The anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause North Carolina was a plaintiff in the lawsuit over the legislative lines, not the congressional lines, but the group’s executive director, Bob Phillips, was in court Monday to watch nevertheless. He said he will continue to push for more permanent reforms at the Legislature, so that future districts can be drawn with “much more robust public input” and potentially avoid so many legal challenges.
“I think there’s a lot of room for improvement on transparency,” Phillips said....

Common Cause North Carolina, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the redrafting, will submit a formal comment on the maps later, its deputy director, Brent Laurenz, said.
“We were a little disappointed in the lack of public engagement in the process,” he said, and legislators in the House appeared to have tweaked some districts “more than needed.”
“You still had politicians walking up there carving up their own districts to their advantage,” he said. “It was illuminating, I guess, to see them go up...

Common Cause, which first obtained the hard drives, said the revelations on them were a wake-up call to supporters of the American system. “Now that the plan has been revealed, it’s important for all of us — the courts, leaders and the people — to stand up for a democracy that incudes every voice,” said Kathay Feng, the group’s national redistricting director.

And critics like Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization focused on holding government accountable, say that just because the information is public, it doesn’t mean it should be made available in this manner.

Like Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Gorsuch cited recent ballot initiatives creating nonpartisan redistricting commissions as a reason for the Supreme Court to hold its fire.

A lawyer for one set of challengers in the North Carolina case, Emmet J. Bondurant II, said such initiatives were not a complete answer. “The vast majority of states east of the Mississippi, including specifically North Carolina,” he said, “do not have citizen initiatives.”

“Now I’m elected, now I’m in, I got the power to draft, lobby and shape the laws that govern the United States of America. Fabulous,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Now, is there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m allowed to touch…based on the special interests funds that I accepted?”

“There’s no limit,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause.

Ocasio-Cortzed continued, “I can be totally funded by oil and gas, totally funded by big...

“Whether it is Democrats or Republicans manipulating the election maps, gerrymanders cheat voters out of true representation,” Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has the opportunity to set a clear standard that will restore a meaningful vote to millions of Americans disenfranchised by gerrymanders in Maryland, North Carolina and across the country.”

“Nothing is 100 percent guaranteed in Albany,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group. But she added: “I think it would be very very difficult for people who were elected on the promise that they were going to heed the voice of the voter, to then turn around and just have it be old-fashioned Albany business as usual.”

“There is no good reason why New York doesn’t have early voting; our elected officials have decided, at least up until now, that it’s not worth the trouble,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan group advocating for improvements to the state’s voting system. “The most logical explanation is: It’ll be expensive or complicated for the counties. It’s uniformly popular in every other state that has it, whether it’s a red state or a blue state,” she added. “The public likes it,...

Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at the watchdog group Common Cause, told Business Insider that such coordination could be in violation of what is known as the "soft money ban," adding that the Iowa event and the distribution of the funds raised during it "were timed to create goodwill and earned media for the Trump campaign in the week leading up to the Iowa caucuses."