October Round-up: 5 Must Read Articles

Want to make sure you don’t miss the month’s best opinion pieces, deep dives, and analysis? Here’s your monthly roundup of must-read articles on voting rights from around the web:

1. Eric Holder penned an op-ed as the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, which centers on what has been called “the largest partisan asymmetry on record.” Maps created as a result of bad faith redistricting efforts are “destructive to the representative democracy that our founders envisioned,” he writes, and the “fight for fair representation is profoundly important to preserving our democracy and making our government accountable to the people.”

2. In the last year’s presidential election, an estimated 16,800 eligible, registered Wisconsin voters may not have voted because of the state’s new voter ID law. With margins of error, the number could be as high as Trump’s margin of victory in Wisconsin.

3. Experts say that Election Integrity Commission co-chair Kris Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program suffers from data security flaws. Kobach has made assurances that data collected by the Commission would “be kept confidential and secure,” but the flaws raise concerns about the Commission’s ability to secure citizens’ data.

4. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, has accepted a request by Democratic lawmakers to review Trump’s Election Integrity Commission. The request charged that “the manner in which the commission is conducting its work ‘will prevent the public from a full and transparent understanding of the commission’s conclusions and unnecessarily diminish confidence in our democratic process.'”

5. In Indiana, which has restrictive voter access laws and the 10th-lowest voter turnout rate of the 50 states, lawmakers recommended exploring measures to expand access to the vote. The measures being recommended are same-day registration and no-excuse absentee voting. For more information about voting access in Indiana, check out the Franchise Project’s Voting Access Scorecard.

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