Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

What's needed nationally, and fast, to prevent Wisconsin from replicating

Wisconsin primary voters

The chaos and confusion in Wisconsin this week is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country in the age of Covid-19, according to Perriello and Ispahani.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Perriello, a former Democratic congressman from Virginia, and Ispahani are executive director and managing director of the U.S. operation for the Open Society Foundations, created by billionaire George Soros to promote democracy and combat intolerance around the world.

It's been an astonishing few days for Wisconsin.

First, Gov. Tony Evers, acting on growing concerns about the safety of voters heading to the polls amid the coronavirus crisis, issued an executive order abruptly calling a halt to in-person voting on the eve of the Tuesday election. The GOP-led Legislature filed suit and the state Supreme Court blocked Evers' order, allowing voting to proceed despite the difficulties of adhering to social distancing guidance inherent in crowds gathering at polling places. The U.S. Supreme Court then weighed in, striking down efforts to extend the window for absentee voting.

The result: a confused electorate left to decide whether to risk their health by heading to the ballot box or silence their voices and forfeit their franchise by sitting out the state's presidential primary and elections for a number of local offices as well.

The chaos is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country in the age of Covid-19. We must begin now to plan for safe voting as this presidential election year rolls on. Keeping elections — our sacred democratic rite — safe and secure will require urgent action at every level: members of Congress appropriating funds, governors and state election officials answering the patriotic call to put safeguards in place, and civic groups educating voters about options for safely casting ballots.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter


While the stimulus package President Trump signed last month provides $400 million to help states make necessary adjustments to ensure safe and fair elections, it's not nearly enough. Experts estimate it will take at least $2 billion and perhaps $4 billion to safeguard our right to vote while protecting public health and making sure every ballot counts.

This is not a partisan issue. Fifteen states have already postponed primaries in response to the coronavirus. Democracy delayed is democracy denied, regardless of your ideology or party of choice.

Under federal law, our general election, unlike more flexible primary rules, must be the first Tuesday in November. It has not been changed due to war, the Great Depression or pandemic. With less than eight months to Nov. 3, elected officials must take bold steps immediately to ensure neither the lives of voters nor the life of our democracy will be at risk.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. What we need are safer ways to vote, emergency federal funding for urgent implementation and a major civic education effort to ensure all Americans know how to vote safely under yet-to-be-implemented rules.

Voting by mail has dominated headlines. In the handful of states that have implemented that statewide, results over time have been largely positive. But initial implementation has often been rocky and required a particular investment in reaching voters of color, rural communities and young people.

It is, however, a myth that voting by mail helps one party over another; turnout numbers move only a little, and in both directions. And high-turnout elections have helped both parties. There's also reason to believe it may help conservative voters these days, given the Republican Party base is older and older people can be counted on to show up to vote in big numbers.

Alongside expanded voting by mail, we must improve other options.

That means expanding in-person early voting, to reduce infection risks caused by long lines and crowded polling places on Election Day; expanding polling locations to reduce voter density and recruit additional poll workers with lower risk of contracting the virus; providing no-postage-needed, self-adhesive envelopes for no-excuse absentee voting; creating online and same-day registration to make the franchise more accessible to all and ensure voter rolls are up to date; and safeguarding polling places against sudden changes that fall disproportionately on communities of color, people with disabilities, students and those with limited English-language ability.

These reforms should be coupled with an intensive public education effort to quash disinformation and provide accurate guidance to voters.

This suite of solutions is outlined in a report by the respected, nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice and supported by a broad coalition of civil rights organizations led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

"Making voting safe, universal and fair in the midst of this public health crisis will require exponentially greater resources," says the conference's leader, Vanita Gupta. "American voters shouldn't have to choose between their public health and their participation in our democracy. With adequate congressional funding and voting options in the states, we can protect the right to vote even amid Covid-19."

