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Defense Secretary Hegseth Testifies Before Senate Appropriations Committee

Can We Fire Hegseth Yet?

People walking down the steps of the U.S. capitol.

DNC's Proposed RCV Ban Sparks Debate Over 2028 Presidential Primaries

What Will It Take to Rebuild American Democracy?

What Will It Take to Rebuild American Democracy?

Missouri Drew a Gerrymander. Now Its Secretary of State Says Voters Can’t Say No.

Missouri Drew a Gerrymander. Now Its Secretary of State Says Voters Can’t Say No.

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As ballot surge starts, a USPS attaboy from its global colleagues

Postal Service

Postal workers have been buffeted by safety, financial and political challenges during he pandemic.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumOct 08, 2020
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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The Postal Service got a little uplifting news Thursday, after having faced quite a bit of guff lately over its readiness to handle this fall's deluge of election mail.

The United Nations agency that sets global postal rules and policies, the Universal Postal Union, declared the USPS the seventh best postal service in the world. That's actually up one notch from last year's ratings.

The high score may offer a psychological balm to postal workers, buffeted by months of bad headlines and lawsuits about service cuts suspected of being designed to slow the pandemic-fueled flow of tens of millions of absentee presidential ballots.

But it is highly unlikely to mollify President Trump. Not only does he continue to derided the USPS as a shoddy operation that's been duped into supporting massive voter fraud, but he's long threatened to withdraw the United States from the treaty that created the U.N. agency because he says it hobbles American trade.

The postal union rankings of services in 170 countries relied on an ocean of data to measure each postal system's reliability (speed and accuracy of delivery), reach (breadth and depth of operations), relevance (intensity of demand) and resilience (diversity of revenue sources and capacity to innovate).

Switzerland tops the rankings, followed by Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and France. The USPS was next with its 83.47 score a full 5.5 points better than last year.

The biggest factor affecting postal service around the world, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, the report says. "At the time of writing this report, the connectivity of the international network has not yet been fully restored," the report concludes.

The report was issued hours after the latest bit of bad election-related news for the Postal Service: The arrest of a New Jersey postal worker Wednesday on charges he poured nearly 100 mail-in ballots into a dumpster near his house rather than deliver them to voters. The state is among half a dozen that have switched the general election to mostly mail-in for this year only to minimize the public's Covid-19 risks.


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Protesters gather at a Nobody Is Above the Law rally protesting President Trump's interference in the Mueller investigation on November 08, 2018 in Washington, DC.

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The Double Standard Presidency: When We Watch Leaders Act Above the Law

Americans are told that no one is above the law. Yet every day, they watch a president behave in ways that would get any ordinary citizen fired, disciplined, confronted, or held accountable — and they watch some Americans excuse it. What makes this moment even more striking is that critics across the political spectrum, including conservatives, now warn that the presidency is operating on a dangerous double standard. This is not a partisan concern. It is a constitutional one. And it is tearing at the fabric of our democracy.

For generations, the Constitution has provided guardrails — separation of powers, checks and balances, oversight mechanisms, and limits on executive authority — designed to prevent any leader from functioning above the law. The framers feared concentrated power more than anything else. They believed that the presidency must be constrained not only by written law but by norms of restraint, dignity, and respect for institutions. Those norms held for centuries because presidents understood that the office was larger than any individual, and Congress understood that oversight was not optional.

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Study Reveals Sharp Generational Divide in How Latino Identity Influences Daily Life

Study Reveals Sharp Generational Divide in How Latino Identity Influences Daily Life

Latino immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos differ sharply in how much their identity shapes their daily lives, according to recent findings from the Pew Research Center’s 2025 National Survey of Latinos. The survey shows that Latino immigrants are far more likely than U.S.-born Latinos to say their identity is central to who they are, and that it influences their experiences in the United States. Pew researchers Gabriel Piña, Mark Hugo Lopez, Sahana Mukherjee, Dalia Fahmy, and Alexandra Cahn report that the divide reflects differences in cultural connection, lived experience, and generational distance from immigrant roots.

Pew’s analysis finds that Latino immigrants are significantly more likely to say their origins are central to their identity, while U.S.-born Latinos — especially those in the third generation or higher — are less likely to feel that connection. The report notes that “U.S. Hispanics are divided on whether their identity helps or hurts them in America,” with some respondents describing their Latino identity as a source of pride and connection, and others saying it is tied to discrimination or barriers.

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A Democracy Cannot Run on an AI Model

Clerk Matthew Sandbar, 34, demonstrates part of the ballot-sorting process to members of the media attending a walkthrough of the Philadelphia Ballot Processing Center used to process the ballots of the 2022 US midterm elections, in Philadelphia on October 27, 2022.

Photo by Ryan Collerd / AFP via Getty Images

A Democracy Cannot Run on an AI Model

Tallying the results of Washington, DC’s first ranked-choice election in June took about 10 days—longer than many voters are used to. In an age when artificial intelligence can generate an answer in seconds, waiting days for election results can feel old-fashioned, inefficient, even suspicious. And it is about to matter far more widely. This November, 17 states, cities, and counties will use ranked-choice voting, including Maine and Alaska statewide, in races that could help decide control of Congress. More voters than ever will watch results take days to resolve, and more will be asked to trust a count they cannot see.

But that slowness may be one of its most democratic features.

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