Skip to content
Project 2025
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Cash in a gas tak

Gas prices up again? What’s going on?

Mail-in restrictions in Minnesota latest target of a Democratic lawsuit

Minnesota voting

Minnesota voters, like this one in Minneapolis earlier this year, face numerous obstacles to vote by mail. A lawsuit is challenging those barriers.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Bill Theobald
By Bill TheobaldMay 14, 2020
Bill Theobald

Bill Theobald is senior writer at The Fulcrum, where he focuses on everything to do with voting. This December marks his 40th anniversary in the business, and he still believes -- now more than ever -- that the glow from great journalism can truly light the world.

See More Writings by author

Another upper Midwest battleground, Minnesota, is the latest target in the barrage of litigation seeking to compel states to make voting by mail easier this year.

The new lawsuit, filed by Democrats in state court Wednesday, focuses on two aspects of Minnesota's election rules that have already been targeted as overly burdensome in several of the other suits: an Election Day deadline for the return of absentee ballots and the requirement that those envelopes have a witness signature.

Only one in eight ballots was cast by mail in Minnesota two years ago, about half the national average. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, a "mass influx of absentee voters will exacerbate existing disenfranchising laws" unless a court intervenes before the Aug. 11 primaries, said Marc Elias, the lawyer once again helming the lawsuit.

The suit says Minnesota's requirement that ballot envelopes be countersigned, by another registered voter or a notary, is punitive at a time when social distancing will likely remain highly recommended even though stay-at-home orders have been relaxed. And it says there should be a "reasonable" extension of the deadline for making sure absentee ballots are received by election offices — currently poll-closing time on election days — in a year when a surge in election mail volume and a strapped Postal Service could result in long delivery delays.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

President Trump plans to contest the state's 11 electoral votes aggressively this fall after coming within 45,000 votes, or 2 percentage points, four years ago. But the Democrat has carried the state every time since 1972, and the party also has a strong shot at picking up a pair of House seats.

The suit was filed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democrat-aligned group spearheaded by former Attorney general Eric Holder, on behalf of the Minnesota Alliance for Retired Americans Educational Fund and several voters.

It's part of a multimillion-dollar legal strategy announced by Democratic campaign officials in January. Elias says he has active cases in 16 states — including Wisconsin and Michigan in the upper Midwest — and several more will be filed in the coming weeks. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign announced last week they were doubling their legal cash commitment to $20 million in order to respond to the Democratic lawsuits.

Latest news

Read More

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
ballot

The ballot used in Alaska's 2022 special election.

What is ranked-choice voting anyway?

Landry is the facilitator of the League of Women Voters of Colorado’s Alternative Voting Methods Task Force. An earlier version of this article was published in the LWV of Boulder County’s June 2023 Voter newsletter.

The term “ranked-choice voting” is so bandied about these days that it tends to take up all the oxygen in any discussion on better voting methods. The RCV label was created in 2002 by the city of San Francisco. People who want to promote evolution beyond our flawed plurality voting are often excited to jump on the RCV bandwagon.

However, many people, including RCV advocates, are unaware that it is actually an umbrella term, and ranked-choice voting in fact exists in multiple forms. Some people refer to any alternative voting method as RCV — even approval voting and STAR Voting, which don’t rank candidates! This article only discusses voting methods that do rank candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
People voting
Paul J. Richards/Getty Images

Make safe states matter

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

It’s time for “safe state” voters to be more than nervous spectators and symbolic participants in presidential elections.

The latest poll averages confirm that the 2024 presidential election will again hinge on seven swing states. Just as in 2020, expect more than 95 percent of major party candidate campaign spending and events to focus on these states. Volunteers will travel there, rather than engage with their neighbors in states that will easily go to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. The decisions of a few thousand swing state voters will dwarf the importance of those of tens of millions of safe-state Americans.

But our swing-state myopia creates an opportunity. Deprived of the responsibility to influence which candidate will win, safe state voters can embrace the freedom to vote exactly the way they want, including for third-party and independent candidates.

Keep ReadingShow less
Map of the United States

The National EduDemocracy Landscape Map provides a comprehensive overview of where states are approaching democracy reforms within education.

The democracy movement ignores education races at its peril

Dr. Mascareñaz is a leader in the Cornerstone Project, a co-founder of The Open System Institute and chair of the Colorado Community College System State Board.

One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2024