Third party voter registration drives are a critical component to ensuring eligible voters are registered.
States should permit third party registration drives without restrictive limitations.
Boards of elections should provide materials on voter registration to registration drives.
The National Voter Registration Act substantially increased the number of places where eligible voters could register. Now, voter registration is available at motor vehicle offices, public assistance agencies, and various other sites.
Early voting allows eligible voters more time to review issues and cast their ballot.
Early voting can increase voter participation.
States should expand early in-person voting locations and adopt no-excuse permanent absentee voting.
In a representative democracy like ours, the more people that vote, the stronger our democracy becomes. Given this truth, our voting procedures should provide the flexibility to accommodate every eligible person who wants to cast a ballot.
States should provide uniform poll worker training before Election Day to ensure Election Day runs smoothly.
Polls workers should receive a uniform wage across the state.
Poll worker recruitment should target public employees and high school and college students.
The formula for a well-run polling place is not complicated. At the heart of it, a sufficient number of properly trained poll workers is necessary to smoothly run an election process.
Ballot design should be simple and straightforward to ensure voters understand for whom and for what they are casting their votes.
Ballots should be written in clear, plain language.
Ballot design should focus on the ABCs: Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity.
It seems almost too basic to have to state that the ballots used for voting must be simple and straightforward. Yet, past experience has shown that ballot confusion is common and can have disastrous consequences.
Overly burdensome photo ID laws add an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy that disenfranchises millions of otherwise eligible voters.
Photo ID requirements place tremendous fiscal burdens on states and localities.
States should look to their constitutions to protect the freedom to vote from onerous ID laws.
Restrictive photo ID laws for voting are a level of unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy that hinder the freedom to vote. Strict laws that require narrow types of government-issued ID go above and beyond normal registration requirements.
Provisional ballots are not counted as regular ballots and should be used in only very limited situations.
Provisional ballots cast solely because an eligible voter voted in the wrong precinct or polling place should be counted as a regular ballot for any office for which the voter was eligible to vote.
Adopting Same Day Registration would substantially decrease the need for provisional ballots because eligible voters can simply re-register if there are registration issues.
The scenario occurs regularly on Election Day: a voter will show up at t
Nearly six million people are denied the right to vote due to felony offenses, even if they have completed their sentences.
One out of every 13 eligible African Americans of voting age has lost their right to vote.
States should not permanently take away the freedom to vote from any citizen. At a bare minimum, the right to vote should be automatically restored once a person is released from incarceration.
Prohibiting citizens from voting defies our democracy’s principle of one person, one vote.
States should ensure eligible voters can be added to state registration databases with fair, effective and uniform standards, and should only remove voters in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and other applicable laws.
Only election officials should be able to challenge the eligibility of a voter.
When a voter is challenged, the burden of proof should fall on the challenger with a specific and timely adjudication process.
Eligible Americans should not have to overcome burdensome barriers to cast their ballots.
Making our election system function for all of our citizens should be a bedrock commitment of our nation. The current disparities by class and race in voter registration—and thus, voter turnout—undermine an essential tenet of our democracy: of, by and for the people. In order to address the current inefficiencies and inadequacies in our election procedures, we have outlined a robust set of policy recommendations and best practices.
More than two years after the recession officially ended, 25 million Americans – 16 percent of the labor force – are still out of work or underemployed.1 There are more than four jobseekers for every job opening. 6.2 million people have been out of work for more than six months. While the economic consensus is that federal stimulus measures prevented an even greater loss of jobs and a more severe downturn,2 these actions were clearly inadequate.
Americans believe that hard work should be rewarded – people who go to work every day should not then be forced to raise their families in poverty. Yet today nearly a quarter of working adults in the U.S. are laboring at jobs that do not pay enough to support a family at a minimally acceptable level. Because their wages are so low, working people are forced to rely on public benefits, from Medicaid to food stamps to rental assistance, in order to make ends meet. Raising work standards would enable them to become more self-reliant and would raise the floor for all working people.
In 1935, with the passage of the Social Security Act, our national leaders made a promise to all citizens: after a lifetime of hard work, no older American would suffer from poverty in their old age. The passage of this landmark legislation was the embodiment of a deeply shared value: a dignified, economically secure retirement. Seventy-five years later, however, our nation has greatly changed and our ability to uphold this value is severely threatened.
Personal debt can stand as an insurmountable obstacle to Americans wishing to build assets and secure a place in the middle class. In addition to the critical last resort of bankruptcy relief, Americans need fair rules to ensure that lenders – from credit card companies to mortgage lenders to vendors of payday loans – don’t impose excessive interest rates, fees, and penalties that make it easier for American to get into serious debt and harder for them to get out.
The United States has long granted trade preferences to developing countries that meet various criteria. These criteria, which are stipulated by the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), have changed with time — reflecting U.S. economic and foreign policy priorities.
While the criteria include non-support for terrorism, enforcement of intellectual property rights, and respect for internationally recognized worker rights, the GSP does not include an environmental provision.
The following report evaluates the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) — the primary U.S. policy response to the job dislocations caused by trade. It shows the ways in which TAA has failed to respond adequately to the challenges facing dislocated workers. It highlights the need for a more comprehensive set of policies to help workers and families navigate the economic restructuring that has become an inevitable part of increasing trade and globalization.
Some Facts & Figures:
Wealthy nations, led by the United States, should move to reduce or eliminate all tariffs on imports from developing countries as one way to help offset the extraordinary costs these countries face in confronting climate change. If U.S. tariff policy continues on the current trajectory, the U.S. is likely to collect about $90 billion in import duties on products from developing countries, excluding China, by 2020.1 The combined total collected by the European Union, Japan, and other wealthy countries may exceed that amount.
Over the past eight years, even as the U.S. signed a number of new bilateral trade pacts, the U.S. government actually decreased its capacity for promoting strong labor standards and enforcing the labor provisions of trade agreements. The Bush Administration sought to slash funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) at the U.S. Department of Labor and, though it wasn't entirely successful in this effort, it still managed to significantly downsize the agency.
