Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Broad search for N.C. vote cheaters finds a couple dozen — from five years ago

North Carolina voters in 2016

A few dozen people have been charged with voting crimes that occurred in North Carolina in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency and Richard Burr was reelected to the Senate.

Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

Foraging for voter fraud has found scattered crimes across North Carolina — but they occurred five years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidency, not when he says he was cheated out of re-election last fall.

Federal prosecutors in Raleigh have announced charges against 24 more non-citizens since last year, with several new cases brought last week. But only two have recently been accused of voting illegally, bringing to 21 the number of foreigners who appear to have wrongly cast ballots in 2016 in one of the premier battleground states. All the others were charged with falsely claiming citizenship, or falsifying immigration papers, in order to register to vote.

But the Justice Department has made no allegations of a conspiracy to tilt the outcome. And given the minuscule numbers involved, such a scheme would not have been worth the effort, no matter the purported beneficiary.


Trump bested Hillary Clinton by 174,000 votes in North Carolina in 2016, while fellow Republican Richard Burr won reelection to the Senate by 267,000 votes. Last year, Trump took the state's 15 electoral votes by a smaller but still decisive 75,000 votes.

The state GOP went on an extensive social media campaign after the election in support of Trump's wholly unsubstantiated allegations of fraud in states he lost. In fact, one of the most palpably improper actions of the campaign took place when the president encouraged North Carolinians to vote twice, once by mail and once in person — to test the resilience of the state's election system, he asserted.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The 43 people who have been charged — after a highly publicized and aggressive investigation — are listed as being from Mexico and several Central American countries as well as France, Yemen, Iraq and Nigeria.

Between his appointment by Trump and the 2018 midterm election, U.S. Attorney Bobby Higdon used subpoenas, issued on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in an effort to obtain millions of voting records from the state Board of Elections and more than 40 counties in the half of the state under his jurisdiction.

The state board rebuffed the demand, labeling it overly broad and unreasonable, while voting rights activists said they suspected a partisan fishing expedition. After extensive negotiations, two years ago the state agreed to turn over its records for about 800 people.

The federal prosecutor's office, under new management since the start of the Biden administration, did not connect the charges to the documents they received.

Read More

Elderly woman on a train

A woman evacuating from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in August looks out from a train car to say goodbye.

Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

On Ageism Awareness Day, consider the impact of war on older people.

Kilaberia is an assistant professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

We know the toll that war has on youth, but older adults are suffering displacement, too.

We have talked about age-friendly cities, age-friendly health care systems, age-friendly universities, age-friendly workplaces dementia-friendly communities. We are not talking about age-friendly or dementia-friendly humanitarian responses.

Tomorrow is Ageism Awareness Day and it offers us the opportunity to draw attention to the impact of ageism, particularly in the many war zones around the world.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino couple

"Women's rights are super important to me because women raised me. Women brought me into this world,” said Rico Cortez, with his mother, Rebececca Guerrero.

Courtesy Rico Cortez

Latino families in Nevada are a deciding factor this election cycle

Couraud is a bilingual multimedia journalist.

The Fulcrum presents We the People, a series elevating the voices and visibility of the persons most affected by the decisions of elected officials. In this installment, we explore the motivations of over 36 million eligible Latino voters as they prepare to make their voices heard in November.

According to the NALEO Education Fund,Latinos make up 28 percent of Nevada's population, and one in every five registered voters in the state is Latino. With Nevada being a crucial swing state in November's election, the Latino vote has become increasingly important.

Although Nevada has a sitting U.S. senator who is Latina (Catherine Cortez-Masto), Latino political representation still lags. This could explain why some Latino voters feel discouraged or why — despite such high population numbers — Latino voter turnout is lower than that of other demographics in the state.

Keep ReadingShow less
Where young voters can have the greatest impact in 2024

Liz Michalkiewicz was 29 when she voted in Milwaukee in 2022. Wisconsin is among the states where voters under age 30 can have the biggest impact this year.

Sara Stathas for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Where young voters can have the greatest impact in 2024

Meyers is executive editor of The Fulcrum.

It’s common knowledge among the politically engaged that the presidential election is going to come down to a handful of states. The same goes for control of the Senate, while just a couple dozen districts will determine which party wins a majority in the House of Representatives.

But which voters will decide the winner in each of those states and districts? While there may not be one, across-the-board answer, researchers at Tufts University have identified the places where young voters (ages 18-29) can have the most influence on electoral outcomes this year.

Keep ReadingShow less
Mark Zuckerberg holding a pair of glasses

Mark Zuckerberg, who is now worth more than $200 billion, shows off new wearabel tech at the Meta Connect developer conference in September.

Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images

We have extreme inequality in America, and it’s getting worse

Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.

Bloomberg recently reported that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg is now worth over $200 billion. He’s not alone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, and LVMH founder Bernard Arnault are also worth north of $200 billion.

The news is a searing reminder of the uneven distribution of wealth in America. In the same country as Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk reside millions of people without a reliable source of food. (Arnault lives in France.) Redistributing just a small portion of the richest Americans’ wealth could alleviate tremendous human suffering.

Keep ReadingShow less
A roll of stickers that read "I registered to vote today!"
Bloomberg Creative/Getty Images

Become an informed voter – it’s the best way to fight voter suppression

Harris is director of media engagement at Stand Up America.

This is National Voter Education Week, when activists and organizations across the country mobilize to educate voters on how to make their voices heard in November. This year, that mission is more important than ever. While voting rights advocates are hard at work helping voters find their polling location and voting options, learn what’s on their ballot, and make a plan for voting, MAGA politicians are ramping up efforts to make it more difficult to vote and even purging voter rolls in battleground states.

Keep ReadingShow less