Alabama primary report
Credit: Alabama News Network
The battle for voting rights never ended in Alabama.
Despite being at the epicenter of the voting rights movement of the 1960s, the state remains one of the most difficult places in the nation for an eligible voter to register and successfully cast a ballot. As other states have expanded access to the ballot box with sound policies for early voting, voter registration and voting by mail, Alabama’s policies, as this report shows, create and perpetuate obstacles, particularly for voters in marginalized communities.
This has especially been the case after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in a lawsuit out of Alabama – Shelby County v. Holder. The high court’s decision gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a powerful piece of legislation under which the U.S. Justice Department blocked more than 100 proposed voting changes in […]
Voters in Texas
Last year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans.
A report by civil rights group The Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 750 polls had been closed statewide since 2012.
Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.
The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.
“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a […]
The Sanders in New Hampshire
In 2016, New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. Senate by a 1,017-vote margin. Even though both parties spent millions on the campaign, the key to Hassan’s victory was thousands of college and university students who registered to vote and cast ballots on Election Day.
The power of student voting was noted by Republicans who took over New Hampshire’s legislative and executive branches in early 2017. They soon passed a law to suppress student voting with a sly hidden poll tax. It required out-of-state students who voted and drove to get a New Hampshire driver’s license and register their cars with the state within 60 days. The law has been challenged in court, and litigation is ongoing.
“The students don’t like this because it is a lot of money in New Hampshire,” said Linda Rhodes, who co-founded New Hampshire’s Indivisible chapter and has been working with a handful of state and national groups […]
Vanderbilt University off-campus voting booth
Credit: Vanderbilt News
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Vanderbilt University student Will Newell wishes it was easier for college students like him to cast ballots in Tennessee, one of 14 states holding a presidential primary on Super Tuesday.
The campus has no locations for early voting, so students must visit an off-campus polling location to cast a ballot on Election Day. Newell drives but worries that many students who don’t have their own transportation won’t make it to a precinct. He said some campus groups offer rides to students, but the university itself does not provide a shuttle.
He supports a bill introduced in the Tennessee Legislature that would require early voting locations at large colleges and universities in the state. That’s not the only restriction working against college students in the state. Tennessee, where overall voter turnout is low, is among several states that does not allow a college student ID. But it does allow a handgun license.
“It just makes the […]
Amazon forest clear cutting
“We’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun.”
A new study published Wednesday adds to mounting evidence that the world’s tropical forests could soon stop serving their climate crisis-mitigating role of carbon sinks.
“After years of work deep in the Congo and Amazon rainforests, we’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun. This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models,” said Simon Lewis, a senior author of the study and a professor from the School of Geography at the U.K.’s University of Leeds.
“There is no time to lose in terms of tackling climate change,” said Lewis.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, represent the collaborative effort of roughly 100 institutions in which researchers tracked some 300,000 trees spanning 565 patches of undisturbed tropical forests across Africa and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
