COLUMBUS, OH – Voting rights, civil rights and labor organizations are joining forces to erect get-out-and-vote billboards in four Ohio and Wisconsin cities this week, pushing back against an anonymously-financed billboard campaign aimed at intimidating voters and depressing voter turnout.
Lorraine C. Minnite, a Rutgers University political scientist and a senior fellow at Demos, a liberal think tank, looked for a turnout effect in a 2009 paper she co-authored with Columbia University political scientist Robert S. Erikson. They didn't turn up definitive evidence, concluding, "our data and tools are not up to the task of making a compelling statistical argument for an effect."
Kimberly Kelley of Tampa has provided Florida elections officials with thousands of names of people she thinks may be ineligible to vote and should be removed from the rolls. On Election Day, she’ll join thousands more — people of all political stripes — to monitor balloting.
“I believe there is fraud both ways. I don’t think it’s a specific group,” said Kelley, a registered Republican whose group is called Tampa Vote Fair. “We’re just there to observe. We’re not going to intimidate anyone.”
NEW YORK - As the Supreme Court hears oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas case challenging the constitutionality of the school’s undergraduate admissions program on Wednesday, October 10, Demos stands with the United States Student Association (USSA) along with hundreds of other community, corporate, military and civil rights leaders, students and other allies in support of diversity in higher education.
It is true that courts have been striking down Republican efforts to restrict voting among certain demographic groups. Yet by no means is the fight over.
To make sure that no voter is subjected to intimidation when they hit the polls next month, one organization is dispensing military veterans to booths across the country.
In 2008, young people—particularly those of color—endured more voting restrictions than any other youth voting demographic that came before, yet black youth turnout hit its highest rate in history.
But evidence is mounting that it is the last point — the fact that people move — that is key, and that past assumptions about why tenants don't vote may be incorrect.
Political scientists who have been re-evaluating reams of voting data have found that whether a tenant votes is less about political will and more about the cumbersome and at times elusive process of registering.
Every year, millions of eligible voters fall through the cracks of our antiquated voter registration system because they have moved sometime in the last year.
At a minimum, we can expect “poll-watchers” to come up with enough “documented” examples of “voter fraud” to support a general post-election effort to de-legitimize the results.
WASHINGTON, -- Eighteen pro-democracy groups - Open Debates, Common Cause, Public Citizen, Rock the Vote, Judicial Watch, Public Campaign, FairVote, Demos, Democracy Matters, League of Rural Voters, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Essential Information, Personal Democracy Media, Reclaim Democracy!, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Citizen Works, Free & Equal Elections Foundation, and Rootstrikers - call on the Commission on Presidential Debates to make public the secret debate contract that was negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns.
Hundreds of non-partisan organizations came together for National Voter Registration Day to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Americans will be able to exercise their freedom to vote and make their voices heard this upcoming November.
NEW YORK – Governor Jerry Brown signed California Assembly Bill 1436 providing for future implementation of Election Day Voter Registration, also known as “Same Day Registration,” a reform that Demos and over two dozen voting rights organizations supported.
The afternoon before early voting began in the 2010 midterm elections, a crowd of people gathered in the offices of a Houston Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots. They soon formed a line that snaked out the door of the Patriots’ crumbling storefront and down the block, past the neighboring tattoo parlor. The volunteers, all of whom had been trained by the Patriots to work as poll watchers, had come to collect their polling-place assignments.
Is there a “state of emergency” over voting rights in America? That was the declaration of a coalition of civil rights, faith-based and social justice organizations and groups representing communities of color in a conference call on Wednesday, just in time for National Voter Registration Day on Sept. 25.
In a 4-2 decision issued yesterday, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court vacated a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed the state’s controversial voter ID law to go into effect for this November’s elections.
The ruling, which sent the case back to the lower Commonwealth Court for further consideration, is not the end of the legal fight over Pennsylvania’s Voter ID laws, but the decision is being celebrated as an important step in the right direction.
There are three inducements of support that Americans are powerless against: the promise of whiter teeth, the suggestion of no-diet weight loss and the cause of justice.