Virginia Rising

The ACLU of Virginia and more than a dozen other groups concerned about voting rights today sent a letter to Governor Bob McDonnell urging him to veto legislation that imposes stricter identification requirements at the polls, which the groups expect will limit eligible voters’ access on Election Day. Read more here.

By Noah Feldman On a cold, windy night in Richmond more than 25 people showed to talk about what we can do to extend Medicaid to more than 400,000 Virginians this year. The event was incredibly exciting. Prominent members of the Healthcare field were there as well as people in the community who care deeply about the struggle. We held …

by Jon Liss For 50 years Virginia and the South have been relegated to political backwater on the margins of history.   With our racially polarized voting patterns, systemic disenfranchisement of people of color, relative absence of unions or social justice institutions, and two dominant political parties generally competing for the same mythic white middle class male voter – no one …

Over 7% of Virginia’s adults are denied their most fundamental democratic right – the right to vote.

Watch live as Cornel West and Tavis Smiley talk about what we all can do to fight poverty and win a better Virginia. Stay tuned at 11am as our very own Tram Nguyen takes the stage. Broadcasting live with Ustream

20 activists from around the country have converged in Richmond, VA to organize people from across the city to fight for healthcare and voting rights for all. Follow their adventures here: //

INSTITUTE INDEX: Will Southern governors sacrifice their economies by seceding from the Medicaid expansion? Read more here.

Virginia New Majority – Northern Virginia Organizer Virginia New Majority is building power for progressive change in Virginia.  We are Virginia’s leading civic engagement organization mobilizing and organizing thousands of voters.  Our year-round approach to organizing involves mass scale voter outreach, linked to intensive leadership development and chapter –building.  We are currently organizing two statewide campaigns to expand the electorate …

After a grueling legislative session in 2012, people across the Commonwealth were ready to stop protecting the status quo by defeating a seemingly endless right wing attack on the majority of Virginians. We’ve heard from a lot of our members that they’re still ready to stop the attacks, but the status quo isn’t good enough, and we actually need to win real improvements in people’s lives.

Last month, officials in South Carolina, facing resistance from the Department of Justice to [Voter-ID_0] their new voter ID law, concocted a ghoulish tale of dead voters taking over the state’s elections.

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

So the question is, how did this cheap B-movie fiction make it into the public debate in the first place?