The world of academic research has changed. The current generation of students have grown up with always-on internet, smart phones and social platforms--and they want their research experiences to be just as fast, convenient and intuitive as googling 'how do I ...' or collaborating on WhatsApp.
What do digital natives want?
We recently put together an infographic that outlines how digital natives want to conduct research and how Nexis Uni helps.
According to Revenue River, digital natives are:
Another important consideration? These digital natives switch devices constantly, so you need a research tool that works as well on a laptop as a smart phone or tablet.
In addition, digital natives want collaboration tools that are just as convenient as the devices they rely on.
Nexis Uni delivers with an intuitive interface that enables fast, precise research across a expansive source universe and collaboration tools that make it easier to work on group projects and keep everyone on the team accountable.
Other steps to take:
A fund which invests in major companies who have made a legal commitment to supporting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced its 2018 performance on Thursday 24 January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It returned 13.71 percent over two years, which is better than every major index other than the Dow Jones. This is hard evidence that ethical and sustainable businesses can be more profitable than others.
Last year, we wrote about the new fund which only invests in companies who can prove they are supporting the SDGs. The SCR500 fund studies the annual reports of the world’s 500 largest companies to determine which have made legal commitments to supporting the SDGs and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. It only invests in those which have committed to the goals in their annual report or can prove that they are making concrete moves in the direction of sustainability.“Our approach is straightforward: we apply traditional investment rules to a select universe of companies that have committed to sustainability and implement their commitment in their business,” said Alfred Berkeley, chair of the fund. The results in its first year were remarkable: Its returns beat every other major fund. So, we attended the announcement of the latest results to find out if its first result was more than a fluke.
At 3.15pm at the SDG Lab opposite Davos’ Congress Centre, the results were unveiled. The fund did not perform as well as last year, but this was to be expected with a difficult period for the markets over the last two months.
Overall, the fund has returned nearly 14 percent since 2017, which is better than every major fund apart from the Dow Jones. Alfred Berkeley, who was formerly President of the NASDAQ stock exchange and advisor to Bush, Clinton and Obama, said the results offer a major lesson to companies. “This performance demonstrates a solid challenge to competitors and highlights that responsible, socially conscious business is also profitable business, providing unique opportunities to support progress on the SDGs while also making an investment profit,” he said. “We’re about proving to investors that you can make a better than average return and proving to companies that it pays to be a sustainable company.”SDGs on the corporate agenda.
Perhaps more interesting than the fund’s results is the data it has now released on how companies are approaching the SDGs. It shows that more companies are focusing on the SDGs: analysis showed that over 85 percent of the largest 500 global corporations now disclose non-financial information as part of their legally-binding annual financial report. “It seems fair to conclude that the SDGs.
1. Read our Q&A with Fund Chair Alfred Berkeley.
2. Download our eBook on the ethical expectations of investors and consumers.
3. Share this blog with your colleagues and connections on LinkedIn.
The transportation funding crisis in the states is continuing to worsen. At least six states -- Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Montana, Tennessee, and Wyoming -- have delayed roughly $2 billion in construction projects, and five states with Republican governors -- Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah -- increased fuel taxes this year.
With Congress’s latest extension of the federal Highway Trust Fund expiring at the end of May and no long-term funding plan having been approved since 2009, states have largely been left to fend for themselves. State and local governments provided 75 percent of the $213 billion spent each year on average between 2008 and 2012, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. And Joshua Schank, president of the nonpartisan Eno Center for Transportation, said that percentage will likely increase as long as federal funding remains stagnant.
In addition to raising fuel taxes, which six states did in 2013 and three did in 2014, along with the five that did this year, states are also turning to the private sector. Ohio, for instance, initiated its first public-private partnership last month, when it issued private-activity bonds for a $430 million highway construction project, the largest in the state’s history.
In Minnesota, meanwhile, Republicans who control the House of Representatives are at odds with Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton over how to meet that state’s transportation needs, with the former advocating for shifting existing sales tax revenues to transportation and the latter calling for a tax hike. But they did seem to agree on one thing.
“We would just as soon be proactive in making sure that we’ve got our needs met, and not relying solely on the federal government to come through,” said Rep. Tim Kelly (R), chairman of the House Transportation Policy and Finance Committee.
And back in February, Dayton said the funding the state needed wasn’t “going to come from the federal government,”
“It’s not going to come from the sky, so it’s going to have to come from us,” he said.
Still, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said states can’t afford to lose transportation funding from Washington.
“The federal funding is still foundational,” he told reporters last month. “They could take one step forward and two steps back if the federal government ends up going over this cliff.” (BLOOMBERG BUSINESS, LEXISNEXIS STATE NET)
Five state legislative chambers currently led by Republican majorities - including both the House and Senate in New Hampshire - will flip to Democratic control next year, as a result of the Nov. 6 elections. The Democrats also took full control of the Connecticut Senate, which has been evenly split between the two parties, and the New York Senate, which has been functionally controlled by the chamber’s GOP minority and a group of breakaway Democrats. Republicans took control of Alaska’s Senate, which has been effectively controlled by a similar Democrat-led coalition.
Battered by partisan opposition and bruised by a federal judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional, the Affordable Care Act continues to be embraced by the states and the clients it serves.
Democrats made preservation of the ACA, often called Obamacare, a central issue in last November’s elections, in which they gained seven governorships and six legislative chambers. Emboldened by their victories, Democrats in several states are seeking to extend the reach of Obamacare.
Legislators of both parties have virtually ignored a sweeping ruling striking down the ACA that was issued Dec. 14 in Texas by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor. Agreeing with 18 Republican state attorneys general and two GOP governors who sued to overturn the law, O’Connor stated that a provision of the ACA requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty was unconstitutional. He said this invalidated every other section of the 2,000-page law.
Experts on both sides of previous ACA legal battles denounced O’Connor’s ruling as overreaching, and many of them predicted it would be overturned on the appeal that has been launched by 17 Democratic state attorneys general. Until the appeal is decided, Obamacare remains the law of the land.
Yale law professor Abbe Gluck, a liberal health care expert, said that O’Connor’s “ludicrous” ruling ignored accepted legal doctrine on congressional intent. She noted that when Congress lowered the tax penalty for those without insurance to zero, it made no other changes in the law.
On the right, the conservative flagship National Review, an opponent of the ACA, made the point even more explicitly, stating that “The deliberate decision by Congress to eliminate the tax without eliminating the rest of Obamacare...shows that Congress in 2017 no longer considered it essential to the law.”
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act by a 5-4 majority that remains intact. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court’s four liberal justices. The two justices since appointed by President Donald Trump replaced justices who dissented from Roberts’ ruling.
The ACA expanded Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor and disabled, to families and individuals with income up to 138 percent above the poverty level. Roberts’ ruling changed this provision, making Medicaid expansion discretionary for the states.
Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid. Four more — Maine, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah — will so do so this year because of ballot measures approved by voters. These approvals occurred in last November’s election except for Maine, where voters favored Medicaid expansion in 2017 only to have their decision blocked by a Republican governor. Janet Mills, the new Democratic governor, ordered expansion to begin Feb. 1.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governors Gavin Newsom in California and Jay Inslee in Washington, all Democrats, have unveiled health care plans that go far beyond the Medicaid expansion authorized by the ACA.
On his first day in office Newsom asked California lawmakers to create a state individual mandate that would require residents to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, expand ACA subsidy eligibility to persons with income up to 400 percent above the poverty limit and extend Medicaid coverage to unauthorized immigrants up to 26 years of age. California already covers unauthorized immigrants who are 18 or younger.
Newsom hopes eventually to create a California single-payer system that would replace all current programs, including Medicare. But the chances of the Trump administration approving such a plan, observed the Los Angeles Times, “seem more remote than the most distant star in the Milky Way.”
In Washington, Inslee and Democratic lawmakers have proposed a state-sponsored public option on Washington’s health-insurance exchange. Inslee called it a first step toward universal health care.
“This is not just a moral right,” Inslee said in announcing the proposal. “It is economic wisdom and very possible.”
In New York City, Mayor Di Blasio announced expansion of the city’s low-income health care program to an additional 600,000 uninsured, including unauthorized immigrants. The program will begin in the Bronx this summer and go citywide in 2021.
States in which Democrats newly control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature are also rethinking health care. Some Democratic lawmakers in Colorado have proposed a state-run insurance plan similar to Inslee’s.
In Nevada, the legislature in 2017 passed a bill that would have allowed anyone to buy into Medicaid. It was vetoed by a Republican governor. The new governor, Democrat Steve Sisolak, has formed a committee to review this and other options.
Delaware, Oregon and New Mexico are also conducting studies on various health care options. All three states have Democratic governors and previously expanded Medicaid.
Twelve million people received health insurance through the federal and state Obamacare exchanges in 2018 and another 11 million were covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.
