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Protecting Our Vote: A Conversation with Eric Holder and Ari Berman
Organizer: Mother Jones
The right to vote is under attack, with Election Day 2020 just more than one year away. From states passing new voter suppression laws to gerrymandering efforts that manipulate district lines, it's becoming increasingly difficult for voters to exercise our democratic rights. Yet a surge in civic action to protect these rights is building momentum, and former US Attorney General Eric Holder is leading the fight for ballot access and against unfair voting maps. As we near an election year that will shape voting maps for the next decade, join Holder in conversation with Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman as they discuss the current state of voting rights in America.
Location: Lisner Auditorium, George Washington University, 730 21st St NW, Washington, DC 20052
Redistricting Reform in Virginia
Organizer: League of Women Voters of the Fairfax Area
Join us to discuss Redistricting Reform in Virginia. 2020 is the critical year!
Location: Stacy C. Sherwood Community Center, 3740 Old Lee Highway, Fairfax, VA 22030
Katie Fahey and Michigan volunteers in 2018.
Making government more responsive is a task for Americans of all stripes
Fahey, who organized the grassroots movement that ended Michigan's politicized gerrymandering, is now executive director of The People, which is forming statewide citizen networks to promote government accountability. She will be interviewing another democracy reformer each month for our Opinion section.
Everyday people are the backbone of the democracy reform movement. As executive director of The People, a new national effort to find common ground and make non-partisan changes to fix our broken democracy, I am most inspired by those who volunteer their time and energy to make sure their government hears not just their voices, but their neighbors' voices, too.
In the coming months, I have the opportunity to introduce you to some of the men and women from across the country whose powerful stories of civic engagement are bettering their communities and repairing America's torn social fabric. Before we kick off this series, I wanted to take a moment to share with you my own journey working toward democracy reform.
Law professor Adam White opens the George Mason Law Review symposium. Attendees were treated to a debate over the effectives of the FEC.
The FEC is actually effective? So says one scholar.
Another argues independent redistricting panels are "smoke and mirrors"
Call it the contrarian conference.
While most in the democracy reform movement often find uniform agreement when defining the problems within — and solutions to — the U.S. political system, a Friday forum provided some alternative outlooks.
The Federal Election Commission is a feckless agency frozen by partisan gridlock? Well, not really, one expert argued at the symposium led by the George Mason Law Review.
Independent commissions are the answer to solving political gerrymandering of legislative districts? Well, maybe not, another panelist said.
