Demos strongly urges the Department of Homeland Security to withdraw the proposed rule to radically enlarge the list of criteria that will be used to decide whether an immigrant is likely to become a “public charge.”
Facebook’s decision to hire a right-wing consulting firm to plant false stories about Color of Change and others who dared to call out Facebook was a nefarious smokescreen to save themselves from well-deserved criticism about the online platform and its business practices.
Chiraag Bains, a former prosecutor and civil rights attorney at the U.S. Justice Department, said that because criminal codes are so complicated, prosecutors have an incredible amount of flexibility in deciding whether and how to bring a case. Prosecutors normally consider the culpability of the individual, the severity of the offense and what kind of penalty is necessary to deter future misconduct.
Home ownership is a major contributing factor to the racial wealth gap, as Demos, a left-of-center think tank, previously argued in a 2015 report. Seventy-three percent of white households own their home, Demos found; in sharp contrast, home ownership drops to 45 percent among black households.
Last week, ballot initiatives to improve the functioning of democracy fared very well. In Florida — a state divided nearly equally between right and left — more than 64 percent of voters approved restoring the franchise to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. In Colorado, Michigan and Missouri, measures to reduce gerrymandering passed. In Maryland, Michigan and Nevada, measures to simplify voter registration passed.
We just filed this emergency lawsuit to protect the rights of eligible Ohio voters who were recently arrested and are being held in jail, unable to get to the polls.
Under the current system, eligible voters who are detained pretrial by the state are being unconstitutionally denied their fundamental right to vote. Ohio’s disenfranchisement of these qualified voters violates the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Demos requests that the Department of Justice investigate a potential violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act by the President of the United States.
Voter suppression is alive and well in Florida where our election protection volunteers reported multiple voting rights violations as well as coercion during early voting and we secured an emergency order in response to the violation of a federal injunction
We secured another win for voters in our Ohio voter purge case, A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) v. Husted. Voters who were removed from the voter rolls in Ohio without adequate notice will now be able to participate in Tuesday’s midterms.
November 1st is Latina Equal Pay Day, marking the date when the typical Latina woman’s wages since January 1, 2017 finally catch up to what the typical white man was paid in calendar year 2017.
Such lawsuits from the right have yielded mixed results, in part because voting rights advocates like the ACLU, Common Cause, Demos, the Lawyers’ Committee, the League of Women Voters and the NAACP have successfully fought back in court. Private groups defending voters have filed more suits to protect voters than the Justice Department itself in recent years. [...]
Similar interim rules were in place for the 2016 elections and more than 7,500 residents used them to vote, said lawyers for Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, two groups that sued the state.
“In a state where elections have been won or lost by only one vote, protecting the right of eligible voters to have their voices heard will uphold the fundamental principles on which our democracy is supposed to operate.”
In a blow for voting rights today, an Ohio federal court ruled that the state does not have to provide relief to allow purged voters to participate in this November’s mid-term elections.