Voting Rights

Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program at the advocacy group Common Cause, told me a “wrong and bad” standard applied to individuals doesn’t mean much. Jan. 6 “wasn’t one or two tweets here or there. It was a massive coordination from numerous organizations,” he said. “You have to have policies that prohibit coordinated efforts to use platforms to incite violence or spread information that leads to the loss of individuals’ right to vote.” Common Cause and about 120 progressive groups appealed to Twitter, Facebook, and all the big social media companies this week to do more to protect democracy with better content enforcement and standards.  

Today, more than 120 civil rights, democracy, and public interest groups called on the major social media companies to combat and curb election disinformation on the platforms ahead of this year’s midterm elections. In a letter to the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet, the groups urged the platforms to take a variety of specific actions, including “introducing friction to reduce the spread and amplification of disinformation, consistent enforcement of robust civic integrity policies; and greater transparency into business models that allow disinformation to spread.”  

Aaron Scherb Common Cause Director, Legislative Affairs: Scherb co-led an umbrella advocacy group made up of 240 organizations to push for passage of the For the People Act, a comprehensive voting-rights package that Republicans opposed.

“It takes us in the wrong direction. It’s another way to confuse voters to put additional obstacles in their way,” Common Cause Indiana executive director Julia Vaughn told The Daily Beast.

"As we saw with Jan. 6, Trump gets so much engagement that his network of high-profile politicians and influencers can keep disinformation flowing at a fever pitch. Some Jan. 6 rioters have been citing election disinformation as a reason behind their actions at the Capitol. He’d be able to essentially restart with this built-in network that can be weaponized against democracy. Either way, consistent content moderation is vital, not just at election time but during non-election periods, when platforms like Twitter and Facebook have disbanded their teams or stopped moderating." - Yosef Getachew Q&A with Todd Zwillich

Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps. “If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”