A Good Day at the Office, October Surprise, Power to the People

By Ashley Winstead, Director of Strategic Communications

A subset of the 56,000 North Carolinians barred from voting by a state felony disenfranchisement law will be able to cast a ballot this year, after attorneys Daryl V. Atkinson of Forward Justice and Daniel Jacobson of Arnold & Porter in September won a partial victory in their effort to get the law deemed unconstitutional. In response to their court case, a three-judge panel concluded that one part of the state’s law — the requirement to pay off fines and fees, essentially a poll tax — is in violation of the state constitution. The rule will not be enforced in the upcoming election.

Some background: Central to their argument was a demonstration of how deeply rooted the disenfranchisement law is in North Carolina’s racist history. The attorneys drew on overwhelming evidence, including testimony from historians, to show that the law was originally created in response to white outrage over Black men gaining the right to vote in North Carolina circa 1868. The state imposed a number of restrictions over the years, all targeting Black voters in an effort to suppress their voting power. And while some of these restrictions have since been knocked down, requirements to complete probation and parole and pay off fees and fines before being allowed to vote remained intact.

Why It Matters: 56,000 North Carolinians' ability to vote is reason enough. But the case has implications that exceed the state of North Carolina. Opponents argue the very principle of tying a person's ability to vote to whether they've paid their court debt constitutes wealth-based discrimination, and keeping people from voting until they've completed probation or parole ignores the reality that Black communities are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and thus disproportionately disenfranchised. 

What’s Next: Other states are grappling with overturning similar laws: Iowa and Kentucky still require people with felony records to complete probation and parole before they're allowed to vote, and Florida is embroiled in a fight to restore voting rights to people who still owe court debt. As Atkinson says, “If there was ever a time where we need to hear from all of our citizens, all of our community members on the proper direction of our state and federal government, now is that time. When would it not be?”

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By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

In states from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania to Florida, the way district maps are drawn massively advantage the party in power, making it all but impossible for opponents to gain a majority — no matter their share of the vote. But voters in Virginia and Missouri will have a chance to strike major blows against gerrymandering this fall.

What’s Happening: Many maps, like Missouri’s, were intentionally created to protect incumbents by creating very few competitive districts, denying voters a genuine choice. Several discriminate against racial minorities by diluting their voting power for partisan gain. And many were done behind closed doors, preventing voters from seeing the manipulation done in their name. “Everything is pre-baked,” said Sean Nicholson of Clean Missouri, an anti-gerrymandering advocacy group supported by Arnold Ventures. “There's no way to hold your elected officials accountable. And there's no way to have a functional choice about who represents you.”

What’s Next: This Election Day, voters in two states face ballot measures on how to draw legislative lines:

• In Missouri, Amendment 3 would undo a widely-supported 2018 reform to make the system fairer — and create a process even more rigged than the one in place. Clean Missouri has launched a campaign urging a No vote. 

• In Virginia, Amendment 1 would end legislators’ exclusive control of the process, giving ordinary citizens a major role. Fair Maps Virginia is leading the campaign for a Yes vote. 

Bottom line: Lawmakers need to be held accountable for their actions and the people they serve. The system of gerrymandering "is resulting in politicians who don’t feel like they have to be responsive to what voters want because they feel safe and unaccountable,” says AV Vice President Sam Mar.

Related: To empower voters, former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urge a No vote on Missouri’s Amendment 3.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

California’s Proposition 25 will result in fewer people detained before arraignment even in jurisdictions that already have progressive pretrial policies, according to a new report by the California Policy Lab. The study looked at booking data for 2017 and 2018 in San Francisco and Sonoma County. On a case-by-case basis, researchers worked to determine the impact on the two jurisdictions if the reforms from Prop. 25 had been in place.

Why It Matters: This report may seem like a routine piece of research, but in the context of a heated campaign for Prop. 25 it’s basically a bombshell. Some progressive organizations have expressed skepticism about Prop. 25, arguing that its use of pretrial assessment may be worse than the status quo and exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system. This report indicates that those concerns are misplaced. Release rates increased for all demographics, with Black Californians especially benefitting. (However, it did not close the racial gap.)

What’s Next: Voters need to say Yes on Prop 25 and finally eliminate cash bail in California. “Referenda elections don’t usually have an October Surprise,” says AV Vice President of Criminal Justice Advocacy James Williams. “This is the sort of thing that can really change minds at the last minute to vote yes on Prop. 25.”

Related: CalMatters offers a balanced look at the Prop. 25 debate. 

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager
 

If we want to understand the impacts of U.S. government policy, we need more holistic ways to measure it. That’s the premise of the Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania, where Director Kent Smetters and his team have developed a rich system of mathematical modeling to forecast more accurately how public policy — such as tax cuts,  stimulus checks, and coronavirus lockdowns — will affect people over a lifetime. Over the short time span of five years, this small but mighty organization has developed a framework, subject to rigorous, honest testing, that is helping policymakers across party lines and at every level of government apply data to policies and programs in real-time. As Smetters points out, “We don't try to influence outcomes or make a judgment whether it’s good or bad. What we do is provide policymakers with a sandbox that allows them to explore their ideas before they actually put pen to paper.”
 

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Related: Penn Wharton estimates that each month of COVID-19 school closures will cost current students between $12,000 and $15,000 in future earnings. 

I’ve been binging “The Haunting of Bly Manor” in my free time, but what’s more bone-chilling than that ghost story is this documentary about the history of voter suppression in this country. “All In: The Fight for Democracy” starts with the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race between former Georgia Rep. Stacey Abrams and then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was both a candidate and overseer of the election process. Victory went to Kemp, but Abrams maintains that voter suppression was at play. (She is also a producer of this film, and her sections include some interesting personal history.)  But this documentary is about more than one election — it illustrates vividly our dark history of voter suppression — tactics “as old as the nation” (see North Carolina story above) and still very much in use today. It’s a painful and shameful history lesson — but an essential one for all Americans in 2020. Is it time for a new Voting Rights Act? 


 

Related: A court ruling allows Texas to reject mail-in ballots over mismatched signatures — without giving voters a chance to appeal.

Related: A Vice investigation finds nearly 21,000 Election Day polling locations were eliminated for 2020.

By Stuart Buck, Arnold Ventures Vice President of Research

This week, I'd like to recommend a simply impressive article by the journalist Maite Vermeulen. She begins by discussing a phenomenon in the literature on migration (human migration, that is, not butterflies or salmon) in which as "poor countries become richer, outward migration increases rather than decreases" at a certain point, perhaps because people are better able to pick up and leave. She had referred to this phenomenon many times in her prior journalism. 

Then, however, she saw a new study claiming that this pattern was a myth. She spoke to the researchers and was writing a new article. But she came across a refutation from another researcher. She kept digging, asking more and more experts to interpret the dispute and help resolve it. 

For all the details, you'll have to read the article. But the impressive part is how seriously Vermeulen took her work, how doggedly she kept at a difficult econometric dispute, and her concluding section on how journalism and science itself ought to work: 

"The only solution seems to be cumulative knowledge: asking all the smart people you can find to give it their best shot too. At its very best, that’s how science should work. And when that happens, it often turns out not to be about what’s true or false. Instead, it’s about which question we want to answer."

Well said.

• A letter (more like a plea) from working parents everywhere.
   
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