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. [...]
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. [...]
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."
Allie Boldt for Demos: In 2015, by a 26-point margin, Seattle voters passed an initiative that has the potential to transform Seattle elections. The initiative established a first-in-the-nation program that gives Seattle residents $100 in "democracy vouchers," which they can distribute to candidates who pledge to receive more of their funding from small-dollar sources and less from big money.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is delaying its early November argument over Ohio's effort to purge its voter rolls because one of the lawyers for the challengers is ill.
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a challenge to the procedure that Ohio uses to remove inactive voters from its voter-registration lists, had been scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday, November 8, but it will be postponed to a later, as-yet-undetermined date.
The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
[A] study by Demos, a progressive think tank which supports AVR, found that the population of voters who came onto the rolls automatically was less white than the population registered under the opt-in system.
Voting rights advocates fear that counties carrying out aggressive purges under legal duress will push officials to purge eligible voters.
"In a lot of these settlements, the push to remove people from the rolls may result in a lot of mistakes," Cameron Bell, an attorney for the liberal think tank Demos, said after fighting a lawsuit in Broward County, Florida. "That’s why Demos got involved, to make sure the parties weren’t reaching settlements that would lead to mistakes that would disenfranchise eligible voters."