#politics

Beef is so expensive right now because drought, high grain prices, inflation and rising interest rates made cattle farming a costly endeavor in recent years. To deal with rising operating costs, many U.S. cattle farmers reduced the size of their herds — and some got out of the business altogether. As a result, the U.S. cattle inventory is the smallest it’s been since 1951.

Tariffs add another wrinkle. President Donald Trump has instituted wide-ranging tariffs throughout his second term, many of which included beef and other agricultural products imported into the U.S. Trump rolled back some food-related tariffs in November.

The cost of tariffs are typically passed through to consumers.

• Inflation drove up input costs, which haven’t receded, making it expensive all around to care for livestock.

• Drought conditions continue to impact pastures in cattle regions, which can force producers to spend more on feed.

• Record-high prices can be good for farmers selling cattle. But anyone looking to expand their herd is paying those same sums.

• High interest rates mean producers are paying more for operating loans, which many rely on to run their businesses.

Tariffs will have a definite impact on consumer prices that could last for years. The beef industry relies on both imports and exports, and it’s no simple task to find new markets and reroute global supply chains. Prices will rise in the short-term while producers decide how to adapt to the new conditions. And long-term, it’s unclear whether tariffs will leave producers better off or worse, which would have consequences for prices.

“For beef valued around $7 per kilogram, that difference can exceed $1.80 per kilogram in tariff costs,” the report said.

Beef prices in the U.S have soared in 2026 due to a reduction in the nation’s cattle herd from years of drought, high feed costs and herd liquidation. The size of the herd is at its lowest point since the 1950s.

What was Citizens United about?

Citizens United arose in 2007 when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The Supreme Court eventually decided 5–4 that Citizens United was within its First Amendment rights to spend its money disseminating the film. But rather than opining solely on the case before it as it had been asked to do, the Court took the opportunity to entirely strike down century-old prohibitions on corporate “independent” spending — money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party.

The justices who decided Citizens United held that independent spending could not pose a substantial risk of corruption on the erroneous assumption that the money wouldn’t be under the control of any single candidate or party.  They also assumed that existing transparency rules would require all the new spending they were permitting to be fully transparent, allowing voters to appropriately evaluate the messages targeting them.

Both assumptions have proven to be incorrect. While super PACs and other outside spenders are supposed to be separate from candidates and parties, they usually work in tandem with them — to the point where affiliated super PACs that can raise unlimited money are now integral to most major campaigns. Legal loopholes also mean that many of these groups can keep their sources of funding secret.

These trends reached new heights in the 2024 election. Billionaire-backed super PACs helped the winning presidential candidate close a substantial fundraising gap. These groups also went beyond just running supportive ads. A group funded by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, took on core components of the winning campaign, including voter outreach operations. And dark money from groups that do not disclose their donors topped $1 billion, including at least $182 million that was funneled through groups closely aligned with the two major parties’ congressional leadership campaigns.

Political action committees, known as PACs, are organizations that raise and spend money for campaigns, or whose major purpose is to support or oppose political candidates or ballot initiatives. Traditional PACs are permitted to donate directly to a candidate’s official campaign, but they are also subject to contribution limits, both in terms of what they can receive from individuals and what they can give to candidates. For example, PACs are only permitted to contribute up to $5,000 per year to a candidate per election.

In the 2010 case Speechnow.org v. FEC, however, a federal appeals court ruled — applying logic from Citizens United — that outside groups could accept unlimited contributions from both individual donors and corporations as long as the groups don’t give directly to candidates. Labeled “super PACs,” these outside groups were still permitted to spend money on independently produced ads and on other communications that promote or attack specific candidates.

In other words, super PACs are not bound by spending limits on what they can collect or spend. Additionally, super PACs are required to disclose their donors, but those donors can include dark money groups, which make the original source of the donations unclear. And while super PACs are technically prohibited from working directly with candidates, weak rules that are supposed to enforce this separation have often proven ineffective.

For example, in the 2022 midterms, just 21 of the biggest donor families contributed $783 million and billionaires provided 15 percent of all federal election financing — most of which went to super PACs supporting congressional campaigns. These donors easily outspent the total given by the millions of small donors giving to House and Senate candidates that cycle.