Enrollment for 2019 on the federal exchange HealthCare.gov dropped about 4 percent, but there was little or no decrease in many states with their own exchanges and later sign-up deadlines. Charles Gaba, a health-care blogger who tracks ACA sign-ups, found that 13 states, including seven with their own exchanges, increased sign-ups for 2019.
By any measure Obamacare has proved a tenacious survivor. It has survived Republican attempts to repeal the law and numerous efforts by the Trump administration to emasculate it.
In addition to eliminating the requirement that everyone have health insurance, the Trump administration has persistently declined to advertise the availability of Obamacare as state exchanges do. Trump also ended the subsidies the Obama administration paid insurers to provide policies for low-income ACA recipients. More recently, the Trump administration offered a bevy of low-cost health insurance plans that do not meet ACA standards, such as covering people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Some people have bought these bare-bone policies, but many more have stuck with Obamacare. The reason is clear from the administration’s own data. Surveys by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) show that 90 percent of Obamacare recipients are satisfied with their coverage.
The ACA has also reduced the ranks of the uninsured. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 44 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2013, the year before the major coverage provisions of the ACA went into effect. By 2016, the number had dropped to just under 27 million.
The number of uninsured crept back up by 700,000 in 2017, the last year for which full figures are available. This reflected increases in ACA premiums in some states that caused some recipients to drop their policies as well as a reduction in health coverage by some employers.
As reported in this space in October, premium increases for ACA policies are less in 2019 than in two prior years, as insurers return to the Obamacare market they once fled. The Wall Street Journal attributed this to “the improved financial situation of many insurers’ ACA business.”
But health care remains more expensive in the United States than in any other industrialized democracy, and costs are at the root of any discussion of health care reform. Beyond Medicaid expansion, such bold proposals as “Medicare for all” or a single-payer system face objections from those who say they are too expensive.
Vermont abandoned a single-payer experiment because of high costs. In Colorado a 2016 ballot measure that would have created a statewide health care system lost by nearly 80 percent of the vote on the same day Hillary Clinton carried the state by a 5-percent margin.
Because health care is important to nearly everyone, ferocious debates about it are not going away. Unfortunately, these debates have been almost entirely partisan since the ACA passed on a party-line vote in 2009.
Without blaming anyone, let’s imagine an alternative universe where some Republicans support the goal of the ACA, prompting concessions from the Democrats.
That universe actually existed in this country in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a then-radical idea of providing government-sponsored health care for the elderly. Some Republicans cried “socialized medicine,” but other GOP members of Congress worked with Johnson and wound up voting for an improved version of what we know as Medicare.
The best thing that could happen in the on-going health care debates would be for Democrats and Republicans to start talking to one another again. In other words, let’s go back to the future.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair sanctioning that state’s economic nexus-based sales tax law, similar requirements - with and without new enabling legislation - have gone into effect in five states, according to the Sales Tax Institute. Economic nexus requirements are scheduled to take effect in 10 more states on Oct. 1 and in seven others by Jan. 1 of next year. Such requirements also went into effect before the Wayfair decision in seven states.
Fourteen states have introduced over 40 bills dealing with sports betting this year, according to LexisNexis State Net’s legislative tracking system. Four states - Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and West Virginia - account for more than half of the measures. One of the bills, West Virginia SB 415, has been enacted so far.
Early last year SNCJ reported that while the development of autonomous, or self-driving, car technologies by Google, Uber, Tesla Motors and others was “progressing rapidly,” state efforts to regulate the testing and operation of such vehicles were moving at “a more deliberate pace,” with only a handful of legislatures having addressed the issue. The pace of both trends has accelerated since then, with major implications for local governments and the auto insurance industry.
In January 2014 IHS Automotive forecast that annual global sales of self-driving cars would grow from about 230,000 units in 2025 to nearly 12 million units in 2035, by which time there would be close to 54 million vehicles with autonomous technology in use around the world. But last year IHS revised that forecast upward significantly, predicting global sales would reach nearly 600,000 units in 2025 and 21 million units in 2035, putting nearly 76 million such vehicles on the road worldwide.
“This is a substantial increase from previous sales estimates and is influenced by recent research and development by automotive [manufacturers] and supplier and technology companies who are investing in this area,” IHS said.
“Big Four” accounting firm KPMG, likewise, predicted in 2015 that self-driving cars would become the “new normal,” replacing the stock of traditional vehicles, by 2040. But the pace of autonomous vehicle development over the last two years outstripped that projection, and this past June KPMG shifted its timetable up by five years.
The pace of legislative activity on the issue has also sped up considerably over the past couple of years. As we noted in our March 2016 report, the number of states introducing bills related to autonomous vehicles has been “ticking upward: six in 2012, nine in 2013, 12 in 2014, 16 in 2015” and, ultimately, 20 in 2016. But 33 states have already introduced autonomous vehicle-related bills this year. Even more noteworthy, 14 additional states have passed legislation, and three more governors have issued executive orders, related to self-driving cars since our previous report. A slew of bills aimed at speeding the adoption of self-driving cars - some of which, as introduced, would preempt state laws - are also under consideration in Congress, but it remains to be seen if any of them will manage to break through that legislative body’s unyielding gridlock.
The state legislation addresses a range of issues, including insurance requirements for operating self-driving cars, privacy of collected vehicle data, vehicle cybersecurity, and “platooning,” the coordinated operation of a group of self-driving cars traveling in the same lane using vehicle-to-vehicle communication. In general, however, the enacted measures provide for the testing and operation of vehicles with autonomous technology on public roads under certain conditions, although a few only authorize studies of such vehicles. Of particular note, a few of the recent enactments deal with “fully autonomous” vehicles, and at least one, Nevada’s AB 69, chaptered in June, allows the operation of those vehicles on state roadways without a human operator present.
The requirement that a licensed driver be at the wheel was one of the main points of contention with the autonomous vehicle deployment regulations proposed by California’s Department of Motor Vehicles in 2015, in accordance with legislation passed by the state in 2012 (SB 1298). Google, which has been focusing its efforts on the development of a completely driverless car with no gas pedal, brake pedal or even a steering wheel, said its testing showed that humans aren’t a good backup for self-driving car technology because when they get used to it, they stop paying attention to the road. A licensed driver requirement also precludes the use of self-driving cars by those with disabilities who are dependent on others even for “simple errands,” Chris Urmson, then-director of Google’s Self Driving Car Project, wrote in a blog post after the release of California’s draft deployment regulations.
“This maintains the same old status quo and falls short on allowing this technology to reach its full potential, while excluding those who need to get around but cannot drive,” he wrote.
California DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez said at the time that the state’s caution didn’t mean it opposed the technology.
“We’re definitely not against it,” she told Bloomberg Business. “We just need to make sure that it’s safe.”
California has since passed AB 1592, authorizing a pilot program for the testing of fully autonomous vehicles in one of the state’s more populous counties, Contra Costa, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, SB 260, providing for a pilot program to test fully autonomous vehicles in up to four municipalities in that state.
The increase in state legislative activity may have been spurred in part by the $4 billion in federal funding for autonomous vehicle pilot programs included in President Obama’s FY 2017 budget proposal, as well as the policy guidance for the safe development of such vehicles issued in January and September of last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“Ninety-four percent of crashes on U.S. roadways are caused by a human choice or error,” NHTSA Administrator Dr. Mark Rosekind said in a press release. “We are moving forward on the safe deployment of automated technologies because of the enormous promise they hold to address the overwhelming majority of crashes and save lives.”
That promise and other potential benefits from self-driving cars, including the prospect of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving mobility and providing a new revenue stream to help offset dwindling gas tax revenues, are likely to keep state legislatures green-lighting the vehicles’ operation.
States’ increasing willingness to allow self-driving cars on the road and the accelerating pace of the vehicles’ development, however, could be costly for local governments across the country. Municipalities derive a sizeable chunk of their revenues from auto-related sources that are largely dependent on the current stock of mostly gas-powered, human-driven vehicles. Collectively, the 25 largest U.S. cities took in almost $5 billion - or about $129 per capita - in auto-related revenues, including parking fees and citations, traffic violations, gas taxes and license and registration fees, in 2016, according to analysis by Governing.
That analysis also showed that cities with the highest car-related revenues per capita - and consequently, those likely to incur the biggest revenue losses in the event of a major shift to electric-powered, fully autonomous vehicles - were densely populated ones where parking is in high demand, such as San Francisco, which collected $512 per capita in auto-related revenues last year, and Washington, D.C., which took in $502 per capita.
Governing said revenue reductions might hardly be noticeable, however, in cities like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, with per-capita, auto-related revenues of $13.5, $14.6 and $14, respectively, largely because Texas shares virtually none of its gas tax or vehicle license and registration fee collections with local governments. Governing also noted there would potentially be cost savings in any city where significant numbers of autonomous vehicles operated, from the reduced need for traffic enforcement, for example. Still, Governing said over the long term revenue hits “seem inevitable,” adding that Lois Scott, a former chief financial officer for the city of Chicago who has been studying autonomous vehicles, expects cities to lose 10 to 15 percent of their operating revenues, on average.
