Voting Rights

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections with Common Cause, said voter advocacy groups are prepared to intervene should partisan actors interfere with certification without justification or if a secretary of state refuses to seek a court order compelling a local board to act. “That is why we are here, and there will be lot of advocates and lawyers willing and able to step in and file if the secretary is not interested in using their authority or their position to ensure that the votes of their constituents are counted,” Albert said.

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas chapter of the watchdog group Common Cause, said the showing of the film by Paxton’s office is particularly concerning because of Paxton’s longstanding embrace of unfounded voter fraud conspiracies — and his role in prosecuting electoral crimes, which are exceedingly rare. (Since 2005, the Texas Attorney General’s website says the office has prosecuted 155 people for 534 election fraud offenses — good for about 0.0048% of the 11.1 million Texas votes cast in the 2020 presidential contest alone, and not even a rounding error’s worth of all votes cast in the state over the last 17 years.) “Paxton hosting a watch party for this completely debunked work of fiction is next-level disinformation,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not like (Paxton) is a person who has no impact on elections — he is constantly doing things to impact elections. … It’s all kinds of alarming and sets off all the red flags.”

The attacks on access have targeted methods disproportionately used by people of color and younger, more Democratic-leaning voters. “These are direct attacks on voters that legislators think will vote for the other party,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “It is clearly an attack on Black and brown and low-income voters.”

The case, Moore v. Harper, arose out of a lawsuit in state court where Democratic Party-backed groups, such as the National Redistricting Foundation, and pro-democracy groups, such as Common Cause, sued the legislature claiming their redistricted maps for state and federal offices were gerrymandered. The groups argued that the state’s constitution prevented extreme partisan gerrymandering. 

“Oregon generally embraces a positive voting environment,” said Kate Titus, executive director of Common Cause Oregon. “All of these little changes around the edges help.” Titus said the state could revisit further expanding its automatic voter registration system to allow registration to occur through other state agencies in the coming years.