President signs executive order blocking Census Bureau from excluding undocumented immigrants from data – here’s what else is worth watching
Happy Thursday,
After an inauguration in which Amanda Gorman left America breathless with her poetry, Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez sparkled, and Bernie Sanders, well, was Bernie Sanders, today is the first full day of Joe Biden’s presidency.
From a violent insurrection to countless attempts to suppress votes:
Attacks on democracy have come in many forms.
The first bill the @SenateDems majority will introduce will be the #ForThePeople Act to renew democracy, end big money in politics, and tackle corruption. #S1
Require early voting and same-day registration for federal elections.
Require states to automatically register voters who interact with certain state agencies and place limits on how aggressively states can remove voters from the rolls
Require states to set up independent commissions to draw congressional districts, reducing the potential for excessive partisan gerrymandering.
More than a dozen civil rights groups in Georgia called for the resignation of a Republican election official in Gwinnett county, a battleground outside Atlanta that has shifted Democratic in recent years. Alice O’Lenick is currently serving as the chair of the elections board in Gwinnett county and recently called for Republicans to change voting laws in the state so “we at least have a shot at winning”, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post.
After the 2020 election, Ohio removed nearly 98,000 voters from its rolls as part of its regular process to keep voter information up to date, according to Cleveland.com. But what struck me about the story is that there were initially more than 115,000 people set to be removed, but more than 10,000 people prevented themselves from being purged by voting in November. That means there were at least 10,000 eligible voters who the state nearly purged erroneously. While the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, a Republican, has earned praise for publishing the list of people set to be purged before they are removed, such a high error rate suggests that Ohio’s process for flagging ineligible voters is prone to mistakes and could disenfranchise voters.