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Is The War on Iran Unlawful And Unfair To U.S. Troops?

Is The War on Iran Unlawful And Unfair To U.S. Troops?

Protestors holding signs, many that say "Stop Bombing Iran."

Trump’s ‘Just for Fun’ War Talk Shows a Dangerous Trivialization

Disinformation Wins: Justifying ICE Murders through Transphobia

Disinformation Wins: Justifying ICE Murders through Transphobia

Republican scheming backfires in Texas election

Republican scheming backfires in Texas election

Trump: The King of Fake

Trump: The King of Fake

Ranked-choice voting poised to return to Vermont's largest city

Burlington, Vt.

Voters in Burlington will give RCV a second shot.

James Buck/Getty Images
Sara Swann
By Sara SwannMar 03, 2021
Sara Swann

As a staff writer, Sara covers a variety of democracy reform issues, including voting rights, money in politics, gerrymandering and civic education. Prior to joining The Fulcrum in May 2019, Sara reported on local government on Maryland's Eastern Shore for the USA Today network. She is a native West Virginian and a graduate of Syracuse University.

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Tuesday was a big day for fans of alternative voting systems.

Two-thirds of voters in Burlington cast ballots in favor of restoring ranked-choice voting in Vermont's largest city. If Vermont's Democratic-majority General Assembly and GOP Gov. Phil Scott also sign off on the ballot initiative, ranked-choice voting will be used for city council elections starting next March.

And a rival method, approval voting, made its debut in St. Louis after winning its own approval last year.

With this latest win in Burlington, momentum for ranked-choice voting continues to build across the country. More than 20 cities or counties use RCV, and Alaska just joined Maine as the first states to implement the system. More than two dozen states have active campaigns advocating for RCV, but its biggest debut will be in the New York mayoral primary in June.

Burlington was an early adopter of ranked-choice voting in 2005, when voters chose to implement it for city council and mayoral elections. However, five years and two mayoral elections later, voters decided to revert back to traditional plurality voting after a controversial mayor was elected through RCV.

After a decade without ranked elections, the city council attempted to put an initiative to use RCV for all citywide elections on the ballot last November, but the effort was vetoed by Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger. Council members then amended the initiative so RCV would only be used for council elections. The mayor approved this narrower use and the initiative was placed on the March 2 ballot.

The pro-RCV campaign Better Ballot Burlington was led by City Councilor Zoraya Hightower, a member of the Progressive Party, and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat.

Under this alternative voting system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. In the case that no candidate receives majority support, the election goes into an instant runoff in which the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and that person's support is redistributed to voters' second choices. This continues until one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold.

Proponents say ranked-choice voting deters negative campaigning and supports more consensus-driven politics, while also boosting the election prospects of women and people of color. Opponents argue the system is confusing and doesn't necessarily lead to better representation.

While ranked-choice voting is probably the most widely known and used alternative voting method, it's not the only option. St. Louis used approval voting for the first time in its mayoral election Tuesday, becoming the second city to employ the system (after Fargo, N.D.).

This voting system allowed the city's voters to "approve" of as many of the four mayoral candidates as they liked. The two candidates who received the most votes, Tishaura Jones and Cara Spencer, will now advance to the April general election — guaranteeing the city will have its second female mayor.


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Is the U.S. at "War" with Iran?

A woman sifts through the rubble in her house in the Beryanak District after it was damaged by missile attacks two days before, on March 15, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.

(Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Is the U.S. at "War" with Iran?

This question is not an exercise in double-talk. It is critical to understand the power that our Constitution grants exclusively to Congress, and the power that resides in the President as Commander-in-Chief of the military.

The Constitution clearly states that Congress has the power to declare war. The President does not have that power. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 recognizes that distribution of power by saying that a President can only introduce military force into an existing or imminent hostility if Congress has declared war or specifically authorized the President to use military force, or there is a national emergency created by an attack on the U.S.

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Healthcare Jobs Surge Mask a Productivity Crisis—and Rising Costs
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Healthcare Jobs Surge Mask a Productivity Crisis—and Rising Costs

Healthcare and social assistance professions added 693,000 jobs in 2025. Without those gains, the U.S. economy would have lost roughly 570,000 jobs.

At first glance, these numbers suggest that healthcare is a growth engine in an otherwise slowing labor market. But a closer look reveals something more troubling for patients and healthcare professionals.

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A large group of people is depicted while invisible systems actively scan and analyze individuals within the crowd

Anthropic’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over a Pentagon “supply-chain risk” label raises major constitutional questions about AI policy, corporate speech, and political retaliation.

Getty Images, Flavio Coelho

Anthropic Sues Trump Over ‘Unlawful’ AI Retaliation

Anthropic’s dispute with the Trump administration is no longer just about AI policy; it has escalated into a constitutional test of whether American companies can uphold their values against political retaliation. After the administration labeled Anthropic a “supply‑chain risk”, a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries, and ordered federal agencies to cease using its technology, the company did not yield. Instead, Anthropic filed two lawsuits: one in the Northern District of California and another in the D.C. Circuit, each challenging different aspects of the government’s actions and calling them “unprecedented and unlawful.”

The Pentagon has now formally issued the supply‑chain risk designation, triggering immediate cancellations of federal contracts and jeopardizing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in near‑term revenue. Anthropic’s filings describe the losses as “unrecoverable,” with reputational damage compounding the financial harm. Yet even as the government blacklists the company, the Pentagon continues using Claude in classified systems because the model is deeply embedded in wartime workflows. This contradiction underscores the political nature of the designation: a tool deemed too “dangerous” to be used by federal agencies is simultaneously indispensable in active military operations.

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