Expand the Vote. As vice-presidential chatter takes over the campaign season, Senior Editor Adam Doster delves into the often overlooked plan at the center of Barack Obama’s drive for the White House: voter registration drives.

Using his massive volunteer base, the one-time organizer is now adapting his Chicago experience for the national stage, leading similar targeted drives in all 50 states. Combined with his ability to inspire new voters and the continued efforts of long-established voter registration organizations, a registration boom could reconfigure the electoral map come November.

An Obama victory, Doster suggests in his cover story, may be as simple as reaching out to unregistered Americans -- many of which are young or minorities:

“About 64 million Americans are eligible to vote but are not registered to vote,” says Project Vote Deputy Director Slater. “That’s about one-third of the entire voting-eligible population. So the opportunity to expand the electorate is there.”

Death Squads in Oaxaca. In April, gunmen assassinated two young hosts on Radio Copala, a radio station in the Triqui indigenous region of the southwestern Mexican state of Oaxaca. In Death Squads in Oaxaca, John Gibler connects the brazen murders of these two women to the long struggle of the Triquis to defend their territory and autonomy:

Mar’a Dolores Par’s, who has worked with Triquis in Oaxaca and Triqui migrants in California for seven years, says the state government goes into the region to foment violence and then “washes its hands of it with theories that the violence comes from the nature of the Triquis themselves.”

“I feel certain that the young women were assassinated for their work with the radio station,” says Dolores Par’s, a professor of rural sociology at the Autonomous University of Mexico. She adds: “The intention has always been to strip the Triquis of their land.”

Read the article here.

And next week in Chicago... David Sirota, New York Times best-selling author and senior editor at In These Times, will join author Thomas Geoghegan (author, The Secret Lives of Citizens) for a discussion of his new book The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington. If you’re in the Chicago area, come by In These Times on Thursday, June 19, at 7:30 p.m. Details here. The event is open to the media and the public - and books will be available on site for sale.

Finally, thanks to all who’ve responded to our “32 Reasons for 32 Years” spring fundraiser campaign by making a donation. Your donations count -- A gift from you isn't a drop in the bucket for In These Times.

Cheers,

Web editor