NEW YORK— As members of the Class of 2012 join the work force or look to higher education, a new report illuminates the connection between poor STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) teacher retention rates and young Americans’ chances of being relegated to low-wage, low-skill jobs that offer little economic security or opportunity.
Citing clear evidence that Alabama public assistance agencies are violating their federally-mandated responsibilities to offer tens of thousands of public assistance clients opportunities to register to vote, today attorneys from Demos, Project Vote, and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent a pre-litigation notice letter to the Alabama Secretary of State on behalf of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP.
Citing clear evidence that low-income Arkansas residents have been denied the opportunity to register to vote, attorneys from voting rights groups Project Vote and Demos sent a pre-litigation notice letter to Secretary of State Mark Martin, the Arkansas Department of Human Services, and the Arkansas Department of Health, regarding the state’s non-compliance with the federal requirements of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
“Voting rights is the foundational issue in American politics and American society. Simply put, if we don’t all have an equal say, how can we expect to have an equal chance?”
Community college credentials can play a vital role in creating economic security for young adults while at the same time rejuvenating career opportunities.
New York, NY — As President Obama calls for massive increases in Federal college grant aide in the 2011 budget, a new report by the policy center Demos shows how one-and two-year postsecondary degrees are vital tools for moving people into living-wage jobs.
"The Eleventh Circuit’s unanimous decision affirmed our client’s victory at trial all the way around—providing a strong precedent for fighting efforts by right-wing groups to twist the NVRA into a tool for voter suppression."
Leaders with Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Dēmos, and Forward Justice continue their efforts to engage, empower and protect returning citizens and their right to vote.
"Unions are what sent my cousins to college, they're what helped us go on vacation, they're what made sure that when there were hard times my family still had jobs."
"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." [...]
Without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lenders preying on communities of color would continue to pull in windfall gains, while widening the racial wealth gap and undermining the precarious financial stability of vulnerable households.
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.
To succeed in 2018 and 2020, Democrats need to run campaigns that actually motivate people to get out and vote, especially 20-somethings and struggling people of all races.
That means running unapologetically on the belief that inclusion and diversity is our nation’s strength, that government can and should ensure opportunity and a decent standard of living for its people and that democracy should work for the people, not just the wealthy and corporations.
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.
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.
That kind of polarization may only intensify in coming years. In a blog post today at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, Sean McElwee points out that young Democratic primary voters and donors are both more liberal than other democrats their age and more liberal than older primary voters and donors. All of that means that the Democratic party will soon be pulled further left, McElwee predicts. [...]