Voting & Elections

Today, the Select Committee on Intelligence in the United States Senate released its long-awaited report on Russian interference into the 2016 elections in the wake of former special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s warnings yesterday that threats to the nation’s election infrastructure are serious and ongoing. Common Cause hailed the report itself as well as the bipartisan and effective work of the Committee as it addressed the critical and growing threat to our democracy.

Today, Common Cause is launching a new effort to ensure voters’ right to know where presidential candidates stand on practical solutions to the challenges facing our democracy. The Our Democracy 2020 campaign will focus getting every presidential candidate in the Democratic and Republican primaries to respond to a 17-question survey and inject the high priority conversation on the need for democracy reform in the presidential campaign. 

A few dozen computer files recovered from the home of a deceased Republican redistricting consultant can be offered as evidence in next week’s partisan gerrymandering trial in North Carolina, state judges ruled on Friday. The three-judge panel presiding over the trial that starts Monday sided with the election reform group Common Cause, the North Carolina Democratic Party and registered Democratic voters who are suing Republican lawmakers and challenging state House and Senate boundaries drawn in 2017.

Today, after a week of confusion and contradiction in the Trump Administration, the President announced that he will not pursue a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. To protect a fair and accurate Census, the decision to not add the citizenship question is important.  However, in issuing an executive order to government agencies to hand over citizenship data, President Trump is engaging in an abusive power grab. Attorney General Barr reinforced the Administration’s intent to collect citizenship data for the purposes of reapportionment and redistricting. Using citizenship data to erase millions of people from apportionment and redistricting violates the Constitution.  

Any action by President Trump to add the citizenship question to the 2020 Census is an illegal, desperate, and ill-fated attempt to further undermine a fair and accurate national headcount. Judges in New York, California, and Maryland, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, have already rejected the Trump administration’s lies about the need for the citizenship question.  

Common Cause is tracking which members of Congress have read, or not read, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian attacks on the 2016 presidential election. The new easily searchable “Will Congress Act?” website (willcongressact.org) allows people to see whether their Members have read the report and contact them to ask that they read it if they have not.