohio with what True the Vote has done in past elections in Texas and Massachusetts:

This is True the Vote:

As a New Yorker, the idea of surviving in Manhattan on less than $10,000 a year is pretty much unfathomable. But that's the harsh reality that the poorest fifth of Manhattanites face, according to new data from the New York Times. 

The wealth gap in this infamous borough is now so large that it rivals rates in notoriously impoverished sub-Saharan Africa: 

Mitt Romney’s complaint that nearly half of us are untaxed government dependents, poisoning the country with an “entitlement” mentality, is the strangest yet to emerge from the twisted moral universe of America’s most government-dependent class, the financial elite.

Conservatives are trumpeting a new video in which a younger Obama embraces the dreaded socialist sin of redistribution. His earlier words will no doubt hurt Obama among some segment of the electorate -- even though most voters in both parties, whether they realize it or not, actually favor a host of redistributive policies. 

Outreach and leadership will strengthen worker rights, but a cultural shift is needed in the way we think and talk about work, panelists said Sept. 12 at the launch of the ILR School's Worker Institute. The event, moderated by MSNBC political analyst Chris Hayes, drew an audience of 300 to hear representatives of community organizations, unions, academia, business and other sectors talk about "Strengthening Worker Voice, Advancing Economic Fairness" at the headquarters of Service Employees International Union 32BJ in Manhattan.

In a 4-2 decision issued yesterday, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court vacated a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed the state’s controversial voter ID law to go into effect for this November’s elections.

The ruling, which sent the case back to the lower Commonwealth Court for further consideration, is not the end of the legal fight over Pennsylvania’s Voter ID laws, but the decision is being celebrated as an important step in the right direction.