Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Abrams targets key states to prevent voting problems

Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for Georgia governor, is taking her voter protection work to the Midwest and Southeast.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Stacey Abrams, who lost her bid for the governorship of Georgia but gained national prominence in the process, is unveiling a multimillion-dollar campaign to support Democrats' voter protection efforts in next year's election.

Abrams planned to announce the initiative, called Fair Fight 2020, during her speech Tuesday at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades convention in Las Vegas.

The effort is expected to cost between $4 million and $5 million and target 20 states, mostly battlegrounds in the Midwest and Southeast, according to news reports.


There were widespread reports of voting irregularities in the Georgia gubernatorial race, which Republican Brian Kemp (who was the state's top election official at the time) won by 1.4 percentage points. Fair Fight Action, the political arm of Abrams' organization, Fair Fight, filed a federal lawsuit in November 2018 claiming, among other things, that the voter registration rolls were improperly purged and that large numbers of voter registrations were incorrectly rejected.

That suit is working its way through the courts.

Last week, Abrams announced that she was forming multimillion fund to help Democrats capture a majority in the Georgia House and to win additional seats in the state Senate. Abrams was previously Democratic leader of the Georgia House.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Read More

"Vote" pin.
Getty Images, William Whitehurst

Most Americans’ Votes Don’t Matter in Deciding Elections

New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.

“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”

Keep ReadingShow less
Why America’s Elections Will Never Be the Same After Trump
text
Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

Why America’s Elections Will Never Be the Same After Trump

Donald Trump wasted no time when he returned to the White House. Within hours, he signed over 200 executive orders, rapidly dismantling years of policy and consolidating control with the stroke of a pen. But the frenzy of reversals was only the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper, more troubling transformation: presidential elections have become all-or-nothing battles, where the victor rewrites the rules of government and the loser’s agenda is annihilated.

And it’s not just the orders. Trump’s second term has unleashed sweeping deportations, the purging of federal agencies, and a direct assault on the professional civil service. With the revival of Schedule F, regulatory rollbacks, and the targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, the federal bureaucracy is being rigged to serve partisan ideology. Backing him is a GOP-led Congress, too cowardly—or too complicit—to assert its constitutional authority.

Keep ReadingShow less
One Lesson from the Elections: Looking At Universal Voting

A roll of "voted" stickers.

Pexels, Element5 Digital

One Lesson from the Elections: Looking At Universal Voting

The analysis and parsing of learned lessons from the 2024 elections will continue for a long time. What did the campaigns do right and wrong? What policies will emerge from the new arrangements of power? What do the parties need to do for the future?

An equally important question is what lessons are there for our democratic structures and processes. One positive lesson is that voting itself was almost universally smooth and effective; we should applaud the election officials who made that happen. But, many elements of the 2024 elections are deeply challenging, from the increasingly outsized role of billionaires in the process to the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation.

Keep ReadingShow less
MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

A check mark and hands.

Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash. Unsplash+ License obtained by the author.

MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

Originally published by Independent Voter News.

Today, I am proud to share an exciting milestone in my journey as an advocate for democracy and electoral reform.

Keep ReadingShow less