Legislative Ethics

Say the legislation “is the bold, comprehensive bill we need because the threats to our democracy are deep, systemic, and wide-ranging”

“You are not giving them a real audit at the end of the day,” Susannah Goodman, an election security expert with Common Cause, said of the GOP reviews in Arizona and elsewhere. “It’s like going to a snake oil medicine doctor and paying him a lot of money and he gives you a bottle of green goop saying this will cure your cancer.”

A letter signed by almost 100 small business and community leaders urging Senator Susan Collins to support the “For the People Act” was released at an event at Portland City Hall. More than four dozen people gathered at a rally sponsored by Common Cause to hear local business leaders explain why the bill needs to become law.

Claire Snyder-Hall, program director for Common Cause Delaware, a good-government group, said the bill would allow public bodies to deny FOIA requests that they consider “inconvenient or embarrassing.” “How will ambiguous and expansive words like “unduly burdensome,” “intended to disrupt” and “abusive” be interpreted in practice?” she asked. “The problem is that the language in the bill is so broad that it could easily be used by corrupt officials to hide information they do not want public to know about,” Synder-Hall added. ”.... It is a basic premise of our system of government that we cannot rely on the goodwill of people in power.”

“This bill will enable security for incumbency,” Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, told me. “It really tramples the person who wants to be the community change agent from becoming an elected official through the legislature, because it’s allowing big donors to create war chests for incumbents.”

Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for the voter access advocacy group Common Cause, said curtailing ballot collections would hurt those living in rural areas, native communities, nursing homes, colleges and anyone who lives far from polling sites or doesn’t have the economic means to get there. “Just like everything else, these kinds of illusions and lies about there being problems are being used to suppress access to the ballot for millions of Americans,” she said, referencing the national GOP push to rollback voting rights. “When we don’t allow for access for everyone we’re letting legislators choose their voters, as opposed to letting the voters choose the legislators.”