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2021-04-14
Data & Society;
The US Constitution mandates that every 10 years Congress should complete a census of the nation's population and use the data to reapportion the House of Representatives, ensuring that congressional representation remains proportional to the number and distribution of its citizens. However, in 1929, Congress passed the first in a series of legislative acts that substituted an automatic apportionment algorithm in place of direct action. The accepted history of this change to apportionment contends that it was a response to the shifting demographics of the nation, and that automatic apportionment was installed to prevent rural politicians from tampering with a process that promised to decrease their power.This report reveals a different history. By diving into the records of the 1920 census and the following decade of congressional debates, the report shows how the move to automatic apportionment was not caused by demographic shifts in the nation. Neither was it caused by a sub-standard 1920 census or by a scientific debate on apportionment methods—the other prevailing accounts. All of these were factors, but ultimately, the constitutional crisis was the result of an underlying decision to freeze the size of the House at 435 members—a move championed in the name of efficiency but rooted in further machinations over political power. The result is that even today, nearly 100 years later, we have a democratic system that is exceptionally limited, one where each American has one-third the share of representation of a century ago.
2021-11-08
Bipartisan Policy Center;
This report aims to outline what a secure, precise, trustworthy audit of an election should look like in every state. Recommendations in the report include that audits should take place before the results are certified, that election officials must maintain custody of the ballots during audits, and that audits should be open to the public for observation. Extralegal investigations in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin do not meet most of the unanimously endorsed recommendations put forward in the report.
2021-11-10
New America;
As ranked-choice voting (RCV) gains momentum in American politics, a new body of research has emerged to examine the reform's effects on voters, candidates, campaigns, and policy. This report offers a systematic overview of the literature on RCV in the United States. Broadly, the research shows that RCV is an improvement over the more traditional single-vote plurality voting system, with clear benefits in some areas—especially campaign quality and descriptive representation—and more marginal or no apparent benefits in other areas. The research should also allay fears that RCV is too confusing or discriminatory: voters understand RCV, and learn to like it, too, particularly with experience.However, many promised benefits of RCV appear to be more modest than many had initially hoped and/or difficult to quantify based on limited usage thus far in the United States. It is possible that these benefits will take time to become apparent as candidates and voters learn and attitudes change. It is also possible that the adoption of RCV nationwide would be more transformative than city-by-city and even state-by-state adoption. But given the broader structural forces at play in our deteriorating national politics, stronger medicine may be needed.
2021-11-01
Pew Research Center;
As Pew Research Center surveys have documented, the United States' global reputation has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, often improving or declining depending on who is in the White House and the foreign policies they pursue. At the same time, many other factors have continued to shape how people see the U.S., including its vast cultural reach, its economic model and its divisive politics. A survey of 17 advanced economies highlights the complexity of America's international image. People in other publics find much to admire about the U.S., but they see many problems as well. Americans, for their part, also see both strengths and weaknesses in their society.
2021-10-28
Pew Research Center;
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that the country shall have no official religion. At the same time, Christians continue to make up a large majority of U.S. adults – despite some rapid decline in recent years – and historians, politicians and religious leaders continue to debate the role of religion in the founders' vision and of Christianity in the nation's identity.Some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country, according to a March 2021 Pew Research Center survey. On the other hand, however, the clear majority of Americans do not accept these views. This report presents findings from surveys focused on American's views on the separation of church and state.
2021-09-29
Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School;
While legislation tends to get more attention, the regulatory process within the executive branch is at the core of day-to-day democratic governance. Federal regulation and rule-making engages dozens of agencies and affects every American. The Biden-Harris administration acknowledged the centrality of the regulatory process with two actions on the President's first day in office. The first called for modernizing the regulatory review process, particularly the central oversight role of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The second was an executive order calling on the federal government to support underserved communities and advance racial equity. These two initiatives together lay the groundwork for a reorientation and modernization of the regulatory process to move it in the direction of equity and justice.To understand the challenges to and advantages of a reformed regulatory review process, New America's Political Reform Program and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government convened a group of academic experts from across the country to share their findings on the state of regulatory review and to identify alternative measures of not just the cost of regulations, but also the distributional impact of their costs and benefits. These experts specialize in administrative law, economic analysis, public participation, and regulatory review, and their work covers policy areas including patent law, healthcare, and environmental justice.This conversation focused first on the changes that could be made within the framework of cost-benefit analysis, and then on reforms that would go beyond cost-benefit to new modes of analysis. Much of the discussion centered around ensuring that regulations appropriately benefit and do not harm vulnerable or marginalized communities.
