Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

MTV launches campaign for more polling stations on campuses

Texas A&M University

One of the newly established polling stations is at Texas A&M University in Galveston.

Wikimedia Commons

College students represent a crucial voting bloc in the election, but for many young people voting isn't readily accessible.

A group of organizations promoting youth voting is partnering with MTV to change that. Launched last week, +1 the Polls is a first-of-its-kind campaign that aims to ease voting for students by establishing new polling locations on college campuses across the country.

The 2018 midterm election saw a massive increase in voter turnout from college students: More than 40 percent of them voted, double what happened in the midterm four years before. Expectations for youth turnout are similar, if not higher, for this year's presidential election — especially since Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, boosted by significant support from younger voters, has surged forward as the Democratic front-runner.


The Alliance for Youth Organizing, Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and Campus Vote Project are collaborating with MTV for the +1 the Polls campaign. Since 2012, more than 1,000 polling locations have closed, making it harder for young people to cast their ballots. Together these groups are offering resources and funding opportunities to open and protect polling places on public, private and community college campuses.

Four new polling locations, on campuses with a combined student population of 73,000, have been established so far. Three will be available for voters on Super Tuesday a week from now — at the College of Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., Texas State University in San Marcos and the Galveston campus of Texas A&M University. The fourth, at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., will only be used for the general election.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The campaign is also on course to establish another dozen polling locations in seven states, on campuses with a combined student population of 438,000. Two more are in Texas, one is in reliably Democratic New Jersey but the rest are in states on the list of presidential battlegrounds: four in Florida, two in Ohio and one each in Minnesota, Arizona and Georgia.

Two historically black colleges and universities are part of this initiative: St. Philips College in San Antonio and Bethune Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Any groups or individuals interested in participating in the +1 the Polls campaign can request a toolkit and sign up for office hours and webinars that offer resources on how to help expand campus voting accessibility. The organizers are also offering "minigrants" to those who want to help, but don't have the financial means to do so.

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