Voting & Elections

Donald Trump blatantly violated his oath of office and fanned the flames of the insurrection on January 6th. As Congress met to certify the election of Joe Biden as President, a defeated Donald Trump incited and set loose a vicious, racist, mob on the United States Capitol – a mob he knew to be heavily armed.  

Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at Common Cause, helped author a letter from more than 120 civil society groups to seven major social media companies, noting that "disinformation related to the 2020 election has not gone away but has continued to proliferate." The letter’s demands included consistent enforcement of civic integrity policies during both election and non-election cycles and the prioritization of enforcement around combatting what they call the big lie that says Trump won the 2020 election. "A lot of the disinformation that we're seeing now is really recycled content from the Big Lie, but it's packaged in new ways that is getting more and more attention," Getachew said. "When we're talking about the 2022 election cycle, we're seeing a lot of candidates now preemptively declare voter fraud, and this is based primarily off the Big Lie. A lot of candidates are using the Big Lie as a platform plank."

Americans deserve to know their votes will be counted and their voices heard in our elections. Reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act is an important step to safeguard the results of free and fair elections. President Trump and his associates came exceptionally close to engineering an overthrow of the 2020 election, as the January 6th Select Committee’s hearings have made clear. They did so in part by making bogus assertions about how the Congress should discharge its certification duties of the presidential election, inciting a violent mob, and convincing 147 Congressional Republicans to vote to overturn the election. Part of this plot included testing arcane provisions of the law that must be modernized and clarified before it happens again.

Dan Vicuña is the national redistricting manager at Common Cause, a national organization focused on expansive voting rights and government accountability. Derek Muller is the Bouma Fellow of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he teaches on topics related to election law and federal courts. They took some time to talk about the concerns around cases like “Moore v. Harper,” whether the 1965 Voting Rights Act offers sufficient protections to these efforts to concentrate elections power among legislators, and the harm caused by gerrymandering.

As described by a prime advocate, the nationwide, 1.5-million-member Common Cause organization, it is "an agreement among states to guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia."