Media

Raleigh — North Carolina's young adults will continue to face a tough economy--one ravaged not only by recession but also by 30 years of declining opportunity and security for all but the most highly educated and affluent, according to a new report by Demos and the North Carolina Justice Center.

Eliminating the deadline and allowing same-day registration would boost voter turnout among underrepresented groups and increase overall voting rates, according to Demos, a nonpartisan think tank. Its researchers found that voter turnouts would have increased by 12.3 percent for 18- to 25-year-olds, 11 percent for Latinos, 8.7 percent for African-Americans and 6.8 percent overall if New York State had same-day registration during the 2000 election.

It's time to put a stop to the unfair and arbitrary use of credit reports to make hiring and firing decisions.

Imagine you’re one of the 6.8 million Americans who have been unemployed for more than six months. (Imagine, that is, if you don’t already have the misfortune of being one of them). You receive a job offer that you quickly accept. But it comes with an increasingly common catch: your potential employer wants to check your credit first.

“A lot of their procedures seem to be deficient on their face,” said Scott Novakowski, one of the report’s authors and a fellow with Demos, a New York City-based public policy research group. “Very rarely do we see declines of that size in a state that has been in compliance.”

Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada Among States With Onerous Laws and Rules That Could Affect Mid-Term Election Results; North Carolina Stands Out as Best for Voters

New York — Millions of low-income Americans can be brought into the political process through proper implementation of an often-neglected provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), according to a report published recently by Demos, and cited in yesterday's New York Times editorial, 

To the Editor,

Already, some states are making changes. A legal settlement in Missouri led to more than 200,000 voter-registration applications from welfare offices in less than two years. A settlement in Ohio has led to more than 100,000 this year. Lawsuits are pending in Indiana and New Mexico.

Obama put[s] the U.S. government solidly back on the side of the middle class