Press Release

Today, an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States by Common Cause, The Andrew Goodman Foundation (AGF), and Equal Citizens  challenged the State of Texas’ age restriction to apply for an absentee ballot in the midst of a pandemic. The case, Garcia v. Abbott (No. 19-1389) challenges a law that restricts young Americans from accessing no-excuse vote-by-mail while making it exclusively available to voters over the age of 65. In their amicus brief, the organizations argue that the unequal treatment of youth voters in the Texas vote-by-mail program violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which bans age discrimination while voting. 

Common Cause today released the results of its Our Democracy 2020 candidate surveys. More than 200 candidates for Congress, including in certain swing House and Senate races, responded on how they promise to defend and strengthen our democracy.

Today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman (FCC) Ajit Pai issued a statement announcing that the FCC will move forward with a rulemaking to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The announcement follows an Executive Order from the President and a petition for rulemaking from the Department of Commerce directing the FCC to adopt rules that set conditions on when Section 230 grants social media platforms a liability shield when they moderate content on their sites and when they do not.

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed a federal District Court decision and allowed the government to stop counting households two weeks earlier than planned. In a media briefing call today, community leaders described how their states would be affected by the sudden end to census counting and shortened data processing timeline.

In the runup to Election Day, Common Cause, with help from our Election Protection coalition partners, has recruited tens of thousands of nonpartisan volunteers to assist and protect voters during the 2020 election. The ranks of volunteers continue to grow daily through ProtectTheVote.net and have already more than quadrupled the totals from 2016 and 2018. The nonpartisan volunteers are already monitoring early voting sites, assisting voters, tracking and removing social media disinformation online, and even helping voters with ballot curing so that their votes will be counted as they intended. 

Every American deserves a voice in our democracy. Today’s U.S. Supreme Court stay of a lower court order allows the Trump administration to shut down the census early. With potentially millions of Americans still uncounted, this Supreme Court decision is a blow to our democracy.