Voting Rights and Democracy

Goals and Aims

We endeavour to keep ourselves informed of key issues affecting the health of our democracy and work to share information with our colleagues and fellow members through a variety of engagements: speaker events, webinars, film screenings, study groups.

We have a strong focus on channeling knowledge into activism to make the changes that we want to see in our US politics: GOTV, phone banking, postcard writing, communicating with our MoC’s and others elected officials, writing and preparing Resolutions and preparing content to be adopted into the DA and Democratic Party platforms.

The PNR Voting Rights group works to undertake research, outreach and activism to advocate and promote awareness amongst our DAUK and DA community.  This includes voter engagement work via our DAUK Family and Youth Projects Initiative and The Future Voters Project.

We focus on the following areas: 

1. Voter suppression

Any measure or strategy used to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. 

2. Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries.

3. Prison gerrymandering

Prison gerrymandering is a practice whereby states and local governments count incarcerated persons as residents of the prisons where they are held, as opposed to their pre-incarceration addresses, when election district lines are drawn. This practice artificially inflates the population count—and thus, the political influence—of the districts where prisons and jails are located. 

4. Felon re-enfranchisement

Felon re-enfranchisement is about restoring the right to vote to individuals who have been convicted of felony crimes but are not incarcerated or have completed their sentences.

5. Disinformation and Big Tech Regulation

Emphasis on disinformation campaigns, propaganda, ’fake news’, Hate Spin, digital rights, media literacy and big tech regulation.

6. Voter engagement

Voter engagement efforts aim to increase voter participation, particularly in underrepresented communities, via voter registration drives and Get Out The Vote measures.

7. Safeguarding our elections

Efforts to safeguard our elections work to prevent election hacking and promote election integrity where results can be verified and trusted.

8. Electoral Reform

Electoral reform includes any reforms to the electoral and political systems that make lawmakers more accountable to the constituents who elect them.

9. Campaign finance reform

Campaign finance reform is the political effort in the United States to change the involvement of money in politics, and in political campaigns.

10. Getting money out of politics

Efforts to get money out of politics includes opposing the use of super PACS, the flow of dark money into politics and the reversal of the US Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.