Voting & Elections

“Ranked-choice voting helps people who want to run but are discouraged from running maybe because they will split the race,” Maria Perez, a campaign manager with Common Cause New Mexico, told Fortune. “That’s not democratic. People who want to run should run and have a voice at the table.”

“On Election Day, we fielded too many calls from voters who had cast ballots in previous elections but were suddenly told that they were no longer in the system,” said Sara Henderson, executive director for Common Cause Georgia. “We will closely monitor the state's compliance with this new statutory requirement.”

Governor Brian Kemp today signed into law HB 392, which has a provision requiring Georgia’s secretary of state to take steps to shore up the security of the state’s voter registration database. The move comes just weeks after Gov. Kemp signed HB 316, which included new protections for Georgia voters who are required to cast provisional ballots. These bills were passed in direct response to a lawsuit brought on behalf of Common Cause Georgia by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, along with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison LLP, and Sugarman LLP.

And critics like Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization focused on holding government accountable, say that just because the information is public, it doesn’t mean it should be made available in this manner.

“The tragedy of it all is that the communities that are the hardest to count are the ones that are yearning to be seen by their government,” said Georgia Logothetis, assistant director of the nonprofit group Common Cause Illinois, which works on democracy, voting rights and gerrymandering issues. "We’re talking children, people living below the poverty line, minorities and immigrants,” Logothetis added. “For every 1% of people that were not counted in the last census, Illinois lost $122 million in health and human services funding.” Illinois could also have less representation and political power, as the state stands to lose one or two congressional seats if under-counted in next year’s census. “This is a true chance for every single person to be counted,” Logothetis said. “In the eyes of the government, if you don’t respond to the census, you don’t exist.”