“The combination of an electric vehicle world and the sharing economy will have a powerful impact,” she said.
The impact of those two forces on the auto insurance industry could be even greater. KPMG predicts that self-driving cars “could reduce the frequency of auto accidents by almost 90 percent by 2050.” And the company said that trend could combine with two other potential developments to create a “perfect storm” of disruption in the auto insurance marketplace. One is a shift away from personal, individual car ownership to commercial, fleet ownership, as a result of mobility-on-demand and car sharing. The other is the assumption of accident risk by the companies developing self-driving cars - an action Google, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo have already taken with their vehicles when they’re in autonomous mode, according to Nerd Wallet - and the consequent displacement of auto insurers. In KPMG’s “Perfect Storm Scenario,” “total losses could decline by 71 percent or approximately $137 billion,” with most of that hit being taken by “the personal auto insurance segment,” which “could erode to only 22 percent of total sector losses by 2050.”
“Insurance companies will have to make important strategic and tactical changes sooner than anticipated to navigate through this turbulent transformation of the industry,” Jerry Albright, a principal in KPMG's Actuarial and Insurance Risk practice, said in a press release.
What, specifically, those changes will be isn’t clear, although KPMG Corporate Finance LLC’s managing director, Joe Schneider, said auto insurers “may choose to branch out into home-related products, or other commercial coverage, to benefit from diversification,” while management consulting firm McKinsey & Company said they “might shift the core of their business model, focusing mainly on insuring car manufacturers from liabilities from technical failure of their AVs, as opposed to protecting private customers from risks associated with human error in accidents.”
What appears more certain is that the technological transformation of the automobile, with all of its potential benefits and challenges, is only going to continue.
The killing of 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12 by a man armed with a military-style assault rifle and a handgun hasn’t produced any more substantive action on gun control in Congress than other recent mass shootings. But those incidents may have tipped the scale in the direction of gun control supporters there as well as in state legislatures.
The initial response of Congress - where the scale has been tipped decidedly in the direction of gun rights - to the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was the proposal of multiple competing Republican- and Democrat-backed gun measures, most coming in the form of amendments to appropriations bills in each chamber. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) offered an amendment barring anyone on a terrorism watchlist from buying a gun, while U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-New York) proposed companion measures in their respective chambers barring individuals on a terrorism watchlist from purchasing a firearm only if investigators were able to prove they actually had ties to terrorists within 72 hours of an initiated sale. Without that restriction, Republicans and the National Rifle Association argued, those mistakenly on the watchlist would be denied their Second Amendment and due process rights.
“Every single senator wants to deny terrorists access to guns they use to harm innocent civilians, but there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way,” Cornyn said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Another pair of competing amendments, from U.S. Sen. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Connecticut) and U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) would have expanded background checks on firearm purchases to include sales at gun shows and on the Internet, and boosted state reporting of mental health records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System used to vet prospective gun buyers without expanding the universe of gun sales subject to background checks, respectively. But both of those proposals as well as the two terrorism watchlist amendments in the Senate failed on near straight party-line votes. And the House measures appeared to be headed for the same fate, which would make federal lawmakers just as unproductive on gun control in the wake of the Orlando shooting as they were last year, after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino, California, and in 2013, after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
At times the partisanship on the issue in Congress the last few weeks has seemed even more rancorous than in the past, the most notable occasions being when Democrats staged a 15-hour filibuster in the Senate and a 25-hour sit-in in the House to try to force Republican leaders to allow votes on the various gun proposals.
Still, some congressional lawmakers said they’ve noticed a change. As U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) bluntly put it to The New York Times, “For the first time in quite a while you’re seeing some Republicans buck the NRA.” U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (DFL-Minnesota) expressed it in broader terms to CNN, saying that she didn’t know if the votes would ultimately go any differently on the issue than they had in the past but that “People are starting to talk.”
“There are starting to be negotiations going on,” she said. “I think that’s very important.”
One manifestation of that new willingness to talk is the compromise watch-list amendment - applying to a more limited group of people than Feinstein’s proposal but providing a less restrictive gun-purchase denial process than the Cornyn-Zeldin measure - drafted by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and a group of other Republican and Democratic senators. The “no fly, no buy” measure was consigned to legislative limbo after surviving a motion to table it but failing to attract the 60 votes needed to advance. The vote was 52 to 46. But seven Republicans, in addition to Collins, joined the chamber’s Democrats in supporting the proposal.
“All of us are united in our desire to getting something significant done on this vital issue,” Collins said when the measure was unveiled last month, according to The Atlantic.
The slight give on the issue is apparently the result of the terrorist element of the San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, with the perpetrators in each of those attacks having either been inspired by or pledged allegiance to terrorist groups. Omar Mateen, the gunman in the Orlando shooting, had been on a terrorist watchlist from 2013 to 2014.
“Surely the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and in Orlando that took so many lives are a call for compromise, a plea for bipartisan action,” said Collins.
Gun control supporters have had more tangible success recently in state legislatures. Laura Cutiletta, managing attorney for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told NBC News that since the Sandy Hook shooting, 42 states have enacted 138 new laws tightening restrictions on the purchase or possession of firearms.
“There is a very stark difference in what has happened since Newtown compared to what it was like before,” she said, adding that the change includes not just the enactment of “proactive” gun control legislation but also the defeat of “gun lobby bills.”
The failure of campus carry legislation this year in Alaska, Florida and Georgia - considered gun rights strongholds, according to Brina Milikowsky, chief strategy officer for Everytown for Gun Safety, as NBC News reported - would presumably fall into the gun lobby defeats category. The gun control movement just claimed several more victories of the proactive variety as well, with California Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) signing of six gun control bills introduced in response to the San Bernardino shooting. The measures include SB 1235, which will make California the first state to require background checks for ammunition purchases; SB 880/AB 1135, which close the so-called “bullet-button loophole” in the state’s current ban on firearms with detachable magazines; and AB 1511, limiting the lending of guns to family members who haven’t undergone background checks, which is how the husband-and-wife San Bernardino shooters acquired their weapons.
The Los Angeles Times noted that the signings seemed to mark a “subtle shift” for the governor, who’s been highly skeptical of gun control proposals in the past. Three years ago he vetoed several gun control measures, including one that would have prohibited the sale of semiautomatic rifles with bullet buttons.
“I don’t believe that this bill’s blanket ban on semiautomatic rifles would reduce criminal activity or enhance public safety enough to warrant this infringement on gun owners’ rights,” he said at the time.
But Brown vetoed five gun control bills this month too, including SB 894, requiring gun losses or thefts to be reported within a few days, which, according to LexisNexis State Net’s legislative tracking database, he said in his veto message he didn’t believe would help reduce gun trafficking or turn irresponsible people who don’t report the loss or theft of a gun into responsible people who do.
“My goal in signing these bills is to enhance public safety by tightening our existing laws in a responsible and focused manner, while protecting the rights of law-abiding gun owners,” he wrote in a signing statement he released on July 1.
The fact that Brown vetoed almost as many gun bills as he signed didn’t appease gun rights groups. According to The Mercury News, Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, said he expected “mass noncompliance” with California’s new laws, adding, “The government would be wise to remember that there are more California residents with guns than there are government officials to take them away.”
“To coin a phrase,” he said, “‘Come and take it.’”
But gun rights groups have had their share of wins in the states too, including the passage of laws allowing concealed weapons to be carried on college campuses, providing gun manufacturers and owners protection from civil lawsuits, expanding gun permit reciprocity agreements with other states, and requiring 16 states to report mental health and other records to the federal background check system.
“The bottom line is we’ve scored very, very well at the state level, Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, told NBC News.
Jon Vernick, co-director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Gun Policy and Research, told NBC News that gun rights groups have probably had more legislative successes but that in his opinion gun control groups have had “more substantial” ones, like the passage of laws expanding background checks to all gun sales in Colorado and Delaware.
Those on both sides of the issue say what’s really changed in the states is that gun control advocates have become more active, largely due to the entry of Everytown, which is backed by billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Everytown’s Milikowsky said her group and its grassroots arm Moms Demand Action “are able to bring both policy and legal expertise and political strategy to build campaigns...as well as real grassroots power.”
Despite the gun control movement’s stepped up efforts, Lawrence Keane, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said there’s no evidence public opinion has shifted away from gun rights. And polling data appears to support that claim. Historical data from Gallup indicates that the number of people who thought gun laws should be stricter in October 2015 was roughly the same as the number who did in October 2005, 55 percent versus 57 percent.
Gallup’s data also suggests that public opinion hasn’t changed too much on a primary focus of the gun control movement. Eighty-six percent of those polled in October 2015 said they favored background checks for all gun purchases, while 92 percent of those surveyed in December 2012 and 83 percent of those surveyed in February 1999 said they favored background checks for gun purchases at gun shows. On the other side of the issue, the number of those opposed to a ban on handguns for anyone other than police and other authorized individuals has risen over the past decade, from 64 percent in October 2005 to 72 percent in October 2015. In addition, 56 percent of those polled in October 2015 said allowing more Americans to carry concealed weapons would make the country safer.
