At a time when political rights are being contested, Dahlia Lithwick shares her thoughts on the women who are working tirelessly through the law and legal system in pursuit of justice and a more democratic society. Lithwick is the senior legal correspondent at Slate and host of Amicus, Slate’s award-winning biweekly podcast about the law.
Close-up of a 2020 mail-in ballot envelope for Maricopa County, Ariz.
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.
In the coming months the Election Overtime Project will help reporters, TV anchors and others prepare America to understand and not fear close elections. Election Overtime is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network developed in partnership with the Bridge Alliance, which publishes The Fulcrum.
The Election Overtime Project held its national launch event last week and will convene the first of many state-level briefings, starting with Arizona, on Sept. 30. All programs are designed for the media but are open to the public.
The briefing will introduce the tools and resources for Arizona included in the Election Overtime Project, including the release of new survey data on voter knowledge of election rules. The online event will also feature commentary from senior political leaders from both parties.
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The Arizona briefing will be followed with events in Pennsylvania on Oct. 2 and North Carolina on Oct. 4 (see the full event schedule). These briefings by election law experts will provide guides for reporting on election transparency, verification processes and judicial procedures.
Speakers at the Arizona briefing, in addition to Heather Balas and Kevin Johnson of ERN , will include:
Arizona state Sen. Ken Bennett. Bennett, a Republican, has served in the Legislature since 2023 and was vice chair of the elections committee. Bennett previously served on the Prescott City Council and in the state Senate for eight years, the last four as Senate president. Bennett was Arizona Secretary of State from 2009 to 2014. He is also a businessman and financial professional with a long history of public service in Arizona.
Ron Barber, senior advisor, Arizona Democracy Resilience Network. Barber, a Democrat, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2012 to 2015, after having been the district director of his predecessor, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D). On Jan. 8, 2011, Barber was standing beside Giffords at a constituent event when a gunman shot the congresswoman. Barber was wounded in the thigh and face. When Giffords resigned from office to focus on her recovery, she asked Barber to run for her seat. He won the special election and took office in June 2012.
Don Henninger, senior advisor, Arizona Democracy Resilience Network. Henninger, a Republican, has been a top media executive and business leader in Arizona for over 35 years, including time as managing editor of the Arizona Republic and publisher of the Phoenix Business Journal. He served on the Governor’s Bipartisan Elections Task Force.
Jackie Salit, president, Independent Voting. Salit leads a national strategy, communications and organizing center that works to connect independent voters across the United States and is a 30-year veteran of the independent and reform movements. She also serves as co-director for the Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy at Arizona State University.
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.
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!”
It is a curious choice. It suggests a certain progress, a “moving forward,” a distancing from the past. The concept of advancing “onward” also supposes that the future journey will be brighter than the one we’re leaving behind. We are all pioneers forging “onward” to a more promising utopia. It is an eternally optimistic and hopeful word.
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The irony of Feulner’s appeal for Americans to press “onward” is that his goal, and the goal of the complete roster of Project 2025 contributors, is to return to a time when America resembled more of a dystopia, when patriarchy ruled effortlessly, racism infused public policy and the blessings of liberty were, at best, disproportionately felt. Here I’m talking about the Reagan years.
Like so many old guard Republicans, Feulner is nostalgic for a period in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was the party’s standard bearer. “The conservative movement had found in Ronald Reagan a President who shared [a conservative] vision and who had the will to go against the established political grain in Washington,” Feulner writes. “[Reagan] also had the ability to speak directly to the American people and convincingly show them how those ideas could work for the benefit of all.”
Feulner and the Project 2025 leadership are hoping that Donald Trump triumphs on Nov. 5 and the former president has the will, like Reagan, to “go against the established grain in Washington” by reintroducing Schedule F, reducing the federal government’s bureaucratic footprint, closing numerous agencies and departments, attacking personal freedoms, rejecting climate warnings, isolating America in an increasingly connected global world and accelerating the principle of a unitary executive.
They have reason to be optimistic; the similarities are scary. Among Reagan’s conservative accomplishments are the 1981 tax cuts that aimed to stimulate economic growth. Trump’s 2017 tax cuts (many of which Kamala Harris promises to retain) shared the same goal. Reagan deliberately and intentionally shifted the ideological balance on the Supreme Court to the right. So did Trump. Reagan used the power of the presidency to fire striking air traffic controllers. Trump recently doubled down on the exact same idea. It’s hardly surprising that Feulner looks to Reagan as the model Republican president.
And yet what Feulner and his Heritage Foundation collaborators fail to recognize (or at least fail to acknowledge) is that Reagan was deceptively ruthless — crafty and dishonest, really — to the detriment of the nation as a whole. His expansion of presidential power ushered in the modern unitary executive. Project 2025 hopes to build on that precedent. He fired civil servants who challenged him and filled those vacant positions with loyalists. Project 2025 encourages the same practice. He issued executive orders that extended his control over independent agencies. Project 2025 promises the same in the next Republican administration. He vetoed legislation that would have weakened the unitary executive. Project 2025 urges a similar practice.