2021-10-15
Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice;
The 2020 presidential elections saw the highest voter turnout in U.S. election history, including among poor and low-income voters (LIV) . Of the 168 million voters who cast a ballot in the general election, 58 million—or 35% of the voting electorate—were LIV. This cuts against common misperceptions that poor and low-income people are apathetic about politics or inconsequential to electoral outcomes.To tap into the potential impact of these voters in the 2020 elections, the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC:NCMR) launched a non-partisan voter outreach drive across 16 states. The drive targeted urban and rural areas and reached over 2.1 million voters, the vast majority of whom were eligible LIV. The drive had a statistically significant impact in drawing eligible LIV into the active voting electorate, showing that intentional efforts to engage these voters—around an agenda that includes living wages, health care, strong anti-poverty programs, voting rights and policies that fully address injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy—can be effective across state borders and racial lines.
2021-09-13
Brookings Institution;
In the America of 2021, a seemingly unstoppable force has met an apparently immovable object. Across the nation, state officials are acting with brazen impunity in curtailing voting rights. At best nakedly partisan, and at worst openly racist, legislators are proposing and passing, and some governors are signing, statutes that will strip the ballot from millions, seize the power to overturn election outcomes those partisans don't like, and potentially tilt the political playing field for decades to come. No wonder President Biden has declared it the "most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War." Federal legislation could prevent this by establishing reasonable best practices for voter registration and early voting, and by barring the worst of the provisions. But, that is where the immovable object comes in. Despite majorities in both houses of Congress that have expressed support for voting rights legislation, the Senate filibuster stands in the way.In this paper we assess a range of possible filibuster modifications. We believe the Senate will also consider these options as the pressure to do something to meet the crisis ratchets up. The history of the filibuster is the history of such changes, and so we begin with a survey of that history in Part I. In Part II, we catalog today's principal proposals for modification, enumerating their pros and cons. We include remedies such as reducing the number of senators needed to open debate in the face of a filibuster; obligating the objectors to be present with one of their number speaking at all times during a filibuster; and shifting the burden to them to muster the requisite number of votes required to maintain the filibuster whenever challenged, instead of requiring the 60 who wish to proceed to so vote.
2021-10-11
Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University;
Michigan has embarked on an historic redrawing of boundaries for its 13 U.S. House, 38 Senate and 110 House districts. Redistricting was entrusted this year to 13 members of the Michigan Independent Redistricting Commission (MICRC) randomly selected from a pool of qualified applicants.This report provides a quantitative analysis of the collaborative Draft Proposed maps, as those maps were collaboratively drawn by the MICRC and released on Oct. 11, 2021. For the collaborative maps, the Commission voted to release four congressional maps, three Michigan Senate maps, and three Michigan House maps. These Draft Proposed maps will be subject to a round of public hearings to be conducted around the state from Wednesday, Oct. 20 to Wednesday, Oct. 27.In this report, the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University analyzes these 10 collaborative Draft Proposed maps.
2021-10-04
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE);
Youth activism and participation in social movements has been one of the defining features of civic life in the past several years: from the anti-gun violence protests after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, to the nationwide actions for racial justice following George Floyd's murder in 2020. Both of those were also election years in which young people achieved historic or near-historic levels of voter turnout. But what, exactly, was the relationship between young people's participation in the streets and at the ballot box?To answer that question, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) joined a team of researchers to produce Protests, Politics, and Power: Exploring the Connections Between Youth Voting and Youth Movements. This research encompasses two studies that tackled this question with different but complementary perspectives and approaches. The Role of Electoral Engagement in Youth Social Movements is a qualitative study based on interviews and supplemental surveys with young leaders and participants in social movements. The second study, Quantifying the Effects of Protests on Voter Registration and Turnout, uses quantitative methods to study changes in electoral participation in areas where protests took place.
2021-10-08
FairVote;
This report reviews an important aspect of the Democratic Presidential nomination process in 2020: the advantages of increasing early access to voting, and the unintended consequence it creates for some early voters losing the chance to cast an effective vote.This report lifts up the experience of state parties that avoided that problem by offering ranked choice voting (RCV) ballots. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming successfully introduced RCV ballots for all voters, while Nevada used RCV ballots for early voting. This greatly increased the numbers of votes that counted toward candidates earning delegates. Implemented nationally, ranked choice voting ballots likely would have resulted in over four million more Democratic voters having a direct effect on the contest. The Democatic National Committee has an opportunity to support this innovation and ensure votes count in 2024 and beyond.
2021-10-28
Center for American Progress;
This policy brief examines the impact that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) would have on alleviating the root cuases of migration in the Americas, specifically issues such as gang violence, food insecurity, political instability, and natural disasters. The author explores the ways remittances from TPS holders could improve the lives of families abroad.
