That kind of polarization may only intensify in coming years. In a blog post today at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, Sean McElwee points out that young Democratic primary voters and donors are both more liberal than other democrats their age and more liberal than older primary voters and donors. All of that means that the Democratic party will soon be pulled further left, McElwee predicts. [...]
Larry Harmon, 60, hadn’t voted in a while when he drove to the high school in November 2015 to weigh in on a local referendum in Kent, Ohio. But he wasn’t allowed to cast his ballot. [...]
The Trump Justice Department is undermining the ability of people to vote, said Brenda Wright, the vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, which is representing the plaintiffs in the Ohio case.
Rather than try to dismantle one of the few tools we have to keep this problem from getting worse, this administration should take a more nuanced and comprehensive approach toward making our campuses more reflective of our society, particularly for the most diverse generation of students ever.
The Justice Department released an amicus brief in the case, currently before the Supreme Court, over whether Ohio can continue to remove “infrequent voters” who fail to cast a ballot over a six-year period.
But the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an African-American trade union group, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, and Larry Harmon, a man who was purged from the rolls, are suing the state over the law.
The groups have stepped up their game, and more recently have targeted counties and states known to play crucial roles in elections. They also began attracting the attention of major voting rights groups like Demos and the League of Women Voters, which sought to intervene in the lawsuits and help the elections officials put up more of a fight.
“We got involved in this case because we’re concerned that overly aggressive efforts to purge voters off the rolls result in removing eligible people, something we’ve seen happen in other states, including Ohio and Georgia.”
Voting rights advocates fear that counties carrying out aggressive purges under legal duress will push officials to purge eligible voters.
"In a lot of these settlements, the push to remove people from the rolls may result in a lot of mistakes," Cameron Bell, an attorney for the liberal think tank Demos, said after fighting a lawsuit in Broward County, Florida. "That’s why Demos got involved, to make sure the parties weren’t reaching settlements that would lead to mistakes that would disenfranchise eligible voters."
[A] study by Demos, a progressive think tank which supports AVR, found that the population of voters who came onto the rolls automatically was less white than the population registered under the opt-in system.
That Texas' discriminatory and partisan voter ID law was allowed to continue is evidence of the Supreme Court's failed understanding of its constitutional responsibilities.
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is delaying its early November argument over Ohio's effort to purge its voter rolls because one of the lawyers for the challengers is ill.
Allie Boldt for Demos: In 2015, by a 26-point margin, Seattle voters passed an initiative that has the potential to transform Seattle elections. The initiative established a first-in-the-nation program that gives Seattle residents $100 in "democracy vouchers," which they can distribute to candidates who pledge to receive more of their funding from small-dollar sources and less from big money.
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a challenge to the procedure that Ohio uses to remove inactive voters from its voter-registration lists, had been scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday, November 8, but it will be postponed to a later, as-yet-undetermined date.
The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
On Friday, the court removed the case from its calendar in response to a request from Demos Senior Counsel Stuart C. Naifeh. Naifeh said a colleague who was supposed to argue the case on Nov. 8 will be "unable to work for a sustained period of time." Naifeh said he will replace his colleague but needs a postponement "to allow adequate time to prepare for the argument."