Ny Safidinao

Voting rights has become an increasingly partisan issue. In Wisconsin, new voter ID laws led to brutal lines at the polls in urban areas—a development designed, even according to Republicans themselves , to suppress Democratic turnout . In Virginia at the end of April, governor Terry McAuliffe re-enfranchised all felons who had finished parole. In theory, the move returned the vote to 200,000 people. This was a refutation of a policy originally designed to explicitly deny black people the vote . It was also, potentially, a way to give more votes to more minority and poor voters, and tip a narrowly balanced purple state more Democratic in the US presidential election. The focus on voter IDs and felon disenfranchisement —while important—has inadvertently obscured other voting rights issues. Every year, with little comment, the United States denies millions of people representation in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories. Washington, DC, has a population o...

1. Can Republicans really change the rules in Cleveland to block Trump’s nomination? In a story titled “ Five Ways the Republican Convention Could Still Be Contentious ,” Jeremy Peters of the New York Times reported Sunday that at least some Republicans “hostile” to Donald Trump continue to daydream about derailing his nomination at the last minute in Cleveland. How? By changing the rules that govern the party’s nominating process. Peters went on to outline two possible scenarios. The first, which he labeled the “nuclear option,” could only be “described anonymously” by a rules expert. “It is tantalizing,” Peters explained, “because it is so simple”: Mr. Trump could be stopped with just a single-word change requiring the nominee to receive a supermajority of votes at the convention rather than the majority currently required. Mr. Trump, after all, had floated changing majority to plurality when it was not clear he would win the 1,237 delegates he needed. The second option, according to...

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced Tuesday that he was ending his presidential campaign, bowing to the reality that his crushing loss in Indiana all but assured the nomination of Donald J. Trump . “From the beginning, I have said that I will continue on as long as there is a viable path to victory,” he told supporters here. “Tonight, I am sorry to say, it appears that path has been closed.” Mr. Cruz, who staked his bid in the Republican race on a message of conservative purity and religious faith, had suffered through weeks of setbacks as the primary calendar reached the Northeast, where Mr. Trump significantly expanded his lead. But the senator had hoped to find more favorable terrain in Indiana, dashing across the state for over a week in a last-ditch effort to unify Republicans who viewed Mr. Trump’s success as an existential threat to the party. Since entering the race over a year ago, Mr. Cruz had far exceeded most expectations, energizing hard-line conservatives and casting h...