Such contributions can help companies buy access to government officials, said Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause.

"Anytime a special interest doing business with the government can make big contributions to public officials handing out contracts or making other government decisions, it's a cause for concern," he said. "Average, everyday Americans can't buy the same influence."

“While the process was at times messy, it was an exercise in democracy done in public,” California Common Cause executive director Jonathan Mehta Stein said in a statement.

That met the goal that his organization and others had in 2008 when they persuaded voters to take the redistricting out of the hands of public officials who had a vested interest in the outcome.

This year’s effort, despite criticism, “put the California public in the driver’s seat,” he said, though the groups promised to seek...

This year's process and these maps were approved against our will. In more than 10 hours of testimony on congressional plans, not a single Texan spoke in favor of the draft maps.

Without reform, we're bound to repeat this flawed process in another 10 years. It's time to put an end to a process that allows the politicians to choose which Texans they want to represent.

(Reuters) - On a recent evening, Tyler Daye, an organizer with Common Cause North Carolina, hosted an online seminar for residents of the city of Wilson on an important but arcane topic: redistricting.

With the help of publicly available mapping software known as Districtr, Daye clicked through maps of federal and state voting districts, showing how in each case Republican lawmakers in 2011 neatly cleaved the city in two, dividing the largely Black eastern half from the mostly white western half.

“When your...

Stephanie Gómez, the associate director of the advocacy group Common Cause Texas, said in a video conference with reporters that the two bills were “weaponizing legislation to codify widespread voter intimidation.”
“If you want to know which state is going to be the next Georgia,” she said, “it’s Texas.”

“Texas already makes it harder to vote than any other state. Rep. Briscoe being put in charge of the Elections Committee is a clear signal that the politicians in charge intend to make it even harder,” Anthony Gutierrez, the head of Common Cause Texas, a non-partisan public-interest group, said in a statement. “We’ll be fighting to stop them at every step.”

Common Cause Maryland, a redistricting reform advocacy group, said that the commission “helps our collective efforts to ensure Maryland’s line-drawing process is open and transparent.”

When she retired from Common Cause in 1999, Archibald Cox, the Watergate prosecutor and longtime chairman of Common Cause, called her “a giant in the world of political reform,” a gifted organizer and an inspiring public speaker.

“If I had her personality,” Mr. Cox said, “I would rule the world.”

"Every vote is going to matter here, as it's excruciatingly close here, as it always is," says Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, one of the most critical of battleground states this fall. If presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins every electoral vote Hillary Clinton did in 2016 – and picks up Pennsylvania and Michigan – he'd still lose by two electoral votes without also capturing Wisconsin.

Heck contends that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote to keep battleground Wisconsin in the...