Frank Newport, editor in chief for Gallup, told NBC News, “We’ve got two conflicting strains of thought” in this country about how to deter gun violence.
“Collectively, Americans say yes to background checks of any kind, he said. "At the same time, they believe individual citizens taking matters into their own hands would also be effective.”
That dichotomy has helped gun control and gun rights groups both succeed in appealing directly to voters. In 2014 Washington state voters approved an initiative requiring universal background checks on gun purchases (I-594) by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent. The same year voters in Alabama and Missouri approved initiatives (Amendment 3 and Amendment 5) by even wider margins, 72.5 percent to 27.5 percent and 61 percent to 39 percent, respectively. Background check initiatives have qualified for the ballot in three states - California, Maine and Nevada - this year.
In response to the gun control movement’s increased activity in the states, Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation said his organization has “adjusted resources to address issues at the state level as well.” Presumably the NRA has done the same with its abundant resources, an operating budget Milikowsky placed at $345 million, 10 times bigger than Everytown’s.
Gun control advocates, meanwhile, appear to be following the lead of the marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage movements in trying to pressure Congress to act by scoring victories in states.
“That’s a long-road strategy to add state after state,” Vernick of the Center for Gun Policy and Research told NBC News. “The hope is ultimately that it persuades Congress that the laws are reasonable that they’re not taking guns away from law-abiding gun owners and necessary.”
The question is whether Congress will end up looking more like the states on the issue or vice versa?
At least 35 states have considered bills or resolutions dealing with cybersecurity in 2018, according to analysis of LexisNexis State Net legislative data by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Twenty-two states have enacted such measures.
We’re almost halfway through calendar year 2015 and two-thirds of state legislatures are done for the year. But with big issues percolating in the 16 states still in regular session and the NBA Finals in full swing, it seems like a good time for the legislative version of what former Boston Celtic Danny Ainge liked to call a “heat check” – a rough attempt at seeing what’s hot and isn’t.
With budget woes not dominating the landscape as much as in years past, expert observers like Tim Storey of the National Conference of State Legislature (NCSL) says there have been few truly dominant themes across statehouses to date.
“I think the theme so far is that there has been no real theme,” Storey says.
There have, however, been issues – some expected and others less so – that have sparked their share of passion in a wide number of statehouses. One topic still gaining traction has been Common Core, the controversial 2009 education standards initiative first fostered by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers to identify and develop a common set of core standards in math and English that every U.S. high school graduate would need to master in order to enter college or start a career. First lauded by a wide collection of people on both sides of the aisle, 46 states – all but Texas, Alaska, Virginia and Nebraska - quickly signed on. But Common Core has since come under intense criticism from a loud chorus of mostly conservative opponents, who see it as a top-down, one-size-fits-all federal intervention into what should be solely in the purview of states and local school boards.
So far this year Tennessee and Missouri have opted out of using the standards, joining Oklahoma, South Carolina and Indiana as previous Common Core supporters that have now chosen to leave the initiative. North Carolina and Maine, meanwhile, are moving ahead with implementation but are also reviewing the standards with the idea of possibly opting out in the near future. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) made leaving Common Core one of his primary agenda items this year as well, but in the face of intense resistance from state education officials he had to settle for a compromise that calls for the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to review and possibly change those standards at some point.
In contrast, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) says 39 states are moving ahead with implementing the Common Core Standards.
So-called “right-to-try” legislation has also been a hot issue in numerous statehouses. According to NCSL, at least 18 states have already adopted laws that allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a means of last resort in their treatment. According to LexisNexis State Net, another 21 are considering similar measures (see “More States Ponder Bills to Let Terminally Ill Try Experimental Meds” in the March 20, 2015 SNCJ http://bit.ly/1MUYo08). Whether the measures actually help the people they are intended to benefit remains unclear. There is nothing in any of the bills that forces drug companies to supply experimental drugs, and there would appear to be little or no financial benefit for them to do so.
One of the more unexpected bill trends has focused on the regulation of a new product called Palcohol, a powdered form of alcohol approved by federal officials earlier this year. According to NCSL, at least 39 states have introduced powdered alcohol-related bills this year, and to date, governors in 18 states have signed legislation to define and regulate the product (See “States Rush to Regulate Powdered Alcohol” in the May 1 SNCJ http://bit.ly/1JMWIqW). Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) is so far the only governor to veto such a measure, nixing HB 2178 on April 14. Meanwhile, measures are awaiting gubernatorial action in several states (see Bird’s eye view). Legislation has also passed through at least one chamber in several more statehouses.
Another unanticipated issue developed in March after a measles outbreak that started in the Disneyland theme park in California spread to at least nine states and Canada. In response, lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced vaccination-related bills, including several to do away with personal belief exemptions some parents use to avoid vaccinating their children against diseases like measles, whooping cough and polio. That drew a ferocious response from vaccination opponents, who contend vaccinating their kids should be their choice.
Most of the measures ultimately failed. Vaccination supporters found success, however, in Vermont, where Gov. Pete Shumlin (D) signed HB 98 - a measure that removes the state’s personal belief exemption – into law on May 15. The measure sparked emotional debate throughout the process from both bill supporters and anti-vaccination opponents, many of whom argued that their children had been harmed by vaccines. Many also cited another state law that requires parents to review educational material before claiming the philosophical exemption, which lawmakers adopted three years ago in the hope it would inspire more parents to vaccinate their kids. But to date that has not happened. According to the Vermont State Health Department, only 88 percent of all kids entering kindergarten in the Green Mountain State have been fully vaccinated, something Shumlin noted in his signing statement.
“Vaccines work and parents should get their kids vaccinated,” Shumlin said. “I know there are strong feelings on both sides of this issue. I wish the legislation passed three years ago had worked to sufficiently increase vaccination rates. However we’re not where we need to be to protect our kids from dangerous diseases, and I hope this legislation will have the effect of increasing vaccination rates.”
Another highly-charged measure that would do away with philosophical exemptions, SB 277, is also on its way to the Assembly floor in California after being endorsed last Tuesday by the Assembly Health Committee. The bill has drawn hordes of often-rowdy protestors to the Capitol, many of whom have traveled from across the state to voice their dissent as the bill has wound its way through the Legislature. The atmosphere has at times become ugly: the bill’s authors, Sens. Ben Allen and Richard Pan, both Democrats, have received threats deemed legitimate enough to be granted extra security.
Given the wide support for the measure among the majority Democrats in both chambers, it appears likely SB 277 will eventually make its way to Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) desk. Brown has said he will consider the bill, but has not indicated if he will sign it. But for those looking to read the political tea leaves, Dana Williamson, one of Brown’s top aides, testified in favor of the bill before the Health Committee last week.
-- By RICH EHISEN
Turbulence appears to be the new normal in today’s global risk landscape. Political turmoil, changing regulations, disruptive weather events, financial instability and a variety of other factors can disrupt supply chains or involve companies in legal actions that result in devastating financial and reputational costs.
In such a dynamic environment, due diligence alone leaves companies vulnerable to emerging risk.
Is it time for your company to adopt a more proactive approach to risk management? That’s the question we asked recently when we teamed up with ProcureCon, S&P Global and CBRE for the webinar, “Risk Monitoring: Riding the Wave of Change.” Watch it now.
Risk management best practices based on real-world experiences
During the webinar, guest panellists offered their own takes on the modern risk landscape.Traci Carbotte, Supply Chain Strategic Sourcing Manager at CBRE, Robert Stahle, Corporate Director, Global Sourcing and Procurement at S&P Global and Oliver Gall, Head of Global Procurement at S&P Global weighed in on:
For example, Traci Carbotte, Supply Chain Strategic Sourcing Manager at CBRE, noted that monitoring for financial instability among suppliers has enabled “good success with risk avoidance” and allows CBRE to protect its clients more effectively. And when asked, “How and why did you convert risk monitoring from a want to a need and what were the hurdles you had to overcome?” Oliver Gall, Head of Global Procurement at S&P Global noted that “It was always a must-have. The degree of investment over time has increased as regulatory demands have increased. We are seeing regulators in other areas in the world replicate what we've seen for some time in the U.S. and Europe, as we expand, it increases the need to invest in third-party risk management.”
A potential fine is just one reason to ramp up risk monitoring
Companies need to move from reactive to proactive risk management.The complex nature of global supply chains exposes companies to much greater risk. Earlier this year, for example, German medical device giant Fresenius agreed to a $231 million settlement to resolve Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations for funnelling nearly $30 million in bribes through third-party intermediaries to public health officials and state-employed doctors in 17 countries.
It’s not just potential regulatory fines—and criminal prosecutions of bad actors—that serve as an incentive for more robust risk management.
