f the Trump Commission uses the data it says it wants to use, it will target this group of citizens with false allegations of illegal voting. We must fight against the purges of these voters, because in America, it is assumed that there are no two classes of citizenship, regardless of what the current President believes.
Many states have rightly refused to provide private data from their voting rolls to the commission. However, the commission will still have access to highly inappropriate federal immigration data to “study” Trump’s theory that millions of noncitizens have voted.
Black students are far more likely to take on debt for a degree than white students, and young black households have more student debt despite fewer educational opportunities and a more uncertain payoff in the job market.
Demos (pronounced with long "e") — a public-policy group trying to shape a Democratic agenda on working-class issues like household indebtedness, college affordability and economic challenges facing young people — tested economic messages with an online survey of 1,536 registered voters in June.
Methodology: Demos sponsored an online survey among 1,536 registered voters, conducted June 5 to June 14, 2017. The research included a base sample of registered voters and, for deeper analysis, oversamples of working-class African Americans, working-class Hispanics, working-class white Obama-to-Trump voters, and progressives, defined as people of all races who identify as extremely or somewhat liberal. The data in this survey is weighted by standard weights to make it fully representative.
“We think of education funding, particularly at the state level, as a spending issue, but it’s myopic,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “There are all kinds of second order effects to investing in education — homeownership or wealth building is certainly one of them. If you don’t spend the money on students now and that means that they’re less likely to go to college or they’re more likely to take on debt, that is going to impact their future economic activity.” [...]
"State officials are rightly wary of the goals of the commission because it does seem that the whole purpose for setting it up is to justify a preordained conclusion that somehow millions of votes were cast illegally in the last election," says Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies at Demos, a progressive think tank. "That's the verdict, and now they want to hold a trial." [...]
“It indicates that the focus of DOJ is going to be on pushing states to take more and more people off the rolls, instead of enforcing the provisions of the NVRA that assist voters in getting registered and staying on the rolls,” said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at the progressive policy and legal group Demos.
Brenda Wright, a lawyer at the left-leaning advocacy organization Demos, emphasizes that progressives want voter rolls to be accurate. What her group opposes, she said, are purging practices that are known to sweep up eligible voters.
"It's very concerning," said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, a liberal advocacy group that's been fighting state efforts to purge voters from the rolls. Wright notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to expand opportunities to register to vote, but that millions of eligible Americans are still unregistered.
FESSLER: Brenda Wright is with Demos, a liberal advocacy group. She notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to make it easier to register but also harder to remove legitimate voters from the rolls.
WRIGHT: The problems that DOJ should be focusing on are that too few eligible people have access to the vote and are voting. DOJ going after states to force them to do more purging is exactly the opposite of what the department should be doing.
“It’s clear that the exact cohort that they were tracking has gone through a fairly tumultuous young adulthood,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
“The EAC is responsible for creating voting systems guidelines that are intended to help ensure the accuracy and accessibility and security of voting systems that states use,” Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies for the public policy group Demos, said in a phone interview.
In a recent study, I compared the damage from shoplifting with that from just one form of wage theft, the failure to pay workers the legal hourly minimum.
The California legislature is pushing its own ambitious legislation, and is one of several Western states teaming up with Canadian provinces to collaborate on climate solutions. Many now see New York, and the CCPA in particular, as presenting the next opportunity for promising state-level action.
Illinois also becomes one of 4 states (Colorado, Connecticut and Vermont) to offer both AVR and Same-Day Registration (SDR). These reforms in tandem complement each other in the effort to best expand voter access and increase turnout.
New York should be expanding voters’ rights, demonstrating what real democracy looks like. We should ensure working moms and dads, immigrants and people of color have equal access and voice in our electoral system. In the face of an imminent federal onslaught, we should be saying unequivocally that we stand for good government of the people, by the people and for the people. [...]
"One thing driving Labour’s over performance was youth turnouts," Sean McElwee, a policy analyst who studies voter attitudes and behavior at the progressive think tank Demos, said in an interview.
McElwee thinks that Labour’s success could be a model for progressives in the United States provided they learn some key lessons about how to enlist and galvanize voters.
Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, a lawyer who works on automatic voter registration at Demos, a progressive think tank, said some of the momentum toward automatic voter registration was born out of the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 election, long lines to vote across the country in the 2012 election and efforts to pass voter ID laws to make it more difficult to vote.