Voting Rights

Common Cause is pleased to announce that two Common Cause veterans have stepped into the role of vice president at the government watchdog. Longtime Common Cause leader Kathay Feng will step into the role of Vice President for Programs and Stephen Spaulding is returning to Common Cause from his role as Policy Director of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee and will serve as Vice President for Policy & External Affairs. Together the two will help lead Common Cause’s national efforts to reduce barriers to a more representative democracy. They will also support efforts for the organization’s 30 state operations working to create a 21st Century democracy that works for everyone.

Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, which has long been critical of Trump’s allegations of election rigging, noted that all the investigations of the former president began well before he started running for president again. “Nobody is above the law, including former presidents, and running for president cannot and must not serve as a shield for wrongful conduct,” Scherb said.

“We saw that it has a lot more restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations," said Amy Keith, program director for Common Cause Florida, an organization that works to ensure fair and free elections. "When you put more rules, when you put more fines, you restrict their work." "When you restrict a small community organization, and you put more of a burden on them, they don't have the ability to comply," Keith said.

We got it right in Texas when we inscribed in our Constitution that “all political power is inherent in the people.” But politicians in power today are not living up to that ideal. Texas is the fourth-most difficult state to vote in by one analysis and 41st in the nation when it comes to voter turnout. We had 9.6 million registered Texas voters sit out the last election — more than the entire population of states such as New Jersey or Virginia.

“States leaving ERIC and creating their own independent registration system increases the potential for election fraud,” Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, testified last week. “The GOP and conservatives for years demanded the kind of results ERIC has produced, and states withdrawing from the compact undercut efforts to keep voter rolls clean and prevent illegal voting.” Ehresman also has questioned whether Nelson’s office could run its own system. She pointed to the office’s botched voter roll purge in 2019, when then-Secretary of State David Whitley used faulty data that questioned the citizenship of tens of thousands of Texas voters. The staffers who worked on that effort “are probably not the people we want to create a new system for maintaining voter rolls,” Ehresman said.

Just days after the story came out, Common Cause, a Washington-based watchdog group, filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission alleging the $130,000 payment to Daniels amounted to an unreported, illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, made in coordination with Cohen. At the time Common Cause did not know it was Cohen himself who had made the in-kind payment, but later amended the complaints to account for Cohen's claims, which the group noted exceeded the legal limit for campaign gifts by $127,000. No charges would be filed against Trump while he was still a sitting president, as is the custom rather than settled law, though Cohen did go to prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and violating campaign-finance laws.