Tag: War on Voting

Which Candidate Matches You on the Issues?

Buck Banks

voting-boothYou can take a quiz to find out which presidential candidate (if any) most closely matches up with your core values. Then you’ll know how to vote!

Almost 25 million of your fellow Americans have employed the quiz to tell them whom to support in the coming election based on their values and stances on a variety of issues. So don’t be a low-information voter anymore, let the Interwebs tell you who you should vote for!

Suggestion: When taking the survey, check the “other stances” selection to give a more nuanced response and don’t forget to click on the slider that indicates how important each issue is to you.

Full disclosure: I sided 92% of the time with Bernie Sanders, 88% with Hillary Clinton and 72% with Martin O’Malley — not surprising. More disturbing, however, were my match-ups with Republicans: 21% with Donald Trump, 20% with Ben Carson and 19% with Ted Cruz.

Obviously, I’ve got some naval-staring to do …

A Blue Tide Terrified North Carolina Republicans into Launching Their War on Voting

Jon Ponder
Left: Pres. Obama’s election in 2008 drove high turnout among students and African-Americans in North Carolina; right: North Carolina moved up from having one of the worst voter turnout records in 1991 to one of the best in 2012 – these two factors terrified the state Republican Party into launching its current war on voting

Rachel Maddow covered the North Carolina Republican Party’s war on voting live from Elizabeth City, N.C., last night. She led off by explaining what it was that so terrified the state GOP that became desperate to kill the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of their own constituents. The source of their terror can be summed up in the two charts above. The chart on the left shows the demographics of the most motivated voters in 2008: students and African Americans. The chart on the right shows how efforts by the formerly Democratic-controlled North Carolina government to make voting easier helped improve the state’s turnout record from one of the worst in the nation, in 1991, to one of the best in 2012.

North Carolina Republicans realized that their days were numbered if these trends were allowed to continue. But instead of coming up with policies that might be more popular or candidates with better appeal, they chose instead to change the rules for voting in ways that specifically targeted students and African-Americans, among others.

Watch the entire segment from last night’s Rachel Maddow show below:

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