Skip to content
Election Overtime Project
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories
Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs on stage

Luke Combs, politics and healing our nation's divide

Department of Veterans Affairs building

Project 2025: The Department of Veterans Affairs

Ducks

The 12 worst House districts: Experts label gerrymandering's dirty dozen

White House with "stop" barrier in front

If Trump wins, should Democrats turn over the keys to the White House?

Mark Esper sitting next to Donald Trump

What would really happen if Trump wins?

Pennsylvania hoping to ease absentee ballot problems using online applications

Mail-in ballots

Pennsylvanians will be able to apply for their absentee ballots online starting Monday.

Alex Edelman/Getty Images
Our Staff
By Our StaffSep 10, 2019
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
See More Writings by author

Pennsylvanians who need absentee ballots will now be able to apply online, starting with this year's municipal elections. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf announced the new system on Monday, a week before the applications open, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Pennsylvania's deadlines to apply for and return absentee ballots are three days apart, and in previous elections, voters have failed to make the turnaround, leaving thousands of ballots uncounted — more than just about every other state. Wolf said he hopes the change "will make the process faster and more accessible for thousands of voters."

Latest news

Read More

A better direction for democracy reform

Denver election judge Eric Cobb carefully looks over ballots as counting continued on Nov. 6. Voters in Colorado rejected a ranked choice voting and open primaries measure.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A better direction for democracy reform

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.

I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.

Keep ReadingShow less
To-party doom loop
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America

Let’s make sense of the election results

Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."

Well, here are some of my takeaways from Election Day, and some other thoughts.

1. The two-party doom loop keeps getting doomier and loopier.

Keep ReadingShow less
Person voting in Denver

A proposal to institute ranked choice voting in Colorado was rejected by voters.

RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Despite setbacks, ranked choice voting will continue to grow

Mantell is director of communications for FairVote.

More than 3 million people across the nation voted for better elections through ranked choice voting on Election Day, as of current returns. Ranked choice voting is poised to win majority support in all five cities where it was on the ballot, most notably with an overwhelming win in Washington, D.C. – 73 percent to 27 percent.

Keep ReadingShow less
Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Chessrat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2024