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Modernization of voting equipment largely stalled, survey of states finds

State and local election officials in 31 states say they want to update voting equipment before the 2020 election, but most believe they don't have the money to do so, according to a survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.

States received $380 million in election security grants from Congress last year, but there's general consensus that the total is not remotely close to what's required to replace outdated and not reliably secure balloting hardware. Russian hackers are widely suspected of searching for vulnerabilities in several states' voting systems in the last presidential election.


The intelligence community says there's no evidence any results were altered, but the vulnerabilities will only be easier to exploit four years later. The biggest concern is with the dozen states where electronic voting machines do not provide printouts confirming each voter's choices.

Of these, Delaware has dedicated money to replacements in time for next year's election, the Georgia and South Carolina legislatures are on course to earmark similar spending, and Louisiana's plan is temporarily on hold because of a contract award dispute. The Brennan Center says modernization is essentially at a standstill in the other states: Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas.

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Ronald Reagan

The people behind Project 2025 hope that Donald Trump has the will, like Ronald Reagan, to “go against the established grain in Washington” by closing numerous agencies and departments, attacking personal freedoms and isolating America in an increasingly connected global world.

Project 2025: ‘Onward’? More like backwards.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

After 343,541 words of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” the Project 2025 opus, we come finally to its very last. “Onward!” is the adverb Edwin Feulner, co-founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, uses to close the conservative handbook.

“Our next mission,” he proclaims, “is just beginning. … Onward!”

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Megan Varner/Getty Images

Experts pan Georgia’s hand-count rule as we prep for Election Overtime

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Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, challenged the validity of the decision in a letter to the elections board:

"There are thus no provisions in the statutes cited in support of these proposed rules that permit counting the number of ballots by hand at the precinct level prior to delivery to the election superintendent for tabulation. Accordingly, these proposed rules are not tethered to any statute — and are, therefore, likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do."
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Women from states with abortion restrictions speak during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August.

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Bayer is a political activist and specialist in the rhetoric of social movements. She was the founding director of the Oral Communication Lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

At a recent campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., Vice President Kamala Harris detailed her plan to strengthen the economy through policies lifting the middle class. Despite criticism from Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — who recently said, “The American people are smarter than Kamala Harris when it comes to the economy” — some economists and financial analysts have a very positive assessment of her proposals.

Respected Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs recently gave Harris high marks in a report compared to former President Donald Trump’s plan to increase tariffs. “We estimate that if Trump wins in a sweep or with divided government, the hit to growth from tariffs and tighter immigration policy would outweigh the positive fiscal impulse,” the bank’s economists wrote.

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People protesting with a large banner that reads "Voters Decide"

Protesters in Detroit rally to support the 2020 election results and other causes.

Why the cost of water for poor Black Detroit voters may be key to Kamala Harris winning – or losing – Michigan

Ronald Brown is a professor of political science at Wayne State University. R. Khari Brown is a professor of sociology at Wayne State University.

The threat of violence was in the air at the TCF Center in Detroit on Nov. 5, 2020, after former President Donald Trump claimed that poll workers in the city were duplicating ballots and that there was an unexplained delay in delivering them for counting.

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Emboldened by Trump’s rhetoric, dozens of mainly white Republican Trump supporters banged on doors and windows at the vote-tallying center, chanting, “Stop the count!”

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