Latest news with #voters
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
"I got pretty revved up": Voters angry over address confirmation letters from Maricopa County
The Brief The Maricopa County Recorder's Office sent out about 83,000 erroneous letters to voters, asking them to confirm their address. The office says the letters were sent due to a glitch from a third-party vendor and should be disregarded by voters. A new, corrected letter will be sent to all affected voters sometime next week. PHOENIX - The Maricopa County Recorder's Office is pledging to fix a big glitch. Tens of thousands of voters received strange letters in the mail asking if they had moved, when they had not. The letters then asked them to fix the mistake. What we know Approximately 83,000 of these letters were sent out on county recorder letterhead and started hitting mailboxes this week – out of the blue. It said Arizona had received information that these people had obtained a driver's license or identification card from another state and no longer lived at the address that matches their voter registration file. And then proof was required, like a birth certificate or passport proving their current address. What they're saying All, or most of these letters were sent to people who hadn't moved, or got another ID, like this man in Fountain Hills. "You need to admit right away what happened. What you're doing to take care of it, you need to get ahead of the problem. That way you have the problem. " On June 27, the office admitted it was an error and blamed a third-party vendor. "I got pretty revved up," said one man who did not want to be identified. He was angry after getting the letter from the county asking if he had moved and then demanding proof that he had not. "What gets my gall is that I've been a resident of Arizona since 1972," he said. "I joined the Arizona National Guard in '81. Served my country for 20 years all over the world.. came back with a ton of injuries. And I have to prove my citizenship because of your glitch?" The backstory The letter stated that Arizona had received information that these people had obtained a driver's license or identification card from another state and no longer lived at the address that matches their voter registration file. It then requested proof, such as a birth certificate or passport, to prove their current address. "They don't need to do anything right now. Disregard the letter," said Janine Petty, director of voter registration. The county quickly admitted the mistake, blaming a third-party vendor error, but wouldn't go much further. "So the voters should disregard the letter that they received and wait for the corrected letter," Petty said. What's next The new corrected letter is expected to start to arrive sometime next week. But for this man, the damage is already done. "If there was a fire and all the records were burned, I get it, but it's not my job as a taxpayer to fix the bureaucratic glitch," he said. The recorder's office would not say what the new letter will say or if the original letter was in any way targeting a specific group, area or party affiliation. It would only confirm that the new letters would come at no cost to the taxpayer. "Today, the Maricopa County Recorder's Office (MCRO) issued the following statement regarding the voter correspondence that was erroneously sent by a third-party vendor for Maricopa County. Yesterday, the MCRO was made aware of voter correspondence sent in error by a third-party vendor for Maricopa County. No voter records were affected due to this error. This error was not caused by internal mistakes at the MCRO. The vendor has taken full responsibility for the mistake, and has already begun mailing out the corrected correspondence to the affected voters at their own expense, so there will be no additional cost to the taxpayers. The approved correspondence was for voters needing to provide Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) related to the MVD glitch. The 90-day period for return of DPOC begins on the date the notice is sent out. Due to the vendor error, the operative date for the start of the 90-day period will be the date that the corrected correspondence is sent to each voter. If voters have questions, please contact our office at 602-506-1511 or voterinfo@
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Board approves Ranked Choice Voting summary that residents will see on petitions
The Brief A new form of voting for elected officials may be presented as a ballot proposal in Michigan in 2026. On Friday, the state canvassing board gave its blessing to the petition language that citizens can sign if they want to see it on the ballot next year. Instead of a single election where the candidate with the most votes wins, ranked choice voting allows people to rank their favorite candidates. (FOX 2) - The Michigan Board of State Canvassers approved the language that petitioners pushing to change the state's voting processes would show to residents as they gather signatures for a potential future proposal. Ranked Choice Voting is not how Michigan currently elects its officials. But residents may get the opportunity to approve implementing it in the 2026 midterms. Big picture view The board that approves language that campaigns can use when gathering signatures for ballot proposals gave the green light to the group that wants to change how Michigan elects candidates for office. On Friday, the Michigan Board of State Canvassers approved the summary that Rank MI Vote can show residents when it gathers signatures in hopes of putting the issue before voters. The effort is still in its early planning stages. But if the group gets enough people to sign onto their petitions, it would appear as a ballot proposal during the 2026 midterms. If a majority of voters approve the proposal, it would change Michigan's constitution. Instead of the candidate with the most votes winning an election during one round of voting, voters would rank their favorite candidates. The backstory Voters have the