The Fulcrum newsroom will be closed through Labor Day. We'll be back in your inbox on Tuesday, September 3. In the meantime, here are some stories to check out. And keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter pages for even more content.
Timing is everything: Why 'off year' elections are a turnout buzz kill
The mayor of Fort Worth, Betsy Price, had an answer for her city's historically low turnout in local elections. She blamed the schools.
"Part of the problem is public schools aren't teaching civic engagement," she said during a mayoral debate in May, the election a few days away.
One of her challengers, though, blamed the press. "If the media would get more behind things and get a fire going, we'd have better turnout," James McBride said.
And another challenger blamed the politicians. "We have leaders who don't want people to come out and vote because they know a low voter turnout favors them," Deborah Peoples said.
Peoples, the local Democratic Party chairwoman, lost the election and Price, a Republican, won her fifth term. But the research on what influences turnout suggests it was Peoples who was onto something.
The curious tale of the disappearing Election Day holiday bill
Making Election Day a new federal holiday has been one of the highest-profile parts of the Democrats' sweeping package for reforming elections, campaign finance and government ethics.
Plenty of prominent members of Congress such as Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who is in his 13th term and a committee chairman, praised the holiday provision when the House debated the bill this spring.
The Associated Press mentioned the holiday language in stories about passage of the legislation, known as HR 1. So did CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Leading good-government advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, shined a light on the possibility of a holiday in praising the measure's advancement.
And what do all of them have in common? They all got it wrong.
There is no such provision in HR 1 anymore.
Expressing your anger at gerrymandering? There's a font for that.
Plenty of congressional districts get mocked for looking like parts of a Rorschach test. But only now have some creative folks conjured up the letters A through Z.
It was hard not to see "a rabbit on a skateboard" in last decade's map for Illinois, or "Goofy kicking Donald Duck" in the Philadelphia suburbs until a few years ago, or — most famously — a salamander slithering across Massachusetts in the 19th century map approved by Gov. Elbridge Gerry, which gave rise to the derisive term gerrymandering for such convoluted contouring.
But today's map of the House of Representatives, it turns out, contains an unsightly but still readily readable alphabet.
Redistricting reformers with a sense of humor, or at least looking for a fresh way to make their point, are welcome to go to UglyGerry.com and download the letters for free.
Opinion
Time to reward every ballot's meaning in presidential elections
The Electoral College system makes it so voters in certain states don't truly see their votes counted, argues Barry Fadem of National Popular Vote. It's time for that to change.
Five reasons unlimited spending undermines American democracy
American Promise's Leah Field details five reasons unlimited spending hurts our government and why the so-called 28th Amendment is necessary.
All politics, and all political transformation, is local
Looking for political change? Eli Beckerman of Open the Debates says that it starts with you, at home in your community.