Elections and Voting

February 25, 2016 - This week a bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders bestowed the Congressional Gold Medal on the Alabama protest marchers who helped win passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But there's little bipartisan unity on restoring provisions of the law gutted by the Supreme Court, and some marchers are speaking out about it.

February 19, 2016 - With concern and anger growing over the corrupting influence of big money in politics, activists nationwide and across the South are planning to risk arrest in Washington and take part in solidarity events in states nationwide to demand reform.

February 19, 2016 - This year the U.S. electorate is expected to be the most diverse ever, and that growing diversity has the potential to alter the political landscape in the conservative South.

February 18, 2016 - The first presidential primaries in the South get underway this week in South Carolina, a state embroiled in the controversy over expanding offshore oil and gas drilling to the Atlantic. While most of the Republicans support expanded drilling, the Democrats don't want to see it come to the East Coast.

February 12, 2016 - The court battle over North Carolina's congressional and legislative districts highlights the role of well-funded interests in shaping political maps. A Washington, D.C.-based super PAC not only helped draw up the congressional districts that were recently ruled unconstitutional, but also helped elect legislators and an N.C. Supreme Court justice who approved the maps.

February 12, 2016 - North Carolina's Republican-controlled legislature redrew congressional districts to make two of them majority-black — and then moved this year's primary up two months. Now, with absentee voting already underway, those districts have been ruled unconstitutional and the legislature ordered to draw new ones.