Citizens United allowed big political spenders to exploit the growing lack of transparency in political spending. This has contributed to a surge in secret spending from outside groups in federal elections. Dark money expenditures increased from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $1 billion in the 2024 presidential elections alone.

Over the long-term, Citizens United would have to be overturned by a constitutional amendment or the Supreme Court. In the meantime, there are policies that can combat the dominance of big money in politics and the lack of transparency.

At a minimum, it is critical to ensure that all large campaign donors are disclosed. Strong disclosure laws, like the one enacted in Washington, require groups spending significant sums on election activity to report their largest donors. Separately, lawmakers and regulators should pass stricter rules to prevent super PACs and other outside groups that can raise unlimited money from coordinating directly with candidates and parties. Existing laws also need to be fully enforced, which has been a longstanding challenge at the federal level thanks to dysfunction at the Federal Election Commission.

Further, candidates can be offered alternative means to fund their campaigns without relying on big donors and super PACs. The most effective way to do that is public campaign financing, specifically small donor matching, in which small private contributions are amplified using public funds. Fourteen states and dozens of large cities and counties have enacted some form of public financing, with other localities actively considering it. Such a system recently went into effect in New York State and candidates have widely adopted it, allowing them to raise far more in small donations from their own constituents.

Notably, overwhelming majorities of Americans across party lines have consistently expressed disapproval of Citizens United. At least 22 states and hundreds of cities have already voted to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. And national polls routinely show that reducing the influence of money in politics is a top policy priority for Americans, a finding consistent across demographics including race, age, and political party affiliation.

So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security. What's more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes--and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier--as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance--and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.

In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.

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A majority of Democrats opposed the legislation, citing opposition to the Iran war and concerns about a provision in the bill that would establish the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. The section also directs the Secretary of Defense to appoint an “executive agent” at the Pentagon to oversee the newly formed initiative.

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), who led an unsuccessful effort to remove Section 219 from this bill earlier this week, said this provision “tragically merges our military and supply chains with Israel’s.”

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law is an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization that works to reform, revitalize, and defend our country’s systems of democracy and justice.

We have solutions for democracy’s most pressing problems.

Voting & Elections

Americans still face many barriers to voting. Meanwhile, elections require secure systems and independent administration of the casting and counting of ballots. The Brennan Center fights for voting rights, and we advocate for plans that will safeguard the election system — and the officials who work in it — from attacks and political interference.

Money in Politics

Americans are fed up with the role of big money in political campaigns. The Brennan Center’s solution: small donor public financing to put power back in the hands of individuals.

Shortly before the 1956 presidential election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a recess appointment to place Brennan on the Supreme Court. Brennan won Senate confirmation the following year.

Due to his ability to shape a wide variety of opinions and bargain for votes in many cases, he was considered to be among the Court's most influential members. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who served alongside Brennan between 1986 and 1990, called Brennan "probably the most influential Justice of the [20th] century."[4][5]

Brennan strongly believed in the Bill of Rights, arguing early on in his career that it should be applied to the states in addition to the federal government.[41] He often took positions in favor of individual rights against the state, favoring criminal defendants, minorities, the poor, and other underrepresented groups.

Furthermore, he generally shied away from the absolutist liberal positions of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, being very amenable to compromise in order to win a majority of Justices.[42]

he believed that the deliberate taking of human life by the state, as a punishment, was inherently cruel and unusual.

In Glass, the Court chose not to hear a case that challenged the constitutionality of the use of the electric chair as a form of execution. Brennan wrote:[47]

Th[e] evidence suggests that death by electrical current is extremely violent and inflicts pain and indignities far beyond the "mere extinguishment of life". Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." "The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands." The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool.

Brennan concluded by stating that electrocution is "nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake."

Brennan wrote the majority opinion in Roth v. United States which set new standards for obscenity laws, allowing some prosecutions, but drastically loosening the laws overall.[48] He later reversed his position in dissent in Miller v. California arguing that obscenity laws were unconstitutional.

