1. Surprised? Florida’s recount is a dumpster fire of flawed election laws, right-wing conspiracy theories, baseless “fraud” charges, and inept ballot design Florida’s Senate and governor races are all too close to call and undergoing a...
1. The real threats to election integrity have nothing to do with Voter ID Three recent stories point to the alarming vulnerability of our election systems to attack. First, the New York Times Magazine has an in-depth feature on "The Crisis of Election...
1. No pressure… but “the next decade is essentially on the ballot in the fall of 2018” Vox takes a deep dive into why 2018 will be critical to determining how gerrymandering will define the next decade. Governors races in key states this fall...
1. John McCain and the lost battle for campaign finance reform Last week, Senator John McCain died. And while I didn’t agree with most of his policies or politics, I will always admire his central role in the last great effort to pass bipartisan campaign finance...
When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on June 27th, many of us looked at it as a big blow for hopes for the Supreme Court to help reign in partisan gerrymandering. Over the last few years, there had been much speculation about how Justice Kennedy might...
The Supreme Court is not coming to the rescue on voting rights It’s been three bad weeks in a row if you care about protecting the right to vote. In three straight weeks, the Supreme Court has ruled against efforts to defend the vote against efforts to suppress...
Supreme Court punts on Wisconsin, Maryland gerrymandering cases In two rulings today, Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone, the Supreme Court effectively hit the snooze button on making a meaningful decision on partisan gerrymandering....
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the state of Ohio in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. The decision focused on Ohio’s practice of purging voters from the eligible voter list if they didn’t vote for two years and if they didn’t respond to a...
Blue wave, schmoo wave: Will young voters show up this fall? When it comes to elections, there’s a reliable trend: old people vote; young people, not so much. Young people have lowest voter participation rate of any age group. In 2016, only 46% of Americans...
“The right people should vote” Axios and SurveyMonkey did a poll earlier this month that sheds light on the differences between parties on voting rights. Overall, 62% of Americans surveyed, and 79% of Democrats, said that “government would function better if...
Ohio votes against Gerrymandering. Kinda. The biggest voting rights news this week is that on Tuesday, Ohio voters, by a three-to-one margin, overwhelmingly approved Issue 1, a ballot initiative designed to reform how congressional districts are drawn. Issue 1 was...
Gerrymandering distorts the democratic process, skewing election outcomes in ways that don’t fairly reflect the electorate. In many states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, partisan gerrymandering has grossly distorted state and...
The biggest threat to the vote in 2018 might be the machines ProPublica posted a story last week about how the biggest threat to the vote in 2018 may not be hacking or voter suppression, but the failing technology in most polling places in America. Check out...
“Extreme Gerrymandering” report pours cold water on optimism for Democratic House in 2019 A report this week from the Brennan Center, one of the leading authorities on voting rights and election law, offered a sobering take on the prospects of the...
