Voting Rights

“Just as we are making changes to our election laws… to account for COVID, we also need to account for first-time voters or people using this avenue for the first time,” argues Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the advocacy organization Common Cause.

Today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman (FCC) Ajit Pai issued a statement announcing that the FCC will move forward with a rulemaking to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The announcement follows an Executive Order from the President and a petition for rulemaking from the Department of Commerce directing the FCC to adopt rules that set conditions on when Section 230 grants social media platforms a liability shield when they moderate content on their sites and when they do not.

"Today's ruling is a relief to many Texans who qualify to vote absentee," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said. "Most of these voters have disabilities and are elderly. With only one ballot return site per county, these voters would have faced challenges in travel that might have made it impossible for them to vote."

Christine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said even if the court allows additional drop boxes in coming weeks, it might be too late. “We are already voting. People already have their ballots,” Turcer said. ... “It hits different parts of the population harder than others. And clearly, when it makes it harder for people who are struggling to pay their bills, then it’s just not right,” Turner said. “It’s unfair, and people should not have unequal access to the ballot.”

In the runup to Election Day, Common Cause, with help from our Election Protection coalition partners, has recruited tens of thousands of nonpartisan volunteers to assist and protect voters during the 2020 election. The ranks of volunteers continue to grow daily through ProtectTheVote.net and have already more than quadrupled the totals from 2016 and 2018. The nonpartisan volunteers are already monitoring early voting sites, assisting voters, tracking and removing social media disinformation online, and even helping voters with ballot curing so that their votes will be counted as they intended. 

“We are seeing the kind of incidents that are likely to happen in every election be blown up to mean there is something fundamentally wrong with Pennsylvania election administration and we can’t trust the Department of State or the counties to give us an accurate count,” said Suzanne Almeida with Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that advocates to expand access to voting. “There are any number of reasons why that’s not true.”