Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Postal deal resolves anxiety over cost of overseas voting

Mailed ballot

Election officers had been worried that without a new agreement on postal rates, it could cost some Americans as much as $60 to mail a ballot from overseas.

George Frey/Getty Images

Agreement this week at an international meeting on postal rates should remove any concerns about potentially outrageous costs for mailing ballots to and from American citizens living overseas.

Election officials had grown increasingly worried following the Trump administration's threat to withdraw in October from the Universal Postal Union, a group of nearly 200 nations that governs international postal rates. Such a move would have made it both difficult and costly for Americans living abroad to mail home their ballots.

But at a special meeting this week in Geneva, the countries involved in the UPU reached an agreement to address concerns by the United States and others regarding the lower rates that China was being charged.

The administration and business leaders complained that the Chinese shipping rates — established when the country was very poor and still developing — gave Chinese businesses a financial advantage over their U.S. competitors.

Potentially caught in the crossfire were state officials preparing for a spike in overseas mail-in voting during next year's presidential election. One predicted that a it could cost overseas voters as much as $60 to use a commercial shipping service.


Nearly 400,000 absentee ballots from overseas voters were counted in the 2018 midterm election, with about 220,000 of those from civilians and the rest from members of the military, according to the Election Assistance Commission. About 500,000 overseas ballots were counted in the 2016 presidential election.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Among the states that receive the most overseas absentee ballots are solidly blue California and Washington along with Texas and Florida, two states with a combined 67 electoral votes that both look to be ardently contested by both nominees.

The Defense Department, which operates a special program for military members who need to vote via absentee ballot, had promised there would be minimal disruptions even if the U.S. pulled out of the international postal union in October.

Read More

"Vote Here" sign
Grace Cary

Bill would require ranked-choice voting for congressional elections

Meyers is executive editor of The Fulcrum.

Three members of Congress are hoping to bring ranked-choice voting, which has been growing at the state and municipal levels, to congressional elections.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) on Thursday introduced the Ranked Choice Voting Act, which would change how all members of Congress are elected. In addition, the bill would authorize funding to assist states to help them educate voters and implement RCV-compliant systems for primary and general elections by 2028.

Keep ReadingShow less
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