In the November 2019 election, voters in Harris County, Texas could vote at any polling location, not just the polling place assigned to their precinct. This change was designed to make it easier for more people to participate in the electoral process. In order to promote the program, the Harris County Clerk brought in our friends…
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Last week, we released a new study, Serving Veterans After Hurricane Harvey, with our partners at Combined Arms examining the impact of Hurricane Harvey on the Gulf Coast veteran population. Texas is home to nearly 1.5 million veterans and many felt the direct impact of the storm. Yet, two years later, we still needed to answer…
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It’s a tough time of year for homeowners in Houston. In November, a letter arrives from the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector with next year’s property tax bill. Some people pay their taxes every month with their mortgage. Others, like me, end up writing a big check in January. But there’s some relief. The Harris County…
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Census 2020 is critically important for determining how much money state and local governments receive from the federal government. That is a major reason why states and cities around the country have been worried about the citizenship question and the lack of census funding, which threaten an accurate count. For every person missed, states end…
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Last year, the City of Houston passed an ordinance that regulated certain types of housing for people on parole. This ordinance includes regulations to promote safety, but it also includes a distance requirement that effectively prohibits new housing. Houston already lacks enough housing for people on parole, and this distance requirement only compounds the problem.…
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In 48 states, a felony conviction means that you lose the right to vote. This can be temporary or permanent, depending on your state. During the 2018 election, Florida pushed this issue into the national spotlight with a state constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to felons. It passed with two-thirds of the vote. Texas,…
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We recently did a webinar with Jamey Caruthers, senior staff attorney at Children At Risk, about how to use data to fight human trafficking. Human trafficking is a huge problem in Texas, especially in Houston, and Children At Risk is leading the charge in helping to write and pass laws that increase penalties for perpetrators while…
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If you’ve been keeping up with the Census, you’ve probably heard about communities that are “hard to count” or “hardest to count.” It’s true that the Census has a hard time getting responses from certain populations, and there are some households the Census never tracks down at all. But is it really fair to label…
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Around the country, there are calls to reform our election process. Activists want to ensure that the outcomes of elections properly reflect the will of the people. Because elections are administered at the local level, this results in experiments in radical democracy in likely and unlikely places. Ranked choice voting is one of those experiments…
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Counting people is vital to our democracy. Every ten years, the US government has a constitutional obligation to conduct a census that counts everyone living in the United States. This count determines how many Congressional representatives each state receives, the levels of Federal funding for state and local governments and federal programs, and serves as…
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