“Americans have the right to know if the president is putting his business empire, or the interests of the public, first,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a group that supports the legislation.

“Tiger Woods is obviously a very talented golfer,” said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, a watchdog group. But Mr. Trump awarding him the Medal of Freedom “shows he’s willing to use any tool of government to benefit his business and political allies.”

Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, said her group has received several calls from people expressing a loss of faith in Ms. Pugh. But Ms. Antoine said she is heartened by recent proposals brought by Baltimore City Council members to tighten ethics disclosure rules and make it easier to remove the mayor.“I think we’re on the verge of recovering from all of this,” she said. “We believe the City Council is taking steps to move forward.”

"The citizenship question is a bald-faced attempt to racially rig the census, undercount communities of color and undermine fair representation which our democracy relies upon," said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan public interest group.

The release of the returns would let “Americans decide whether the president is making decisions that benefit his businesses at the expense of American taxpayers,” Aaron Scherb of Common Cause, the government watchdog group, has written in USA Today. “If Trump has significant debt to banks and/or individuals in certain countries, some of which might be adversaries of the United States, we must know because his foreign policy decisions might be compromised.”

Aaron Scherb, the legislative director of watchdog organization Common Cause, noted that conservative religious organizations have previously donated large amounts to groups that further their political interests.

"The Religious Right and certain conservative religious groups have significant resources at their disposable. As we detailed in a 2015 report, they often flex their political muscle to further enhance their ability to spend big money in politics to drown out the voices of dissenting views," he told Newsweek.

"Mr. Whitley has no business being involved with elections, much less serving as Texas' chief election officer," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said in a written statement. Common Cause is among the groups that have asked Whitley to withdraw his office's Jan. 25 advisory. "This 'voter purge' was poorly thought out, incompetently implemented and definitely seems to have been more about politics than anything else," he said. "At this point, I think purging Mr. Whitley from the secretary of state's office would be...

"It gives an opportunity for folks who are not themselves independently wealthy," says Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause in Connecticut, which advocates for public financing. The funds also free up policymakers from some of the constant fundraising that often goes hand in hand with holding office, she adds. "They don't have to go around with their hands out saying, 'Please give me money.'"

Something similar happened last fall in Delaware, where the Voting Equipment Selection Task Force also voted to replace its aging touch-screen machines with a variant of the ExpressVote system. When Jennifer Hill, at Common Cause Delaware, a government-accountability group, obtained all the bids from a public-records request, she found that “the Department of Elections had pretty much tailored the request for proposal in a way that eliminated venders whose primary business was to sell paper-ballot systems.” Hill also noted that a lobbyist...

Aaron Scherb, the legislative affairs director at the nonprofit government watchdog Common Cause, said a comprehensive review of the program is long overdue especially in light of the Trump administration's decision to pull American troops out of countries like Afghanistan and Syria. "I think a GAO audit on the effectiveness of the program as well as a potential Department of Defense inspector general report would go a long way to determine how necessary and useful this program is, as the U.S. military continues to draw down in certain...