Washington, DC – Today, Demos, Every Voice, People for the American Way, and 23 other organizations sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing John Bush’s confirmation to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth District and Damien Schiff’s confirmation to the Court of Federal Claims. The organizations opposed Bush and Schiff due to their troubling views on the issue of money in politics.
"It's very concerning," said Brenda Wright, vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, a liberal advocacy group that's been fighting state efforts to purge voters from the rolls. Wright notes that the main purpose of the motor voter law is to expand opportunities to register to vote, but that millions of eligible Americans are still unregistered.
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.
The League of Women Voters of Missouri and the St. Louis and Greater Kansas City Chapters of the A. Philip Randolph Institute Call on State to Fix Voter Registration at DMVs
“The EAC is responsible for creating voting systems guidelines that are intended to help ensure the accuracy and accessibility and security of voting systems that states use,” Brenda Wright, vice president for policy and legal strategies for the public policy group Demos, said in a phone interview.
In a recent study, I compared the damage from shoplifting with that from just one form of wage theft, the failure to pay workers the legal hourly minimum.
Illinois also becomes one of 4 states (Colorado, Connecticut and Vermont) to offer both AVR and Same-Day Registration (SDR). These reforms in tandem complement each other in the effort to best expand voter access and increase turnout.
New York should be expanding voters’ rights, demonstrating what real democracy looks like. We should ensure working moms and dads, immigrants and people of color have equal access and voice in our electoral system. In the face of an imminent federal onslaught, we should be saying unequivocally that we stand for good government of the people, by the people and for the people. [...]
"One thing driving Labour’s over performance was youth turnouts," Sean McElwee, a policy analyst who studies voter attitudes and behavior at the progressive think tank Demos, said in an interview.
McElwee thinks that Labour’s success could be a model for progressives in the United States provided they learn some key lessons about how to enlist and galvanize voters.
Kathy Culliton-Gonzalez, a lawyer who works on automatic voter registration at Demos, a progressive think tank, said some of the momentum toward automatic voter registration was born out of the controversy surrounding the results of the 2000 election, long lines to vote across the country in the 2012 election and efforts to pass voter ID laws to make it more difficult to vote.
What happened in 2016? In a recent Monkey Cagepiece, I discussed the research Demos is performing with political scientists Bernard Fraga, Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes on how depressed turnout contributed to Trump’s electoral college victory. However, the piece doesn’t discuss what caused that decline in turnout and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party.
The nation is experiencing a crisis of care. Across the country, parents are trapped in an economic bind without paid leave or affordable child care, even as older Americans and people with disabilities contend with their own unmet needs for care. At the same time, we face a desperate need for good jobs. While unemployment has fallen, millions of working people still struggle to make ends meet with low wages, precarious work schedules, and a lack of basic benefits and job security.
A group of civil-rights organizations, including the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the think tank Demos, and the ACLU of Ohio, filed a lawsuit against Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted challenging the supplemental process’s legality in early 2016.
The Supreme Court granted Ohio’s petition for certiorari in the case of Husted v. Ohio A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI). The case addresses Ohio’s Supplemental Process, a practice of targeting voters who fail to vote in a two-year period for eventual cancellation of their registrations – even if they have not moved and are still fully eligible to vote.