Media

States around the country are making registering to vote through the DMV more cumbersome and difficult than federal law allows.

Today, citing clear evidence that the State of California is violating its federally-mandated responsibility to offer California drivers and ID card holders the opportunity to register to vote, attorneys from Demos, Project Vote, ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and the global law firm Morrison & Foerster sent a pre-litigation notice letter to the California Secretary of State on behalf of the League of Women Voters of California, ACCE Institute, California Common Cause, the National Council of La Raza, and several individual California citizens.

For companies hiring staff, pitches from online security firms sound appealing enough: Running a credit check before signing up a new employee will “offer insight into an applicant’s reliability and a sense of their personal responsibility,” insists employeescreen.com.

Another security firm swears employers using credit checks will “find out what you need to know.”

The wheels of justice have been said to turn slowly. Andfew things move quickly here in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of 12,000 people with no movie theater and a quaint commercial district that’s shuttered on Sunday. But when a deadline on a school desegregation suit—originally filed in 1965—came and went last month with opposing sides still unable to agree on a resolution, some locals admitted frustration.

It’s been more than two decades since Congress passed the so-called Motor Voter Act requiring state DMVs to let residents register to vote at their offices — but the ACLU of California says the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is falling asleep at the wheel, and it’s threatening to sue.

Eric Holder and his team announced a $1.4 billion settlement with Standard & Poor’s regarding its ratings of mortgage backed securities and its role in the crash of 2008. There is no question of the venality that dictated behavior at S&P and probably the other major rating agency, Moody’s. The financial and econometric models used by S&P were allowed to yield rosier results and to ignore risks despite internal concerns, and a major motivator was the drive to maintain market share in the massive mortgage marketplace.

In recent weeks, the White House has reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening "community policing" around the country. The U.S.

Demos President Heather McGhee released the following statement on the selection of Carl Heastie as the new New York Assembly Speaker:

Two of the most commonly cited reasons for the lack of more liberal policymaking in the United States are the decline in unions and the rising class bias in voter turnout.  In the 2014 midterm congressional elections, the Democrats’ rout was largely attributed to a failure of their coalition to turn out at the polls. What is rarely examined, however, is the relationship between a decline in voter turnout and the dwindling number of union members.