Category Archives: Elections & Voting

Do you have a favorite candidate in the upcoming congressional midterm elections? Want to do everything you can to see that candidate elected? Thinking about opening your wallet in the campaign’s final days? Continue reading →

The polls are tightening up right now, and the media is treating it like it’s some mystical force of nature causing people to shift their concerns from abortion, guns, climate, democracy, and the survival of Social Security over to gas prices, Black crime, banning books, and trans kids playing sports. Continue reading →

One of the country’s most high-profile efforts by Trump Republicans to avoid using ballot-marking computers in 2022’s midterm elections and instead count votes by hand is coming apart at the seams. Continue reading →

With just 8 days to go before the November 8 congressional elections, the candidates in close races are frantically racing around their districts, dialing for campaign dollars and doing more of the same speechifying and repetitive political ads. “More of the same,” however, may not be enough. Continue reading →

Government watchdogs are warning that Republicans are operating a well-funded, well-organized campaign to sow “an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt” in this year’s midterm elections by lodging dubious legal challenges even before Election Day arrives and training thousands on how to create confusion at the polls. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON—If Democrats keep control of the House and gain just two seats in the Senate, something well within reach two weeks from now, there will be a clear path to making Roe the law of the land again and halting the GOP drive to take away a host of other constitutional rights. Continue reading →

TV personality Dr. Mehmet Cengiz Oz is the Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Pennsylvania. He could become the first senator to hold dual citizenship, notably that of Turkey and America. Continue reading →

Many of the biggest issues affecting our day-to-day lives are determined by state and local officials who are running for office down here—as well as ballot measures. Continue reading →

Six months ago, people on the left in France faced a crucial choice. None of their candidates had gotten enough votes to make it into the presidential runoff election. On the upcoming ballot were the neoliberal president Emmanuel Macron and the neofascist challenger Marine Le Pen, who had trailed the incumbent in the first round by less than five percentage points. What to do? Continue reading →

WASHINGTON—Even as workers and their allies hit the political hustings, campaigning door-to-door, explaining issues, phone banking and more, they face one big problem on the campaign trail: Hordes of corporate campaign cash fueling the drives of anti-worker—and anti-democracy—politicians. Continue reading →

Despite both a torrent of lawsuits attacking every aspect of voting with mailed-out ballots in the 2020 presidential election as well as post-election efforts in GOP-led states to pass laws limiting their use, a record-setting 42 million or more Americans are likely to vote using mailed-out ballots in the 2022 general election—a 40 percent increase from the last midterm election in 2018. Continue reading →

Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party. Continue reading →

Efforts to reform the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law whose quirks and ambiguities became a roadmap for Donald Trump and his allies to try to subvert congressional certification of 2020’s Electoral College vote, moved a step closer in the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday. Continue reading →

Brazil’s first round of elections, held on October 2, yielded a major victory for the man who held the presidency from 2003 to 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Winning 48 percent of the vote in a multicandidate race, Lula now heads to a runoff against incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who won 43 percent. It’s the first chapter of a dramatic comeback for a leader who was once hailed as the epitome of Latin America’s resurgent left, who was then imprisoned on corruption charges by a politicized judiciary, eventually was released, and has now emerged onto the political scene in a very different nation than the one he once led. Continue reading →

Unprecedented efforts by pro-Trump Republicans and election officials are targeting 2022’s general election. Continue reading →

Republican Party leaders didn’t have a platform in 2020. Continue reading →

Colorado’s southwestern Mesa County is filled with desert lore. It’s also home to one of 2020’s stranger false stolen election narratives that keeps resounding like echoes in its canyons but offers lessons for 2022’s general election. Continue reading →

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are on a power trip, but we can make them irrelevant after this year’s election. Continue reading →

Since 2020’s presidential election, two rural counties in Michigan and Colorado that initially reported incorrect results have had outsized roles in spreading Donald Trump’s big lie that his second term was stolen by Democrats colluding with one of the country’s biggest computerized voting systems makers. Continue reading →

US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) doesn’t like ranked choice voting. It’s “a scam to rig elections,” he tweeted on August 31, after Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin in a special election for US House in Alaska. “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat ‘won.’” Continue reading →

Prospects for Democrats winning in November in the House and Senate have picked up recently. Nonetheless, political pundits are still not counting on the Democrats to win the House of Representatives. Candidates have eight weeks to refine their policies, messages, and strategies to energize and mobilize voters. Continue reading →

Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) runs about on stage at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo. He was there on August 22, 2022, speaking at a book launch featuring photographs by Ricardo Stuckert about Lula’s trips around the world when he was the president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010. Lula is a man with a great deal of energy. He recounts the story of when he was in Iran with his Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in 2010, trying to mediate and end the conflict imposed by the United States over Iran’s nuclear energy policy. Lula managed to secure a nuclear deal in 2010 that would have prevented the ongoing pressure campaign that Washington is conducting against Tehran. There was relief in the air. Then, Lula said, “Obama pissed outside the pot.” According to Lula, then-U.S. President Barack Obama did not accept the deal and crushed the hard work of the Brazilian leadership in bringing all sides to an agreement. Continue reading →

Anyone paying attention knows that Joe Biden’s accomplishments as president are pretty sparse. The oligarchy allowed his American Rescue Plan stimulus program to go through but then put a stop on Build Back Better or any other legislation that would help the people in a meaningful way. The student loan debt relief plan is a bait and switch scam used against desperate people. Biden brags about allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies but that won’t happen until 2026 and will only be allowed for ten drugs that are to be named later. Continue reading →

The latest Republican plot to sabotage our elections could remove American voters from the process of selecting their president. Continue reading →

In two states that more accurately represent a microcosm of American voters—Florida and New York—candidates generally committed to democracy and the rule of law defeated a Republican hodgepodge of Qanon believers, Adolf Hitler admirers, and, in one case, an admirer of Russia and Vladimir Putin. The election returns also pointed to a collapse in the corporate media’s insistence that the Republicans will score victories at the expense of Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. Continue reading →

KINGSTON, N.Y.—The constitutional right to abortion and democracy itself took center stage and gave Democratic Ulster County, N.Y., Executive Pat Ryan a win in a special congressional election in a swing U.S. House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley. Continue reading →

American voters have heard plenty about Republicans seeking high office in 2022 who still deny that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. They have heard less about the Democratic candidates running against the election deniers, especially in battleground states. Continue reading →

Progressive activists and organizers are eyeing lessons from the resounding victory for abortion access in Kansas where nearly 60 percent of voters recently defeated a ban on the politicized medical procedure. Now, the Fairness Project hopes that state-by-state ballot measures can restore the reproductive right to an abortion that the Supreme Court stripped away earlier this year. Such measures can also achieve economic justice victories like increasing the minimum wage and expanding access to paid sick and family leave. Continue reading →

In an under-the-radar move to boost the GOP’s chances in November, the right-wing Supreme Court has told four states where lower courts found Republican legislators illegally drew congressional boundaries to exclude both Black and Democratic voters that they can go ahead and use those illegal maps in the November election. Continue reading →

Three months before the 2022 general election, momentum is tangibly growing for holding Donald Trump and Trump Republicans legally accountable for a range of criminal activities tied to their ultimately violent effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Continue reading →

Near the end of July, Andrew Yang—whose previous political projects include an unsuccessful run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, an unsuccessful run for the 2021 Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, and what initially looked likely to be an unsuccessful new “third party,” the Forward Party—announced a re-launch of that last effort. Continue reading →