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.
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.
A 2015 report by Demosfound that California had one of the country’s the lowest ratios of DMV voter registration applications to DMV transactions, between 0.01 and 0.1. [...]
A group of civil-rights organizations, including the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the think tank Demos, and the ACLU of Ohio, filed a lawsuit against Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted challenging the supplemental process’s legality in early 2016.
Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, a lawyer who works on automatic voter registration at Demos, a progressive think tank, said some of the momentum toward automatic voter registration was born out of the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 election, long lines to vote across the country in the 2012 election and efforts to pass voter ID laws to make it more difficult to vote.
New York should be expanding voters’ rights, demonstrating what real democracy looks like. We should ensure working moms and dads, immigrants and people of color have equal access and voice in our electoral system. In the face of an imminent federal onslaught, we should be saying unequivocally that we stand for good government of the people, by the people and for the people. [...]
"One thing driving Labour’s over performance was youth turnouts," Sean McElwee, a policy analyst who studies voter attitudes and behavior at the progressive think tank Demos, said in an interview.
McElwee thinks that Labour’s success could be a model for progressives in the United States provided they learn some key lessons about how to enlist and galvanize voters.
Addressing the needs of these drop-off voters and young non-voters, while reducing structural and political barriers to voting, are critical steps for the Democrats going forward, far more so than trying to win back Obama-to-Trump voters.
