Faced with popular initiatives to protect abortion rights and other measures they dislike, state Republicans are passing new bills that local advocates say will hollow out direct democracy. Organizers ...

Seattle is poised to continue its experiment in public campaign financing. Voters on Tuesday renewed the city’s democracy vouchers program, which provides each adult Seattle resident with four $25 ...

An Alabama teen was shot alongside his friend, then prosecuted for his killing. His case highlights a particularly harsh doctrine in American criminal punishment: felony murder.

I follow the U.S. Supreme Court: Why also care about state supreme courts? If state and local governments have any involvement in an issue, you can bet that state supreme courts shape public policy on ...

Chicago built a new police team to rebuild community trust. It harassed drivers of color instead.

By international human rights standards, Jack Morris was tortured by the state of California for almost four decades. Morris mostly lived in solitary confinement from the time he went to prison in ...

In North Dakota as elsewhere, Native voters face a triple threat: judges targeting the VRA, Trump officials hostile to discrimination laws, and a funding crunch depleting their work.

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and New York Focus. Five years ago, a social worker who believed in rehabilitation joined the New York State Board of Parole. During her time ...

“An Egalitarian Pressure”: Australia Has Been Requiring People to Vote for 100 Years As Australia compels voters to show up at the polls this weekend, a scholar lays out the genesis of 'compulsory ...

A historian answers Bolts readers’ questions on the deep roots of forced labor in U.S. prisons, how it operates today, and efforts to challenge it.

Your Guide to Four Emerging Threats to the Voting Rights Act Conservatives are targeting Section 2 of the landmark civil rights law with a series of new legal arguments that risk unraveling it further ...

The upcoming presidential election is routinely cast as a battle over the future of democracy, but as we enter 2024, so much remains in flux about what democracy looks like this year. After court ...