Skip to content
Project 2025
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Cash in a gas tak

Gas prices up again? What’s going on?

Former felon Erica Racz registering to voting

Florida top court ruling on felon voting is hardly the final word

Democracy Madness: Top-seeded 'best of the rest' dominate the last Elite Eight

Democracy and basketball
by designing makes me more alive/Getty Images
Our Staff
By Our StaffMay 21, 2020
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
See More Writings by author

The top seven seeds have all made it through to the Elite Eight round in the "Best of the Rest" division of Democracy Madness — our tournament where readers are deciding which of 64 ideas for fixing the government they want most.

The only minor upset in the opening round of our final quarter: The notion of conducting more extensive audits of election results, our ninth seed, barely snuck past the idea of creating federal standards for all voting machines, slotted eighth.

Now it's time to whittle it down to four. The voting lasts until Sunday night.

Will using nothing but paper ballots (No. 1) get by those post-election audits? Will providing a steady flow of federal funding for elections (No. 2) best a demand for Congress to spend more time in Washington (No. 7)? Does Congress need more capacity (No. 3) or should kids spend more time learning about civics (No. 6)? Want the District of Columbia to be the 51st state (No. 4) or a code of ethics for the Supreme Court (No. 5)?

These are the questions that await you in this round of the bracket. Which one will join the other three bracket champions who readers have already sent to the Democracy Madness Final Four?

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Click "Vote Now" to make your four choices. (You can click the matchups, then each label, for more on the proposals.)


Latest news

Read More

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.”

Keep ReadingShow less
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.

Keep ReadingShow less
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.

Keep ReadingShow less
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.

Keep ReadingShow less
Close up of congressional document

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

www.archives.gov

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.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2024