On Monday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed the Colorado Voting Rights Act (COVRA) into law, significantly bolstering protections against voting discrimination and reinforcing the right to fair and equal access to the ballot. “Governor Polis and the Colorado legislature have made clear that they are committed to defending voters from discrimination,” Janai S. Nelson…
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When Laurel M. M. Benfield changed her name, she went through months of bureaucratic labor and countless hoops and expenses to ensure that her new legal name was reflected on all identity documents, including her birth certificate. The process required criminal background checks, notaries, court documentation, trips to the DMV, an updated license, a new marriage certificate, and finally a state ID…
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In one of his many bold, sweeping and likely unconstitutional gestures, President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that purports to “protect election integrity.” Many experts have already charged that it constitutes a clear abuse of power that flagrantly exceeds the president’s allotted authority. Far from protecting electoral integrity, the order attempts to subvert it…
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According to an exclusive report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), obtained by Truthout, a recently reintroduced bill in the U.S. House of Representatives could create new barriers to voter registration for transgender Americans, jeopardizing the voting rights of millions. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act would require all U.S. citizens to verify their citizenship in…
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A key GOP lawmaker made clear in an interview published Thursday that Republicans plan to push for a pair of their voting-related bills when they take control of both chambers of Congress and the White House next month. Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who campaigned for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), chairs the Committee on House…
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This November, a few months after being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, Eloy Tupayachi Salas voted in a U.S. presidential election for the first time. As a North Carolina resident, he also voted on a constitutional amendment to change the language on voter eligibility from “every person born in the United States and every person who has been naturalized” to “only a citizen” who meets age and…
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Thousands of mail ballot applications across Pennsylvania have been challenged, in many instances by right-wing activists, in what the state calls a “bad-faith” coordinated effort accusing the voters of being ineligible based on their address or voter registration status. At least 14 counties have received the challenges seeking to invalidate mail ballots, ranging from a dozen in Clinton…
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Thousands of mail ballot applications across Pennsylvania have been challenged, in many instances by right-wing activists, in what the state calls a “bad-faith” coordinated effort accusing the voters of being ineligible based on their address or voter registration status. At least 14 counties have received the challenges seeking to invalidate mail ballots, ranging from a dozen in Clinton…
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Georgia Republican Party activist Pam Reardon challenged the right of 32,132 of her neighbors to have their ballots counted during the 2020 election. Alton Russell, the Republican Party chairman of Columbus, Georgia, personally challenged roughly 4,000 voters’ right to a ballot in 2020. These two pro-Trump activists are not government officials. They are self-appointed vote fraud hunting…
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In September, Wisconsin’s Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen — an especially vocal denier of the 2020 election results — filed a lawsuit against her state’s Elections Commission. The aim of her legal challenge is to force the state to sever its ties with a formerly obscure nonpartisan entity: a multistate information sharing partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center…
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When he was in second grade, Alexis Jaimes asked his undocumented parents who they would be voting for in the upcoming elections. “They said they couldn’t, and I found that so strange,” Jaimes, now a 30-year-old teacher, told Truthout. “Why can’t they, but others could?” On election day, Santa Ana, a city in the greater Los Angeles region, will be voting on whether its 24 percent…
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Less than a third of 43 online voter registration forms for 42 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., could likely be navigated and completed independently by disabled users, according to research published earlier this month. In the new comprehensive evaluation from QAwerk, titled “The State of Web Accessibility for U.S. Voters with Disabilities,” only North Carolina’s voter registration website…
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For several weeks, Jamie Boyle of Virginia has been checking to see if the ballots she and her husband mailed on October 4 to an elections office in Pennsylvania have been processed. As of late October, she’s still waiting. Now Boyle, whose husband serves in the Army, is worried about a series of lawsuits filed by Republicans, including the Republican National Committee…
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For more than a decade, GOP state legislators have sought to make it harder for students — a group that by and large leans left — to vote. In 2012, Republicans in North Carolina eliminated the ability of 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote so that they would be automatically able to cast their ballots upon turning 18. The following year, Ohio Republicans sought to penalize…
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The sprawling county fairgrounds in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, are lined with rows of barns for showing cattle, sheep, pigs and horses. The space sat almost entirely empty last month when it hosted the GOP’s “Protect the Vote Tour” — the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) effort to recruit 100,000 volunteer poll watchers and lawyers across the country that could perhaps better be understood as a…
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In key swing states battered by hurricanes, voting rights groups are challenging Republican state leaders over ballot access as elections approach and millions of people contend with ongoing evacuations and recovery. Civil rights groups filed an emergency lawsuit in a Georgia state court on Monday after the swing state’s Republican governor and attorney general refused to extend the October 7…
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Congressional leaders on Sunday said they reached an agreement on legislation to fund the federal government for three more months, averting a shutdown and stoking right-wing ire and allegations that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson “caved” to Democrats by dropping a key demand by his far-right colleagues. According to The New York Times: “While I am pleased bipartisan…
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The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a GOP resolution that would have punted a fight over government funding until after the next president takes office and pushed through a noxious voter suppression measure backed by Republican nominee Donald Trump. The final vote was 202-220, with 14 Republicans joining nearly every member of the House Democratic caucus in voting against…
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Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo is perhaps best known for spreading the baseless claim on air that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 presidential election. Her source for that “information” was a viewer who also claimed to be “internally decapitated” and said she spoke with the wind. Along with similar misinformation, this false claim landed Fox in court for defamation…
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made headlines this week after suggesting the 2024 election could be the last U.S. election if he wins in November. We look at a secret organization of wealthy Christians called Ziklag that is backing Trump’s efforts by working to purge more than a million voters from the rolls in battleground states and mobilize Republican voters to back Trump.
