Voting Rights

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said the group has heard of similar efforts in Harris County, Texas; and Florida, but the challenges in Georgia are the most extensive currently underway. She said it’s also troubling because Georgia law allows the state to take over local elections boards if it finds them incompetent. Many clerks are worried that if they don’t do a quick vetting of the mass challenges or the challenges lead to longer lines on Election Day, they’ll face a state takeover.

New voters will turn out if they’re concerned about issues that are important to them, such as democracy, taxes, education and housing costs, said Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, a government accountability organization. “All these people are joining in democracy and getting their voices heard at the ballot box,” Dennis said. “We have to pay attention to why they want to go out and vote, and what they care about.”

Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause, said that the increased retirements and resignations mean that the country must invest in "the infrastructure to train the next generation of election workers." "We're going to run an election and we're going to make sure people can vote -- we're just going to have to use all hands on deck," she said of the upcoming midterms. "But we should be looking towards a long-term solution of proper investment in the election system."

“A lot of people have questions about this new law,” said Amy Keith, program director for the good government group Common Cause Florida.

“The ‘big lie’ has become embedded in our political discourse, and it’s become a talking point for election-deniers to preemptively declare that the midterm elections are going to be stolen or filled with voter fraud,” said Yosef Getachew, a media and democracy program director at the liberal-leaning government watchdog Common Cause. “What we’ve seen is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t really doing the best job or any job in terms of removing and combating disinformation that’s around the ‘big lie'.”

Meanwhile, good government groups like Common Cause Florida say some voters have come to them with confusion about casting their ballots because of new state laws restricting mail-in voting. “We’ve also seen that in many cases, in counties where under the Voting Rights Act they’re required to have signage and materials in both Spanish and English, that we haven’t seen the same level of signage in Spanish,” said Amy Keith, CCF’s program director.