Voting Rights

“All of these changes together are forcing Harris County voters to live in a different set of circumstances than the rest of the state. This is creating a disparate scenario for those voters and barriers to well run elections,” said Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director at Common Cause Texas. “There’s a clear partisan element to that with Harris County growing in its Democratic stronghold. But there’s also definitely a disparate racial impact element to these bills continuing to pass as the county is home to the largest population of Black, brown, [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters in the state.”

"The Voter Privacy Violation Act was pushed under the false guise of transparency when in reality, it was based on conspiracies and would have only served to further facilitate the rampant spread of election misinformation," Common Cause Arizona Program Director Jenny Guzman said in a statement.

A similar case would go through the court system in Wisconsin and eventually find its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. Republicans may also appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. "Unfortunately, I think politics would play a role in both state Supreme Court and in the U.S. Supreme Court," Heck said, "which is why this hypothetical scenario I hope never happens, because it would be awful."

"We've had 130-something days and no hearings on online voter registration, but multiple hearings on criminal penalty bills or firing elections administrator bills or state takeover bills," said Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager for Common Cause Texas. "That is a clear priority of lawmakers, as opposed to making it easier for people to vote, and instead just kind of spread these conspiracy theories of unfounded voter fraud."

State courts have become the battleground for partisan gerrymandering after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 2019 ruling in the case known as Rucho v. Common Cause. "For several decades, people in the states had held out hope that the Supreme Court would lay down a standard for finding that partisan gerrymandering had happened and potentially overruling maps where that kind of vote rigging had happened," says Kathay Feng, vice president of programs at Common Cause, the advocacy group that has also helped lead the ongoing case against a North Carolina congressional map approved by Republican state lawmakers.

“Today, we put Judicial Watch’s false claims about the security of our elections to rest. This settlement confirms what the vast majority of Pennsylvanians know: our elections are free and fair,” said Jill Greene, voting and elections manager at Common Cause of Pennsylvania. “We’ll continue to protect our neighbors from attempts by outside groups to rob them of their right to vote.”