Voting Rights

Watchdog groups like the American Constitution Society and Common Cause are sounding the alarm over the real danger of such a convention. “The worst case scenario is that [an Article V convention] puts all of our cherished constitutional rights and civil rights completely up for grabs,” Stephen Spaulding, vice president of Common Cause, testified at Johnson’s subcommittee hearing last month.

Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager for Common Cause Texas, stressed that more voting isn’t a problem. Having more polling places in counties that are growing should always be a goal, she said. The real issue that should be addressed is the chronic underfunding of election system, she said. “The biggest issue is election administration and making sure that we can do that well funded and equitably, and that’s not something that Senate Bill 924 created an issue with,” Ehresman said. “That’s something that the state legislature has continued to avoid addressing.”

Voting-rights advocates said Tuesday that they’ve heard from students, including “dozens” at Ohio State University, who have said they never got the mail ballot they requested for today’s election. Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, said they’ve encountered these students as they’ve showed up at polling places this morning on OSU’s campus to try to vote. Lewis said that other than in college towns, state data doesn’t show an unusually high number of outstanding absentee ballots overall. Voting-rights advocates weren’t certain about the reason for the ballot problems for students, but thought it could have something to do with university mail systems that serve as a “middle man” between students and the post office.

Though many North Carolinians may have already experienced their first brush with the state's new voter ID laws during this year's municipal election cycle, there are still some questions residents may have about the new requirements. Host Jeff Tiberii sat down with Tyler Daye, policy and civic engagement manager for Common Cause North Carolina to discuss a host of issues, including which IDs are valid, whether or not an expired driver's license can be used at the polls and how to obtain a valid ID for free.

“It’s a really contorted argument to try to say, ‘Hey, we have to throw out this election in this jurisdiction but not for other offices,’” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, a nonprofit involved in the arguments before the Supreme Court in Moore.

“We’d like to think that when the voter rolls are cleaned up, it’s the folks who’ve moved, it’s the folks who passed away, but unfortunately, other folks end up getting picked up and purged sometimes by accident,” said Catherine Turcer, director of Common Cause Ohio. The last-minute removal of more than 26,000 voter registrations and the numerous recent changes to voting requirements, Turcer says, “can become really problematic” for voters. “All of these little things combined create a situation where there are more obstacles to voters,” she warned