News
Big win for voting rights: S.C. drops demand for full Social Security numbers
South Carolina has agreed to drop its requirement that people registering to vote disclose their full Social Security number, Democratic campaign leaders announced Tuesday.
They hailed the agreement — in response to a lawsuit filed by the state's Democratic Party and the party's Senate and House campaign arms — as one of the most important victories yet for one of their major 2020 strategies: filing voting rights lawsuits in many competitive states, hoping the courts will strike down an array of election regulations in time to help boost the party's turnout this fall.
"This is a massive early win," said Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Five major reflections 10 years after Citizens United
Ten years ago exactly — on Jan. 21, 2010 — the Supreme Court gave the green light to unlimited political expenditures by corporations, labor unions and nonprofit groups. The decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which said curbs on such spending violated the First Amendment, fundamentally changed the way elections are financed today.
A decade later the majority opinion in Citizens United is labeled, more often than any other single thing, as the ultimate antagonist of the democracy reform movement. The ruling has become so infamous it's used as shorthand for a campaign financing system that gives lopsided political advantage to the wealthiest over everyday citizens, including for reasons that have nothing to do with that case. That said, however, the decision has permitted groups that are not affiliated with any candidate or political party to pour almost $4.5 billion into the subsequent campaigns for president and Congress — an astonishing six times the total for all such independent expenditures in the two previous decades.
The 10-year anniversary has campaign finance experts all along the ideological spectrum reflecting on what the decision has meant for American politics, and what changes to laws and regulations might withstand court challenges and limit the impact of Citizens United in the decade ahead — on the assumption the ruling is on the books for at least that much longer.
Glitch added noncitizens to Illinois voter rolls
A programming error at the Departments of Motor Vehicles led to nearly 600 noncitizens being added to the Illinois voter rolls in the past two years.
The secretary of state's office notified the Board of Elections in a letter last month that 574 noncitizen residents of Illinois had likely been registered to vote inadvertently while applying for a driver's license or identification card between July 2018 and December 2019. Those people are now being taken off the voter manifests.
It's a relatively rare case of a government agency openly admitting such a mistake, which if left unaddressed could open the officials running the coming election to charges of incompetence or malfeasance.
On election security, Democrats and Republicans see different Americas
Like so many other attitudes toward pressing problems these days, attitudes about election security are deeply divided along party lines, a poll out Tuesday finds.
Overall, 41 percent of people surveyed this month worry the country is either not very well prepared — or not prepared at all — to keep this year's presidential election secure and free of foreign interference.
But while two-thirds of Democrats believe the country is not ready, 85 percent of Republicans say the opposite, according to the results of a Marist Poll conducted for National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour.
Debate
What everyone should know about Reconstruction 150 years after the 15th Amendment's ratification
Do you know what the 15th Amendment is? Or how it shaped Reconstruction? West Virginia University professor Tiffany Mitchell Patterson breaks down how the amendment opened the door for black political leaders in the South — while giving rise to a new wave of white supremacy.
Community
National Phonebank to Stop Gerrymandering in VA
Join RepresentUs members across America on Jan. 28 for the national phonebank to pass an anti-gerrymandering amendment in Virginia. You'll call Virginia voters and connect them to their local representatives to show them that voters are putting this issue front and center.