Abuse of Power

Voting rights advocates are mulling whether to mount another dauntingly expensive ballot initiative to make the commitment to nonpartisan maps ironclad, said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio. And the bar to success might get even higher. Republican legislators proposed a constitutional amendment last month that would raise the threshold for voter approval of constitutional changes to 60 percent of the vote, from the current simple majority. Republicans call it a move “to safeguard Ohio’s constitution from special interests” who pour money into initiative campaigns. Ms. Turcer called it an effort to shield the ruling party from anything that could dilute its control. “It’s clear these people are drunk on power,” she said. “And what do you do with those kinds of people? You take away their keys.”

“I think the reason Common Cause is fighting so hard to make sure everyday people understand what’s at stake in Moore v. Harper is that this is not just about who decides how lines are drawn for districts in North Carolina. This is fundamentally about our American democracy,” Common Cause's National Redistricting Director Kathay Feng tells Symone Sanders, host of MSNBC's Symone Show.

During the oral arguments, Neal Katyal, an attorney for the Common Cause organization, brought up past remarks that the Supreme Court made in the Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board case. "And Justice Thomas, it's the same point picking up on Justice Kavanaugh's questioning. Palm Beach, the court said that sovereignty was at its apex when talking about state constitutions and interpretations by state courts," Katyal said. "This Court never second-guessed state interpretations of their own constitutions." In Katyal's remarks, he specifically mentioned page 78 of the Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board ruling, where the Court said, "It is fundamental that state courts be left free and unfettered by us in interpreting their state constitutions."

“We know that registered voters with prior convictions and even people who are fully eligible to vote such as people who only have a misdemeanor are concerned or even scared about getting in trouble if they cast their ballots,” said Amy Keith, program director of Common Cause Florida.

The last two items are critically important for our freedoms and the health of our democracy. The January 6th Select Committee’s forthcoming report is expected to highlight the former president’s role in fomenting a deadly insurrection and provide recommendations to ensure we have peaceful transfers of power between administrations. The Electoral Count Act revisions are consequential because they would modernize a law passed in 1887. Updating this antiquated law could help prevent another insurrection and attempted coup. Especially now that the former president is running again and has continued to peddle the "big lie" about who won the 2020 election, it’s important to pass legislation that ensures the will of the voters will be respected and followed.

Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst at the watchdog group Common Cause, said she knew of new accounts being created on Twitter that were focused on the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, supporters of which call for the mass arrest or execution of public figures they accuse of being satanic pedophiles. Some accounts, Steiner said, are trying to “censorship check” Twitter by seeing what kind of material earns a response from the company ― what she called “a lot of boundary-pushing.” Steiner noted one recent high-stakes test Twitter faced: when Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, tweeted incorrect advice to voters on Election Day. Voters in Maricopa County were experiencing long lines and printer problems in several polling places across the county, which is home to Phoenix and most of the state’s voters. Arizonans can participate at any polling place in a given county — if they’ve signed in to one, they only need to be “checked out” to go to another — but Lake urged voters not to switch polling locations at all. Steiner contacted Twitter, urging the site to append a fact check to Lake’s tweets. Knowledgeable reporters, she noted, had pointed out that Lake was giving false information to her supporters. The tweets could potentially suppress the participation of Lake’s own supporters in the election, a violation of Twitter’s rules. “It was completely inaccurate,” Steiner said. “You just have to talk to a poll worker to be checked out, and then you can go to another location.” Twitter “declined” to act on the false Lake tweet, Steiner said. Since then, Lake has repeatedly cited long lines on Election Day as part of her refusal to concede the election, despite trailing the winner, Democrat Katie Hobbs, by more than 17,000 votes. Twitter’s refusal to address the false information from Lake is part of a pattern: The previous Friday, Common Cause had flagged multiple inaccurate tweets about vote-rigging and election fraud, some from accounts with more than 1 million followers, to Twitter only to hear the day before Election Day ― an unusually long response time ― that Twitter would not take action. “It made us wonder if content moderation was still happening at the platform,” Steiner said. To the extent Musk is following any plan at all, it’s one of opposition to his perceived philosophical enemies, Steiner said. “It does seem to be kind of an ‘owning the libs’ strategy.”