Abuse of Power

“It’s going to be harder for people to vote,” said Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for Common Cause, which advocates for expanded voter access. “It means that states have to put more money and time and energy into educating the voting population in how to go about being able to vote in spite of these burdens.”

Jay Young, executive director of Common Cause Illinois, said the maps the Legislature will vote on Tuesday “will not be crafted of public input, but of pure politics.” “At each opportunity in this redistricting process, it’s as if lawmakers went out of their way to ensure the creation of these maps had as little public input as possible,” Young said.

Stephanie Gómez, associated director of Common Cause Texas, said the bill would give partisan poll watchers “unhinged levels of influence over elections” and said the bill would make it harder for all Texans to vote, particularly voters of color and those with disabilities. Her group also hosted what it called a "honk! for voting rights" protest, encouraging cars to circle the Capitol on Monday morning, hoping for a noisy show of dissent with social distancing baked in.

“The country was mesmerized by Gov. Cuomo’s blunt talk about the pandemic, but he didn’t even follow the experts,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause, a good government group that has long butted heads with Cuomo. “That’s emblematic of his style: The performance looks great, but when you get into the details, there are big holes and very little substance.”

(Reuters) - On a recent evening, Tyler Daye, an organizer with Common Cause North Carolina, hosted an online seminar for residents of the city of Wilson on an important but arcane topic: redistricting. With the help of publicly available mapping software known as Districtr, Daye clicked through maps of federal and state voting districts, showing how in each case Republican lawmakers in 2011 neatly cleaved the city in two, dividing the largely Black eastern half from the mostly white western half. “When your communities are split, your voting power and representation is split as well,” he told attendees. “This attacks the very backbone, the very core of our democratic system, which is having the voters, the citizens, picking their legislators. Through this system, it’s the other way around.” ... “It’s almost like a light-bulb moment,” said Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a voting rights organization. “We feel we’ve been able to reach people in ways we never have.”

Jay Heck of Common Cause Wisconsin called the tax provision "one of the most glaring examples of quid-pro-quo pay-to-play politics I've ever seen." "The idea a U.S. Senator would stand in the way of a major initiative of his own party on a very specific provision of a complicated tax bill, and the fact it benefited two of his largest donors, I just think is pretty eye-opening," he said. "My goodness what a great investment for the Uihleins and Diane Hendricks."