Voting & Elections

Common Cause and Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed their Supreme Court brief upholding the role of checks and balances in elections.

If someone did attempt to register a dead relative, that application would most likely be rejected, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a group that advocates for voting access. If a dead person did make it onto the voter rolls, "the person attempting to impersonate the deceased person would still have to navigate identification requirements, signature verification, and the possibility that the voter registration would be flagged once the appropriate databases did get updated," Gutierrez said. "The odds of this person successfully casting a ballot for their dead relative are extremely low, and the odds of them using this ploy to have any meaningful impact on the outcome of an election are practically zero, whereas their odds of getting themselves into very serious legal trouble and probably spending some time in prison would be extremely high," Gutierrez said.

Today, the Council of the District of Columbia unanimously passed the Elections Modernization Amendment Act, which makes permanent several changes implemented in 2020 because of COVID, including: providing all DC registered voters with a postage-prepaid mail in ballot; making permanent the Vote Centers, where any registered DC voter can vote in-person; and making permanent the accessible ballot drop boxes. It also builds on the promise of guaranteeing all citizens in DC the right to vote.

"It's a snake eating its tail at this point," Sylvia Albert, Common Cause's director of voting and elections, told Newsweek. The challenges to GOP's election denial tactic were unraveled in the Republican primaries, where GOP candidates are pitted against one another. As some moved onto the general ballot, others refused to accept the primary wins of members of their party. "If you have multiple election deniers up for election, and one of them wins, the other one is still going to deny that the election actually took place," Albert said. She added, "The right has gotten themselves to somewhere they didn't expect."

“We certainly know elections can, and have been, and will be again decided by a handful of votes, so anything that affects voters has the potential to change the outcome,” said Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at Common Cause, an advocacy organization whose efforts include fighting mis- and disinformation. “That would include voter myths or disinformation which could either cause the voter to miss the chance to participate because they believed incorrect information, or cause them to not participate at all because they don’t believe in the integrity of the election process,” Littlewood said. ... The steps a voter should take are “the same whether it’s a tweet, a Facebook post, a WhatsApp chat from your uncle or aunt or a Telegram message from former President Trump,” Littlewood said. “You should take the same steps of verifying that it’s a trusted source of information and verifying the motivation of who the provider of the information is,” he said. ...

Civil rights, democracy, and public interest groups are calling out the major social media companies for not doing enough to combat election disinformation and urging them to take steps to combat and curb the rampant problem in the final weeks before this year’s midterm elections. In a letter to the CEOs of Meta (Facebook), Twitter, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet, the groups urged the platforms to do more to combat the proliferation of election disinformation on their platforms with a particular focus on combatting the ‘Big Lie’, preventing disinformation targeting non-English speaking communities, and creating more friction to reduce the distribution of content containing electoral disinformation.