He is regarded as one of the most liberal justices in the history of the court.[54]

Mamdani has said New York City’s legal department is discussing the possibility of arresting Netanyahu when the prime minister is in the city to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague,” Mamdani told The New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court. And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years,” the mayor said.

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday, said, “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on Nov. 21, 2024, alleging he is “responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population” in Gaza, as well as “crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives

They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”.

On Wednesday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz responded to the prospect of grants to Maga-aligned groups in Berlin by saying: “I do not ‌want the American government or institutions close to the government to interfere in German ⁠elections.”

A state department spokesperson said that the DRL grants would “continue to undergo the Department’s standard and rigorous vetting process by grant professionals” and that decisions were still under “active deliberation”. They added: “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities. “

The grants are part of a broader shift that has caused dismay among veterans of the state department. In interviews, five former officials suggested that there has been a months-long effort by Trump-aligned individuals in the state department to subvert normal funding procedures and allocate US taxpayer money to conservative and Maga-aligned causes in the UK and Europe.

A former US official who reviewed the allocations called the lack of procedure around them “outrageous and absurd”.

“Sole source awards require significant legal justification to avoid required competitive processes,” they said.

“They are usually given to entities with unique capabilities that are hard to find elsewhere. But in this case I would argue that these entities are being funded to subvert legal and competitive processes.”

Another said that the sole source grants laid out in the document amounted to “horrible stewardship of US taxpayer money.”

The plans are laid out in a congressional notification seen by the Guardian, which documents how the state department intends to spend a sum of money that was allocated last year to a branch of the state department called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

878 has yet to list any specific initiatives, but says that it is focused on “mass migration”, “warfighting” and “rejuvenating energy abundance for urgent re-industrialisation”, as well as “Judeo-Christian culture”.

Twitter existed for 16 years before Musk bought it. He wasn’t even close to the biggest account during that era. Then he bought it. Now his account is the biggest.

As Silver’s data analysis shows, Musk’s X is not just dominated by right-wing accounts, it’s dominated by “who the hell is that?” right-wing slop accounts.

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.

A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.

In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.” Anne Applebaum: Trump’s anti-patriotic trap “Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” “One day” is today. The trump presidency, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage. At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as ma

This is the context in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.

Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.

The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall. The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.

Here’s what you need to know about the SAVE America Act: 

1. Citizenship is already a requirement to vote, and instances of noncitizen voting are rare.
2. Many eligible citizens don’t have access to documentary proof of citizenship.
3. There are better ways to verify citizenship that put the responsibility on government, not voters.
4. The SAVE America Act could have unintended consequences for election officials and election administration.
5. The SAVE America Act’s photo ID requirements are more restrictive than any state law currently in place.
6. The SAVE America Act needs more time and resources to be implemented well.

Sounds like a coup in the making:

The SAVE America Act was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2026. Congress is now weighing a scaled-back version through the budget reconciliation process. Instead of a blanket mandate, this version takes an incentive-based approach: No state would be required to adopt documentary proof of citizenship or photo voter ID, but states that meet the requirements would qualify for federal funding. The House set aside $10 billion for this purpose in its July 15, 2026, budget resolution. Because the resolution specifies only the total dollar amount, the details of the framework are still undetermined. For perspective, that $10 billion is nearly double everything Congress has allocated for election administration since 2002 combined.1

Although instances of noncitizen registration and voting are rare, the SAVE America Act’s goal of ensuring that only citizens can register to vote is important. But there are easier, more cost-effective ways to improve citizenship verification that don’t create new barriers for eligible voters.

Registration and voting attempts by noncitizens are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that attempts at voting by noncitizens have ever been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome. In fact, there is ample evidence to indicate that registration and voting by noncitizens is few and far between.

Utah, for example, performed a citizenship review of its entire voter registration list from April 2025 through January 2026. After a time-intensive, multi-step review of more than 2 million registered voters, they identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.

Additionally, many state election offices began using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program in 2025 to verify voter citizenship. Records from this program show that just 0.04% of voter verification cases are returned as noncitizens.

Many eligible citizens don’t have documentary proof of citizenship

According to the U.S. Department of State, examples of primary citizenship evidence include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate. (While Real IDs are often assumed to be a reliable proxy for citizenship, they do not definitively establish citizenship.) 