On the international front, the 40th president went behind the back of Congress (and the American people) to accomplish his goals in the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration secretly, and illegally, engaged in arms sales with the Iranians, and then proceeded to use the profits from those sales to prop up the Contras, a group of anti-socialist rebels in Nicaragua. The entire incident violated the law. Right on the heels of the Watergate scandal, it furthered the disquieting narrative that the president had become impervious to most legal guardrails. Sadly, the writers of Project 2025 don’t seem so bothered by that imperviousness.
Arguably, the most sinister Reagan initiative was his “war on drugs.” Racist through and through, the program’s target was low-level drug peddlers, many of whom were men of color. As Michelle Alexander persuasively shows, Reagan’s “war on drugs” was an attempt to control an entire population of young black men, a “New Jim Crow” as she calls it. Incarcerating millions of Black and Brown men under the auspices of being “tough on crime” allowed white elites to perpetuate systems of racial subordination, systems that resemble the more formal and overt structures of slavery and Jim Crow. Lock large segments of America’s racial minorities up and you permanently remove them from the political process. The result is the preservation of white authority.
Correspondingly, Project 2025 calls for a “restoration of law and order,” including increased sentences for minor violations, sacking prosecutors who are “soft on crime,” reinstating mandatory minimums and boosting the death penalty as a criminal justice tool. These are all policy changes that would disproportionately impact our Black and Brown neighbors.
“Onward!” Feulner implores. But to where? If the Project 2025 braintrust had its way, it would be “onward” to a past where progress around gender equality, racial equity, socioeconomic disparity, salary gaps, social justice, environmental fairness, government transparency, widespread tolerance and just plain decency were erased — a past where the power of white men always prevailed and the promises of America remained elusive.
Let’s choose a different path.
More articles about Project 2025
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
It’s been almost five years since the Bridge Alliance, an organization that I co-founded, held its 2019 annual summit, attended by over 200 political and social change agents/leaders. The theme was strengthening democracy and evolving into the multicultural, pluralistic society that our founders envisioned but could not enact.
In preparation for the summit, we turned to pop culture to build the connection between participants who didn't know each other and who represented diverse backgrounds and opinions. We did so by crafting an agenda based on two songs from the Broadway show “Hamilton” — "My Shot" and "The Room Where It Happens."
These two songs embodied the political situation we found ourselves in five years ago and still do today. Those in the room felt the fierce urgency of that time coupled with the empowerment to make a difference in the nation, and the world, for the betterment of all.
Our country needs more inspiration today as we celebrate National Civics Day. The observance commemorates the date the Federalist Papers, which convincingly made the case for ratification of the Constitution, were first published on Oct. 27, 1787.
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The Federalist Papers were penned by three of the biggest political figures of the day — Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay (although they published their writings anonymously).
In 1787, the trio was trying to convince the states to accept the Constitution. Right now, it’s critical that we convince our fellow citizens of the importance of voting. And many pop culture stars are doing just that, including Taylor Swift, who urged her followers to vote while endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 12.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most,” she wrote on Instagram.
And the cast of "Hamilton" has reengaged, re-writing one of Lin-Manuel Miranda's classic songs into a stirring tribute to democracy. Listen to this incredible song, “The Election of 2024,” and you’ll surely agree that it is time to “party at the polls.”
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Let this wonderful song spark our collective imagination of a people that embraces our diversity as the operating system of our nation. Despite our many frailties, America is exceptional because from the outset its citizens saw themselves as participants in an experiment that would have implications for all of mankind. Our task is far from complete, so tell your friends it’s time to party to the polls and make a difference for America
The video ends by directing viewers to a pair of organizations working hard to get people to vote.
VoteRiders is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with a mission to ensure that all citizens are able to exercise their freedom to vote. VoteRiders informs and helps citizens to secure their voter ID as well as inspires and supports organizations, local volunteers, and communities to sustain voter ID education and assistance efforts. When We All Vote is a leading national, nonpartisan initiative created by Michelle Obama with a mission to change the culture around voting and to increase participation in each and every election by helping to close the race and age gap.
You too can join the party by spreading the message.
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."
Election Board Chairman John Fervier, a Republican, voted against the rule change, saying the "overwhelming number of election officials" who reached out to him were opposed to the change and passing the measure would be ignoring the advice of the board’s counsel.
"I do think it's too close to the election," Fervier said. "It's too late to train a lot of poll workers."
An important fact about this ruling has not been very clear in press coverage: The rule requires counting the number of ballots, to check that the total matches the number shown on tabulators, not the votes. It does not mean officials will hand count the votes for different candidates in all the different races. Nevertheless, this new rule threatens to inject delay and confusion into what should be a standard process. Georgia law has clear deadlines for state and local certification — deadlines that may be threatened by the new requirements.
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A number of independent elections experts have spoken out against the board’s ruling.
Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law:
“This move by the Georgia Election Board appears to be yet another in a series of ploys to endanger our democratic process. Requiring hand-counting of all votes cast in every polling place across Georgia on Election Day serves no one except those who want to promote chaos. The rule is contrary to Georgia law and risks delaying the counting of the votes to the extent that Georgia could miss the certification deadline for the presidential election. Rather than ensuring the accuracy of the vote, the State Election Board’s action may lead to the votes of every Georgian not counting at all in this consequential election. That is the antithesis of democracy.”
Kevin Johnson, executive director of the Election Reformers Network:
“Unfortunately, there are questions that arise about motivation and partisanship behind this ruling, given the unethical decision by a Board member to attend a campaign rally in support of a presidential candidate. Boards need to be seen as neutral, and Georgia and other states probably need to consider reforms to the structure and ethics of election boards to achieve that neutrality.”
The situation is fluid and the final process is unclear. The Fulcrum will watch in the coming weeks as the specifics of the new hand counting process unfolds as a part of our Election Overtime coverage. Between now and the conclusion of the presidential election, we will counter false narratives about elections being corrupt or stolen.
We understand the public will need a deep understanding of the rules of “election overtime” and through our partnership with the Election Reformers Network we will serve as a valuable resource to provide our readers with up-to-date, accurate information as to how the process of validating close elections works.
“The more people know about the rules of elections, the more they see the guardrails that protect results,” Johnson said. “That’s true in the case of the Georgia Board as well. Georgia law is very clear about the deadlines for state and local certification, and that creates legal avenues to challenge any rules that could put timely election results in Georgia in jeopardy.”
Women from states with abortion restrictions speak during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August.
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.
However, missing from these conversations is the interconnectedness between the economy and another top issue for voters: reproductive rights.
Even though intimately connected, the economy and abortion access continue to be cast as distinct issues. As an economic variable, abortion is as much a kitchen table issue as the cost of groceries or housing. Laws restricting abortion not only lead to poorer economic outcomes for women and their families, these laws undercut the overall economy by handicapping women’s presence in the workforce, a variable essential to economic growth and prosperity.
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Women denied an abortion have higher levels of debt, housing and food insecurity, eviction, poor credit, and significantly higher rates of household poverty throughout their lives than women able to abort an unwanted pregnancy.
In a study conducted by the University of California San Francisco of 1,000 women — half of whom were able to obtain an abortion and half of whom were not — researchers found that being denied an abortion, rather than having one, resulted in greater harm. Women denied an abortion had significantly higher pregnancy-related medical emergencies, physical and emotional complaints, and ongoing financial hardship compared to women able to have an abortion. Most tellingly, the financial trends between these groups were similar until those women seeking an abortion were turned away.
The medical costs of prenatal care and childbirth — even for women with health insurance — is significant, averaging $4,500 on out-of-pocket expense. Women without insurance coverage often skimp or forgo essential prenatal care. These costs are amplified since childbirth invariably interrupts a woman’s paid work, resulting in lost income. With less than 10 percent of workers currently eligible for paid medical leave, lost wages compound the financial stress of an unwanted pregnancy. It’s not surprising that the rate of childhood poverty decreased following the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.
The financial hardship for women denied an abortion tends to be greatest during the four or five years following birth, but the struggle continues. The cost of returning to work when daycare is needed, ongoing expenses of supporting another child, and the secondary costs of emotional and medical complications for an unwanted pregnancy handicap a woman and those dependent on her. Sixty percent of women seeking abortions are already mothers who cannot support, on multiple levels, another child. Women able to obtain an abortion are largely spared from these handicaps.
Women able to abort an unwanted pregnancy achieve higher educational, employment and income levels than women denied an abortion. And while some women do report sadness or regret regarding the “situation” prompting them to choose an abortion, they do not report regretting the decision itself, a fact confirmed by 95 percent of women in the Turnaway Study who were able to obtain an abortion.
Information on the actual effects of abortion on women, their families and the larger cultural environment has grown significantly in the decades following Roe. Yet misinformation has remained essentially unchanged. Common myths such as “abortion is dangerous to a woman’s health,” “abortion casts a long, painful shadow over her emotional well-being” and “killing a fetus and is akin to murder” are still prevalent in the narrative.
These chilling claims are reminiscent of the same statements I heard from anti-abortion protesters 50 years ago as a clinic escort for Planned Parenthood, and that continue to dominate anti-abortion rhetoric. We have an opportunity now to broaden the discussion of abortion based on what we have learned from decades of research rather than legitimizing arguments against abortion that are little more than subjective religious views.
Anti-abortion politicians like Scott find it “cruel” and “callous” to talk abortion within an economic framework, as if the financial hardship women face is inconsequential. Even if correct, economic consequences are insignificant to protecting a fetus.
Abortion rights have been protected in every state voting on the question thus far, demonstrating that women aren’t willing to sacrifice their autonomy and material well-being to protect the religious beliefs and sensibilities of anti-abortion politicians. Rather than talking about the need to lift the middle class and restore full abortion rights as mutually exclusive policies, we must talk about lifting the middle class by restoring abortion rights.
