Instead of policies and agency practices that divide us by doubling down on the grave inequality created by historic and current discrimination, we should advance policies that repair these rifts and bring us together.
FLORIDA – Today, voting rights organizations Demos, LatinoJustice/PRLDEF and 18 other social justice groups sent letters to 13 Florida County Supervisors of Elections, urging them to provide bilingual voting materials for their Puerto Rican residents, as required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
[A]ccording to our in-depth analysis of data from Demos and NCES, black and Hispanic students are paying more when it comes to student loans than white students. [...]
Demos’ new briefing book, Everyone’s Economy, offers an economic agenda that will enable all of us to thrive. Women’s History Month is an opportunity to dig into the ways that a race-conscious, populist economic agenda must elevate women. Over the next 2 weeks, Demos will share a series of blog posts that explore different ways that policy can impact women’s economic opportunity and stability. Today we look at why reproductive justice is vital to women’s economic well-being.
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has signed a law that will create publicly financed elections, reversing her previous opposition to a plan that advocates say will help curb money’s influence in District politics.
Bowser announced that she was throwing her support behind the Fair Elections Act, which was approved unanimously by the D.C. Council in February. The law, which will first affect elections in 2020, will steer millions annually toward the campaigns of local candidates and is aimed at reducing their reliance on deep-pocketed donors. [...]
Coalition cheers final passage of bill, calls for full funding and implementation of landmark democracy reform
WASHINGTON, D.C.- Advocates and activists celebrated on Tuesday as Mayor Bowser signed the Fair Elections Act, a major democracy reform that will bring small donor public financing to local elections. The campaign to pass the bill has been supported by dozens of economic, social, and racial justice organizations, as well as the entire D.C. Council.
Indiana—On Thursday, Demos, the ACLU, the ACLU of Indiana and the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, on behalf of Common Cause of Indiana, filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to halt the implementation of a new Indiana law that would allow the state to kick voters off the rolls based on flawed data, beginning on July 1.
MASSACHUSETTS - Yesterday, Demos, Rock the Vote, SEIU, and Massachusetts Community Action Network (MCAN), represented by attorneys from Cooley LLP, filed an amicus brief in a case challenging Massachusetts’s 20-day voter registration cutoff. In the case, Chelsea Collaborative v. Gavin, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is being asked to determine whether the state’s voter registration deadline violates the Massachusetts Constitution.
At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Empire State Indivisible will host its monthly “What’s Happening in Albany” panel at the Fourth Universalist Society on the Upper West Side. This installment will focus on voting reform, with a panel consisting of Ari Berman, Mother Jones’ voting rights reporter, Susan Lerner of Common Cause/NY, Naila Awan of Demos, and State Senator Brian Benjamin.
But progressive groups say that the Ohio law goes too far. They argue the state’s methods kick off eligible voters while leaving ineligible people on the rolls, and that Ohio doesn’t make it clear that people will lose their chance to vote if they don’t respond to the state’s mailer. “Their real agenda, in my view, is to get people off the rolls so they don’t participate,” says Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, a liberal think tank.
“The closer we get to the elections, the more difficult it will be to remedy any maps that are held unconstitutional in time for the election,” Stuart Naifeh, of the Demos think tank in New York, told Bloomberg Law. Demos is involved in its own high court voting challenge over voter purges by Republicans in Ohio.[...]
Settlement in “Motor Voter” Case in Time for 2018 Elections
SACRAMENTO - Millions of Californians who renew their driver’s license or state identification by mail will be able to use the renewal form to register to vote or update their voter registration, starting in April of 2018.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard our Ohio voter purge case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. At issue in the case is Ohio’s Supplemental Process, an unjust practice of removing infrequent voters from its registration rolls.
Six other states — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — have similar practices that target voters for removal from the rolls for not voting, but Ohio’s is the most extreme.
“The National Voting Rights Act sought to eliminate practices such as Ohio’s that penalize people who exercise their right not to vote,” Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at the liberal think tank Demos, said in a call with reporters last week.
WASHINGTON – Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union presented arguments today to the U.S. Supreme Court in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), a case focusing on Ohio’s practice of purging voters from its registration rolls. The groups argued that the Supplemental Process directly violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
"None of these voters had become ineligible to vote by reason of a change in residence or otherwise," the voting rights group Demos, representing the A. Philip Randolph Institute, argued in court papers. "Nonetheless, all had been purged from the rolls." [...]
But Stuart Naifeh of Demos says about four in five voters who receive the notices don't send them back. “People don’t look at their mail all that closely,” he says.
“They want the ability to use non-voting to remove people,” Demos senior counsel Stuart Naifeh, who is representing the Ohio challengers, told TPM. “And in these cases that they’ve brought or threatened to bring, they want counties or states to adopt that as a practice.”