Election Protection

Last night, the General Assembly passed important legislation to increase security of Rhode Island elections with post-election audits to ensure the accuracy of vote counts. The bills, once they are signed by Governor Gina Raimondo who has publicly supported them, will phase in the use of an innovative procedure called risk-limiting post-election audits. These audits serve as a check on the initial machine counts reported on election night, and confirm that our election results are correct.

Common Cause and registered voters from Florida, Texas, and New York, filed a complaint against Kris Kobach, Vice-Chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, to halt his unprecedented and unlawful investigation into individual American voters.

The Virginia State Board of Elections voted this afternoon to retire voting machines that have been identified as vulnerable to manipulation and tampering and will shift to the use of paper ballots statewide before the November election. Common Cause and other groups had urged the board to retire the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, before the upcoming election because they do not produce a durable paper record of votes. Computer scientists have long advised that paper ballots should be used for voting because they are not digital and therefore cannot be altered by malware.

President Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Commission is a flawed vehicle designed to provide cover for outrageous and unsubstantiated claims made by the President as an excuse for why he lost the popular election a new report from Common Cause, “Flawed from the Start,” documents. When compared to other recent high-profile commissions convened to improve our voting and elections process, the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is unique in that it is heavily stacked with noted vote suppressors.

Common Cause Ohio’s response to the U.S. Department of Justice’s filing of an amicus brief in Husted v. A Phillip Randolph Institute, supporting Ohio effort to conduct voter roll purges if the have not voted in the last two years.

The impaneling of a grand jury to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election hammers home the imperative that the Trump Administration must not interfere with Robert Mueller’s investigation or that of the grand jury. Regardless of whether the President wants to continue to call Russian election interference “fake news,” he and his Administration must take this criminal investigation seriously and offer investigators their full cooperation.