"Many of these folks are asking what is the point of voting since politicians all seem to perpetuate a broken system. We need them to see voting as meaningful, and for them to see voting as meaningful they need to, I think, have a real choice."
“Without a doubt, the secret to Democratic victories in the past three years has been women’s leadership. The idea that that wouldn’t translate into the first woman president was heartbreaking for many of us."
Our analysis of voter turnout in Ohio’s primary finds large disparities in absentee ballot request rates and voter turnout between predominantly white and non-white neighborhoods.
States must now take swift action to design racially equitable voting systems—including dramatically scaling up vote by mail, while also maintaining accessible in-person voting—so communities are not disenfranchised this fall.
Efforts to change the long-standing practice of counting every individual in the country for the purposes of drawing legislative districts would reduce the political power of—and the resources provided to—Black and brown people.
Potentially thousands of voters were deprived of their right to vote because Florida was “unable to run a functional voter registration website” during the crucial final hours leading up to the registration deadline.
Although the path forward is still uncertain, one thing is clear: There is momentum around voting rights, and Americans across the country are ready for our elected officials to do everything they can to make it easier — not harder — to vote.
"Central to the work of racial justice is ensuring that Black and brown, our most marginalized communities, our most marginalized residents of this country, have access to the ballot."
“In their genesis, they’re about preventing Black people in the South from voting. So especially in our pursuit of a multiracial, inclusive democracy, these laws can’t exist.”
How our work to enforce Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act has resulted in over 3 million new voter registration applications through public assistance agencies.
Our current voter registration system, which is designed as a voter-initiated or “self-registration” system, creates barriers to registration that do not serve any significant purpose in a democracy. Automatic voter registration is the answer.
“Voting rights is the foundational issue in American politics and American society. Simply put, if we don’t all have an equal say, how can we expect to have an equal chance?”
"State officials are rightly wary of the goals of the commission because it does seem that the whole purpose for setting it up is to justify a preordained conclusion that somehow millions of votes were cast illegally in the last election," says Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies at Demos, a progressive think tank. "That's the verdict, and now they want to hold a trial." [...]
Demos (pronounced with long "e") — a public-policy group trying to shape a Democratic agenda on working-class issues like household indebtedness, college affordability and economic challenges facing young people — tested economic messages with an online survey of 1,536 registered voters in June.
FESSLER: Brenda Wright is with Demos, a liberal advocacy group. She notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to make it easier to register but also harder to remove legitimate voters from the rolls.
WRIGHT: The problems that DOJ should be focusing on are that too few eligible people have access to the vote and are voting. DOJ going after states to force them to do more purging is exactly the opposite of what the department should be doing.