Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Help at the polls won't be limited in Minnesota under latest voting rights settlement

St. Paul city council member Dai Thao

St. Paul city council member Dai Thao faced charges in 2017 for helping a Hmong woman, who had trouble seeing, translate and complete her ballot. The charges were ultimately dropped.

Facebook

Minnesota has agreed to abandon two of its most unusual and harsh election rules, which have restricted help for people casting ballots — the freshest victory in the barrage of voting rights litigation in this year's battleground states.

The state laws at issue bar candidates from helping others vote and say that no one else may help more than three people complete in-person or absentee ballots in any election. With the lawsuit settlement, announced Tuesday, Arkansas will be the only other state with such strict limits on providing voting assistance.


The intent of Minnesota's law was to prevent campaign operatives from manipulating the votes of elderly, disabled and non-English-speaking voters. But the suit argued the statute was a direct violation of the Voting Rights Act, which says voters needing assistance have the right to choose whomever they want, and denied voters their political and free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions.

Three years ago, a federal appeals court struck down, for similar reasons, a law in Texas requiring language interpreters at the polls to be registered voters in the county where they were offering aid.

The new settlement was in a suit filed in February by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of four Hmong-Americans. The principal plaintiff was Dai Thao, a St. Paul city council member running for mayor in 2017 faced charges for helping a neighbor, a Hmong woman who had trouble seeing, both translate and complete her ballot. The charges were ultimately dropped.

The Twin Cities has the nation's largest Hmong population. And almost 11 percent of Minnesotans have a disability that could lead them to seek help voting, the ACLU said.

A similar claim had been brought a few weeks earlier by the Democratic congressional campaign committees, a piece of the party's broad array of nearly two-dozen suits hoping to get rules that potentially suppress the vote relaxed before November. The Republicans are fighting many of them, but now their defense in Minnesota is moot.

But the partisan fight continues in a second Minnesota suit, a challenge in federal court to the state's laws about the order in which each party's candidates are listed on the November ballot.

The Democratic nominee has carried Minnesota in 11 straight elections, but President Trump came within 2 points (45,000 votes) last time and has vowed to go hard after the state's 10 electoral votes this fall.

Two of the state's top elected Democrats, Secretary of State Steve Simon and Attorney General Keith Ellison, were technically in charge of defending the assistance restrictions but said after the settlement was announced that they were thrilled to see the provisions abandoned.

Read More

Hand blocking someone speaking

The Third Way has recently released a memo stating that the “stampede away from the Democratic Party” is partly a result of the language and rhetoric it uses.

Westend61/Getty Images

To Protect Democracy, Democrats Should Pay Attention to the Third Way’s List of ‘Offensive’ Words

More than fifty years ago, comedian George Carlin delivered a monologue entitled Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” It was a tribute to the legendary Lenny Bruce, whose “nine dirty words” performance led to his arrest and his banning from many places.

His seven words were “p—, f—, c—, c———, m———–, and t—.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Fox News’ Selective Silence: How Trump’s Worst Moments Vanish From Coverage
Why Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is good news for all media outlets
Getty Images

Fox News’ Selective Silence: How Trump’s Worst Moments Vanish From Coverage

Last week, the ultraconservative news outlet, NewsMax, reached a $73 million settlement with the voting machine company, Dominion, in essence, admitting that they lied in their reporting about the use of their voting machines to “rig” or distort the 2020 presidential election. Not exactly shocking news, since five years later, there is no credible evidence to suggest any malfeasance regarding the 2020 election. To viewers of conservative media, such as Fox News, this might have shaken a fully embraced conspiracy theory. Except it didn’t, because those viewers haven’t seen it.

Many people have a hard time understanding why Trump enjoys so much support, given his outrageous statements and damaging public policy pursuits. Part of the answer is due to Fox News’ apparent censoring of stories that might be deemed negative to Trump. During the past five years, I’ve tracked dozens of examples of news stories that cast Donald Trump in a negative light, including statements by Trump himself, which would make a rational person cringe. Yet, Fox News has methodically censored these stories, only conveying rosy news that draws its top ratings.

Keep ReadingShow less
U.S. Flag / artificial intelligence / technology / congress / ai

The age of AI warrants asking if the means still further the ends—specifically, individual liberty and collective prosperity.

Getty Images, Douglas Rissing

Liberty and the General Welfare in the Age of AI

If the means justify the ends, we’d still be operating under the Articles of Confederation. The Founders understood that the means—the governmental structure itself—must always serve the ends of liberty and prosperity. When the means no longer served those ends, they experimented with yet another design for their government—they did expect it to be the last.

The age of AI warrants asking if the means still further the ends—specifically, individual liberty and collective prosperity. Both of those goals were top of mind for early Americans. They demanded the Bill of Rights to protect the former, and they identified the latter—namely, the general welfare—as the animating purpose for the government. Both of those goals are being challenged by constitutional doctrines that do not align with AI development or even undermine it. A full review of those doctrines could fill a book (and perhaps one day it will). For now, however, I’m just going to raise two.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump-Era Budget Cuts Suspend UCLA Professor’s Mental Health Research Grant

Professor Carrie Bearden (on the left) at a Stand Up for Science rally in spring 2025.

Photo Provided

Trump-Era Budget Cuts Suspend UCLA Professor’s Mental Health Research Grant

UC Los Angeles Psychology professor Carrie Bearden is among many whose work has been stalled due to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to universities across the country.

“I just feel this constant whiplash every single day,” Bearden said. “The bedrock, the foundation of everything that we're doing, is really being shaken on a daily basis … To see that at an institutional level is really shocking. Yes, we saw it coming with these other institutions, but I think everybody's still sort of in a state of shock.”

Keep ReadingShow less