In this video, Andre reflects on how the threat of racial discrimination and violence has impacted him and his relationships and the walls that our racial challenges can lead us to put up between each other. They also talk about whether the focus on racial stories in today’s media is a net good or net bad for society and race relations, discussing both its upsides and downsides.
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New Tool Reveals Which Americans Hold Outsized Voting Power
Oct 23, 2026
Here’s the scenario: You and four friends are deciding where to eat. Two want pizza. Two want sushi. Everyone turns to you. You have one vote, like everyone else, but yours decides dinner. Your vote has more power.
This fall, something like that is true for about 2.75% of eligible American voters. Just 7.3 million people out of 266 million eligible adults will have more power to decide the outcome of this year’s midterm elections than the rest of us. The difference from the friend group scenario is that these people with decisive power often don’t realize it. In fact, they may doubt whether they should even bother to vote.
A new technology aims to shed light on voting power in a novel way. U26.vote, a website that instantly reveals the power of a person’s vote, uses data science to determine the political, situational, and demographic factors that affect voting power, then uses an algorithm to translate each voter’s relative advantage into a score.
Action Tank, a company founded by serial tech entrepreneur Ben Bilbrough, developed the technology and partnered with Vote.org, the country's largest voter registration platform, to distribute the tool at scale.
U26.vote visitors discover the power of their vote by entering their ZIP code and birth year to see how they compare to the typical American voter. For voters looking for a reason to show up this fall, it could be a game changer.
Four factors determine a voter’s power.
Geography comes first: Of the 435 House districts, only a few dozen remain truly competitive, and in some states a competitive Senate race appears on the same ballot. Eligible voters in those districts have the most influence on the midterm outcome, so they see a score bump relative to how close their race(s) are projected to be.
Age comes next. Young voters are a large and growing share of the electorate, but they skip midterms at far higher rates than older voters, so each young voter who shows up counts for more. The size of each age group in the district, as well as their historic turnout rates, are the levers here.
A third factor is the redrawing of Congressional district maps. New district lines mean unfamiliar candidates and confusion about voting mechanics, which can depress turnout and make every ballot cast in the affected areas more important.
Finally, consider the risk of voter suppression. In contested districts, where fear or misinformation about voting rules is more likely to keep many people home, every ballot cast carries greater relative weight.
In some states, like New York, which allows people who own multiple homes to choose where to vote, the tool makes comparison easier by providing data. College students can also compare their score at home with their score at school. Voting rules for students vary by state, but Vote.org's tools help voters check what applies to them.
Across the country, U26.vote reveals striking disparities in voting power. A Baby Boomer in California's 11th District scores 1.0x – this reliable voter type in an uncontested race receives the baseline score that everyone earns simply by living in a democracy. But in Ohio's 9th District, where a race is projected to be decided by about one percentage point in a state with a competitive Senate contest, a Gen Z voter has a power score of 26.2x - a score the site reveals to be in the top 0.2% nationally.
A voter discovers their vote has real power. Now what?
Billions will be spent this fall persuading Americans to vote for one candidate or another, nearly all of it aimed at people who vote reliably. Young voters, who are less likely to turn out in midterms, tend to be under-targeted in these campaigns, so those messages don’t reach them. To fill that information gap for voters who believe their vote has power but aren’t sure how to use it, U26.vote offers a short seven-question survey on current high-profile topics like clean energy, healthcare, and ICE deportations that maps users to the candidates on their ballot who best align with their values.
Every vote counts, and most Americans already know it. Millions turn out in every election, across every district, because they care about the races on their ballot, the measures that shape their communities, and the simple idea that democracy works best when everyone takes part. That commitment is the foundation of our democracy, wherever a voter lives.
But not everyone feels the same pull to the polls, especially in the midterms, as evidenced by chronically low turnout. A tool like U26.vote unlocks a different incentive or motivation for a different kind of voter, and that’s what Vote.org and Action Tank are leaning into.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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NewYorkTlan 2026, a vibrant transnational festival that celebrates the cultural contributions of indigenous immigrants and Native Americans in New York City.
