By nearly every measure, voter fraud in U.S. elections is rare, but that isn't stopping the Texas Legislature from considering dozens of bills this session, some of which a voter rights group calls "extreme."
The Texas Republican Party has made election security one of its legislative priorities this year, with bills introduced to further restrict access to the ballot box. In contrast, Democrats are pushing legislation to expand voting access.
Texas ACLU senior attorney Matt Simpson said he believes some of the bills, including one to change the penalty for illegal voting from a misdemeanor to a felony, will create fear and intimidate people at the polls.
"If you take a step back, and you try to identify where the election fraud is that's being targeted - all of these proposals, more or less, amount to solutions in search of a problem," he said, "and Texas hasn't really had an election-fraud problem."
Following the defeat of Donald Trump by President Joe Biden in 2020, Texas' GOP-dominated Legislature approved multiple new voting restrictions including rules for voting by mail, a prohibition on drive-through and 24-hour voting, and a reduction in local initiatives meant to make it easier to vote.
One Republican proposal would create a new law-enforcement unit to prosecute election crimes, modeled after a law authorized by Florida's Republican governor. The Texas unit, to be led by state "election marshals," would prosecute election and voting crimes.
Simpson, who has monitored actions at the Capitol since 2009, isn't convinced it's needed.
"There's, like, a very small segment of Republican voters that that's a priority for," he said, "and yet we're seeing just this large number of proposals - a lot of conversation about it - and I just wonder where the mismatch is."
A 359-page audit of the 2020 election was released by the Texas secretary of state's office. It reviewed the two largest Democratic counties and two largest Republican ones and found some "irregularities," but concluded they were largely related to holding an election during a pandemic.
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A U.S. Senate subcommittee has uncovered widespread abuse of pregnant and postpartum women incarcerated nationwide, including in Georgia.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, said its research has found more than 200 reported cases of human rights violations against women in state prisons and jails. He said the abuses range from neglect during labor to newborns being taken away immediately after birth.
"We've heard from mothers forced to give birth in prison showers, hallways or on dirty cell floors," he said. "Mothers who gave birth into toilets, after being told they were 'not in labor.'"
Despite laws in 41 states including Georgia that prohibit or restrict shackling pregnant and postpartum people in prison, the subcommittee said violations were found in at least 16 states.
During last week's hearing, Jessica Umberger, who gave birth in a Georgia state prison, testified about the abuse she endured. She recounted being forced to have a Cesarean section, and said she was denied proper hygiene and placed in solitary confinement shortly after the birth.
"I was put in solitary when my baby was only five days old," she said. "In solitary confinement, I had no medical support. The staples in my stomach from my C-section had not dissolved, and there was no air conditioner."
The senators also heard from Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She suggested changes to address mistreatment and improve conditions for those who are pregnant behind bars.
"There are many opportunities for policy and practice change that could improve conditions and the well-being of pregnant and postpartum women in prisons and jails, as well as for their newborns," she said. "One is to find a pathway to require medical standards of care."
She said expanding Medicaid to cover people in prison could help enforce these standards.
Ossoff stressed the need for bipartisanship, and said further investigation is needed.
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Civil rights groups are sounding the alarm about potential threats to American democracy posed by Project 2025, a roadmap created by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican president.
The 900 page document calls for dismantling key protections against discrimination, access to reproductive health care, and more.
Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, said Project 2025 aims to undo gains made 60 years ago with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
But she said this agenda isn't new.
"And either we're going to stand on the victory of ending slavery, and of understanding the role of a federal government in ensuring that we all have civil rights, or we will not have a democracy," said Wiley. "And this is a blueprint for ending it."
Donald Trump has recently distanced himself from Project 2025, after praising the Heritage Foundation's plans in 2022.
Heritage says the roadmap - which was co-authored by top Trump advisors - does not speak for any single candidate, it just provides recommendations.
Many of those track closely with Trump's priorities, including removing regulations and checks on presidential power.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said Project 2025 also calls for expanding child labor and rolling back workplace protections under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or "OSHA" - designed to prevent accidents, injury and death.
"Tell that to a woman who lost her son in a grain silo, that could have been prevented, because he was cleaning it without the proper equipment," said Shuler. "That is OSHA. These fines and these laws are there for a reason."
Project 2025 would ban both abortion and in vitro fertilization nationally, and restrict access to contraception.
Patrick Gaspard, CEO of the Center for American Progress, said he believes the roadmap's creators want to take the nation back not to 1964 but to 1864.
"When men made decisions for women," said Gaspard, "when people who looked like me did not have the full agency and franchise of this great American republic, when huge corporations worked folks like farm animals."
Support for this reporting was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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Today is Black Women's Equal Pay Day and at 11 a.m. PT, advocates hope to get the topic trending with a "social media storm."
The wage gap is stark. Black women working full-time, year-round make 69 cents for every dollar made by non-Hispanic white men. And the number is 66 cents when you include all full-time, part-time and part-year workers.
Deborah Vagins, national campaign director for the nonprofit civil-rights group Equal Rights Advocates and director of its Equal Pay Today coalition, explained the day is intended to spark debate.
"Black women have to work all the way into July of this year to make what white non-Hispanic men would have made in 2023 alone," Vagins pointed out. "It's an acknowledgment of that pay gap."
Advocates are pressing Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would protect all workers against retaliation for discussing their pay. It would also ban the use of prior salary history when setting wages and require the federal government to collect pay data from employers, making it easier to root out disparities.
Vagins noted the fight for equal pay for equal work is more complex than the battle against racial and gender discrimination.
"It's also the lack of pay transparency in the workplace," Vagins emphasized. "It is setting salaries based on your prior salary history rather than on your qualifications for the job. It's jobs failing to have protections against harassment or pregnancy discrimination."
Vagins also cited the segregation of Black women into poverty-level minimum-wage work, particularly tipped jobs in the restaurant industry using a subminimum wage.
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