Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: More than 800,000 noncitizens and “Dreamers” in New York City will have access to the ballot box — and could vote in municipal elections as early as next year — after Mayor Eric Adams allowed legislation to automatically become law Sunday. Opponents have vowed to challenge the new law, which the City Council approved a month ago. Unless a judge halts its implementation, New York City is the first major U.S. city to grant widespread municipal…

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Sam Levine reports: The Mississippi officials met in the heat of summer with a singular goal in mind: stopping Black people from voting. “We came here to exclude the Negro,” said the convention’s president. “Nothing short of this will answer.” This conclave took place in 1890. But remarkably, approximately 130 years later, the laws they came up with are still blocking nearly 16% of Mississippi’s Black voting-age population from casting a ballot. The US stands alone as one of the…

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Adam Serwer writes: As 2022 begins, the risk American democracy faces is not just that Donald Trump supporters will repeat the events of January 6, 2021—attempting to overturn a free and fair election to illegitimately install Trump as president. It is that Trump will win outright, and use his second term in office to further erode popular sovereignty. During the four years of the Trump presidency, his opponents could draw comfort from the fact that a majority of Americans had…

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Rioters are tear-gassed as they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images By Amanda J. Crawford, University of Connecticut Americans had to confront a new reality when an angry mob attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Some of their fellow citizens were in the grips of a false reality and had resorted to violence to support it. Conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and the strange alternate universe of QAnon…

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Lane Cuthbert and Alexander Theodoridis write: All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. Experts on both sides of the political aisle, and even President Donald Trump’s own Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election. Even a Republican-sponsored audit of Arizona’s results found no evidence of fraud or malfeasance. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most…

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The New York Times reports: The embattled president of Kazakhstan has the pedigree of an international technocrat. The son of prominent intellectuals, he studied in Moscow at a premier academy for diplomats, and later worked in the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. He served as a key adviser to the strongman who ruled the oil-rich Central Asian country as a fief for nearly three decades — and then, in 2019, became his heir. The rise of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to the presidency…

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Security fences stand near the U.S. Capitol on January 5, 2022. Drew Angerer/Getty Images By Ken Hughes, University of Virginia Now that a full year has passed since the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, the 2020 election and the republic, it’s evident that the attack never really ended. Instead, it spread out to other, less visible, more vulnerable targets. Donald Trump had hoped to reverse his election loss in a single, decisive, dramatic confrontation between his supporters and…

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The New York Times reports: Researchers led by Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth College, in a paper titled “Current Research Overstates American Support for Political Violence,” argue that “documented support for political violence is illusory, a product of ambiguous questions, conflated definitions, and disengaged respondents.” Often, pollsters were just capturing people expressing their partisan tribalism. So in a new YouGov survey of 2,750 Americans conducted in November, a group of political scientists known as Bright Line Watch took another whack…

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Karl Rove writes: What if in early January 2017, Democrats similarly attired and armed [as Trump supporters were on January 6, 2021] had stormed the Capitol and attempted to keep Congress from receiving the Electoral College results for the 2016 presidential election? What if Democrats claimed that Donald Trump’s razor-thin victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin resulted from extensive voter fraud and should be rejected, despite having failed to establish in a single court that extensive fraud had actually occurred?…

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Reuters reports: President Joe Biden on Thursday accused his predecessor Donald Trump of spreading a “web of lies” to undermine U.S. democracy in a speech on the anniversary of the deadly Capitol attack by Trump supporters who tried to undo his 2020 election defeat. Speaking at the white-domed building where rioters smashed windows, assaulted police and sent lawmakers fleeing for their lives on Jan. 6, 2021, Biden said Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread…

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