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Congress Bill Spotlight: renaming Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America”

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Project 2025: Part II

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Georgia restores 22,000 to voter rolls as bigger purge fight goes on

Federal courthouse

The federal courthouse in Atlanta where the voter purge fight is being argued.

Department of Justice
The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumDec 19, 2019
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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Roughly 22,000 names were put back on Georgia's voter registration list Thursday after they were incorrectly removed from the rolls during a massive purge this week.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office essentially blamed a clerical error from 2015 for mistakenly removing about 7 percent of the 309,000 registrations deemed inactive and taken off the rolls Monday.

The error was revealed as a federal judge in Atlanta heard arguments related to the state's plans for culling its registration roster ahead of the 2020 election, when both of Georgia's Senate seats will be contested and Democrats are vowing to make the state competitive in the presidential election as well.

Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group affiliated with Democrat Stacey Abrams, the party's losing candidate for governor last year, filed an emergency motion Monday seeking to stop the state from sweeping its rolls of inactive voters. If her side's arguments prevail, this week's removals could be reversed long before the primaries.

Raffensperger's office said that the state's "list-maintenance process," implemented four years ago, started its review of valid registrations by looking at people who had either voted or had contact with government offices since June 1, 2012 — rather than Jan. 1, 2012, as required by state law, The Associated Press reported.

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The statement said the 22,000 affected people would be moved back to inactive status rather than being deleted from the rolls.

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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.

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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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The United States Supreme Court.

Getty Images / Rudy Sulgan

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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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Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

Someone filling out a ballot.

Getty Images / Hill Street Studios

Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

In the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S.

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