Today the Census Bureau released detailed population and demographic data from the 2020 census. It’s the starter’s pistol for states and local governments to begin drawing new voting district boundaries, and gerrymandering is bound to follow. This time around it could be worse than ever due to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that gerrymandering for party advantage cannot be challenged in federal court. The practice’s threat to our democracy is real. From how it works to how to end it, our new explainer details six things to know about partisan gerrymandering.

As the bad faith “audit” of the 2020 election results in Arizona drags on, the partisan effort to unearth nonexistent evidence of voter fraud is spreading to other states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin. These politically motivated shams are a far cry from the legitimate election validation and auditing procedures routinely used by election officials to count votes and check results. Their purpose is to perpetuate the Big Lie that the election was stolen, and for the sake of our democratic system, they must stop.

The Department of Homeland Security was founded in a flurry immediately after 9/11. A jumble of agencies with disparate mandates, it has been riddled with problems from the start. In an essay for the Brennan Center’s series marking 20 years since 9/11, former U.S. national security official Richard Clarke proposes a way to rebuild DHS in a more sensible fashion: by breaking it in two. One new entity would focus only on domestic security, and the other would relate to borders and transportation. The result would be a more rational structure with a better chance at success.

The latest essay in our Punitive Excess series is by Shon Hopwood, a Georgetown University law professor who served over 10 years in federal prison. He argues that the American prison system seems designed not to rehabilitate, but to ensure that people return to incarceration instead of successfully reentering society. With dehumanizing treatment, terrible conditions perpetuate intergenerational cycles of imprisonment in communities that already suffer from too much involvement with the criminal legal system. Hopwood offers up policies that would help end the abuse in prisons in favor of fair and just environments that will make us all safer.

Our new report looks at how Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter’s content moderation practices can limit the freedom of expression for marginalized groups while protecting the powerful groups that can be the main drivers of online and offline harms. Read more on Instagram >>