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

Sports and America
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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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Beware the moral panic over AI data centers

A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida on July 18, 2026.

(Thomas Simonetti/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)

Beware the moral panic over AI data centers

Don’t look now, but we seem to have a moral panic on our hands.

The term moral panic, at least as a social science concept, is relatively modern. It was coined by Stanley Cohen in the 1972 book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics.” Moral panics emerge when large numbers of people start to freak out about something that doesn’t warrant the freak out.

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Business owner hanging an open sign at a cafe

Black wealth is rising but the racial wealth gap is widening. From Douglass to Mays to today, the freedom struggle's unfinished business is ownership.

Luis Alvarez/Getty Images

Salute A True America 250: Black History Lessons on Power Everyone Needs Today

From Emmaus, Pennsylvania and Staten Island to Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in Kansas, Tennessee, N. Carolina and more, as well as the Ohio State Fair's butter cow theme (and deviled egg recipes), the celebration of America 250 continues throughout the rest of the sesquicentennial year.

Added to the recent Sail250 tall ship event culminating in Boston’s harbor attended by millions was part of the country’s s 1776 official birthdate of independence, but the persistent calls for Black freedom of the last two centuries are still ignored.

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Ross Perot

American businessman and politician Ross Perot, Annapolis, Maryland, 1992.

(Photo by Arnold Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

Perot 2.0

On February 20, 1992, Texas businessman Ross Perot appeared on Larry King Live and set in motion a significant challenge to the two-party status quo. I’m not asking to be drafted. But if the people want to register me in all 50 states, I’ll promise you this: between now and the conventions we’ll get both parties’ heads straight.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans responded. Volunteers put him on the ballot. By June he was leading in the polls. Even after dropping out of the race for a month (someone should write a book about why he did that), he received 20,000,000 votes.

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United States' Constitution and Declaration of Independence on a flag background

The Constitution didn't create American prosperity — geography, immigration, and historical luck did. Here's why that matters for reform debates.

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The Constitution Did Not Make America Rich

Americans are taught a reassuring story about their country’s success. The United States became prosperous, powerful, and free because the framers wrote an exceptional Constitution. The miracle of Philadelphia produced the miracle of America.

The story appears in classrooms, campaign speeches, judicial opinions, and serious scholarly works. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson have argued that institutions securing property and constraining expropriation help separate rich nations from poor ones. But the popular American version takes that insight and turns it into something much stronger – and misguided: that our prosperity flowed from our particular constitutional design, and that altering it would put the wealth at risk.

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