Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Restore 200,000 Georgians to the rolls before Senate election, lawsuit demands

Georgia voter rally

Georgia Tech's women's basketball team encouraged voters on Nov. 3.

Tom Williams/Getty Images

Nearly 200,000 valid voters should be returned to the rolls in time for Georgia's twin elections that will decide partisan control of the Senate in five weeks, a new lawsuit argues.

The suit, filed Wednesday by three voting rights groups in federal court in Atlanta, alleges the Georgia secretary of state's office improperly removed 198,351 voters from the state's registration database last year — an error rate of 63 percent.

The Black Voters Matter Fund, the Transformative Justice Coalition and the Rainbow Push Coalition maintain that voters who hadn't moved were taken off the rolls because the state did not use the correct list to verify addresses. The suit also challenges the state's "use it or lose it" law, which requires people to vote in at least one federal election every four years or interact with a state election office in order to remain registered.


The lawsuit is based on a report released by the ACLU of Georgia in September. As with most potentially disenfranchising actions, it concluded, young, poor, urban and minority voters were the most affected by the apparent purge.

It is unclear how many, if any, re-registered in time for the November election. The voting rights groups have asked that all the voters be restored by Jan. 5. That is when the state will vote in one of the most impassioned and expensive runoff elections in modern congressional history. Both of the state's Senate seats will be contested, because on Election Day nobody received the 50 percent majority required by state law.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Republican incumbent David Perdue is seeking a second term against Democratic activist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ossoff. And GOP Senate appointee Kelly Loeffler is seeking election in her own right against Democratic Rev. Raphael Warnock. If Democrats win both races, they will effectively control the Senate, with 50 seats and the new vice president, Kamala Harris, available to break a tie.

At a news conference Wednesday, Gabriel Sterling, the voting system implementation manager in the secretary of state's office, dismissed allegations of bad behavior by his office. "I'm going to go with no," he said when asked if nearly 200,000 voters had been unfairly purged, but he added: "Frankly, I've not seen or heard of this lawsuit yet."

Read More

Houses with price tags
retrorocket/Getty Images

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.

Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?

Yes.

The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.

Keep ReadingShow less
I Voted stickers
BackyardProduction/Getty Images

Voters cast ballots based on personal perceptions, not policy stances

The Fulcrum and the data analytics firm Fidelum Partners have just completed a nationally representative study assessing the voting intentions of U.S adults and their perceptions toward 18 well-known celebrities and politicians.

Fidelum conducted similar celebrity and politician election studies just prior to the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Each of these found that perceptions of warmth, competence and admiration regarding the candidates are highly predictive of voting intentions and election outcomes. Given this, The Fulcrum and Fidelum decided to partner on a 2024 celebrity and politician election study to build upon the findings of prior research.

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand waving an American flag

"Freedom, a word that should inspire, has been distorted to justify the unchecked pursuit of individual interests at the expense of collective well-being," writes Johnson.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

Redefining America's political lingua franca

Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.

A seismic shift has occurred in America's race, identity and power discourse. Like tectonic plates beneath the Earth's surface, long-held assumptions are adjusting and giving way to a reimagined lingua franca for civic engagement. This revived language of liberation redefines the terms of debate. It empowers us to reclaim and reinvigorate words once weaponized principally against marginalized communities.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino attendees of the Democratic National Convention

People cheer for the Harris-Walz ticket at the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Harris’ nomination ‘hit a reset button’ for Latinas supporting Democrats

As the presidential race entered the summer months, President Joe Biden’s level of support among Latinx voters couldn’t match the winning coalition he had built in 2020. Among Latinas, a critical group of voters who tend to back Democrats at higher levels than Latinos, lagging support had begun to worry Stephanie Valencia, who studies voting patterns among Latinx voters across the country for Equis Research, a data analytics and research firm.

Then the big shake-up happened: Biden stepped down and Vice President Kamala Harris took his place at the top of the Democratic ticket fewer than 100 days before the election.

Valencia’s team quickly jumped to action. The goal was to figure out how the move was sitting with Latinx voters in battleground states that will play an outsized role in deciding the election. After surveying more than 2,000 Latinx voters in late July and early August, Equis found a significant jump in support for the Democratic ticket, a shift that the team is referring to as “the Latino Reset.”

Keep ReadingShow less