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President Trump Claims To Care About Interference in US Elections While He Is Doing Everything To Eliminate the Protections

President Trump Claims To Care About Interference in US Elections While He Is Doing Everything To Eliminate the Protections

Woman voting on election day

Which Proportional Voting System Best Fits America’s Constraints?

The Tone of Our Country Has Changed — And Americans Can See and Feel It Everywhere

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Ranked-choice voting remains on Maine ballot, but it's not over yet

Maine voters

Maine, where voters were the first the use ranked-choice voting in a federal election, will print its 2020 election ballots with RCV for the presidential contest.

Gregory Rec/Getty Images
Sara Swann
By Sara SwannSep 09, 2020
Sara Swann

As a staff writer, Sara covers a variety of democracy reform issues, including voting rights, money in politics, gerrymandering and civic education. Prior to joining The Fulcrum in May 2019, Sara reported on local government on Maryland's Eastern Shore for the USA Today network. She is a native West Virginian and a graduate of Syracuse University.

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After months of back and forth, Maine will print ballots with ranked-choice voting for president this fall. But uncertainty about its use remains.

Democratic Secretary of State Matt Dunlap made the decision to start the presses on Tuesday. He acted hours after the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the effort to get a referendum opposing presidential ranked-choice voting on the ballot in November, which would have prevented the use of the alternate election system in the 2020 contest.

Maine has been a voting reform trailblazer for years. In 2016, it became the first state to have ranked elections for almost all federal and state positions. If the most recent ruling stands, the state will also be the first to use so-called RCV to award electoral votes — a moment champions of the system eye as a watershed for their cause.

Officials could not wait for the next phase of the fight to play out. They must start printing ballots Friday in order to send them to military and overseas voters in time for the general election.

Republicans, who lead the antagonism toward the system across the country, attempted to block its use in the presidential race by getting a so-called people's veto referendum on the ballot. When state officials concluded their piles of petitions had too many invalid signatures, they sued.

A trial court judge two weeks ago took the Republicans' sid e and said the referendum had enough support for a spot on the ballot, but the top court put a hold on that decision until it could hear arguments on both sides and deliberate comprehensively. If the justices end up ruling for the GOP in the next eight weeks, election officials will be directed to not tabulate the presidential results using ranked-choice voting.

Joe Biden is favored to carry the state. But under an unusual state law an electoral vote goes to the winner in each congressional district, and President Trump has a shot at prevailing in one of them — especially if the votes for minor-party candidates are not redistributed in an instant runoff, as RCV provides.

Regardless of the court's ruling, RCV will still be used in Maine's down-ballot races this year.


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A record number of veterans, especially women veterans, are running for Congress in 2026, bringing military leadership and public service to the campaign trail.

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In Lady Veterans We Trust

Many people who have served, or are still serving in the military, are not thrilled with the state of our country. There are plenty of active duty members who wish they could quit–and many of them are in my DMs asking for my advice–which might be why the number of military personnel inquiring about conscientious objection has risen by 1,000% since the start of the Iran war. Whether they joined to patriotically serve their country or simply for the promise of stability and upward mobility, a draft dodger who “finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible” is now holding them hostage in an indefinite war against Iran.

Veterans feel an obligation to speak up against the betrayal. 752 of them are running for Congress in 2026. A record number of them are women.

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Policy experts at every level of government require solid facts and data to come to the best decisions for their constituencies. However, especially as the second Trump Administration took over executive agencies in 2025, the data world has faced unprecedented new challenges. These include funding cuts that limit agencies' ability to gather and maintain data, frequent leadership changes that disrupt continuity, increased constraints on accountability and oversight, and disruptions in key statistical divisions. The combination of these challenges has made it significantly harder for policy professionals to rely on consistent, high-quality data.

Some of these issues were explored recently in an illuminating webinar which is part of the Democracy and Public Service Initiative, a partnership between the National Academy of Public Administration and the Bridge Alliance. The panel was moderated by Democracy and Public Service Initiative Fellow Joel Gurin, President and Founder of Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE). “It is a fraught issue and one where we need to seek a lot of creative solutions,” Gurin said.

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