Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Georgia set to enact broad changes to voter access rules

A sweeping bill to change Georgia's election practices awaits Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's expected signature.

It offers some hope for those who say the system failed miserably in the nation's eighth most populous state last fall, when a hotly contested and high-turnout election was marred by allegations that voters were wrongly denied access to the polls, absentee ballots were rejected for questionable reasons and vote counts were shady and incomplete. Kemp was secretary of state, in charge of election administration, at the time. He narrowly defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams, who was bidding to become the nation's first African-American woman governor.


Georgians will get a new generation of voting machines, with touchscreens attached to printers that generate paper ballots. This permits voters to review their choices before their ballots are counted and preserves a written record for use in recounts and a new system of audits, which the state election board has been ordered to put in place in time for the 2020 election.

Once the law is enacted, voter registrations won't be canceled for inactivity for eight or nine years, two years longer than under existing law, and voters will be mailed a notification at least a month before such cancelations. (More than 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in the state over the past eight years.)

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The new law will also limit Georgia's "exact match" rule, which stalled more than 50,000 registrations last year because of mismatches between applications and other state records on such things as hyphenations of last names and use of maiden names. From now on, applicants will immediately become active voters when they sign up, with such discrepancies flagged for election judges to review when voters show photo IDs at polling places.

Also, the bill prevents polling place relocations or closures within two months of a primary or general election. County officials have closed 214 precincts across Georgia since 2012, according to an analysis conducted last year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But at the same time the bill will reduce the number of voting machines in each precinct to one for every 250 voters; now, it's one per 200 voters.

The new statute says absentee ballots may not be rejected because of mismatches between voters' signatures on their ballots and their signatures on file. Instead, a system will be created to allow people with signature problems to provide identification. (The AJC found that nearly 7,000 absentee ballots, or 3 percent of the statewide total, were rejected in November.)

Finally, the legislation lowers the threshold for a losing candidate to request an automatic recount to half a percentage point; the standard is now a full percentage point.

Read More

It’s time to defend the guardrails of democracy

A gavel.

Getty Images, Alexander Sikov

It’s time to defend the guardrails of democracy

Lawyers know that President Trump’s executive orders targeting individual law firms, and now, theentire legal profession, are illegal and unconstitutional. The situation puts a choice to every lawyer and every law firm. Do you fight – speak out and act out against this lawless behavior? Or do you accommodate it, keep your head down, and wait for the storm to pass?

The answer is to fight. Here’s why – and here’s what lawyers should do.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Could Help Save the Democratic Process

A dollar sign balloon.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Could Help Save the Democratic Process

After contributing more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump, Elon Musk has now turned his attention to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving millions of dollars to support Judge Brad Schimel, the Republican candidate.

According to The Brennan Center, this race is the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. If Musk is successful, it will tip the High Court’s balance to his political favor.

Keep ReadingShow less
The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

An illustration of hands putting together a puzzle.

Getty Images, cienpies

The Evolving Social Contract: From Common Good to Contemporary Practice

The concept of the common good in American society has undergone a remarkable transformation since the nation's founding. What began as a clear, if contested, vision of collective welfare has splintered into something far more complex and individualistic. This shift reflects changing times and a fundamental reimagining of what we owe each other as citizens and human beings.

The nation’s progenitors wrestled with this very question. They drew heavily from Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the social contract as a sacred covenant between citizens and their government. But they also pulled from deeper wells—the Puritan concept of the covenant community, the classical Republican tradition of civic virtue, and the Christian ideal of serving one's neighbor. These threads wove into something uniquely American: a vision of the common good that balances individual liberty with collective responsibility.

Keep ReadingShow less