“This bill will enable security for incumbency,” Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, told me. “It really tramples the person who wants to be the community change agent from becoming an elected official through the legislature, because it’s allowing big donors to create war chests for incumbents.”

Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for the voter access advocacy group Common Cause, said curtailing ballot collections would hurt those living in rural areas, native communities, nursing homes, colleges and anyone who lives far from polling sites or doesn’t have the economic means to get there.

“Just like everything else, these kinds of illusions and lies about there being problems are being used to suppress access to the ballot for millions of Americans,” she said, referencing the national GOP push to rollback...

"Florida's Republican legislative leaders seem determined to weaken the system that voters have relied on, without significant problems, for the better part of a generation," Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for good-government watchdog Common Cause, said in a statement on April 28 after Florida's House passed the bill.

In Texas, the leaked video of the Harris County Republican Party’s training, which was published by the voting rights group Common Cause, recalled a similar episode from the 2010 midterm elections.

That year, a Tea Party-affiliated group in Houston known as the King Street Patriots sent poll watchers to downtown polling locations. The flood of the mostly white observers into Black neighborhoods caused friction, and resurfaced not-too-distant memories when racial intimidation at the polls was commonplace in the South.

Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first Black woman reporter at The Washington Post, said in 2019, “When journalists are being called ‘an enemy of the people,’ and Black women reporters, and other reporters, are being called names and treated with such disrespect, I think it’s just so important to remind people of the importance of the media.”

"SB 90 will limit voters' options when they make a choice in the three methods to cast a ballot. It will create hurdles to every step of voting by mail. It will reduce voters' access to ballot drop boxes. It will add to elections officials' workload and add to the need for voter education. It will make it more difficult for the nonpartisan Election Protection volunteer program to assist voters in understanding their rights in the voting process," Sylvia Albert of Common Cause said in a statement released following the House vote.

“It’s critically important that the For the People Act remain big, bold and together,” said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, one of several groups working with Democrats on the bill, adding, “People don’t want piecemeal solutions to comprehensive problems.”

“I can’t fully support a boycott within Georgia,” said Aunna Dennis, the executive director of the Georgia chapter of Common Cause. “The boycott hurts the working-class person. But corporations do need to be held accountable on where they put their dollars.”

“It’s very difficult to see how a Manhattan D.A. candidate can accept really large and numerous donations from people who are involved in industries who could easily be the subject of that office’s attention,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group.

Common Cause Texas said the presentation, which is dated March 10, was circulated online by the Harris County Republican Party.

“The impetus for releasing right now is there are some bills in the legislature that seek to empower poll watchers in some really scary ways, and also at the same time, take away the power of the presiding judge at the poll site from being able to remove a disruptive poll watcher,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. The group blurred out the Republican official's name...