The Pew Center on the States has a new on-line service called Election Data Dispatches. It’s billed as a round-up of the best stories, data, research and analysis about what's involved in administering elections across the 50 states, what works, what needs improvement, etc - from voter registration to ballot design to election costs. Check [...]
Which companies are doing the best job of disclosing their political spending to their stockholders and the public? For several years, the Center for Political Accountability has led a growing campaign to make the biggest publicly traded companies see the wisdom in opening their books and lowering their exposure to the kind of attack that [...]
A trio of groups that analyze judicial elections today released a report documenting a national campaign “to intimidate America’s state judges into becoming accountable to money and ideologies instead of the Constitution and the law.” The New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2010 examines the “hostile takeover” of judicial elections by special interests and the attacks on [...]
So who do you want your Insurance Commissioner listening to when it comes time to regulate insurance rates? The public or the insurance companies? If the private companies supply the bulk of the commissioner’s campaign money, you can bet they’ll have an insider’s advantage. That’s one powerful reason why we need the Voter-Owned Elections program [...]
Here’s a story that deserves more attention: NC House Rules Co-chair Stephen LaRoque (R-Kinston) loaned his for-profit management company $200,000 from a non-profit organization that he set up to channel federal small-business loans to high risk ventures in rural North Carolina – and then he refused to disclose this insider dealing on the non-profit’s report [...]
Sign this petition: http://bit.ly/cut-the-strings-petition. And then pass this link along to 4 others.
The behemoth created by the proposed merger of Duke Energy and Progress Energy would not only yield the nation’s largest electric utility. The new creature would become the most politically influential corporation in NC, according to a new analysis by Democracy North Carolina. Duke and Progress Energy have long sponsored PACs that rank among the [...]
The State Auditor’s office issued a report criticizing the State Board of Elections’ failure to process campaign finance reports in a timely manner and hold late report filers accountable. Democracy NC has identified similar problems, including our May report pointing out that 42% of the campaign reports for the legislative winners in 2010 had not [...]
The ACLU has produced a graphic map that illustrates the wide variety of state laws that allow (or don’t allow) people with felony convictions to register and vote. An estimated 5.3 million Americans are currently disfranchised due to excessively restrictive laws. The voting rights of people with the same sentence for the same crime are [...]
The New Yorker’s profile of Art Pope last week helped pull back the curtain to reveal more about the 40 million dollar man prodding the right-wing’s recent successes in North Carolina. Rachel Maddow/MSNBC followed with a long segment that put his 2010 electoral victories in a national context for 2012 (jump ahead 7 minutes for [...]