Policy choices have allowed big companies to continuously use their power to preserve economic and democratic imbalances that maintain their wealth and influence at the expense of everyone else.
"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."
This case study follows the Texas Organizing Project as it worked to build power and equity for working-class Black & Latino communities in greater Houston after Hurricane Harvey—ultimately implementing a winning 3-part inside-outside strategy.
This case study follows the coalition For Us Not Amazon (FUNA) and members of the Athena Coalition as they organized to prevent one of the biggest corporations in the world from taking over the civic, social, and political life of Northern Virginia and beyond.
After evaluating the progress of 10 federal agencies in responding to President Biden’s Executive Order on Promoting Access to Voting, we find that most federal agencies have room for improvement.
“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.
16 policies and practices that would make registration more accessible and seamless, lead to more effective and efficient election administration, and strengthen protections for voters’ rights.
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?”
"I think Greta has been able to speak truth to power in a way that has resonated with a lot of young people who are frustrated, who have lived their whole lives seeing inaction on climate change."
"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.