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Oklahoma starting its biannual move to purge voting lists

Thousands of Oklahomans will be purged from the voter rolls this month under a state law permitting government officials to remove people who haven't voted in several years and don't respond to address confirmation mailings.

The last such purge, in April 2017, deleted 13 percent of the people then registered – more than 291,000 out of 2.2 million, according to records Oklahoma Watch obtained from the state Election Board. Of that amount, more than half were deleted due to inactivity. Of those, 46 percent were Democrats although members of that party make up 39 percent of registered voters.


Six other states give similar power to election officials to cull the rolls of inactive voters. Oklahoma drops people who haven't voted in eight years and don't answer several mailings from the state. The biggest states with such "use it or lose it" rules, Ohio and Georgia, allow election officials to purge voters after a six-year period of inactivity.

The House's comprehensive political process overhaul, HR 1, would restrict states from pursuing such policies. But last year the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that Ohio's law did not violate the Voting Right Act.

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ballot envelope

Close-up of a 2020 mail-in ballot envelope for Maricopa County, Ariz.

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Election Overtime Project kicks off state briefings in Arizona

The worsening political polarization in America is creating deep anxiety among voters about the upcoming 2024 elections. Many Americans fear what disputed elections could mean for our democracy. However, close and contested elections are a part of American history, and all states have processes in place to handle just such situations. It is critical citizens understand how these systems work so that they trust the results.

Trusted elections are the foundation of our democracy.

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Ronald Reagan

The people behind Project 2025 hope that Donald Trump has the will, like Ronald Reagan, to “go against the established grain in Washington” by closing numerous agencies and departments, attacking personal freedoms and isolating America in an increasingly connected global world.

Project 2025: ‘Onward’? More like backwards.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

After 343,541 words of “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” the Project 2025 opus, we come finally to its very last. “Onward!” is the adverb Edwin Feulner, co-founder and former president of the Heritage Foundation, uses to close the conservative handbook.

“Our next mission,” he proclaims, “is just beginning. … Onward!”

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Georgia voting stickers
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Experts pan Georgia’s hand-count rule as we prep for Election Overtime

On Sept. 17, Georgia’s election board voted to hand-count all ballots cast at polling places across the state’s 159 counties on Election Day, contrary to the legal opinion of the Georgia attorney general and the advice of the secretary of state.

Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, challenged the validity of the decision in a letter to the elections board:

"There are thus no provisions in the statutes cited in support of these proposed rules that permit counting the number of ballots by hand at the precinct level prior to delivery to the election superintendent for tabulation. Accordingly, these proposed rules are not tethered to any statute — and are, therefore, likely the precise type of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do."
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Women on state in front of a screen that reads "Our firght for reproductive freedom"

Women from states with abortion restrictions speak during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August.

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Abortion and the economy are not separate issues

Bayer is a political activist and specialist in the rhetoric of social movements. She was the founding director of the Oral Communication Lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

At a recent campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., Vice President Kamala Harris detailed her plan to strengthen the economy through policies lifting the middle class. Despite criticism from Republicans like Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — who recently said, “The American people are smarter than Kamala Harris when it comes to the economy” — some economists and financial analysts have a very positive assessment of her proposals.

Respected Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs recently gave Harris high marks in a report compared to former President Donald Trump’s plan to increase tariffs. “We estimate that if Trump wins in a sweep or with divided government, the hit to growth from tariffs and tighter immigration policy would outweigh the positive fiscal impulse,” the bank’s economists wrote.

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