A farewell to ‘Digital Democracy’
Well, web_crawlr readers, I have a bittersweet announcement: This is the final installment of Digital Democracy.
It’s been an absolute pleasure writing this column for you. Explaining the laws, ballot measures, and court decisions across the country that are making a splash online has afforded me the opportunity to take a deep dive on the legislative ecosystems of each state—and I thought I’d take an opportunity to share some of my conclusions from my seven months of reporting.
The hot-button issues in each state aren’t all that different. The two main topics that kept coming up again and again in Digital Democracy are abortion and voting.
After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that constitutionally enshrined the federal right to an abortion, state voters have passed the right to an abortion—even in Republican-led states. And next month, eleven states will have abortion on their ballots.
And thanks to false claims from former President Donald Trump and his supporters that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, many states have passed voting rights measures—or have voting measures on November ballots—to ensure that non-citizens can’t vote (which is already against federal law) and to prevent against any amorphous “fraud.”
Unsurprisingly, these two issues seem to be the ones that Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump have hinged their campaigns on: Hers sees abortion as a winning issue, and Trump and other Republicans have put all their might into alleging that undocumented immigrants voted for Harris, thus illegally handing her the election.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from reporting Digital Democracy for you all these past seven months, it’s that when you leave issues up to the states, they decide. Federal elections and legislation is much more murky—and more of a toss-up.
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