Voting Rights

In New Mexico, Amber Carillo is helping members of the state's various tribes get information on the best way to register ahead of the Oct. 31 deadline. A member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe with relatives in the Acoma Pueblo, Carillo is particularly distressed whenever she gets word of another elder who has died from complications of COVID-19. “These are people that carry our cultural wisdom and language,” says Carillo, a Native American voting rights organizer with the activist group Common Cause New Mexico. “For us, when they die, it’s like the Library of Congress burning down.”

Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan watchdog group and Election Protection partner, is hearing from voters who want reassurance they’re doing everything right. “We are seeing such incredible voter anxiety in Pennsylvania that is really a result of a lot of the new laws,’’ said Suzanne Almeida, the group's interim executive director. Almeida pointed to various election changes, including vote-by-mail available to eligible voters for the first time in some states, satellite election offices and deadline extensions. “All of which is in the midst of probably the most fraught election – at least of my lifetime,’’ she said.

The groups are also planning for Election Day itself. The nonpartisan grassroots group Common Cause is appointing “election protection volunteers,” which it describes as “voters’ first line of defense against restrictive election laws, coronavirus-related voting disruptions, or anything else that could silence their voices.” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, told BuzzFeed News that the volunteers will monitor the polls from outside voting stations while others watch for online disinformation and field calls to a hotline set up to take reports of voting problems, which could be anything from a lack of wheelchair access to illegal campaigning inside polling stations to explicit voter intimidation. In 2016 and 2018, the group had about 6,500 volunteers; this year, the number went up exponentially to more than 36,000. Albert said the thousands of unarmed volunteers outside polling stations will be trained to handle situations in which they face intimidation or violence, although she believes that anything of the sort is unlikely to happen.

Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at watchdog group Common Cause, said emails and videos meant to make the elections system look insecure or suspicious follow a pattern of attempts to “shake people’s faith in the integrity of our elections.” The problem is not exclusively foreign either, he added. “We have seen some domestic bad actors use disinformation to create mistrust and it has had measurable effects,” Littlewood said. “These examples try to prey on and stoke people’s fear, and that has been amplified.”

Today, an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States by Common Cause, The Andrew Goodman Foundation (AGF), and Equal Citizens  challenged the State of Texas’ age restriction to apply for an absentee ballot in the midst of a pandemic. The case, Garcia v. Abbott (No. 19-1389) challenges a law that restricts young Americans from accessing no-excuse vote-by-mail while making it exclusively available to voters over the age of 65. In their amicus brief, the organizations argue that the unequal treatment of youth voters in the Texas vote-by-mail program violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which bans age discrimination while voting. 

“Putting all your eggs in one basket seems like a very bad idea—and it’s avoidable. We’ve seen what happened in the primaries,” said Sylvia Albert, the national director of voting and elections at the good-government organization Common Cause. ... Even in states that have dramatically expanded mail voting, cuts to in-person Election Day voting sites could lead to disenfranchised voters — and could disproportionately impact poor and nonwhite voters as well as younger voters who are less likely to live at the same address they did in the last election. “You cannot fault voters for being hesitant about vote-by-mail. Obviously I think it’s a great option, but that’s what it is — an option. Voters should be able to choose whichever way they want to vote,” said Albert, Common Cause’s national director of voting and elections.