Voting & Elections

“Technology is a tool not a process. This recount concept is not ready for prime time,” said Liza McClenaghan, Common Cause Florida state board chair. Both Common Cause and the League of Women Voters say the technology offers promise as a way to give supervisors of elections another tool to store and track paper ballots, but they say the state’s rush to encourage counties to start using digital images of ballots for recounts is a mistake. “The proposal that the digital image generated by the software is trustworthy while the paper ‘may’ be consulted is ludicrous,’’ McClenaghan of Common Cause said.

"As long as Team Bloomberg doesn't talk to Team Biden about what it's doing -- how it's spending Bloomberg's fortune to support Biden -- it's not subject to any limits at all," said Paul Ryan, a veteran campaign-finance lawyer who is now vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause.

Democracy reform, driven by the people, is on the march in states and municipalities across the nation where scores of pro-democracy reforms have been enacted. But democracy reform remains stalled in the U.S. Senate where the Republican majority ignores the will of the people. Sunday will mark one year since the U.S. House of Representatives passed its sweeping and transformative package of pro-democracy reforms in the For the People Act, or H.R. 1.

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”

“We saw a lot of poll workers wearing face masks and also some who were very vigorously wiping down every ballot-marking system after voters finished,” Kathay Feng, Common Cause’s Los Angeles-based national redistricting director, said on a conference call with reporters. “A few voters were nervous, asking if they [should] come out to vote. But given the long lines [in California] … there are a lot of voters who are still turning out.”

Kathay Feng, executive director of Common Cause of California, said election officials were using a new system for electronically checking voter registration and for marking ballots, which created voting delays. "At the same time that there is extremely high voter turnout, people are able to ask for same-day registration, people are able to request party registration change and to indicate that they want crossover voting," Feng said. Those requests are "causing extreme delays," she said, reported at 45 to 90 minutes.