Vote16USA is a national campaign, organized by Generation Citizen, that aims to support efforts to lower the voting age on the local level, help start new local campaigns, and elevate the issue's prominence on a national level.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter.
Wisconsin's method of cleaning its voter registration list may disenfranchise a significant number of voters.
A new study suggests some voters in Wisconsin, particularly members of minority communities in that perennial tossup state, may lose their voting rights thanks to flaws in the state's process for maintaining registration lists.
At least 4 percent of Wisconsin voters' registrations were incorrectly flagged as out of date in 2018 because they were suspected of having moved but had not done so, Yale University researchers found.
Their report offers a number of caveats that demonstrate the incorrect labeling is likely higher than 4 percent. And in a place where the state Supreme Court is considering whether to purge 129,000 voters — and where the last two contests for presidential electors were each decided by fewer than 25,000 ballots — every registration is critical.
With HR 1 facing no chance of passage in the Senate, Amy Klobuchar is leading a parallel campaign to convince President Biden to take action independently.
Democrats will push HR 1, a package embodying almost all their democracy reform aspirations, through the House in two weeks.
The announcement signals party leadership's confidence in passage of the legislation — which aims to substantially ease access to the ballot box, curb the role of money in politics, end partisan gerrymandering and tighten government ethics — even though the Democratic majority has just three seats to spare. Republicans seem certain to oppose it unanimously and on Wednesday launched two nationwide efforts to make voting more difficult in 2022.
As a result, unless the filibuster is neutralized, the package stands no chance in the 50-50 Senate. That's one reason why 20 Democratic senators on Wednesday pressed President Biden to act on his own authority to achieve several of the measure's most immediate goals.
The Arizona legislature is the first in a swing state to dispose of legislation that would make it harder to vote.
Legislators in Arizona narrowly rejected a proposal that would have removed 200,000 people from the list of voters who automatically receive a mail-in ballot for every election.
The Republican-backed bill would have purged voters from the list if they had skipped multiple elections, but would not have canceled their registration. Democrats, who stopped the bill in a Senate committee with the help of a single Republican vote, argued such a purge would make it harder for people to vote, particularly people of color and low-income voters.
When legislatures opened their 2021 sessions, lawmakers in three dozen states introduced more than 500 bills aimed at changing voting laws. Arizona is the first swing state to dispose of legislation aimed at tightening the rules.
Some states may consider legislation to expand early in-person voting while others are looking to make such rules more restrictive.
In the aftermath of an election that included dozens of changes to voting laws, states have seen a surge in legislation that could further alter the voting process — or unwind some of the advancements made in response to Covid-19.
The pandemic prompted more Americans than ever to vote by mail last year. Seeing broad success with this and other alternative voting methods, Democrats want to make absentee and early voting both permanent and more widespread. But Republicans want stricter voting rules to protect against fraud — even though no significant allegations were proven true last fall.
A report released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy institute at New York University Law School, found that just a month into the new year more than 500 voting rights bills have already been introduced in 37 state legislatures — more than double what had been proposed by this time last year. While a majority of this legislation is aimed at expanding access to the ballot box, more than 100 measures across 28 states would restrict voting access.
