Voting & Elections

In a letter to U.S. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, the state legislators urge their federal counterparts to “do everything in your power to pass” the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“We still have the Trump Big Lie that is metastasizing,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause. “Trust is the glue that really holds the system together. When it starts to erode, it really threatens the whole system.” Groups, such as Spaulding’s, are gearing up for big efforts ahead of the midterms to combat election disinformation. They plan to dispatch nonpartisan poll monitors and scrub social media of inaccurate information, especially about dates, places and ways of voting. 

Eight months after Inauguration Day, one-third of Americans told pollsters they still believed Donald Trump actually won the election and that Joe Biden stole it away from the incumbent. A new report offers a mix of government and corporate reforms to limit the spread and influence of such election disinformation. The Common Cause Education Fund, an affiliate of the democracy reform advocacy group Common Cause, issued a report in late October reviewing the state of disinformation campaigns and a series of recommendations designed to stem the tide. "Just as we came together last year, rising up to vote safely and securely in record numbers during a global pandemic, we must now rise up to stop election disinformation efforts in future elections," the researchers wrote.

Anthony Gutierrez with Common Cause Texas says whether this is a good thing kind of depends. ANTHONY GUTIERREZ: You know, it really can go both ways. I mean, you see some election administrators who do a really good job because they're professionals who stay in that job for decades in some cases. LOPEZ: But, Gutierrez says, sometimes appointments can be pretty political. For example, he says, Governor Greg Abbott recently appointed a new elections chief for the state who was part of President Trump's legal team trying to overturn 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. Gutierrez says, in those situations, voters can't weigh in at the ballot box to vote someone out. He says this is why he thinks for this model to work, there needs to be transparency. GUTIERREZ: With this type of an appointment system, you really need to have citizens involved. You need to have a public, transparent interview process, where you have multiple candidates that people can interact with.

Every American deserves a voice in our elections, but all but one Senate Republican revealed again today that they prefer to pick and choose who can vote and who cannot in order to gain partisan advantage. Today’s Senate vote was more than eight years in the making after the Supreme Court gutted a core provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County and four months since it weakened another pillar in Brnovich. The modern Republican Party still tries to cling to the mantle of the ‘Party of Lincoln’ as it turns its back on voting rights as some states pass a new generation of Jim Crow laws to make it harder for many Americans to vote – particularly Black and Brown Americans.