Why Language Access Matters for Indigenous New Yorkers
Oct 23, 2026
What good are rights if the people who hold them cannot understand how to exercise them?
Imagine seeking refuge in a strange land, far from everything you know, and being handed papers in a language far from your own. State officials loom overhead as they urge you to sign your name on a dotted line. You can't quite make out what they’re saying, but you get the impression that signing your name will end this experience.
You sign the papers without fully understanding what they mean. Handcuffs are tightened around your wrist. And there is nothing your loved ones can do to stop your deportation.
According to Mary Jose Prudente, co-founder of the Colibrí Interpreters Collective, this is a common story among some families navigating immigration proceedings. Immigrants would sign deportation orders without knowing how the documents in front of them could change the course of their lives. When she and others later tried to help, there was little they could do to reverse what had happened.
This underscores a fundamental flaw in American civil life: How can people be expected to consent to consequential decisions about their livelihood without fully understanding the language in which those decisions are suggested?
Prudente’s work as an indigenous interpreter is rooted in mending this flaw through linguistic justice — the principle that all people should have equitable access to communication in a language they know best. She believes access to a system is not the same as understanding it.
“Estás en un cárcel abajo de los Estado Unidos,” said Prudente, “Esto es la consecuencia de no tener una intérprete.” (“You’re in a prison under the United States. That’s the consequence of not having an interpreter.”)
This is even harder for Indigenous migrants who are often only given Spanish as an alternative, if any. Something Prudente knows from personal experience.
Prudente immigrated to the United States at 13 from Guerrero, Mexico. She’s from one of Mexico’s indigenous communities known as the Ñuu Savi (or Mixtec), speaking Tu’un Savi as her native language.
After suffering much discrimination from employers, Prudente learned early on that language would be a barrier that kept her from defending her rights. Most interpreters and translations were offered in Spanish. And while Prudente had grown up bilingual, many people from her community did not have that same privilege.
Having seen the ways her people were discriminated against in the U.S., Prudente began to act as an interpreter for other Tu’un Savi-speaking migrants. She’d been volunteering her interpretation services to different organizations when she connected with the Red de Pueblos Nacionales — a network of indigenous communities in New York City who advocate for the rights of Indigenous migrants.
The network allowed her to work as a formal interpreter. In doing so, she realized there was a gap in American civil rights that left Indigenous people like herself vulnerable to harm in the United States.
In 2021, Prudente helped establish the Colibrí Interpreters Collective – the first indigenous interpreters collective in New York City. The collective advocates for linguistic justice in every aspect of American life. They provide interpretations for academic, medical, and legal proceedings for nine different indigenous languages.
Their clients range from individuals to entire government bodies such as the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs and the Federal Court system. Most notably, they’ve assisted in translating during immigration proceedings for children who arrived in the United States without a parent.
Colibrí's work comes at a time when language access is scrutinized across the United States. In 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that revoked policy aimed at improving access for people with limited English proficiency by declaring English as the official language of the United States. While federal agencies that have previously offered translators may continue, some people are concerned that support for immigrants navigating public institutions could quickly disappear. For indigenous migrants, Colibiri fills a gap in the system where immigrants from south of the border would often be treated as monolith.
Despite noncitizens having a right to a competent interpreter, Indigenous Americans from communities outside of the U.S. are not politically or legally recognized as such. Instead, they are viewed as citizens of their respective home countries which limits access to Native American recognition and rights.
Prudente hopes that the Colibrí Interpreters Collective can serve as a resource for Indigenous people navigating the immigration system while they wait for the government to provide an accessible pathway to citizenship.
“No es culpa de nosotros como seres humanos porque la migración era algo para siempre,” said Prudente. (“It’s not our fault as human beings because migration has existed forever.”)
