Prison-based gerrymandering is the practice of counting incarcerated persons as “residents” of a prison when drawing legislative districts in order to give extra influence to the districts that contain the prisons. The U.S. Constitution requires that election districts be roughly equal in size, so that everyone is represented equally in the political process. But prison-based gerrymandering distorts our democracy by artificially inflating the population numbers — and thus, the political clout — of districts with prisons, while diluting the political power of all other voters.
Missouri is considering a bill requiring all voters to present government issued photo identification at the polls. The fact that Missouri is introducing a restrictive voter identification bill is particularly unfortunate considering the legislature passed such a bill in 2006 and it was struck down as unconstitutional under the state's constitution by the Missouri Supreme Court.
When drawing legislative districts, New York State counts incarcerated persons as "residents" of the community where the prison is located, instead of counting them in the home community to which they will return, on average, within 34 months. This practice of prison-based gerrymandering ignores more than 100 years of legal precedent.
The Veterans Voting Support Act required that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) agree to state designations of its facilities as voter registration agencies under Section 7 of the NVRA.
Election Day Registration (EDR), which allows eligible voters to register and cast a ballot on Election Day, is a reform that reduces the unnecessary disfranchisement of eligible voters that may be caused by arbitrary registration deadlines.
Testimony of Demos Counsel Lisa J. Danetz before the United States House of Representatives Subcommittee on Elections on the challenges the National Voter Registration Act presents to public assistance agencies.
Twelve years since the enactment of the NVRA, states across the country have regularly failed to comply with public assistance voter registration requirements.
Although photo ID and proof of citizenship proposals are offered as necessary to prevent fraud in elections, we know that the facts do not warrant these extreme measures.
Testimony on the need to restore Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act’s protections against purposeful racial discrimination in jurisdictions that are subject to the Section 5 preclearance requirement.
While Florida’s purges of felons from voter rolls in 2000 have received national attention, little is known about the procedures other states use. To shed some light on these procedures, we surveyed the purge processes of 15 states.