Although at least one of these documents are in theory available to most citizens, not all voters have them readily available. According to recent studies:

9% of all eligible voters do not have, or do not have easy access to, documentary proof of citizenship. 52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name. 11% of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate. Additionally, birth certificates often lack information that matches a person’s current identity. For instance, someone who has changed their name through marriage or court order may need to present a third document (such as a marriage certificate) to join their proof of citizenship (e.g., birth certificate) with their proof of identity (e.g., driver’s license), further decreasing the likelihood that a voter will have the appropriate documentation on hand to successfully register.

Even if voters were to provide documentary proof of citizenship, verifying the authenticity of those documents is an inherently complex task, one that election officials and motor vehicle departments often do not have the resources or training to perform.

Kansas offers a case study of how a documentary proof requirement would likely play out in practice. Before the law took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After adoption, the documentary proof of citizenship requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering to vote than noncitizens.

He said that although a prohibition on mail-in voting with exceptions and other requests made by Trump could be included, the “bigger reach” is to hone the bill to focus on providing proof of citizenship when registering to vote and the presentation of photo ID before casting a ballot — the core components of the bill. “That eliminates the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody’s concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states,” Johnson said.

The shuttering of local news outlets and proliferation of AI-generated content has led to a rise in “pink slime” websites, which the Poynter Institute describes as outlets producing “poor quality reports that appear to be local news,” and are “frequently produced via automation and templates.” Often these sites are, according to Poynter, “funded by outside companies with a partisan source of financing.”  For example, a sprawling network of 450 websites — including 189 that “were set up as local news networks across 10 states” — was discovered ahead of the 2020 election cycle by the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR linked the network to a conservative businessman’s company “known for its low-cost automated story generation,” as well as for “faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism.” In Knox County, Ohio, a proposed wind farm became the subject of critical coverage in a local outlet after it was purchased by Metric Media, “part of a ‘pink slime’ network,” ProPublica reported at the time.

A 2019 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that minimum wage increases did not affect the overall number of low-wage jobs in the five years following the wage increase. However, it did find disemployment in 'tradable' sectors, defined as those sectors most reliant on entry-level or low-skilled labor.[78]

A 2018 study published by the University of California agrees with the study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; it finds that minimum wages actually lead to fewer jobs for low-skilled workers. The article discusses a trade-off for low- to high-skilled workers: when the minimum wage is increased, GDP is more heavily redistributed toward high-academia jobs.[79]

In another study, which shared authors with the above, published in the American Economic Review, found that a large and persistent increase in the minimum wage in Hungary produced some disemployment, with the large majority of additional cost being passed on to consumers. The authors also found that firms began substituting capital for labor over time.[80]

Card and Krueger expanded on this initial article in their 1995 book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage.[82] They argued that the negative employment effects of minimum wage laws are minimal if not non-existent. For example, they look at the 1992 increase in New Jersey's minimum wage, the 1988 rise in California's minimum wage, and the 1990–91 increases in the federal minimum wage. In addition to their own findings, they reanalyzed earlier studies using updated data, generally finding that the earlier negative employment effects did not hold up in the larger datasets.[83] This had major implications on policy, challenging long-held economic views that increasing minimum wage led to deadweight loss.

A 2011 paper reconciled differences between datasets, showing positive employment effects for small restaurants but negative effects for large fast-food chains.[87] A 2014 analysis found that minimum wage reduces employment among teenagers.[88]

A 2017 study in Seattle found that raising the minimum wage to $13 per hour reduced the incomes of low-wage workers because they worked fewer hours as businesses adjusted to higher labor costs.[94] A 2019 study in Arizona suggested that smaller minimum wage increases might lead to slight economic growth without significantly distorting labor markets.[95]

For free-market types, including The Economist, fiddling with wages by fiat sets off alarm bells. In a competitive market anything that artificially raises the price of labour will curb demand for it, and the first to lose their jobs will be the least skilled—the people intervention is supposed to help. That is why Milton Friedman called minimum wages a form of discrimination against the low-skilled; and it is why he saw topping up the incomes of the working poor with public subsidies as a far more sensible means of alleviating poverty.