Alejo Cruz, a student at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, is a fall fellow at The Fulcrum.
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AI chatbots are always guessing, even when they sound sure. Experts and Claude itself explain the AI trust gap, bias and why to check sources.
Oscar Wong/Getty Images
AI’s Information Crisis: Why Trust Is Harder to Sustain Than Ever
Oct 23, 2026
In all the debates about human and machine intelligence, one thing has become clear: We humans love to talk about AI. We’ve speculated whether AI will create or eliminate jobs, revolutionize or destroy science, comfort or torment us, entertain us brilliantly or rot our brains, or some combination of all these things. But amid the noise, we may have paid too little attention to a subtler impact: how AI is disrupting our relationship to information and making it harder to know what to believe.
The problem isn’t just deepfakes, the malicious manipulation of images, video, and audio. Even benign, well-intentioned AI applications can be profoundly misleading. The nature of the large language models that power chatbots means that they are always guessing, however confident they seem. How can we use AI to produce reliable information that improves public discourse rather than distorting it?
To explore this dilemma, I moderated a webinar on Trust in Information in the Age of AI, co-sponsored by NAPA, CODE, and the Bridge Alliance, with four leaders in the field: Richard Coffin of USAFacts, Professor Renée Cummings of the University of Virginia, Meghan Herbst of WIRED, and Dr. Alan Shark of NAPA and George Mason University. I also interviewed Claude (Opus 5.5 Extra), which assessed its own limitations and offered some useful advice.
The human experts and the machine intelligence agreed on several points.
A significant AI trust gap exists. Several surveys show that more Americans use AI, but few trust its results. However, many of us still have no firm opinion on AI, suggesting that trust in AI will depend on how it performs in the future.
Our skepticism is justified: AI often gets things wrong. Large language models don’t actually “know” anything – they answer queries based on patterns they deduce from the data they’ve been trained on. While accuracy rates depend on the task and how you measure success, rough estimates hold that chatbots make errors about half the time. The general consensus is that these AI hallucinations can be reduced but may be impossible to eliminate.
AI is often biased in ways that can be hard to detect. Algorithmic bias has been a concern for years, long before today’s chatbots were developed. Because AI is trained on historical data, it can reinforce old biases about gender, race, or ethnicity in hiring, criminal justice, and other areas. This can be a serious issue in any AI application used for public policy.
AI doesn’t quite know how to use government data. Chatbots often rely on secondary sources even when more reliable primary government data is available. The problem stems from the fact that much government data isn't “AI-ready,” and AI models aren't designed to go to government sources first, even when they are fit for use.
AI’s impact on information needs regulation. The debate over AI regulation has focused on the big picture: the need for guardrails to ensure AI doesn't turn on or even destroy humanity. While that priority is hard to argue with, we also need regulations to prevent AI from misleading or misinforming us. The European Union now requires a watermark on images or text produced by AI. In the U.S., several states are moving to prevent bias in public uses of the technology.
AI may offer real benefits for all kinds of human endeavors, but its flaws remind us to treat the technology with caution and care. This is especially true for using AI in public policy and decision-making, where poorly informed plans can have major repercussions.
For now, the best advice is to use AI with an awareness of its shortcomings, don’t put human judgment aside, and ask for and review your chatbot’s sources. As Claude said about our interview at the end: “If your readers take away one habit from it, I hope it’s checking the sources I’ve cited rather than taking my word for any of this.”
You can watch the full video of the webinar “Trust in Information in the Age of AI” on YouTube at: https://napawash.org/event/napa-technology-leaders...
Joel Gurin is the president and founder of the Center for Open Data Enterprise.
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Universal basic income would cost trillions. Wage insurance, a bigger child tax credit, and a tax break for work could help workers left behind by AI at a fraction of the price.
Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images
AI’s Costs: The Human Element & the Response
Oct 23, 2026
The age of AI will be a revolutionary age. In medicine, engineering, and more, there is the possibility of great benefit to humanity. Consider some Wall Street Journal headlines: “The Quest to Use AI to Help Find New Drugs,” and “Fusion Startup Gets an AI Boost.” Already, AI is a substantial portion of GDP growth.
Yet a rising tide will not lift the boats with holes in their hulls, as Jack Kemp once said. Artificial intelligence is challenging our leaders to think about those possibly left behind. Within the AI community itself, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expresses concern that we could see 5-10% GDP growth with 10% unemployment.
We cannot allow this concern about AI’s human costs to go totally unaddressed. “Pull yourself up by only your own bootstraps” is not an appropriate response when there is so much disruption throughout the entire economy—when the owners of capital will thrive as workers and would-be workers struggle. Ideas from both political parties are necessary.
A universal basic income is one possibility being pushed, but the cost may be prohibitive. A decent-sized UBI of $12,000 a year would cost trillions annually. A more realistic approach is needed.
There are two alternate proposals that have not passed Congress in the past, but they could be brought back up for consideration. First is the expansion of a concept called “wage insurance.” The second is an expanded child tax credit. I will contribute a third idea too.
Wage insurance was part of the Trade Adjustment Act’s safety net. A worker 50 or older who lost a job due to foreign trade qualified if the worker found another job paying less (but no more than $50,000). The benefit was half the difference in pay between the old and new jobs, up to $10,000 over two years.
The Obama administration proposed eliminating the trade-impacted requirement. Anyone over age 50 would qualify for wage insurance so long as they were in their previous job for at least three years. The cost was estimated at $3 billion a year. Unlike a universal basic income, Congress could find the savings to offset this spending.
Wage insurance directly addresses the immediate costs of an AI economy. The worker whose career is disrupted by what was only, until recently, science fiction finds a benefit other than only unemployment insurance. The worker may very well never have the old income level again and is approaching retirement. Help for such a person in the throes of capitalism’s “creative destruction” makes sense. We are addressing those in the spaces between what was and what is becoming.
I mentioned an expanded child tax credit as well. Former Sen. Mitt Romney proposed a kind of refundable and advanceable child tax credit—meaning paid even to those who do not owe taxes, and paid monthly before even filing a tax return—of $4,200 per child under age six and $3,000 for other children. This contrasts with the $2,200 per child, with less refundability, under President Donald Trump’s “one big beautiful bill.”
Sen. Romney proposed paying for the cost partly through tax reforms that largely, but not entirely, shift the tax code’s other credits and deductions in a more progressive direction. The “mostly” is why anti-poverty advocates seemed to give the bill two cheers instead of three. Overall, the proposal would net reduce childhood poverty but would cause some families lifted out of poverty to slip right back in.
Still, the Romney proposal could be a countervailing force against AI’s corrosive effects. Even more so if the bill’s pay-for is tipped in an even more progressive direction. We would have a kind of modest universal basic income for families with children. We would be addressing those of greatest need in the economy.
The third suggestion is this: Provide a tax break for work equivalent to the size of what we give to capital. The lower income tax rate for dividend income costs the federal government a little over $40 billion a year. Putting similarly-sized tax relief into workers’ pockets would produce an average tax savings of about $235 per worker.
An extra $235, or for a two-earner family, $470, is not a universal basic income, but it is affordable. The more progressive could very well connect the revenue that can be raised by eliminating the dividend preference to offsetting the cost of lowering the 10% bottom income tax rate, or some other way to put the money in pockets. A more ideologically conservative approach would seek the curtailment or elimination of tax breaks and government programs.
What is important is recognizing that the owners of capital will be great beneficiaries of the AI age. As a matter of public policy, we should look out for labor too. Patch the boat’s holes and let the tide rise. The human cost of not doing anything needs to be addressed along with the fiscal cost of doing something.
Scott Miller is a graduate of Widener School of Law, a former chief of staff in Congress, and the author of 'Christianity & Your Neighbor's Liberty.
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