Last year, Americans took over 10 billion trips on public transportation. These were trips to work, to school, to stores, to health care, to places of worship, and elsewhere. For millions of Americans, their quality of life rests on the quality of public transit.
Conservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers’ jobs harder. Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, in turn, say that the benefits are mostly imaginary, and that the purges are intended to reduce the number of minority, poor and young voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.
More than a quarter of Ohio’s registered voters didn’t cast ballots last year, and for some of them, that could have been one inactive election too many. Ohio has been removing voters who haven’t cast ballots over a period of six years – unless they contact their Board of Elections during that time.
Larry Harmon is one of them, and now his lawsuit against Ohio is the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case expected to be argued early next year. [...]
The Lawyers’ Committee, Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School and Demos—all legal advocates that have defended the right to vote for years and fought voter suppression tactics in court—said Wednesday that they would be sending letters to the local offices targeted by PILF. Their letters will urge local election officials to not be intimidated by PILF’s threat of suits unless they proved, to PILF’s satisfaction, that they had purged sufficient numbers of legally registered voters. [...]
“You hear the apocryphal story of being able to work your way through school, because it was true,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “If you were a student in 1980 and you took on a full-time summer job and a part-time job in the school year, your college costs would be covered and your living expenses would be covered.” [...]
Improving transit access to jobs can be a key tool in closing that gap, according a new report from Algernon Austin at Demos, because people of color are more likely than white people to rely on transit to get to work.
Demos, a liberal think tank, and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University found African Americans are far more likely to have student debt, regardless of income. Black families, after decades of being shut out of traditional ladders of economic opportunity, have the fewest resources to cover the costs of college or to protect against the risk of borrowing.
This report presents findings on the use of public transit by people of color and on the potential jobs benefits that people of color can gain from investments in public transit.
LONG WAY HOME: According to a new report by the public policy organization Demos, African American workers are three times as likely as white workers not to have a car at home and they use transit four times more, which could be part of why some see transit as an issue of racial equity. The solution, Demos suggests, is to invest in infrastructure — improving transit and creating jobs for people who need them.
A 2013 survey by Demos, a public policy organization that combats inequality, showed that 10 percent of respondents who were unemployed had been informed that they would not be hired because of some facet of their credit history. The same survey indicated that 1 out of every 7 job applicants with “blemished credit histories” had been told they were not hired because of their credit history. [...]
Simply put, black families in the District overall have less wealth and income than white families — and therefore have less ability to give to political candidates. This helps explain why black D.C. residents are underrepresented year after year in political donations.
Studies have shown that policy most reflects the preferences of the most wealthy members of society and that those preferences do not reflect the greater public opinion on issues including the economy.
But even though one vote has only a tiny chance of being the pivotal one in an election, that doesn't mean that voting isn't important. Collectively, votes matter a great deal. Certain groups in the population that have higher turnout rates — such as older voters, the wealthy, and white Americans — benefit from the clout that they achieve as a result, says Sean McElwee, an analyst for Demos, a public policy organization that works to reduce political and economic inequality in the U.S.
As Wisconsin’s Latino community responds to the needs of people on the island, it’s very clear that some Puerto Ricans will come to live with family and friends in the Dairy State.
A federal judge in Miami is currently examining whether Brenda Snipes, Broward County’s supervisor of elections, is adequately maintaining the registration list in her county. A lawsuit filed by a conservative election integrity group, the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), charges that Dr. Snipes has embraced a lenient approach to list maintenance that violates guidelines set in federal law. [...]
“You’re going to have deductions and credits that primarily benefit the middle- and upper-class go away, but it’s not done in benefit to the working class,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s just done as a revenue raiser.”
Democrats have all kinds of ways of addressing this problem. One would be to cultivate the class identity of white voters by embracing populist rhetoric that paints “the billionaire class” as an out-group they can define themselves against. Another would be to invest more resources into registering nonwhite voters. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites are registered to vote in the United States.
On Friday, the court removed the case from its calendar in response to a request from Demos Senior Counsel Stuart C. Naifeh. Naifeh said a colleague who was supposed to argue the case on Nov. 8 will be "unable to work for a sustained period of time." Naifeh said he will replace his colleague but needs a postponement "to allow adequate time to prepare for the argument."