Scepticism about the merits of minimum wages remains this newspaper’s starting-point. But as income inequality widens and workers’ share of national income shrinks, the case for action to help the low-paid grows. Addressing the problem through subsidies for the working poor is harder in an era of austerity, when there are many other pressing claims on national coffers. Other policy options, such as confiscatory taxes, are unattractive.

Nor is a moderate minimum wage as undesirable as neoclassical purists suggest. Unlike those in textbooks, real labour markets are not perfectly competitive. Since workers who want to change jobs face costs and risks, employers may be able to set pay below its market-clearing rate. A minimum wage, providing it is not set too high, could thus boost pay with no ill effects on jobs.

Empirical evidence supports that argument. In flexible economies a low minimum wage seems to have little, if any, depressing effect on employment. America’s federal minimum wage, at 38% of median income, is one of the rich world’s lowest. Some studies find no harm to employment from federal or state minimum wages, others see a small one, but none finds any serious damage. Britain’s minimum wage, at around 47% of median income, with a lower rate for young people, also does not seem to have pushed many people out of work.

High minimum wages, however, particularly in rigid labour markets, do appear to hit employment. France has the rich world’s highest wage floor, at more than 60% of the median for adults and a far bigger fraction of the typical wage for the young. This helps explain why France also has shockingly high rates of youth unemployment: 26% for 15- to 24-year-olds.

A second lesson is that politicians should give the power to set minimum wages to technocrats. In Britain, the floor is adjusted annually on the advice of economists and statisticians in the Low Pay Commission; it has generally advanced gradually. In America, the federal floor is set by politicians and adjusted irregularly in huge increments. That does no favours to American workers or their employers.

Finally, governments should remember that minimum wages are a palliative. They should not distract attention from more fundamental causes of low wages—such as a lack of education and skills—and the efforts to address them.

There is a long and sorry history of political operatives trying to trick Americans out of voting. In 2008, these tactics were focused on voters in battleground states. In Philadelphia, fliers distributed and posted in a West Philadelphia neighborhood claimed that any violation as simple as an unpaid parking ticket would render people ineligible to vote and subject to arrest at the polls. In southern Virginia and at George Mason University in the northern part of the state, official-looking fliers “informed” voters that, because of projected high turnout, Democrats should wait and vote on November 5, the day after the election.

The U.S. has a long history of mail voting. Large-scale use of mail ballots originated during the U.S. Civil War, when some soldiers were allowed to vote remotely after absentee voting laws were passed in their home states. Today, mail voting is widely used around the world, with more than 30 countries—including Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea—allowing voters to cast ballots by mail.

Mail ballots are widespread across the United States. For example, in 2024 alone, the U.S. Postal Service processed over 99.2 million mail ballots.

Several studies indicate that certain forms of mail voting can increase voter turnout. A 2009 study for the Pew Charitable Trusts found that no-excuse absentee voting increased voter participation by about 3 percentage points in comparison to states with excuse absentee voting, when controlling for other factors that may impact turnout.

First, we find that cases of fraud involving any form of mail ballots were very rare. Across the entire country, and utilizing a maximally inclusive estimate, between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud were identified in each general election. To calculate the percentage of mail voting fraud in a given year, we divided the total number of mail voting fraud cases by the total number of mail votes cast for each general election. We find an average total mail voting fraud percentage across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections of only 0.000043%, or about four cases of mail voting fraud out of every 10 million mail votes.

Although the database we utilized self-identified as “not…comprehensive,” we have reason to believe that this limited scope did not meaningfully distort our overall findings. The News21 database, which is among the most extensive databases of its kind currently publicly available, includes over 2,000 cases, of which we found 1,605 related to alleged voting fraud between 2000 and 2012. That averages to roughly 134 cases per year. Even if we assume this same case rate persisted for the four general elections examined, and assume the 134 cases of voting fraud were all mail voting fraud,8 that would still translate to only about 2.5 cases of mail voting fraud per 1,000,000 mail votes. This indicates that, even under assumptions that greatly inflate the frequency of mail voting fraud, the resulting probability of fraud remains negligible.