Increasingly, investors and consumers are holding companies to much higher ethical standards. The pressure to be profitable and do good is pushing companies to walk the walk when it comes to their Corporate Social Responsibility commitments. Companies that do meet environmental, social and governance standards are proving that sustainable, ethical business practices pay measurable dividends.
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The shadow of unfunded public pension liabilities casts a menacing cloud over the otherwise mostly bright futures of U.S. states and municipalities. The situation is gravest in Illinois, where court rulings have stymied legislative attempts at reform, but a score of states and a slew of cities also face significant challenges from unfunded pension liabilities.
Against this backdrop, a recent settlement in San Jose with union officials on a disputed voter initiative known as Measure B may show at least a partial way out of the public pension morass in which many states and cities are trapped.
Although a few states are doing well, a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts and an analysis of California public pensions from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) paint an overall bleak picture. Pew found that the nation’s state-run systems had a $968 billion shortfall in 2013 — the last year for which complete data is available — that rose to more than $1 trillion if municipal liabilities were included. Furthermore, the systems as a whole are headed in the wrong direction, adding $54 billion to the debt from the previous year.
There is a Washington anecdote, probably apocryphal, that President Harry Truman once said he wanted a one-armed economist. An aide asked why. “Because economists are always saying ‘on the one hand, and on the other,’” Truman supposedly replied.
“On-the-one hand, on-the-other” pretty well describes the latest PPIC findings about California’s public pension liabilities. The good news is that investment returns have been higher than expected. The less good news is that the Golden State’s two largest pension funds, the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teacher’s Retirement System (CalSTRS) show unfunded liabilities of $62 billion and $74 billion, respectively, for the 2013 fiscal year.
Liabilities have continued to soar because the pension funds are structurally underfunded, a fancy way of saying that state employees and teachers don’t contribute enough to keep them solvent. Demographic factors are also at work. The PPIC report found that the percentage of adults aged 65 and older increased from 9 percent of the population in 1970 to 13 percent in 2013 and is projected to be 17 percent in 2025. This is a recipe for eventual fiscal calamity.
While public unions downplay the significance of unfunded liabilities, saying they are not as onerous as bonded debt, some pension scholars claim they’re worse. “For citizens and taxpayers, unfunded pension liabilities are actually more of a burden than bonded debt,” David Crane of the Stanford Institute for Policy Research told the Orange County Register. He observed that pension liabilities have a higher priority in bankruptcy proceedings than any other kind of debt and usually must be repaid first.
States can’t go bankrupt under federal law, but cities and other local government entities are allowed to do so in many states. Orange County, California, went bankrupt in 1994. Detroit, in 2013, was the largest U.S. city ever to go bankrupt. The financial condition of Chicago, the nation’s third most populous city, is shaky. According to Governing magazine, 36 cities, towns, and other governmental units have filed for bankruptcy since 2010.
In this context, city officials in California and pension reformers everywhere can take modest comfort from an agreement announced in San Jose last month by Mayor Sam Liccardo. San Jose voters in June 2012 approved Measure B, which rolled back retirement benefits. It gave city workers a choice of paying more into their pension funds or receiving a reduced pension. Public unions sued, and a judge struck down that section of the measure. Her ruling was under appeal when the city reached a settlement with unions representing police and firefighters that is expected to serve as a template for similar agreements with other city unions.
Both sides put on happy faces after the settlement, stressing what they had won. For the city and the pension reformers, this meant scaling back pensions for new hires and eliminating bonus checks for retirees. For the unions, it meant preserving pensions for previous hires and eliminating the key requirement that retirees contribute more to their pensions. Disability payments that would have been cut by Measure B were preserved, but future disabilities will have to be certified by a physician rather than by a board on which the union is represented.
Given past rulings of the California Supreme Court, the San Jose compromise was probably the best that reformers could have hoped for. The state’s high court has held that the California Constitution provides extraordinary protection for pensions. Once a worker is hired, his or her pension status is inviolate.
The legal find that public pensions are set in stone sets them apart from other issues. Other laws that prove too costly can be changed. But the Legislature and local governments don’t have that alternative with pensions, which in California are more generous for public employees than for most of their counterparts in private industry. In 1999, when the stock market was booming, the Legislature passed SB 400 at the behest of Gov. Gray Davis (D), reducing the retirement age for state workers from 60 to 55 with pensions paying 2 percent of salary for each year worked and basing pensions on the highest single year’s salary rather than the previous average of three years. The state standard was widely copied by local governments, which in many cases made benefits retroactive.
Small wonder that Crane calls SB 400 “the single greatest issuance of debt in state history.” In 2003, the unfunded liabilities of the 80 public pension systems in California totaled $6.3 billion. By 2004, with the new provisions in effect, it had reached $50.9 billion. By 2013, it had topped $198 billion.
California’s situation on public pensions, dire as it is, pales in comparison to Illinois, the Greece of American states. The Prairie State ranks dead last in fiscal health among the 50 states and has unfunded public pension liabilities of $164 billion. The liabilities for Chicago’s four pension funds and a teacher’s fund amount to another $20 billion. According to Pew data, Illinois public workers contribute only 39 percent of the money needed to fund their pensions.
For years, pension reformers in Illinois were thwarted by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, which was too often in thrall of the public unions. By 2013, however, the state’s sagging credit ratings induced previously resistant Democrats to raise the retirement age for public workers and reduce cost-of-living increases for retirees. In 2014, the Legislature passed another measure that reduced cost-of-living increases for retired Chicago city workers and increased their contributions to pension funds.
The legislative turnaround went for naught. In May the seven-member Illinois Supreme Court unanimously struck down the 2013 law with an Olympian pronouncement. “Crisis is not an excuse to abandon the rule of law,” the court said. “It is a summons to defend it.” Then last month, Cook County Judge Rita Novak overturned the 2014 law for Chicago city workers, brushing aside a plea from Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) now proposes a state constitutional amendment that would allow pension cuts for state and city workers. But passage requires a three-fifths favorable vote both by the Legislature and the public, unlikely in a Democratic-leaning state with activist labor unions.
The U. S. federal system allows much leeway to state courts. As with Illinois and California, courts in Arizona, New York and Oregon have barred reducing existing pension benefits. Courts in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and South Dakota have permitted such reductions.
This patchwork of judicial decisions contributes to an enormous variance among states and municipalities in the health of their pension funds, some of which suffer from insufficient contributions, missed payments or poor investment performance. The Pew report found that only 22 of the 50 states fully fund their pension systems.
The plight of underfunded public pension systems is likely to become worse as members of the Baby Boom generation retire and the number of retirees in relation to the number of workers accelerates. Addressing this issue is one of the great political challenges of our time, for Social Security as well as state and local pension funds.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But the common sense displayed by city officials and union leaders in the San Jose settlement on Measure B, copied Aug. 5 in an agreement negotiated by Los Angeles with its municipal workers, provides a modicum of hope. Protecting current retirees while also requiring higher pension contributions by future hires is a step down a promising path toward the elusive goal of fiscal solvency. What happened in San Jose is worth emulating.
-- By Lou Cannon
How long would it take a woman processing shrimp in a typical Indonesia or Thai facility to earn what a CEO of a major grocer takes home in one year’s salary? 4,000 years. It’s just one of the disturbing statistics shared by Oxfam’s #BehindTheBarcode campaign to raise awareness into forced labor in the Food & Beverage supply chain. As part of the campaign, Oxfam scored major supermarkets serving the UK based on the policies and practices that they have implemented to prevent human rights abuses—from paying poverty wages to unsafe and unsanitary working conditions. German grocer Aldi, which has 10,000 stores across 20 countries, rated only 1 percent on Oxfam’s Supermarkets Scorecard, but not a single company achieved higher than 23 percent. Clearly, identifying force labor risk in supply chains presents challenges. What can organizations do to better mitigate the risk?
Set a high standard addressing and monitoring for forced labor risk
The pressure for large supermarkets to keep prices low often places undue economic pressure on the small-scale farmers and workers that keep the produce shelves stocked. Laws like the UK Modern Slavery Act and the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act require companies to publish a statement outlining their commitment to keeping modern slavery out of their supply chains. Such public pledges may be helping. Oxfam’s report “Ripe for Change,” which looked at the trading practices of the 16 largest supermarkets in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the U.S., rated four German grocers the lowest, in part because the supermarkets keep over 50 percent of the prices paid by customers, while less than 8 percent goes to small-scale farmers and workers. Forced labor and unfair trade practices include a number of abusive practices:
The “Ripe for Change” report notes, “It is one of the cruelest paradoxes of our time that the people producing our food and their families are often going without enough to eat themselves.”
Oxfam developed its scorecard based on international standards and expert-recommended best practices related to workers, transparency, small-scale farmers and women. For example, one best practice is having a senior executive with “explicit responsibility for ensuring human rights are respected in its supply chain.” This advice isn’t just for supermarkets, either. Regulator guidance—whether for addressing money-laundering risk, bribery and corruption risk, or forced labor risk—emphasizes that compliance starts at the top.