opportunity to rewrite the Michigan constitution using ballot proposals. But the journey a proposed constitutional amendment takes before appearing on a ballot is a lengthy one. It starts with a citizen-led petition drive. When a group wants to change something about the state constitution, they bring it to the canvassing board, which works to summarize the proposed change in 100 words or less. After approving the summary, the group must obtain enough signatures from voters before they can get it to appear on the official election ballot. Only then can citizens vote for or against the constitutional change. Dig deeper On Friday, the canvassing board approved summary language that Rank MI Vote will take to voters as it seeks to obtain enough signatures. The election method allows voters to rank their favorite candidates in a race. If a candidate receives more than half of the first choices, they win the race. If no candidate wins the most first-choice votes, then the lowest-ranked candidates will be eliminated, and their voter's choices will be reallocated to their second choice. The proposal would also move up the summer primary earlier in the year to allow for enough time. Below is the summary language approved by the canvassing board: Require Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) for federal offices, governor/lieutenant governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, allowing voters to numerically rank candidates by voter preference starting in 2029, count votes in rounds, eliminating lowest-ranked candidate, and reallocating their votes to remaining ranked candidates until candidate with most final round votes is declared the winner, allow voters to rank at least four more candidates than positions to be nominated/elected, unless insufficient number of candidates, authorize local jurisdiction to adopt use of RCV in local elections, move August primary to June or earlier in even-year elections. Require legislative funding and implementing legislation. The Source The Michigan Board of State Canvassers meeting on Friday was used while reporting this story.
Washington Post
a day ago
- Business
- Washington Post
Deficit-financed tax cuts aren't real tax cuts
Everyone is glad to see the waiter when he brings the appetizers. No one is excited to see him when he comes around with the bill. What is true of waiters is also true of the politicians who serve us: Cheers greet those who announce new benefits, while those who suggest raising taxes to pay for them meet with voter fury. This is why the United States has a persistent budget deficit exceeding 6 percent of the economy.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Here is the single thing Labour can do to see off Reform and make British politics work
Look at the coverage of any general election opinion polling recently and what you are likely to see is a map of Britain divided into its constituencies and covered in Reform's light blue. They are utterly dominant when it comes to the projected seats. Take the latest YouGov MRP poll, published with great fanfare this week. MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) is a particularly detailed kind of poll that creates projections for each constituency – and this one predicted that Nigel Farage's party would win a whopping 42% of the seats inside the House of Commons if a general election were held now. Even this was fairly low compared with some other recent data that actually projected a majority of 30 seats. But while Farage and some parts of the media really want you to focus on the number of seats Reform might win, what you should be looking at is what the data is actually telling us. Stay with me on this. Because, while the latest YouGov poll may show Reform achieving 42% of UK seats, the proportion of people in the UK who actually support them, according to that same poll, is only 26%. What we really should be taking from the latest data is the headline 'three-quarters of UK voters don't want Nigel Farage and Reform'. Only one in four people want them in government. When you think about it like this, the ridiculousness of the current system is laid bare. This party is unpopular with most of the voters, yet the question on Westminster watchers' lips is: 'Can they win a majority?' This warps the discourse around our entire political system and creates the impression that most of the public want something that they self-evidently don't. If you need more convincing as to how the UK's first-past-the-post system is spinning politics to the extremes, take a look at the part of the UK where Reform are polling even better – Wales. Recent polls in Wales have shown Reform and Plaid Cymru vying for first place ahead of the Senedd (Welsh parliament) elections next year. The latest poll puts Reform in first place with 29%. But in Wales there is no genuine conversation (outside the Reform party itself) about Reform really being able to form a government next year. And why is this? It is because in Cymru we have a system that is far more proportional. There is simply no way that any party can come close to a majority with less than a third of the vote. Call me crazy, but in a democracy, doesn't that make sense? Let me give you an example. In a poll at the start of May looking at voting intentions in Wales, Plaid Cymru got 30% and Reform UK 25%. When it came to seat projections inside the Senedd (which has 96 seats), Plaid was projected about 35 and Reform 30. This is broadly reflective of the numbers of people who would have voted for them. So Reform could easily be the largest party in Wales next year. I think it will be. But there is still very little chance of it forming a government for the plain and simple reason that its politics are miles away from the views of most people in Wales. Inside the Senedd there are six parties who can realistically win seats: Plaid, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Conservatives and Reform. All those first four parties have categorically ruled out working with Farage. The only party