Coalition cheers final passage of bill, calls for full funding and implementation of landmark democracy reform
WASHINGTON, D.C.- Advocates and activists celebrated on Tuesday as Mayor Bowser signed the Fair Elections Act, a major democracy reform that will bring small donor public financing to local elections. The campaign to pass the bill has been supported by dozens of economic, social, and racial justice organizations, as well as the entire D.C. Council.
Indiana—On Thursday, Demos, the ACLU, the ACLU of Indiana and the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, on behalf of Common Cause of Indiana, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to halt the implementation of a new Indiana law that would allow the state to kick voters off the rolls based on flawed data, beginning on July 1.
In every state except Wyoming, the share of revenue that public colleges receive from tuition — aka students and families — has grown since 2001, according to an analysis released Thursday by Demos, a left-leaning think tank. And in 24 states, tuition covered more than half of public colleges’ revenue in 2016. Compare that to public colleges of the past, which got much of their money from state and local funding, and kept the costs for families relatively low. In some cases, they were even free.
MASSACHUSETTS - Yesterday, Demos, Rock the Vote, SEIU, and Massachusetts Community Action Network (MCAN), represented by attorneys from Cooley LLP, filed an amicus brief in a case challenging Massachusetts’s 20-day voter registration cutoff. In the case, Chelsea Collaborative v. Gavin, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is being asked to determine whether the state’s voter registration deadline violates the Massachusetts Constitution.
A new analysis comparing how much members of Congress paid for their schooling to the costs of today’s students backs him up. When the members of the House of Representatives went to college, the average cost for a year of school was $8,487 in today’s dollars, according to the study published Thursday by Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Washington, DC – Today, Demos, a New York public policy organization, released a first-of-its-kind congressional college yearbook, which compares the cost of college tuition members of Congress experienced with the cost of college for today’s students. The yearbook, entitled When Congress Went to College, finds that the average student today paid nearly $20,000 a year more for college than current members of Congress.
At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Empire State Indivisible will host its monthly “What’s Happening in Albany” panel at the Fourth Universalist Society on the Upper West Side. This installment will focus on voting reform, with a panel consisting of Ari Berman, Mother Jones’ voting rights reporter, Susan Lerner of Common Cause/NY, Naila Awan of Demos, and State Senator Brian Benjamin.
The high-priced ads, which could reach an audience of more than 100 million, are just the latest indication that catering to student loan borrowers can be big business. Companies are now offering credit cards with rewards geared to student loan help and tools to help borrowers monitor their debt. Employers are even looking to lure talent with benefits packages that include student loan help.
But progressive groups say that the Ohio law goes too far. They argue the state’s methods kick off eligible voters while leaving ineligible people on the rolls, and that Ohio doesn’t make it clear that people will lose their chance to vote if they don’t respond to the state’s mailer. “Their real agenda, in my view, is to get people off the rolls so they don’t participate,” says Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, a liberal think tank.
Overseas students subsidize other students and programs, as they often pay higher fees, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Many colleges and, in particular, public colleges have relied on international students paying full-freight in order to make up for budget shortfalls elsewhere,” he said. [...]
“The closer we get to the elections, the more difficult it will be to remedy any maps that are held unconstitutional in time for the election,” Stuart Naifeh, of the Demos think tank in New York, told Bloomberg Law. Demos is involved in its own high court voting challenge over voter purges by Republicans in Ohio.[...]
[T]he pain of retail sector hemorrhaging will be most severe for Black workers considering retail is the second largest Black population employer. Nearly 12 percent of retail workers are Black – close to their overall population ratio. And 54 percent of Black retail workers are supporting households, according to think tank Demos, the highest proportion of any demographic group in that sector. Black retail workers also suffer the highest poverty rates.
[M]ark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, who focuses on student debt, says “we’ll see more and more” programs like Mission Scholarships. “There’s everything right with an institution looking at a labor market shortage” and trying to ameliorate it. “Free education is an obvious carrot.” [...]
Settlement in “Motor Voter” Case in Time for 2018 Elections
SACRAMENTO - Millions of Californians who renew their driver’s license or state identification by mail will be able to use the renewal form to register to vote or update their voter registration, starting in April of 2018.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard our Ohio voter purge case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. At issue in the case is Ohio’s Supplemental Process, an unjust practice of removing infrequent voters from its registration rolls.
Six other states — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — have similar practices that target voters for removal from the rolls for not voting, but Ohio’s is the most extreme.
“The National Voting Rights Act sought to eliminate practices such as Ohio’s that penalize people who exercise their right not to vote,” Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at the liberal think tank Demos, said in a call with reporters last week.