Another best practice: Make a clear commitment to meet the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Embracing these principles, as well as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, benefits people and the world. But it also benefits companies. Increasingly, investors expect companies to meet Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards and consumers reward retailers who meet ethical sourcing and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals.
In addition, companies can complement initial onboarding due diligence with ongoing risk monitoring of business partners, suppliers and other third parties to identify potential problems sooner. No single organization can end forced labor on its own, but if more companies establish strong programs to mitigate the risk—and require their suppliers to do the same—it will have a positive impact on the more than 14 million people around the world who labor in homes, factories, farms, and mines due to force, fraud or deception.
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While media attention focuses on the presidential campaign, courts are making changes in voting laws in ways that could impact election outcomes in 2016 and beyond.
Under the banner of combating voter fraud, Republican-run legislatures have in the last several years passed a slew of stringent voter identification laws, some of which also limited the hours of voting and registration. But such laws received a potentially significant setback last month when a federal appeals court invalidated part of a restrictive Texas law on grounds it discriminates against minorities.
Meanwhile in North Carolina, the U.S. Justice Department alleges in a lawsuit filed under the Voting Rights Act that the Tar Heel state also targeted minorities with a 2013 law that required photo identification, reduced voting hours and abolished same-day registration. This lawsuit spurred changes even before it was tried. Shortly before the trial commended in federal court, the North Carolina legislature amended the law, which takes effect in 2016, to allow voters who lack a required photo ID to cast a provisional ballot.
Because North Carolina is one of the nation’s most closely contested swing states, the Justice lawsuit is being keenly watched by both parties. Barack Obama carried North Carolina in 2008; four years later it was the only state that moved from Democrat to Republican, delivering its electoral votes to Mitt Romney.
Voter identification is an issue that has been around for decades, but requiring a photo ID is a modern development. In 2005, the Republican-controlled legislature in Indiana approved a law requiring photo identification, which after a prolonged legal battle was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2008. Encouraged by the court’s decision, Republicans began a nationwide drive for strict voter ID after gaining control of a majority of legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. Over the next three years 17 states passed strict voter ID laws or tightened existing measures.
Democrats and civil rights groups resisted in court, saying that the declared Republican purpose of reducing fraud was a fig leaf for the political goal of erecting voting barriers for minorities and poor people. At best, they claimed, strict voter ID laws fixed a process that wasn’t broken. According to testimony in the North Carolina lawsuit, there have been just four cases of voter impersonation in the Tar Heel State in the last 15 years. A 2014 study by Loyola Law School in Los Angeles found only 31 instances of voter impersonation among the approximately one billion ballots cast in all U.S. elections since 2000.
Opponents of strict voter ID have won occasional victories, with state courts striking down such laws in Arkansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania. Presently, according to a compilation by Wendy Underhill of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), 32 states require some form of voter identification. She classifies 21 of them as “non-strict” and 11 as “strict.” Non-strict states allow voters who lack acceptable identification to cast a provisional ballot that may be counted without further action of the voter. Many non-strict states also permit easily obtainable identification such as a utility bill or a bank statement. Strict states are more limiting. For example, the Texas law now on hold requires a government-issued photo ID such as a driver’s license, passport, or certificate issued by the state’s Department of Public Safety.
Although the Texas law raises constitutional issues, it may never reach the Supreme Court. Having spoken on the Indiana voter ID law, the high court seems disinclined to revisit the issue; in March it declined to hear a challenge to Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law. This has left decision-making to lower federal courts, which are playing a mediating role. The appeals court that invalidated the Texas law tiptoed around the trial judge’s finding that the Legislature intentionally discriminated against minorities. Instead, in a complex ruling, the court said that the law “had the effect” of discriminating and sent the case back to the trial judge for re-hearing.
Likewise in North Carolina, the federal court has asked both sides to submit proposals for changes in the law in the hope of forging a mutually acceptable compromise.
Voter ID laws are probably here to stay, but so far have had minimal impact. As Underhill observes, voter ID is just one of many factors influencing turnout, and some of the other factors loom larger. In 2012, respected polling analyst Nate Silver estimated that strict voter ID laws would reduce turnout by 2.4 percent. But in Indiana and Georgia, the first states where strict voter ID laws were tested at the ballot box, minority (and overall) turnout increased, boosted in large part because Barack Obama’s name was on the ballot. Also in 2012, the Republican Majority Leader (and now Speaker) of the Pennsylvania House, Mike Turzai, asserted that the state’s strict voter ID law would deliver the Keystone State to Romney. Instead, Obama carried Pennsylvania by more than 300,000 votes. When a state court two years later struck down the Pennsylvania law, the Republican governor didn’t even bother to appeal.
Is the attraction of strict voter ID waning for Republicans? Perhaps. No one is making any announcements, but it’s noteworthy that after the passage of so many such laws in the three years from 2011-13, there were no new enactments in 2014 or 2015. By asserting that these laws targeted minorities, opponents of strict voter ID have made the debate about alleged discrimination at a time the nation has become racially charged. It’s hard to see why any Republican would want to become immersed in a racial discussion over laws that have so little political payoff.
But while strict voter ID laws may have lost some of their luster, the broader issue of ballot access remains potent. In Ohio earlier this year a compromise was reached over a law passed by the GOP-controlled legislature that reduced early voting and abolished a so-called “golden week” in which persons could register and vote on the same day. The case was headed for the Supreme Court with neither the plaintiffs – the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the NAACP – nor the defendants confident of victory. So the two sides sensibly hammered out a settlement. The golden week is gone, but Ohioans will now be able to cast ballots on Sundays and in the evening for several weeks before Election Day. ACLU legal director Freda Levenson said the settlement means that “more voters will have a chance to actually vote.”
Unfortunately, ballot access in the form of early voting remains inadequate in several states outside the South, many controlled by Democrats, where restrictive rules have gone unchallenged by civil liberties groups or the government. In a provocative editorial in Bloomberg View headed “The Wrong Way to Fix the Voting Rights Act,” David Shipley questioned the practice of the Justice Department – and the law itself – in focusing only on states with a history of discrimination. The Department of Justice is suing North Carolina because it reduced early voting hours and ended Election Day registration. But as Shipley observed, New York State has no early voting or same-day registration and its overall rules are more restrictive than North Carolina’s.
“In practice, violations of the Voting Rights Act only occur when states limit voting opportunities, not when they fail to expand them,” Shipley wrote.
Two years ago, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court struck down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states and counties, mostly in the South, with a history of past discrimination to obtain “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department for changing voting rules. Democrats in Congress and the president seek to restore that requirement. It would be even worthier to offer a broader bill that guarantees ballot access to everyone, not just residents of states that have discriminated in the past.
While Congressional and state legislative races drew most of the attention on Election Day, those races were hardly the only critical issues voters would decide.
Missouri, Colorado and Michigan became the latest states to endorse independent commissions or other bipartisan or nonpartisan means to create legislative or congressional districts, or both, to combat gerrymandering. Ohio voters in May endorsed a similar measure for drawing congressional districts, making 2018 the most active year for redistricting ballot measures since 1982, highlighting what has become a slowly growing movement toward stripping state lawmakers of the power to choose their own voters.
Named in reference to 19th Century Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, gerrymandering refers to the drawing of districts to favor the party in power. Gerry signed off on a bill in 1812 to create Senate districts favorable to his own party, including one district so oddly drawn it was said to look like a salamander. The term eventually evolved to gerrymander.
Coming into the election, 13 states – including Ohio – countered gerrymandering by using commissions to draw legislative district lines. Of those, seven also used commissions to draw lines for congressional districts.
Missouri was the lone state to use separate commissions to draw its state House and Senate districts, while Colorado’s state lines were drawn by an 11-person political commission with members appointed by the governor, the four party leaders and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Missouri used a similar political commission.
Under the measures voters approved this month, Colorado’s state and congressional lines will now be drawn by an independent 12-person commission. In Missouri, a nonpartisan demographer will now draw the state’s legislative district lines. Those districts can be challenged by yet another commission composed equally of Democrats and Republicans, but any changes would require 70 percent approval.
Michigan’s Proposition 2, meanwhile, will recruit its 13 members directly from the ranks of the Wolverine State citizenry. Much like the system in place in California, the commissioners – four Republicans, four Democrats and five independents – will be randomly drawn from the qualified applications submitted by likely thousands of Michiganders. The commission will draw both legislative and congressional districts. Final approval requires only a simple majority, but that group must include at least two Dems, two Republicans and two independents.
The measure Ohio voters endorsed in May – Issue 1 – leaves the map-drawing to lawmakers, but with significant checks. Lawmakers will still draw the lines, but approval requires a three-fifths majority in each legislative chamber, which must include 50 percent of the vote of the minority party. Failing that, the state’s existing seven-person commission takes up the task. Any plan that group devises must have the votes of at least two of the commission’s minority party members. If that effort also fails, lawmakers get another crack at it. The three-fifths standard remains in place, but now approval requires only one third of the minority party’s approval. If all else fails, the maps can be adopted with a simple majority, but they only stay valid for four years rather than the usual 10.