that would do so is the Tories, but all the evidence suggests that most of Reform's gains are coming at their expense. So the better Reform does, the smaller is its only prospective coalition partner likely to be. This is the benefit of proportional democracy in action: it stops extremes guiding the agenda. Imagine you and 12 mates are going out. Three of you want to go have a cappuccino, three want lattes and three want flat whites. You all want coffee but can't quite agree on which specific one, but broadly you are in agreement on what you want to do. But imagine that the remaining four want to go out to get out and get battered on Special Brew and smash up a bar. Under first-past-the-post, because there are more people wanting Special Brew than cappuccino, lattes or flat whites respectively, you are all condemned to go out on the piss. Under the Welsh setup, and frankly those of most healthy democratic systems (like those in New Zealand, Finland and Norway), the direction of the nation is as close as possible to the view of most of its people, not simply the largest minority. Whereas the UK as a whole is going to be forced to go out on the lash by Reform even though they really want a nice cup of coffee. If Keir Starmer really wants to counter Reform, he needs to change an electoral process that punishes parties for having broad appeal. It's the single biggest change he can make as prime minister that will stop the hard right seizing power. Will he have the courage to do away with a system that gave his own party 63% of the seats on just 34% of the vote? I doubt it. But if he is serious about putting country over party, he must. Will Hayward is a Guardian columnist. He publishes a regular newsletter on Welsh politics and is the author of Independent Nation: Should Wales Leave the UK?
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
What to know about ranked-choice voting as NYC heads to polls
New York City's ranked choice voting system will be critical to determining who prevails in its Democratic mayoral primary. Voters first approved ranked-choice voting for certain city elections in 2019, but this will be only its second mayoral race to be run under the system. The winner of the Democratic primary four years ago won by about 7,000 votes, and the primary may be just as close this time. Supporters tout the system as an alternative to the first-past-the-post system, in which the candidate who receives the most votes wins, even if it's with less than a majority of the vote. They argue it requires a candidate to build a wider coalition and can produce winners who are more acceptable to a larger group of voters. In New York City's ranked-choice system, voters are allowed to rank up to five candidates in order of their preference, though they aren't required to rank five. If one candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, they are declared the winner outright. This seems unlikely to occur with a crowded field of nearly a dozen candidates, including several big names in the city. If no candidate receives a majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed according to their supporters' next choices. If a voter doesn't have a second choice, then their vote is considered exhausted and won't factor into the next round of counting. The process continues as additional candidates are eliminated in subsequent rounds and one candidate reaches a majority. In 2021, that took eight rounds for now-Mayor Eric Adams (D), who is running this time as an independent for reelection. He started out ahead in the first round of counting with about 30 percent of the vote, but he didn't gain much in the following rounds as other candidates gained on him. In the seventh round, he was ahead with just more than 40 percent of the vote to just more than 30 percent for former city Sanitation Department Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and 29 percent for former city official Maya Wiley. Wiley was eliminated, and most of her supporters preferred Garcia, but it wasn't enough for her to beat Adams, who ultimately won by less than 1 point. This year, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Assembly member Zohran Mamdani will need to rely on support from voters who prefer one of the other candidates — such as Comptroller Brad Lander, New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and former Comptroller Scott Stringer — as their top choice. Those three candidates have been in the next tier behind Cuomo and Mamdani but generally haven't received more than low double digits in the polls. Mamdani is hoping to use ranked-choice to his advantage as he and some other candidates have worked to try to get voters to rank any candidate except for Cuomo. Mamdani and Lander, who has often come in third in polling, have cross-endorsed each other, calling on their supporters to rank them first and second. The goal is to make it more likely that as many votes for one candidate as possible go to the other candidate when one of them is eliminated, creating a united front against Cuomo. Adrienne Adams didn't formally cross-endorse, to some Cuomo opponents' disappointment, but she called on voters to back a slate of candidates endorsed by the Working Families Party, a smaller, left-wing party influential among progressives. That slate includes herself, Mamdani, Lander and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie. Cuomo regularly has been first in the initial round based on polling, usually in the mid- to upper-30s. That would mean he needs help to get to a majority. Polling has shown him usually inching up to get there in seven to 10 rounds of counting. The final results of the race are also likely not to come Tuesday. New York City allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Tuesday to be counted after primary day, so the rounds of ranked choice won't happen until next July 1. But what seems apparent is Cuomo and Mamdani will engage in a multiround race to get to more than 50 percent. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
