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Trustworthy Elections Report

Trustworthy Elections Report
Braver Angels

Conservatives and liberals distrust our electoral system for vastly different reasons—from voter fraud and election security to voter suppression and peaceful transfer of power. Leading up to the 2024 election, Braver Angels worked to rebuild this trust by seeking solutions supported by people across the political spectrum.

This report is based on 26 workshops with 194 evenly-balanced Red and Blue participants. Together, they found 727 unanimous points of agreement across values, concerns, and solutions. This report has distilled those into three principles:


  • “Voting should be easy. Cheating should be hard.”
  • “Every citizen should have an equal say in who will govern them; this is done through free and fair elections.”
  • “The American government will fail if candidates refuse to accept any outcome other than victory.”

This report—based on hundreds of cross-partisan conversations—could provide a blueprint for restoring trust in our elections.

Read the report.


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Trump’s Anti-Latino Racism is a Major Liability for Democracy

Close-up of sign reading 'Immigrants Make America Great' at a Baltimore rally.

Trump’s Anti-Latino Racism is a Major Liability for Democracy

Donald Trump’s second administration has fully clarified Latinos’ racial position in America: our ethnic group’s labor, culture, and aspirations are too much for his supporters to stomach. The Latino presence in America triggers too many uneasy questions (are they White?), too many doubts (are they really American?), and too much resentment (why are they doing better than me?).

Trump’s targeted deportations of undocumented Latinos, unwarranted arrests of Latino citizens, and heightened ICE presence in Latino neighborhoods address these worries by lumping Latinos with Black people. Simply put, we have become yet another visible population that America socially stigmatizes, economically exploits, and politically terrorizes because aggrieved White adults want to preserve their rank as our nation’s premier racial group. The cumulative impacts are serious: just yesterday, an international panel of investigators on human rights and racism, backed by the U.N., found that such actions have resulted in “grave human rights violations.”

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Just the Facts: The SAVE Act and the Future of Voter ID Rules
A close up of a window with a sticker on it
Photo by Zach Wear on Unsplash

Just the Facts: The SAVE Act and the Future of Voter ID Rules

Last week, I wrote a column in the Fulcrum entitled “Just the Facts: Voter ID, States’ Powers, and Federal Limits.” The facts presented in that writing made it clear that the U.S. Constitution does not require voter ID and left almost all election administration—including voter qualifications—to the states. However, over time, constitutional amendments and federal statutes have restricted states’ ability to impose discriminatory voting rules, but they have never mandated voter ID.

The SAVE America Act

The national debate over voter ID has entered a new phase with the introduction of the SAVE America Act, the most sweeping federal voter‑identification and citizenship‑documentation proposal in modern history. For more than two centuries, voter eligibility rules—ID included—have been primarily a matter of state authority, bounded by constitutional protections against discrimination. The SAVE America Act would shift that balance by imposing federal requirements for both photo identification and documentary proof of citizenship in federal elections.

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Posters are displayed next to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as he speaks at a news conference to unveil the Take It Down Act to protect victims against non-consensual intimate image abuse, on Capitol Hill on June 18, 2024 in Washington, DC.

A lawsuit against xAI over AI-generated deepfakes targeting teenage girls exposes a growing crisis in schools. As laws struggle to keep up, this story explores AI accountability, teen safety, and what educators and parents must do now.

Getty Images, Andrew Harnik

Deepfakes: The New Face of Cyberbullying and Why Parents, Schools, and Lawmakers Must Act

As a former teacher who worked in a high school when Snapchat was born, I witnessed the birth of sexting and its impact on teens. I recall asking a parent whether he was checking his daughter’s phone for inappropriate messages. His response was, “sometimes you just don’t want to know.” But the federal lawsuit filed last week against Elon Musk's xAI has put a national spotlight on AI-generated deepfakes and the teenage girls they target. Parents and teachers can’t ignore the crisis inside our schools.

AI Companies Built the Tool. The Grok Lawsuit Says They Own the Damage.

Whether the theory of French prosecutors–that Elon Musk deliberately allowed the sexualized image controversy to grow so that it would drive up activity on the platform and boost the company’s valuation–is true or not, when a company makes the decision to build a tool and knows that it can be weaponized but chooses to release it anyway, they are making a risk-based decision believing that they can act without consequence. The Grok lawsuit could make these types of business decisions much more costly.

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