It wasn’t yet a clean sweep for commissions, however. The fate of Utah’s Proposition 4 – which would create a seven-person commission with members appointed by the governor and legislative leaders, all with the directive to refrain from favoring incumbents – as of this writing was still being determined. The measure’s fortunes have bounced up and down since the election, lading at times by over 4,000 votes before falling behind by less than a thousand votes last Tuesday, and then leading again by over 2,000 votes on Thursday.
If eventually adopted, a commission will be tasked with drawing maps for congressional, legislative and Beehive State school districts. Wendy Underhill of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) notes that lawmakers would still get final approval rights, but only after the maps are reviewed by the chief justice of the state Supreme Court to ensure they meet “state-specific criteria” noted in the measure.
All of the other measures adopted by voters in 2018 did so with comfortable margins, perhaps indicating that in a nation as polarized as America limiting lawmakers’ ability to draw their own district lines is one of the few things a wide majority of people can agree on.
The broader interest in redistricting is something of a new phenomenon. For many years, bringing up gerrymandering was a great way to quickly ensure some alone time at a party. But with ongoing court challenges to partisan maps in states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia continuing to make national headlines, these days a scintillating discussion about the difference between “cracking a district” and “packing” one might actually draw a crowd.
That is in part, says University of Southern California political science professor Christian Gose, because activists are more aware now of how easy it is for partisan map makers to use technology to micro-target voters right down to individual houses on a specific block, giving the issue a greater sense of urgency than ever before. Having federal courts uphold the legality of commission systems in California and Arizona also gave reform advocates reason to push ahead in more states, he says.
But Gose, who is also a faculty fellow at the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, a public policy think tank chaired by former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), gives his boss credit for raising awareness about the issue. Since leaving office in 2010, Schwarzenegger has focused significant time advocating for issues he championed when in office, including redistricting reform. Schwarzenegger actively campaigned for the ballot measures in Colorado and Michigan.
“People see him campaigning for the issue, which raises the issue’s profile,” Gose says. “And once the issue’s profile is raised, it gives voters more reason to look at the ballot measure.”
Schwarzenegger’s wasn’t the only celebrity star power brought to bear. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, some members of the powerful Walton (WalMart) family and actress Jennifer Lawrence also stumped for reform initiatives. All four ballot measure campaigns also received major donations from the Action Now Initiative, the charitable foundation of Texas billionaires John and Laura Arnold. According to analysis by the Associated Press, the Action Now Initiative spread almost $8 million across the four campaigns.
The man once known around the world as “The Governator” will likely get more opportunities to flex his famous muscles on the matter. According to NCSL, at least 29 states introduced bills in 2017 to create independent redistricting commissions. According to the State Net database, at least 19 states did so in 2018. Of those, eight measures are still pending.
But convincing lawmakers to voluntarily surrender one of their most powerful tools hasn’t been easy in today’s political environment. Ohio’s measure – which was approved to be sent to voters by lawmakers in 2015 – is the first successful reform not initiated by a citizens’ group since Alaska lawmakers did so in 1998.
What impact, if any, the turnover in governorships and statehouse control has on legislative redistricting reform efforts remains to be seen. Minnesota is now the only legislature in the country with split control, with Democrats in charge of the House and Republicans holding the Senate.
Gose believes that states with the proposition process are still the most likely places to adopt commissions in the near future, though litigation is always possible as well.
The major problem there to date has been a lack of willingness by the Supreme Court of the United States to weigh in on the issue. That changed a bit last week as the High Court agreed to hear an appeal by Virginia Republicans of a lower court’s order that 11 House districts must be redrawn to correct racial gerrymandering.
While the election seemed to solidify the belief that voters have had enough of the partisan nature of drawing district lines, it also muddied the water on the argument that the current process is guaranteed to block a minority party from power. While the expected effects of partisan gerrymandering held true in states like North Carolina this election – Tar Heel State Dems received over 48 percent of the total vote but won only three of the state’s 13 U.S. House seats – it didn’t do so in states like Texas or nationwide, fueling the argument that commissions are unnecessary.
That probably heightens the need for the SCOTUS to finally rule, Gose says.
“I think there will definitely be continued litigation until the Court takes a definitive stance,” he says.
Over 165 women in 39 states will likely run for statewide political office this year, more than twice the number that actually filed to run in 2016, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. Connecticut, Illinois and Minnesota currently have the highest number of female candidates, at 10 apiece, with six of the candidates in Connecticut, one of the candidates in Illinois and eight of the candidates in Minnesota all running for governor. There are also seven women running for governor in Maine.
Source: Center for American Women and Politics
As of late January, legislation dealing with paid time off for workers to care for a newborn or ill family member was pending in at least 26 states, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures and LexisNexis State Net. Since California became the first state to enact a paid family leave law in 2002, five other states have passed such laws, with Washington most recently, in 2017. Five of those six states are also among those with pending paid family leave bills.
When optometrist Dena Davidson decided she was ready to leave her profession behind, she knew two things. First, she was really interested in pursuing a career in human resources management. Second, she was less sure where or how to get started.
“With optometry there was one very clear path to follow,” she says. “With HR it was very different. Did I need to go back to school? Do I need to get a certificate? It really wasn’t clear at all.”
In the beginning she was able to mine some information from people she knew in the field, but found that the entry process was very specific to where those particular people worked. Hesitant to make the commitment to another four-year university program without a clear answer that it would all pay off in the end, she opted for a shorter certification course through the University of California Davis extension program. She eventually did work her way into her new career, but even with her certificate it was a long process that included spending a year at an entry-level position in a call-center.
Davidson acknowledges today that even with the hard road she took she had a few things in her favor many others seeking to change or start a career don’t have. For one, she knew she would always have a well-paying career to return to if it didn’t work out. That career had also afforded her the means to plan and budget for a period where her income would be significantly less than she was used to. Perhaps most significant, she would never not have a four-year college degree, something the vast majority of workers out there do not possess.
Although the U.S. Census reported last year that more than a third of U.S. workers now have a diploma from a four-year institution – the highest since the Census began recording such information in 1940 – almost 67 percent of workers nationwide still lack a bachelor’s degree. With most high paying jobs currently requiring a college degree as an entry point, for many job seekers the lack of necessary education is killing their higher aspirations before they begin.
Lack of a college diploma can make it hard to find work at all. According to 2016 Georgetown University study, there are 7.3 million fewer jobs today for workers with only a high school degree than there were in 1989. Of the 7.2 million jobs lost during the Great Recession, 5.6 million were for workers with a high school degree or less, and only about 1 percent of those jobs have been recovered since 2010.
Workers are not the only ones hurt by the situation; employers are also suffering. Data from the U.S Department of Labor shows there are approximately 6 million unfilled jobs in America. Many of those are good-paying “middle skill” jobs (on average $55,000 per year) that don’t require workers to have a college degree but do demand they have more than a high school diploma. That number could well rise in the coming years as aging Baby Boomers continue to retire. It may also be particularly problematic for smaller businesses that already have trouble competing with large corporations for the best talent. In a survey released in June by the National Federation of Independent Business, 48 percent of small businesses reported they were unable to find qualified applicants for open positions. The lack of qualified employees is in fact forcing a growing number of small to mid-sized companies to look outside of the country for workers.
It is a troubling scenario for both employers and the U.S. economy. And while much of the discussion of the issue has revolved around technical skill positions, as Davidson’s situation illustrates the problem clearly touches on the white collar world as well. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas CEO Robert Kaplan said as much in a recent Bloomberg op-ed, noting his company’s surveys show many chief executive officers reporting “shortages of workers for middle-class-wage jobs such as nurses, construction workers, truck drivers, oilfield workers, automotive technicians, industrial technicians, heavy equipment operators, computer network support specialists, web developers and insurance specialists. If these types of jobs go unfilled, businesses will expand more slowly and U.S. growth will be impeded.”
With so much on the line, states are increasingly working on ways to help workers acquire the skills they need to access the middle skills job market. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 37 states passed a total of 97 workforce development bills in 2016. These measures address a number of efforts, including incentivizing apprenticeships and other work-based learning programs, aligning education offerings with workforce needs and taking a fresh look at career technical training programs in high schools and community colleges. Some states, such as Alabama and South Carolina, have adopted plans to offer tax incentives to companies that hire apprentices, while Rhode Island is now reimbursing employers up to $5,000 annually for apprentice training costs. A similar plan is underway in Indiana, where the state’s NextLevelJobs Indiana program will reimburse employers $2,500 per employee for on-site apprenticeships, up to $25,000 annually. Rolled out last month, state officials said 1,200 people signed up in the program’s first three days.
