Voting
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NYC’s Ranked Choice Voting debacle only helps Republican politicians cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections
This is a story about deciding not to write a story, and what that tells us about the challenge of getting people to care about election processes at a time when they’re under attack in states across America.
This was originally going to be a piece about the complete mess the New York City Board of Elections has made of the Democratic primary for mayor. The primary, which was held last Tuesday, was supposed to be a showcase for Ranked Choice Voting, an electoral system that allows voters to rank the candidates in a race rather than voting for just…
DEMOCRACY 2021
Modern democracy requires boundary setting between us and those running for office
We have come to accept access as an integral part of modern life. Anyone, anywhere, can get in touch, at any time. We have allowed friends, family, colleagues, long-lost acquaintances, high-school nemeses, big-box brands, and humanless bots to access us on any and every platform. Call me old-fashioned at 43, but I for one am exhausted by the constant pinging and ringing. It’s a full-time job just to keep up with all of our messages. Enough. The promise of modern connectivity was the speed at which we could transmit messages. I am not sure when and how we all agreed…
The state’s recent legislative session shows how deeply Republicans fear Black voters will once again turn Arkansas blue
Once upon a time, the Arkansas state government was a solid blue oasis in the South. In 2006, Democrat Mike Beebe ran the state as governor while his party swept both chambers of the statehouse, as they had during every election since Reconstruction. Arkansas Democrats also controlled both seats in the U.S. Senate and held one of the state’s four congressional seats. Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, further raising hopes the state might continue to have a Democratic future. At the time, I was teaching in a rural Arkansas school in Helena, a majority Black town. My school…
Here’s how Nsé Ufot and the New Georgia Project are fighting the state GOPs’ latest attempt to suppress Black and Brown voters
Following Democrats’ stunning victories in Georgia in November and again in the January U.S. Senate runoffs, the Peach State has once again become ground zero for Republican voter suppression efforts. The latest iteration of their fight to shrink the vote is House Bill 531, which passed Monday in the Republican-controlled Georgia House of Representatives. The legislation adds new restrictions to in-person and absentee voting, including adding new ID requirements and limiting the early voting period that was so crucial to Democrats’ recent successes. The bill now heads to the GOP-controlled Georgia Senate, where an identical measure was introduced last month…
Grassroots groups helped turn out a record number of voters
Growing up as a Vietnamese immigrant in Georgia, Quynh Nguyen saw firsthand the barriers that can prevent foreign-born Americans from participating in the electoral process. “My mom and dad speak English,” she says, “but not well enough to understand that there’s a website where they can check their voter registration status.”
Nguyen has devoted her career to helping members of her community navigate the voting system. …
There’s no telling how successful the next power-hungry incumbent will be in taking advantage of Trump’s groundwork
Donald Trump and his allies have spent the past six weeks hell-bent on ignoring reality, but electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia are set to reaffirm once again on Monday that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.
Six weeks after the 2020 general election, democracy has kept chugging on unencumbered. The procedural move marks the end to any chance Trump had of pursuing a legal recourse to overturn the results of the election. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a lawsuit that baselessly claimed voter fraud in Pennsylvania…
Why George W. Bush succeeded where Trump failed
Over the past five weeks, Donald Trump has led a series of bumbling, incompetent, and spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to undo the results of an election he has clearly and decisively lost.
His increasingly unhinged attempts have sparked a wave of apprehension. Pundits have thrown around terms like coup, autogolpe (Spanish for “soft coup”), and sedition to describe his actions.
Writing in The Atlantic, Zeynep Tufecki captured the sentiments of many when she argued that Trump is “establishing a playbook for stealing elections by mobilizing executive, judicial, and legislative power to support the attempt.” …
The youth vote helped Democrats win the White House. Can it deliver the Senate too?
“We were born into the tragedy protest movement,” says Reshad Daniels, a 22-year-old senior at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, summing up his generation’s perspective.
Daniels is an intern with Rev. Raphael G. Warnock’s runoff campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia, having completed another internship with Jon Ossoff’s campaign for the state’s other Senate seat. Young voters’ share of the Georgia electorate grew to 16.2% in 2020 from 14.4% …
Georgia is the most important battleground state since Florida in 2000
The fate of the U.S. Senate will be decided on January 5 in Georgia when polls close for the two seats up for grabs in a pair of runoff elections, as Democrats Jon Ossof and Raphael Warnock challenge incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, respectively. The results of the elections will determine if Joe Biden gets to install the policies he’s promised and campaigned on or if Mitch McConnell will be empowered to obstruct student loan forgiveness, Covid-19 stimulus checks, health care expansion, and a bevy of other issues that Biden voters are clamoring for. In terms of electoral significance…
Ballots are still being counted, but already voter turnout is projected to have reached the highest level since the presidential election of 1900. So far, 66.2% of the voting-eligible population has been logged as having voted — about six points higher than in 2016, when 60.1% voted. According to the Washington Post, states across the South and Midwest have seen voting turnout records shattered.
Already, Joe Biden has broken Barack Obama’s record high of winning 69,498,516 votes in 2008; Biden was leading the popular vote with 72,263,868 votes (50.4% of the total) as of Thursday morning.
Donald Trump has thus far received 68,508,167 votes (47.8% of the total), up from 62,979,879 votes in 2016. Which means that even if Biden wins the presidency—which he’s currently favored to do—Trump could still break Obama’s record too.
All of which is to say: Early voting was huge for turnout—and for Biden’s election hopes.
GEN
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