Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Meet the reformer: Kat Calvin, who wants you to get the right voter ID

Kat Calvin

Kat Calvin founded Spread The Vote to help people get the IDs they need to participate in elections in their states.

Photo courtesy Kat Calvin

A 36-year-old attorney, Kat Calvin founded Spread the Vote after the 2016 election. She said the results that year convinced her that the Supreme Court's striking down of the preclearance requirements under the Voting Rights Act has led to a wave of voter suppression across the country. Her answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

What's the tweet-length description of your organization?

Spread The Vote helps people obtain the government-issued photo identification cards required for voting in many states.


Describe your very first civic engagement.

Oh wow, I don't know! I do remember getting out of school in probably the fifth grade to vote for Bill Clinton with my mom.

What was your biggest professional triumph?

Discovering that I had built a team of incredible people who believed in each other and our mission enough to stick together through the hard times.

And your most disappointing setback?

Learning that no matter how hard you work, when you run a nonprofit you just cannot control when the money does and does not come in.

How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?

I'm a black woman. Black women are a high percentage of people living without IDs in this country and we face much bigger barriers to both obtaining those IDs and rebuilding our lives after we get them. I try to be conscious of the fact that it looks very different when a white man gets an ID and wants to get a job and start over and when a black woman gets an ID and wants to get a job and start over. She will always face 20 more layers of challenges than he will, and we have to think about how that affects the kind of services and opportunities we can both provide and find for our clients.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

It's also much, much more difficult to raise money as a black woman and I have to live with donors and potential donors who sometimes say very racist and sexist things to me. There's a lot of grinning and bearing it and remembering why I'm here, and going home to drink bourbon and go for very long runs to calm down.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

My mother always reminded me of Marian Anderson and said that if they're not listening you find higher ground and shout until they have to hear you.

Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.

Jurassic Bark: chocolate ice cream with Oreo crumbles and peanut brittle in the shape of dinosaurs.

West Wing or Veep?

West Wing

What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?

Make sure I haven't missed any bonkers news or the apocalypse or something.

What is your deepest, darkest secret?

I don't know how much of a secret this is but I am a sucker for anything about serial killers — books, podcasts, movies, socks. I don't care. I'm in.

Read More

Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries
person in blue denim jeans and white sneakers standing on gray concrete floor
Photo by Phil Scroggs on Unsplash

Independent Voters Gain Ground As New Mexico Opens Primaries

With the stroke of a pen, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham enfranchised almost 350,000 independent voters recently by signing a bill for open primaries. Just a few years ago, bills to open the primaries were languishing in the state legislature, as they have historically across the country. But as more and more voters leave both parties and declare their independence, the political system is buckling. And as independents begin to organize and speak out, it’s going to continue to buckle in their direction.

In 2004, there were 120,000 independent voters in New Mexico. A little over 10 years later, when the first open primary bill was introduced, that number had more than doubled. That bill never even got a hearing. But today the number of independents in New Mexico and across the country is too big to ignore. Independents are the largest group of voters in ten states and the second-largest in most others. That’s putting tremendous pressure on a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

Getty Images, Grace Cary

Stopping the Descent Toward Banana Republic Elections

President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.

Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Vote" pin.
Getty Images, William Whitehurst

Most Americans’ Votes Don’t Matter in Deciding Elections

New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.

“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand Placing Ballot in Box With American Flag
Getty Images, monkeybusinessimages

We Can Fix This: Our Politics Really Can Work – These Stories Show How

As American politics polarizes ever further, voters across the political spectrum agree that our current system is not delivering for the American people. Eighty-five percent of Americans feel most elected officials don’t care what people like them think. Eighty-eight percent of them say our political system is broken.

Whether it’s the quality and safety of their kids’ schools, housing affordability and rising homelessness, scarce and pricey healthcare, or any number of other issues that touch Americans’ everyday lives, the lived experience of polarization comes from such problems—and elected officials’ failure to address them.

Keep ReadingShow less