Abuse of Power

Complaints against Li “Cindy” Yang, who raised campaign cash and parlayed persistence to gain access to Republican circles in Florida and get pictures taken with the then-president, were filed by Common Cause, a Washington-based watchdog group, and the Campaign Legal Center. The dismissal of those complaints came three years after the Miami Herald first revealed Yang’s activities in a series of articles titled Trump Tourism.

Bob Phillips, director of Common Cause North Carolina, said court oversight is important. He noted that every election here in the last decade was held using Republican-drawn maps that were later ruled unconstitutional, for either racial or partisan gerrymandering. “We feel strongly that the state courts should not be taken out of the equation,” Phillips said in a media briefing this month. His briefing, as well as Holder’s, focused mostly on turning the national media’s attention toward the North Carolina case. Reporters for outlets like CNN, NBC, CBS and Politico attended. Kathay Feng, who leads Common Cause’s national redistricting efforts, said it’s not only Republican-led states that gerrymander their congressional maps. She pointed to New York and Maryland as examples of Democratic gerrymandering.

"Where we take issue is when any candidate utilizes information they know is false, data they know is suspect at best, to try and move a particular policy agenda that they know is in no way, shape or form doing anything to improve access to the ballot," said Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, a nonpartisan voting rights group that typically doesn't weigh in on specific races. In August, Common Cause Minnesota issued a statement rebuking Crockett for comments she made during a radio interview railing against proposed election law changes and telling listeners, "This is our 09/11." Crockett told the Star Tribune that she meant the proposed changes should be a "wake-up call" for Republicans and then claimed to be victim of a "hit piece."

Elections expert Sylvia Albert of Common Cause predicted the scenario is inevitable: "We will see somebody who denies the 2020 election win office. We will."

On Sunday, Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn told MSNBC that in the hands of Republicans, a second constitutional convention could "put all of our constitutional rights up for grabs."

"By creating these new bureaucracies and this new red tape," said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, lawmakers are "creating a cycle of voter intimidation." This is "a relic of the past", she went on, and too close to "what we saw in Jim Crow, with folks coming to people's doors with guns and pitchforks, trying to ask, 'Are you the registered voter here?'"  Her group has developed an election protection program meant to help dispel any doubts voters have about the election process and to ensure they don't encounter barriers while casting their ballots. But Dennis says Georgia's new law, SB 441, which authorizes state police to launch a probe into any allegations of voter fraud, worries her. Such unfounded allegations, she says, can create a "domino effect," damaging voters "who are not in areas that are inundated with news and disempowering their voices at the ballot box," Dennis said. "I think in Georgia particularly, [there] is a coordinated effort to purposely do that."