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Democracy Madness: On to the Elite Eight (Voting Division)

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How low does a seed have to be to officially be a "Cinderella" team? Banning straight-ticket voting and promoting so-called STAR voting have scored big upsets, but otherwise the top seeds in the Voting division of our Democracy Madness bracket are through to the Elite Eight.

The next round starts Wednesday and continues Thursday.

Automatic voter registration and ranked-choice voting blew away their opponents in the first round, while felon voting rights and early voting both snuck through. AVR and felon voting rights are going head-to-head now. Will felon voting rights be able to pull off the upset? Or will AVR continue to crush its opponents?


Remember: You can click the matchups, then each label, for more about the surviving proposals. But there are just two days for this round — so don't forget to press the Vote Now button and make all four choices.

After this quarter of the draw gets done, look for future brackets contesting ideas for reforming campaign finance, elections, civic life and Congress. Ultimately, we're looking for our readers to tell us what they view as the most transformative idea for reforming democracy out of 64 leading proposals.



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The Supreme Court’s stay in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem restores ICE authority in Los Angeles, igniting national debate over racial profiling, constitutional rights, and immigration enforcement.

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Public Safety or Profiling? Implications of Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem for Immigration Enforcement in the U.S.

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The Supreme Court’s recent decision in September 2025 to stay a lower court’s order in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem marks a significant development in the ongoing debate over the balance between immigration enforcement and constitutional protections. The decision temporarily lifted a district court’s restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the Los Angeles area, allowing agents to resume certain enforcement practices while litigation continues. Although the decision does not resolve the underlying constitutional issues, it does have significant implications for immigration policy, law enforcement authority, and civil liberties.

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For the Sake of Our Humanity: Humane Theology and America’s Crisis of Civility

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For the Sake of Our Humanity: Humane Theology and America’s Crisis of Civility

The American experiment has been sustained not by flawless execution of its founding ideals but by the moral imagination of people who refused to surrender hope. From abolitionists to suffragists to the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement, generations have insisted that the Republic live up to its creed. Yet today that hope feels imperiled. Coarsened public discourse, the normalization of cruelty in policy, and the corrosion of democratic trust signal more than political dysfunction—they expose a crisis of meaning.

Naming that crisis is not enough. What we need, I argue, is a recovered ethic of humaneness—a civic imagination rooted in empathy, dignity, and shared responsibility. Eric Liu, through Citizens University and his "Civic Saturday" fellows and gatherings, proposes that democracy requires a "civic religion," a shared set of stories and rituals that remind us who we are and what we owe one another. I find deep resonance between that vision and what I call humane theology. That is, a belief and moral framework that insists public life cannot flourish when empathy is starved.

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