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For thousands of people with past convictions in Nebraska, their right to vote is now in doubt. In an unprecedented move, the attorney general and secretary of state are attempting to nullify two laws enacted by the legislature that restored voting rights to people who have completed their sentences — one of which has been in effect for nearly two decades. Their attempt to roll back the right…
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A new law went into effect in Georgia this month that makes it easier for people to attempt to kick their neighbors off the rolls through voter challenges. Georgia already made voter challenges far too easy. Now, voters in the state face increased risk of losing their right to vote or being forced to defend it at public hearings, and election deniers have wide latitude to spread disinformation and…
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Alabama may be the birthplace of the civil rights movement, but today, it has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation. With a historic election on the horizon, a bill enacted in March further restricts access to the polls, this time disproportionately threatening to disenfranchise the state’s largest marginalized group: disabled people. Under Alabama’s Senate Bill 1 (SB 1)…
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When Kenia Flores was studying for her bachelor’s degree at Furman University in South Carolina and wanted to vote in her hometown election in North Carolina, she needed an absentee ballot. However, she soon discovered North Carolina did not offer accessible absentee ballots for blind or print-disabled individuals. This left Flores, a blind voter, in the position of either sitting out the election…
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As any schoolkid might tell you, U.S. elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn’t been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans and poor White people. The first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. This week’s show is about a current version of this very old problem.
For this episode, Reveal host Al Letson does a deep dive with Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman about his new book, “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People – and the Fight to Resist It.”
We go back to America’s early years and examine how the political institutions created by the Founding Fathers were meant to constrain democracy. This system is still alive in the modern era, Berman says, through institutions like the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, which were designed as checks against the power of the majority. What’s more, Berman argues that the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. Then there are newer tactics – like voter suppression and gerrymandering – that are layered on top of this anti-democratic foundation to entrench the power of a conservative White minority.
Next, we trace the rise of conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan and how he opened the door for Donald Trump. Buchanan made White Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. And he opposed the Voting Rights Act, which struck down obstacles to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests that had been used to keep people of color from the polls. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but he transformed White anxiety into an organizing principle that has become a centerpiece of much of today’s Republican Party.
The final segment follows successful efforts by citizen activists in Michigan to end political gerrymandering and reinforce the democratic principle of one person, one vote. Berman argues that this state-based organizing should be a national model for democratic reform.
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This article was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. Carolina Wassmer piloted a gray SUV around the city, dropping off canvassers from the civic engagement group Poder Latinx one by one. It was a muggy day, but the canvassers hopped out with their clipboards and pens, ready to engage in a longstanding…
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Ten months after Georgia officials said they would take steps to ensure that counties were correctly handling massive numbers of challenges to voter registrations, neither the secretary of state’s office nor the State Election Board has done so. In July 2023, ProPublica reported that election officials in multiple Georgia counties were handling citizens’ challenges to voter registrations in…
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The day after I graduated from college, I jumped into a car with my roommate and another friend and headed south to Mississippi. We were in good spirits after graduation, but we were in a racially integrated car and sensed danger on the road. A year earlier, three young people with the same destination for the same reason in the same season had been shot and killed. That had been the worst tragedy…
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A growing number of states are considering restrictions on guns near voting sites, a move that some lawmakers and voting rights groups hope will better protect not just voters, but election administrators and poll workers, from threats of violence and intimidation during a fraught election year. Only about a dozen states and Washington, D.C., completely prohibit people from carrying a gun — either…
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The election landscape facing voters shifted rapidly from state to state in recent years, thanks in part to rank partisanship and the baseless conspiracy theories spread by a certain election-denying former president. After the calamitous presidential election of 2020, state lawmakers passed an unprecedented number of laws shaping elections and access to the ballot. Litigation over ballot access…
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