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Legislators revive drive for automatic voter registration in New York

The majority Democrats in the state Senate are reviving their effort to bring automatic voter registration to New York.

It would be the second-biggest state to adopt the system, after California. Fourteen other states and Washington, D.C., have also done so, in each case boosting turnout. Under AVR, as it's dubbed, an adult citizen's name is automatically added to the voter rolls interacting with a state government agency – most typically the one that issues driver's licenses – unless the person chooses to opt out.


"Automatic voter registration is a straightforward and evidenced-backed policy that would remove barriers between voters and the ballot box and make it easier for people to make their voices heard," the chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, Brooklyn Democrat Zellnor Myrie, said in announcing a hearing will be held after Memorial Day.

This year Democrats are running both legislative chambers in Albany for the first time in a decade and have already passed several measures designed to increase the state's historically low turnout. The measures expanded early voting, permitted Election Day registration, consolidated state and local primary days and modernized voting equipment.

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Latino attendees of the Democratic National Convention

People cheer for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats

As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.

Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.

Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”

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Taylor Swift on stage
Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift enters the fray

Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

On Feb. 4, I wrote an article for The Fulcrum with the headline “Will Taylor Swift enter the fray?” Now, seven months later and shortly after the end of the first Harris-Trump debate, Swift made her decision clear when she announced her support for the vice president on Instagram.

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People voting

Jessie Harris (left,) a registered independent, casts a ballot at during South Carolina's Republican primary on Feb. 24.

Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Our election system is failing independent voters

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and co-founder of Let Us Vote.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

Lost, perhaps intentionally, in these debates is one undebatable truth: Our electoral system treats the millions of Americans registered as independent voters as second-class citizens by law.

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Abortion rights protestors

Arizona residents rally for abortion rights in April, on the heels of the state Supreme Court decision enacting an 1864 law banning abortion.

Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

In swing states, R's and D's oppose criminalizing abortion before fetal viability

While policymakers argue over whether abortion should be a right or a crime, the public has a clear policy stance on the matter. A new survey in the six swing states finds that majorities of Republicans and Democrats oppose criminalizing abortion before fetal viability.

Furthermore, bipartisan majorities favor reducing unintended pregnancies and abortions through policies ensuring access to birth control.

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Close up of congressional document

The House joint resolution proposing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1866.

How the 14th Amendment prevents state legislatures from subverting popular presidential elections

Eisner is a Ph.D. student in history at Johns Hopkins University. Froomkin is an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center.

Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election not only failed, but some of them also rested on a misreading of the U.S. Constitution, as our new analysis argues. The relevant constitutional provision dates back to just after the Civil War, and contemporaries recognized it as a key protection of American democracy.

In November 2020, as it became clear that Trump had lost the popular vote and would lose the Electoral College, Trump and his supporters mounted a pressure campaign to convince legislatures in several states whose citizens voted for Joe Biden to appoint electors who would support Trump’s reelection in the Electoral College votes.

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