The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) took the necessary first steps toward improving voter registration services offered online and at its 174 field offices across the state, though it still will need to address some major issues.
Beginning this month, people who are eligible and affirmatively choose to register when applying for or renewing a driver license or identification card at a DMV field office will:
In May, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online will publish a series of essays examining the role that political equality could play in the Supreme Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. The authors in this collection are helping to relaunch a conversation that has been stagnant for forty years.
A newly released report provides the first-ever comprehensive study of how municipal level elections and policymaking are dominated by big donors. How Chicago’s White Donor Class Distorts City Policy shows that in the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, candidates raised more than 90 percent of their funds from donors giving over $1,000.
Automatic Voter Registration (AVR)—meaning voter registration that occurs without a proactive effort by individual citizens—has caught fire. Here are three major factors that stakeholders must address.
However, money still matters a lot, and it probably matters more on the local and state level than it does nationally. As McElwee notes, the donor class has sharply different ideological beliefs than the public at large. For obvious reasons, they tend to resist the tax increases necessary to pay for better services, and tend to support "centrist" austerity derp like the Bowles-Simpson program. In other words, they're more conservative.
In a nutshell: Rahm Emanuel relied overwhelming on large donations from a very nearly exclusively white pool of donors — who also, as further analysis shows, largely live in the same few rich wards of the city (save for non-Chicagoans, as Emanuel also did a lot of fundraising outside the city). Even Garcia's donors were disproportionately white, though to a much lesser extent. "We expected going in there would be some demographic disparities," McElwee told The Week.
When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ran for re-election in 2015, his opponents accused him of representing the elite in a city starkly divided by race and class. A new analysis of campaign finance data shows that, at least from a fundraising perspective, the mayor’s support did indeed come largely from a narrow band of Chicago’s citizens.
2016 will likely be remembered for a deeply polarizing presidential election that brought out huge numbers of voters. It should also be remembered for massive voter disenfranchisement.
The organizations are demanding that Ohio stop illegally removing voters from its voter registration rolls in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
The latest challenge of voting procedures contends the state’s system eliminates names of registered voters based on their failure to vote. The lawsuit naming Secretary of State Jon Husted specifically alleges the illegal cancellation of registered voters who are homeless.
Today President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duty by nominating Judge Merrick Garland to succeed Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the question is whether U.S. Senators will do their jobs.
In a recent report, Demos and the Public Interest Research Group showed how many viable candidates, including many candidates of color, struggle to compete against better-funded incumbents.
Public financing of elections, as a state and local democracy reform, can help enhance the political voice and power of working-class people and people of color. It is an effective antidote to the outsized influence corporations and major donors currently have on both politics and policy.
Same Day Registration is powerful means to reduce the barriers to voting, by making registration and voting a one-stop process that doesn’t depend on navigating confusing pre-election deadlines.