Brooke DeRenzis, state network director for the National Skills Coalition, which tracks state and federal efforts to help workers grow their skillsets, says one more critical thing states can do is to help industries seeking good workers to help themselves. In that regard she notes many states are now working on skill development programs called sector partnerships, which use state dollars to convene multiple employers within an industry with local resources and agencies to close employee skill gaps. To date, at least 22 states have adopted sector partnership policies, including Georgia, which came on board this summer.
“If you are a small to mid-sized business in a region with lots of businesses in the same kind of industry, how do you get the kind of skilled workers that you are looking for?” she says. “A sector partnership is your business working with other businesses and community colleges and even labor unions to develop a pipeline to provide those kinds of skilled workers.”
There is also a growing private sector effort to nudge employers toward making their hiring process more about skillsets than solely degrees. Non-profits like Skillful and Opportunity@Work are striving to create what Skillful CEO Beth Cobert calls “an ecosystem perspective” for both employers and job seekers, essentially making them partners in the process.
Skillful – a project of the New York-based Markle Foundation in partnership with LinkedIn, the state of Colorado and other local partners – does that by providing job seekers with numerous tools to help them discover jobs for which they can utilize their current skills even without a college degree. For workers seeking new skills, the site connects them with approximately 1,000 training programs around the state, as well as volunteer coaches to help guide them toward their career goals. Skillful also provides employers with a vast number of detailed tools to improve their hiring process, from something fairly complex like how to adopt a skills-based hiring model to the simple act of writing job postings more likely to draw highly qualified candidates. To date, over 49,000 job seekers have signed up to access tools through Skillful since the effort launched in early 2016.
Even more noteworthy, says Gov. John Hickenlooper (D), is that over 90 companies have since partnered with the project. That enthusiasm from Colorado employers recently helped Skillful garner a $25.8 million grant from Microsoft philanthropies as part of a three-year partnership to help spread the platform to other states.
“I think this is going to scale very rapidly,” Hickenlooper said in a recent interview with SNCJ. “Since we’ve been doing this every business I’ve talked to has said it’s great. I can’t remember seeing a public policy where businesses were embracing having to accept more costs. They see an outcome where they’re going to get better employees.”
Skillful’s Cobert declines to give a timetable for when Skillful might start appearing in other states. But she says the transition to the mindset behind Skillful and other efforts like it is already in motion.
“We really need to shift our model that says we get all of our education in a four chunk at one time in one place between the ages of 18 and 22,” Cobert says. “That is not what is going to be effective in the 21st Century, and frankly most Americans know that.”
Colorado Department of Labor Executive Director Ellen Golombek, agrees. And the answer, she says, isn’t really one that lawmakers alone can devise.
“It’s hard to legislate culture change. But what we need to move to is a culture of lifelong learning,” she says. “If we’re going to be competitive in a global economy then we need to accept that every person in our workforce needs to continually update their skills, learn more things, become more proficient and have the opportunity and the availability of the tools to do that.”
Even more key, Golombek says, is shifting our mindset away from the ideas that college is the only way for someone to work their way to the middle class.
“Eighty percent of all top jobs in Colorado by the year 2020 will require some kind of post-secondary education, and that doesn’t mean college. We really need to stop talking just about college and start talking about post-secondary education, because that really is the key. That’s not to say people shouldn’t go to college but it is saying there are multiple ways to get to the middle class.”
As of 2013, Illinois had the most underfunded public pension system in the nation on a percentage basis, according to data from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The state only had enough assets in its pension accounts to cover 39.3 percent of its pension liability. And only California had more pension debt in terms of dollars, $169,633,728 compared to Illinois’ $100,800,547. South Dakota and Wisconsin had the highest pension “funded ratio,” at 99.9 percent, with pension debts of $7,598 and $52,600, respectively.
Source: Pew Charitable Trusts
Legend:
States with biggest pension debt by percentage: Illinois, Kentucky, Connecticut, Alaska, New Hampshire
States with smallest debt: South Dakota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee
There are bad ideas and then there are ideas that reek like an animal that crawled up and died inside a wall of your house. A new proposal from a trio of Washington state lawmakers is definitely in the latter category. As Sports Illustrated reports, Reps. Matt Shea, David Taylor and Bob McCaslin have introduced a bill (HB 1015) that would allow folks to bring their guns into sports stadiums. It would in fact bar privately operated stadiums like Safeco Field and Century Link Field, home to MLB’s Seattle Mariners and Seattle Seahawks respectively, from enforcing their own current rules that prohibit fans from packing heat during a game. Because adding guns to a situation already overflowing with copious amounts of booze and testosterone...what could possibly go wrong?
In most states eligible voters can cast their votes before Election Day, either by going to the polls during designated early voting periods or by voting via absentee ballot. But 30 states have no early voting period, although 13 of those states allow voters to cast absentee ballots in person before an election and another three do voting entirely by mail. Twenty states allow absentee voting only with an excuse. And 14 states fall into both categories, having no early voting period and allowing absentee voting only with an excuse. Note: Indiana allows absentee voting, but only in person and with justification.
Source: National Conference of State Legislatures
By-mail voting only: Colorado, Oregon, Washington
“In-person absentee” voting: Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin, Wyoming
Absentee voting only with excuse: Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia
No early voting and absentee voting only with excuse: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia
Marijuana legalization was one of the most prevalent issues on state ballots on Nov. 6. And with the approval of one of those measures, Proposal 1, on a 54-46 vote, Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize marijuana for recreational use. But voters in another Midwestern state, North Dakota, decisively rejected a recreational marijuana legalization measure there, Measure 3, with a 41-59 vote. Measures legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, meanwhile, were approved in two states: Missouri (Amendment 2) and Utah (Proposition 2).
Healthcare was another issue on the ballot in multiple states this year. Voters in three of them - Idaho (Prop. 2), Nebraska (Initiative 427) and Utah (Prop. 3) - decided to expand Medicaid eligibility, as provided for by the Affordable Care Act. And in the most expensive ballot measure contest in the country, California voters decided not to regulate prices charged by dialysis clinics (Prop. 8).
There were also a host of closely watched ballot contests in individual states:
Alabama voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, allowing the display of the 10 Commandments on public property.
Arizona voters approved Prop. 127, increasing the percentage of electricity utilities must obtain from renewable resources from 12 percent in 2020 to 50 percent in 2030.
California voters decided not to repeal the gas tax passed by the state’s Legislature last year (Prop. 6) or to allow more local government rent control (Prop. 10).
Voters in Colorado rejected Prop. 112, which would have established minimum distance requirements for oil and gas development projects.
Florida voters decided to restore voting rights to former felons (Amendment 4).
Massachusetts voters decided not to limit patient loads for nurses (Question 1) and also opted not to repeal legislation (SB 2407) prohibiting gender discrimination in public accommodations (Question 3).
Nevada chose not to deregulate the state’s electricity market (Question 3).
Ohio voters refused to reduce penalties for drug possession (Issue 1).
And Washington voters rejected I-1631, which would have established a first-of-its-kind-in-the-nation carbon emissions fee. (INITIATIVE & REFERENDUM INSTITUTE, BALLOTPEDIA)
At least four governors have signed bills in recent weeks to help prevent suicide among school-age kids. The first came on May 5 when Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) signed HB 198, a measure that requires school personnel to undergo yearly training in suicide awareness and directing schools to develop a policy on suicide prevention. That was followed by similar bill signings last week in Montana, Maryland and Utah. The Montana measure, HB 374, requires state education officials to develop a specific suicide prevention program for teachers and other school staff. Gov. Steve Bullock (D) signed the measure into law on Tuesday. The next day, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) signed HB 947, a bill that requires school counselors to receive specific training in suicide prevention, including how to recognize signs of mental illness and behavioral distress such as depression and substance abuse.
They were preceded a few days earlier by Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R), who on Monday signed five suicide prevention bills, including SB 175, which extends and makes statewide an existing school safety and crisis response line commissioned by the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute and allows the institute to add texting capabilities to its service. At a bill signing ceremony, Herbert told reporters that some of the best tools for preventing young people from taking their own lives was to make sure they have services available to help them through depression and other troubled times and giving them the comfort of knowing it is okay to talk openly about those troubles.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it, and we should not be ashamed about it, we should not be hesitant to talk about it, depression, hopelessness, despair, which we all at probably at some sort of fashion have in our lives, but we’re able to control it, well others need help,” Herbert said. (ST. GEORGE NEWS, FOX13NOW.COM [SALT LAKE CITY], MONTANA STANDARD [BUTTE], PR NEWSWIRE, NEWS.GNOM.ES)
As of April, 13 states relied primarily on redistricting commissions rather than lawmakers to draw their legislative districts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In seven of those states, redistricting commissions also had primary responsibility for drawing congressional districts. On Nov. 6, voters in Colorado approved ballot measures (Amendments Y and Z) providing for bipartisan legislative and congressional redistricting commissions, while voters also endorsed a proposal (Proposition 2) to create a 13-member citizens redistricting commission in Michigan. A measure that would establish a commission in Utah (Proposition 4) is still pending.