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Disabled voters push against the revival of paper ballots

Disabled voters push against the revival of paper ballots

While paper ballots are seen as a good way to prevent election fraud, advocates for the disabled say voting machines are necessary to assure accessibility.

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While electronic voting equipment offers the most accessibility to the disabled, paper ballots are the preferred method in this moment of heightened worries about election security. Reconciling the disconnect before the 2020 election is becoming a top priority of disability advocates.

"Between security and accessibility, one is not more important than the other," Michelle Bishop, a voting rights expert at the National Disability Rights Network, told Stateline. "We have to be able to do both if we really want to make democracy work."


Two blind voters and the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland filed a federal lawsuit against the Maryland Board of Elections last month to force the state to make electronic machines the default voting method in the state because that's the only way to prevent the effective political segregation of many disabled people.


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While en route to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee rode past Appomattox Courthouse in rural Virginia.

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The Civil War Never Really Ended, But an American Union Could Finally Help America Truly Heal

In previous essays, I argued that the United States should seriously consider a new governing structure — an “American Union” — in which red and blue America peacefully separate into two sovereign nations while preserving a common military alliance, shared currency, and freedom of movement, with each new nation having its own constitution reflecting its own political consensus.

Simply put, the United States is too politically, culturally, and geographically divided to function effectively under the existing highly centralized, winner-take-all system in which every election determines how more than 330 million people must live.

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America's moving season is slowing to a historic standstill. Discover how mortgage lock-in, housing shortages, and declining mobility threaten economic opportunity and the American Dream.

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America Has Stopped Moving

The arrival of early June traditionally signals the great seasonal stirring of the American demographic engine. As school districts wrap up and corporations align their fiscal calendars, hundreds of thousands of families pack up moving vans, pull up stakes, and chase opportunity across state lines. This radical freedom to move - to escape an economically stagnant region, abandon a declining industry, and claim a stake in a booming frontier - has long been the primary safety valve of American democracy. It is the literal mechanism of self-reinvention, an unwritten article of the national faith that promises that where you begin is not where you are destined to finish. It was this spatial fluidity that historically distinguished the American social hierarchy from the rigid, ancestral geography of Europe, where a family's prospects were bound to the soil of their birth for generations.

Yet, as the peak moving season gets underway this year, real estate data reveals an eerie, unprecedented stagnation: domestic relocation rates have plummeted to modern historic lows, with the Census Bureau reporting the lowest mobility rate since tracking began in 1948. The great continental migration that has defined American economic vitality and cultural mixing since the days of the frontier has ground to a sudden, structural halt. From abroad, the silence of this once restless internal movement is even more striking – a demographic engine that once roared now barely hums.

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