Community organizations will be essential to safe voting this fall. They must immediately work with and pressure states to implement reforms in the most effective way, and to engage all our neighbors in what could be a very different style of election.

Community and philanthropic leaders will need to make an unprecedented commitment to support their efforts, as well as to monitor and confront confusion about how, when or where to vote Nov. 3.

We've failed to respond adequately to recent threats to the vote, from the hanging chads of 2000 to the Russian interference of 2016 to the fiasco in this year's Iowa caucuses.

If we fail to move now and fix elsewhere what went wrong in Wisconsin, the virus will have done more than ransack our communities, strain our public health system and crash our economy. It will have shaken the democratic bedrock upon which our nation is built.

If we respond with the creativity, civic responsibility and seriousness this moment demands, our democracy may emerge from this more resilient than before, inoculated against long-standing threats to safe voting for every American.

Read More

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
Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention

Vice President Kamala Harris closes out the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night.

Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

The Democrats didn't have a meaningful primary, and no one cared

Lovit is a senior program officer and historian at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, where he also hosts the podcast"The Context.”

In many respects, last week’s Democratic National Convention was indeed conventional. The party faithful gathered in a basketball arena in Chicago for speeches carefully calibrated to unite factions and define the central messages of the Harris-Walz campaign. It was a ceremony, a celebration and a storyline — just like the Republicans’ convention last month, and many conventions in years past.

For most of American history, party conventions served a different purpose. They were practical meetings where elites hammered out details of the party platform and wrangled over potential nominees. In a political world where party tickets at every level of government were determined in smoke-filled rooms, the convention was the biggest smoke-filled room of them all.

Keep ReadingShow less
Hands making a heart and painted to look like an American flag
Chinnapong/Getty Images

A framework for democracy philanthropy

Stid is the executive director of Lyceum Labs, a fiscally sponsored project of the Defending Democracy Together Institute. The following is reposted with permission from his blog, The Art of Association.

It is challenging for philanthropic funders to get started and stay focused when it comes to strengthening democracy. The vagaries of our political system — really a complex system of systems cast on a continental scale — make it hard to know where to even begin. There are dozens of solutions that could be worthy of support. Alas, none are backed by dispositive evidence indicating that they are the single-best way forward. Then, every second and fourth year, elections reset the stage of democracy and reshuffle the cast of characters, often in unsettling ways.

Democracy's proximity to politics further complicates the philanthropic picture. The tax code bars foundations from backing or opposing candidates, parties and ballot measures. Many foundations take a belt-and-suspenders approach to this proscription on electioneering by avoiding anything that smacks of politics (as democracy-related causes frequently do). Other foundations, in contrast, push right up to the edge, seeking to exploit all the legal ways they can underwrite voter registration, education and participation, ostensibly on a nonpartisan basis, to further their political goals.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Keep ReadingShow less
Red and blue figures pulling a map of the U.S. apart

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, who oversees elections, is running for governor this year.

filo

We can break the partisan cycle by unrigging the system

Sturner, the author of “Fairness Matters,” is the managing partner of Entourage Effect Capital.

This is the sixth entry in the “Fairness Matters” series, examining structural problems with the current political systems, critical policies issues that are going unaddressed and the state of the 2024 election.

We face complex issues, from immigration to the national debt, from Social Security to education, from gun violence to climate change and the culture war, from foreign policy to restoring a vibrant middle class by ensuring economic outcomes are more balanced and equitable.

Yet, neither party seems to be doing much about any of the political problems and policy challenges plaguing our nation. Instead of working on real solutions, our politicians spend their time and our national resources distracting and dividing us by using every tool at their disposal to retain power. Why is that? As Andrew Yang points out in a recent TED Talk (quoting a senator), “A problem is now worth more to us unaddressed than addressed.” It’s galling until you remember that the Democratic and Republican parties are private, gain-seeking organizations that exist to seek and retain power. As such, we should be wary of political parties because our interests and theirs are not aligned.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Keep ReadingShow less