Voting & Elections

“What’s at stake is really our American notion of what it means to have a responsive and participatory democracy,” Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, said. “The question is, how important is that to us? Because this one theory would threaten to dismantle those fundamental principles.” Common Cause North Carolina and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice have launched a statewide tour — holding town halls in all 100 counties — to build a movement against the case. Riggs, who will argue the case before the Supreme Court this fall, doesn’t want people to feel defeated. She believes the case is winnable.

“That is creating a system where if you are rich enough, you can access your right to vote, because you’ll be able to get out of pretrial detention,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “And if you aren’t rich enough, then you can’t access your right to vote.”

Speaking of the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court hearing of Moore v. Harper during a Monday webinar co-hosted by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause, said that "the date has yet to be set, but what we do know is the question at issue: Whether state legislatures should be given absolute and supreme power to create voting laws and redistricting maps for congressional elections." Feng blasted what she called the GOP's "down and dirty" map rigging as "illegal and unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders with devastating consequences for voters, particularly Black voters, and their ability to elect candidates of their choice." "The danger is not just that partisan political leaders will be able to draw lines without any kind of checks, but also that we the people will no longer have a representative government," she asserted. "Our government will be of, by, and for the politicians, not regular people."

Common Cause is urging every member of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote “yes” on the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act (H.R. 8326) to ensure that future censuses are not subjected to the unprecedented level of malfeasance and politicization that plagued the 2020 Census count. The letter emphasizes the critical importance of conducting a transparent and accurate count of everyone in the United States each decade as our Constitution requires, because that count shapes the nation’s government, public policy, and budgets for a full decade.

John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, said the state will need a few election cycles to gauge what the new permanent voting pattern will be, but this year is bound to see an increased percentage of voters casting ballots by mail and early voting as compared to pre-pandemic levels. “In 2020, tens of thousands of people tried voting early or by mail for the first time and many of them liked it,” Marion said. “And that is what we have seen in other states: As you make voting more convenient and provide other forms of voting, people take advantage of the opportunity.”

Common Cause today released initial results of its Our Democracy 2022 candidate questionnaire in the leadup to the first election since January 6th. With two months to go before Election Day, more than 100 candidates for Congress, including in certain swing House and Senate races, responded on how they promise to defend and strengthen our democracy.