Media

While Public Interest Legal Foundation Undertakes National Campaign to Institute Massive Purge Voter Programs, Civil Rights Groups Offer Needed Guidance to Election Officials on Prohibitions within the National Voter Registration Act

The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters. [...]

WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court arguments in the Ohio voting purge case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, have been rescheduled for Jan. 10, 2018. Paul M. Smith, vice president of litigation and strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, will argue the case on behalf of the plaintiffs.

“You hear the apocryphal story of being able to work your way through school, because it was true,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “If you were a student in 1980 and you took on a full-time summer job and a part-time job in the school year, your college costs would be covered and your living expenses would be covered.” [...]

Improving transit access to jobs can be a key tool in closing that gap, according a new report from Algernon Austin at Demos, because people of color are more likely than white people to rely on transit to get to work.

New York, NY – After Richard Cordray announced that he would be resigning from his role as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Tamara Draut, Vice President of Policy and Research at Demos and Demos Action, released the following statement:

Demos, a liberal think tank, and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University found African Americans are far more likely to have student debt, regardless of income. Black families, after decades of being shut out of traditional ladders of economic opportunity, have the fewest resources to cover the costs of college or to protect against the risk of borrowing.

Underfunding Public Transit Disproportionally Hurts African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans 

Last year, Americans took over 10 billion trips on public transportation. These were trips to work, to school, to stores, to health care, to places of worship, and elsewhere. For millions of Americans, their quality of life rests on the quality of public transit.