Americans are headed to the polls next Tuesday in thousands of contests to decide whether to re-elect or confirm members of Congress and governors, and also mayors, school board members, and judges. There are also hundreds of referendums on the ballot, although perhaps none of those votes has as much long-term potential to change the rules of U.S. democracy as Initiative 194 (I-194) in Montana.

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Los estadounidenses están llamados el próximo martes a decidir en miles de contiendas si renuevan o confirman a congresistas y gobernadores, y también a alcaldes, miembros de distritos escolares o jueces. Hay, además, centenares de referéndums convocados, aunque tal vez ninguna de esas votaciones tenga tanto potencial para cambiar a largo plazo las reglas de esta democracia como la Iniciativa 194 (I-194), en Montana.

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Justin Pearson is playing a game in which the cards were marked in favor of his opponent after play had already begun. Pearson is the Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee’s ninth district (TN-9), one of three in the U.S. South that Republicans rushed to redraw in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling in April that curtailed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision dealt a fatal blow to one of the major gains of the civil rights era. It banned consideration of race when drawing electoral districts, but the court’s conservative majority approved doing so for political reasons.

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Election officials, activists, voting-rights lawyers, legal experts and other watchdogs of U.S. civil society have spent the past year and a half warning about what they describe as a campaign by U.S. President Donald Trump to undermine confidence in the conduct of free and fair elections. Their concern is that he is laying the groundwork to overturn the outcome if it does not favor the Republican Party.

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Former vice president Kamala Harris landed in the state of Mississippi on Thursday at the start of a tour to help Democratic candidates in the final stretch of the midterm campaign. The series of campaign events, which began the previous day in Nevada and will continue in the coming days in Georgia, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, also serves as a thermometer for measuring the enthusiasm of potential voters for the notion of Harris running again for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028. That would be four years after her defeat by Donald Trump following a brief and disappointing 107-day surprise run for the White House.

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Donald Trump’s second presidency, it was said, would not be like the first. He was back after a period in the wilderness, but with lessons learned; this time he was surrounded by an army of loyalists and not, as in 2017, by a team of aides willing to disagree with him now and then. Nor would it once again be a nonstop spectacle of leaks, backstage betrayals and impulsive firings communicated through social media.

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