Welcome to the Tuesday, July 16, Brew. Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:

1. Candidates in second Democratic presidential debates will be announced this week
2. Four statewide ballot measures certified over the past month
3. Nine candidates running for an open seat on Atlanta’s school board

Candidates in second Democratic presidential debates will be announced this week

Twenty-one Democratic presidential candidates have reached either the polling or fundraising threshold for the party’s second set of debates on July 30 and 31. Since only 20 candidates—10 per night—will participate, the Democratic National Committee will use tiebreaker criteria to determine who will participate. These criteria are, in order:

1. Candidates who have achieved both the polling and fundraising thresholds,

2. Candidates with the highest polling average, and

3. Candidates with the highest number of contributors.

The 14 candidates who have reached both sets of requirements are Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Willamson, and Andrew Yang.

Six other candidates—Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, John Hickenlooper, and Tim Ryan—have met the polling threshold of 1 percent support or more in three eligible national or early state polls.

Over the weekend, Mike Gravel announced he had reached the fundraising threshold of at least 65,000 unique contributors and at least 200 unique contributors from a minimum of 20 U.S. states. Four candidates have not yet met either qualifying criteria—Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Joe Sestak, and Tom Steyer.

The lineup for each night of the debates will be announced during a live drawing on CNN July 18. 

These debates—which will be held in Detroit—will be conducted using different rules than the first set of debates on June 26 and 27. According to CNN, candidates will be allowed to make both opening and closing statements and participants who repeatedly interrupt other speakers will be penalized. Unlike last month’s debate, there will be no questions requiring a show of hands or one-word, down-the-line answers. 

The third Democratic presidential debate is scheduled for Sept. 12 in Houston. Candidates will need to receive two percent support or more in four national or early state polls and have received donations from at least 130,000 unique donors to qualify.

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Four statewide ballot measures certified over the past month 

In our latest edition of State Ballot Measure Monthly—click here to subscribe—we learned that four new statewide measures have been certified for the 2019 and 2020 ballots. 

Three will go before voters in 2019. Here's what each measure would do:

• A state constitutional amendment in Maine would authorize legislation allowing persons with physical disabilities that prevent them from signing their own names to use an alternative signature to sign petitions for citizen-initiated ballot measures. Maine's constitution currently requires people to sign petitions for citizen-initiated ballot measures with their original signature. 

• A New Jersey amendment would extend an existing $250 property tax deduction that veterans receive to be sent to continuing care retirement centers on behalf of the veterans living there. It would also require those retirement centers to pass the value of the deduction on to veterans in the form of credits or payments.  

• A Pennsylvania amendment would add a specific set of rights for crime victims—together known as Marsy's Law—to the state constitution.

A 2020 measure that would allow state and local governments to pass campaign finance laws was certified in Oregon. The state legislatures referred all four of these amendments to their respective ballots.

Read this month’s issue→

Nine candidates running for an open seat on Atlanta’s school board

Nine candidates are running in a special election for a seat on the Atlanta Public Schools board. They include three former school board candidates, a former Atlanta city council candidate, and a former candidate for the Georgia House of Representatives. The election is Sept. 17. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, a runoff election will be held Oct. 15.

Former board member Byron Amos resigned the seat in January to run for the Atlanta City Council. Amos had served on the board since 2011 and was re-elected in a 2017 runoff by less than one percentage point. Keisha Carey, who lost to Amos in the 2017 runoff, is one of the nine candidates seeking the open seat. The winner of the special election will serve until 2021 when the entire nine-member board is up for election.

The Atlanta public school district is the sixth-largest in Georgia. It had 51,145 students during the 2014-2015 school year.