Virginia legislators are considering several bills that would make it more difficult for eligible persons to cast a ballot that will be counted, and would impose large costs for implementation. One bill requires photo identification in order to vote, while others require one of an enumerated list of identification documents. If the voter does not have identification he must sign a sworn statement of his identity and then cast a provisional ballot.
Demos and Young Invincibles partnered to complete the State of Young America report, the first comprehensive look at the economic challenges facing young adults since the Great Recession.
Proof that when laws to protect peoples’ democratic rights are put into practice, they can have a major impact on bringing more voices into the political process.
Prison-based gerrymandering is the practice of counting incarcerated persons as “residents” of a prison when drawing legislative districts in order to give extra influence to the districts that contain the prisons. The U.S. Constitution requires that election districts be roughly equal in size, so that everyone is represented equally in the political process. But prison-based gerrymandering distorts our democracy by artificially inflating the population numbers — and thus, the political clout — of districts with prisons, while diluting the political power of all other voters.
Missouri is considering a bill requiring all voters to present government issued photo identification at the polls. The fact that Missouri is introducing a restrictive voter identification bill is particularly unfortunate considering the legislature passed such a bill in 2006 and it was struck down as unconstitutional under the state's constitution by the Missouri Supreme Court.
When drawing legislative districts, New York State counts incarcerated persons as "residents" of the community where the prison is located, instead of counting them in the home community to which they will return, on average, within 34 months. This practice of prison-based gerrymandering ignores more than 100 years of legal precedent.
Election Day Registration (EDR), which allows eligible voters to register and cast a ballot on Election Day, is a reform that reduces the unnecessary disfranchisement of eligible voters that may be caused by arbitrary registration deadlines.
Twelve years since the enactment of the NVRA, states across the country have regularly failed to comply with public assistance voter registration requirements.
This memo outlines how the Justices lined up on the issues in Randall v. Sorrell, provides some analysis of the opinions, and touches on the implications for future reform efforts.
While Florida’s purges of felons from voter rolls in 2000 have received national attention, little is known about the procedures other states use. To shed some light on these procedures, we surveyed the purge processes of 15 states.