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Eliza Newlin Carney

Eliza Newlin Carney is The American Prospect's senior editor.

 

Recent Articles

Keeping Russia Out of the Voting Booth

Eliza Newlin CarneyJun 22, 2017
(AP Photo/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
(AP Photo/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) A woman with her daughter votes in North Las Vegas on November 8, 2016. O f all the disturbing questions raised by Russia’s interference in last year’s election, the most alarming may be how a foreign power might hack into the nation’s voting infrastructure. So far there’s no evidence that Russian cyberattacks altered U.S. vote totals in any way. But recent disclosures make clear that Russian intelligence intrusions were much broader and deeper than initially known. And the U.S. election system, while it has strengths, remains vulnerable on several fronts. Aging voting machines, the absence of a paper trail in some states, and spotty audits are all weaknesses that could be exploited in 2018 and 2020. The threat posed by foreign meddling in American voting is a rare point of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill, where the Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing Wednesday on Russian election intrusions. The panel’s GOP chairman, North Carolina’s...

Collecting Campaign Cash from the Homeless

Eliza Newlin CarneyJun 15, 2017
Katz/Shutterstock
Katz/Shutterstock Marchers at a campaign-finance reform rally in New York City I n the special election to be decided next Tuesday between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, high-dollar donors and outside groups have pushed spending to just under $40 million , a House record. In municipal elections now unfolding in Seattle, by contrast, housing activist Jon Grant is collecting campaign contributions from a very different source —the city’s homeless encampments. Homeless donors are helping power Grant’s campaign for city council thanks to a new public financing program that gives every Seattle voter four vouchers worth $25 each, to hand out to candidates as they see fit. Such is the dichotomy between the federal campaign-finance system, where unrestricted money reigns supreme, and the experiments in publicly funded, citizen-powered elections that are popping up around the country in cities, states, and municipalities like Seattle...

The Simple Case Against Trump

Eliza Newlin CarneyJun 08, 2017
Angelo Carconi/ANSA via AP
Angelo Carconi/ANSA via AP President Donald Trump boards the Air Force One to Brussels at the end of a two-day visit to Italy. A simple but seldom asked question may prove surprisingly central to the Russia investigation that’s consuming Capitol Hill this week: Did Donald Trump violate the campaign-finance laws? The case that Trump and his team broke the rules that ban foreign involvement in American elections is “more or less hiding in plain sight,” argues Democratic election lawyer Bob Bauer in a recent analysis . For all the speculation swirling around whether Trump team members met with foreign officials, notes Bauer, Trump’s own public statements may already put him on precarious legal territory. Campaign-finance laws are explicit that foreign actors may not donate money or any “other thing of value” in connection with American elections, a rule that on its face appears to have been broken. U.S. intelligence officials have already concluded that the Russian government hacked and...

The Maps That Kill Competition

Eliza Newlin CarneyJun 01, 2017
Corey Lowenstein/The News & Observer, File via AP
Corey Lowenstein/The News & Observer, File via AP Republican State Senators Dan Soucek, left, and Brent Jackson, right, review North Carolina's congressional district map. D emocrats eyeing the 2018 midterm elections have a lot to feel optimistic about—fired-up liberal activists are thronging to protests and town halls, low-dollar donors are opening their wallets , candidate recruitment is setting records. But Democrats also face a massive handicap: cleverly drawn electoral maps that dramatically favor Republicans, in both House and state legislative races. Democrats have mounted an aggressive, multi-million dollar effort to fight back against district lines that they say were unfairly and even illegally drawn. And they may get an assist from the Supreme Court. The practice of gerrymandering—manipulating electoral boundaries to favor the party in power—is hardly new, and the arcane topic of redistricting typically makes voters’ eyes glaze over. But the issue is drawing national...

Ethics Watchdog Can Only Do So Much

Eliza Newlin CarneyMay 25, 2017
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File Walter M. Shaub Jr., director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics walks on Capitol Hill in Washington. F or more than 30 years, watchdogs have pleaded in vain with Congress to strengthen the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), an independent agency set up in the wake of Watergate to ward off executive branch conflicts of interest. Now, lawmakers may finally take notice. Until this year, it’s been easy for Congress to overlook the OGE’s relative lack of clout, sleepy profile, and reluctance to take forceful action. After all, until now all presidents have voluntarily followed fixed ethics conventions, such as disclosing their taxes and placing their assets into blind trusts, and have stood squarely behind the OGE in its inevitable clashes with other federal agencies. But Donald Trump’s determination to throw those conventions out the window, and his administration’s moves to not only reject OGE’s advice but block it from doing its job, have made it...

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