The Freedom to Vote Act, which would make a number of major changes to election law in the United States, is could come up for a vote soon. The bill includes a number of provisions, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering for congressional districts, new registration and early voting requirements for federal elections, and a federal voter ID provision.

California is now the largest state to permanently adopt universal mail-in ballot distribution. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the measure into law Monday. While it goes a long way to increase voter participation in the Golden State, public officials are still not doing everything they can to give all voters a level playing field in elections.

It’s January 2021, there’s a new president in D.C., a new Senate majority and a Democratic majority crowing about how voting rights is their top priority, even making the For the People Act their first bill (H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate).

Cut to nine months later.

Change can be challenging, particularly in the political arena. A deeply rooted history only adds to that challenge. The filibuster is an excellent case-in-point. It allows senators to prohibit a bill from being voted upon, unless three-fifths of the Senate vote to limit and then close the debate, referred to as invoking cloture. The filibuster has been both critiqued as obstructing democratic ideals and hailed as enhancing them. 

After more than a year of economic suffering that has left millions of Americans reeling from the devastating effects of unemployment, the end finally appears to be in sight. While the upward trends that we are experiencing are certainly promising, there is a misguided misconception that there are already enough quality jobs out there, and employees simply need to return to work.

With S1 going to markup before the U.S. Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday, May 11, the inherent hypocrisy behind HR1/S1 - the ‘For the People Act’ must be called out. But it won't happen as part of the public hearing process, because there won’t be any one present that will raise it.

U.S. democracy is in existential crisis.

The country already suffers from unrepresentative winner-take-all, single-seat-district legislative elections, a two-party duopoly, partisan gerrymandering, the corrupting influence of big money in politics, and an Electoral College and US Senate that give vastly outsized influence to some voters over others. In the case of the Electoral College, it can also prevent the presidential candidate receiving the most votes from being elected.

January 6, 2021 was — to borrow a line from a famous speech by former president Franklin Roosevelt — a day which will live in infamy. Two days later, Twitter announced that it had permanently banned @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter account due to violations of its “Glorification of Violence” policy. Other social media companies were quick to follow suit.

The House on Wednesday, March 3, passed HR 1, also known as the "For The People Act," which provides sweeping reform to US elections, including on the subjects of gerrymandering, election security, and the corruptive influence of foreign entities in US elections. The bill passed on a mostly party-line vote, with one Democrat joining Republicans to vote against it.

Editor's Note: Please see the corresponding number in the "Notes" for the source of the information.

Introduction

Now more than ever, police misconduct has rocketed to the forefront of our national conversation.

Unfortunately, the current system has proven unequipped to handle this misconduct and hold police accountable for their actions. (1) After all, an outsized number of police officers who violate their duties are never tried for their offenses, and those who are fired often “police hop” to policing jobs elsewhere. (2)