KOR In The News

Remarks by Timothy E. Wirth, July 2023 Boulder, Colorado Fifty years ago I was first elected to Congress, a beneficiary of voter backlash against the chaos of the previous decade. Our country had just been through a significant stress test: could our governing structures withstand the pressures of an unpopular war, widespread anti-war protests, RFK…

Mark Medish is the co-founder of Keep our Republic, a non-partisan civic education organization. He served as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council and as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury in the Clinton administration. He was a law partner with Akin LLP and headed the…

I wrote a piece recently on how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made himself unelectable by doing the politically foolish thing of changing his position on abortion—denying abortion access after six weeks or even earlier. Former President Donald Trump has also made himself increasingly unelectable as he does more and more to strengthen his hold on the Republican nomination.…

The 2024 presidential election is rapidly approaching, and we aren't prepared for how new artificial intelligence models will affect our elections. Fake, A.I. generated images of former President Trump resisting arrest provided another fresh example of the firehose of lies, deception and false information that AI threatens to unleash on our electoral process. The potential for AI-generated…

Keep Our Republic, a non-partisan group organized in 2020 to protect election laws and strengthen the power of checks and balances in the electoral system, hosted a conversation called “Our Fragile Republic — Sounding the Alarm in Defense of Democracy,” where they discussed their upcoming plans in the Stern Great Room. The event, held on…

Speaking Monday during a panel discussion on democracy and civics at Dickinson College, Tom Corbett, who served as Pennsylvania’s governor from 2011 to 2015, said the advent and growth of social media has changed how news and information flows, and said a response is needed to combat disinformation from spreading in future elections. “What’s really changed –…

The group, known as “Keep Our Republic,” said it is concentrating its efforts in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where leaders say they’ve seen “brush fires” of anti-democratic activism that need to be countered early and often. In rolling out the Pennsylvania effort at Dickinson College in Carlisle, KOR leaders stressed their…

“In a brief order, the court called for the parties involved in the dispute and the Justice Department to file ‘supplemental letter briefs’ addressing the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over the case, given that the North Carolina Supreme Court has agreed to rehear the redistricting dispute at its center.”

Alot was written after the 2022 midterms of how election deniers promulgating the Big Lie were defeated in the major races, depriving the Republicans of a major victory many had wrongly predicted. Certainly these were results to cheer about. Yet they also led to a great deal of complacency over something that remains the major threat to…

Editor’s note: To hear a conversation with Mary McCord and Andrew Weissmann about paths to reform after the January 6th report, including addressing paramilitary groups, listen to the Just Security podcast here. Two years ago, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol and ruptured our country’s tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, images of the mob’s extremism…

After the unrelenting crusade by election deniers to overturn the 2020 election, which reached its low point, if not its end, with the January 6 riot, many Americans concerned about our democracy approached the 2022 midterms with trepidation. They breathed a sigh of relief as voters in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona rejected…

This week the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing Moore v. Harper, a case with potentially devastating consequences for our democracy. In that case the Court is considering whether to adopt the “independent state legislature” theory to interpret the election clauses of the U.S. Constitution. The gist of this theory is that since…