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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.

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Half-Baked Alaska

A photo of multiple checked boxes.

Getty Images / Thanakorn Lappattaranan

Half-Baked Alaska

This past year’s elections saw a number of state ballot initiatives of great national interest, which proposed the adoption of two “unusual” election systems for state and federal offices. Pairing open nonpartisan primaries with a general election using ranked choice voting, these reforms were rejected by the citizens of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The citizens of Alaska, however, who were the first to adopt this dual system in 2020, narrowly confirmed their choice after an attempt to repeal it in November.

Ranked choice voting, used in Alaska’s general elections, allows voters to rank their candidate choices on their ballot and then has multiple rounds of voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the final vote and is declared the winner. This more representative result is guaranteed because in each round the weakest candidate is dropped, and the votes of that candidate’s supporters automatically transfer to their next highest choice. Alaska thereby became the second state after Maine to use ranked choice voting for its state and federal elections, and both have had great success in their use.

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Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

The United States Supreme Court.

Getty Images / Rudy Sulgan

Top-Two Primaries Under the Microscope

Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

Now, three minor political parties, who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The Peace and Freedom Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party have teamed up to file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their brief repeats the same argument that the courts have previously rejected—that the top-two system discriminates against parties and deprives voters of choice by not guaranteeing every party a place on the November ballot.

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Supreme Court
Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Gerrymandering and voting rights under review by Supreme Court again

On Dec. 13, The Fulcrum identified the worst examples of congressional gerrymandering currently in use.

In that news report, David Meyers wrote:

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Rear view diverse voters waiting for polling place to open
SDI Productions/Getty Images

Open primary advocates must embrace the historic principles of change

This was a big year for the open primaries movement. Seven state-level campaigns and one municipal. Millions of voters declaring their support for open primaries. New leaders emerging across the country. Primary elections for the first time at the center of the national reform debate.

But with six out of eight campaigns failing at the ballot box, it’s also an important moment of reflection.

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