Voting & Elections

As millions of voters head to the polls today, Common Cause is working in the Election Protection coalition to help voters across the country who are having issues voting and working with election administrators to solve problems. For 50 years, Common Cause has a nonpartisan resource to voters, helping solve problems and making our elections more accessible and secure for all voters. Common Cause’s work in the 2020 Election Protection effort is focused on running field programs in targeted states where we organize and train nonpartisan volunteers to help voters and monitor issues at polling places. Common Cause also leads a social media monitoring program to flag and work with social media platforms to remove posts that spread misinformation and disinformation about people’s right to vote or posts that attempt to confuse people about when, where, and how to vote. 

For its part, the national media must recognize the public needs facts, not spin, not false equivalencies, not Beltway conjectures that ignore the very fragile state of our democracy and the need voters have for truth. And truth is necessary, even for those who refuse the believe it right now. It matters to most of us right now and will matter to everyone eventually if we are to repair our republic and strengthen democracy.

“I would frankly chalk up most of the issues we’re seeing today to Texas being a state that doesn’t prioritize voting,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. said "Problems like the Secretary of State website crashing and the widespread voting technology issues could have been easily avoided if the state allocated resources towards election infrastructure.”

The very high-profile failure of a new app that was supposed to help report Iowa Caucus results has generated some important lessons. Even though the New Hampshire primary was not plagued by the same kinds of gross technical failures, it would be a mistake to just quickly move on and forget the lessons of the first debacle. As the Nevada Caucus approaches, it’s clear some lessons have been learned, but not all.

Voter suppression is voter suppression, whether it’s done by purging the voter rolls, turning people away at the ballot box, or feeding them lies to keep them from showing up in the first place. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley is failing in its response to address online voter suppression, as are policymakers, and both must take this threat more seriously.The stakes are higher in the 2020 elections, and we expect to see far more disinformation circulated by foreign governments, dark money groups, and online trolls. Maintaining the authentic civic engagement and discourse that underpins a healthy democracy will require stepping up the fight against these new efforts to suppress the vote.

Americans deserve secure and fair elections and caucuses as they choose their elected representatives. Last night a new app that was introduced to help report Iowa caucus results failed. The new app – which Nevada had been planning to use for its caucuses later this month - was intended to help the precinct chairs record the results from each round of voting and aggregate the results. But no results were delivered because the app failed in numerous ways.