The problems behind the long lines, clerical errors and misallocated resources that bedeviled the 2012 election remain unaddressed in many states as the 2014 campaign enters its final days, according to a new report from Common Cause.

“I hope it sends a really strong message to Democrats in Congress, especially in the Senate, that these fights are especially important. Democracy is literally at risk and you have to do absolutely everything you possibly can do,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “This wasn’t Democrats shutting down the rules. This was them using every single thing to their advantage, taking a stand to protect voting rights.”

Amid the chaos surrounding President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow served up a bit of helpful perspective.

Iowa and New Hampshire set the trends for presidential elections.Let’s hope that their influence does not extend to election laws.

“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.”

“What’s happening now is a direct result of conservatives’ decision they’d take all this underground and not meet in public,” says Heck.

Given their track record, “If conservatives were the new majority there would be no question about what they’d do,” Heck adds. “They’d name a conservative chief justice and say, ‘We have a 4-3...

Gavin Geis of Common Cause Nebraska said he has seen outside spending every year in Nebraska legislative races, “but not like this.” He said the increased spending by such groups drives up the costs for ordinary Nebraskans to run for public office.

“I have never seen an organization like this spend this much money and be almost exclusively funded by out-of-state interests,” Geis said. “This is the biggest cash dump I’ve seen in a long time.”

“My concern always is that a generally positive measure like this might later during the legislative process be amended to include some onerous (anti-voting ) provision which then makes it impossible to support the overall measure,” says Jay Heck of Common Cause Wisconsin. “That occurred a few times in the last session with some voting measures.”

One positive aspect of SB-39 is that it’s a stand-alone measure, Heck says, “rather than the mixed packages of bills we saw last session on elections and voting where some...

Republicans appear to have cynically calculated that these “ballot security” measures to suppress the vote may be harmful to some of their own voters, but that it will block  more Wisconsinites who might vote for their political opponents.  Republicans have targeted voters who reside in urban areas like Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay. They have also homed in on college and university students by making it more difficult for that population to vote, even with a college-issued photo ID, than almost anywhere else in the nation.