Today, Common Cause filed an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court in Trump v. New York, urging the court to uphold the three lower court rulings blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to omit undocumented immigrants from the census numbers used for the apportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Three lower courts have ruled that President Trump’s memorandum ordering this unprecedented change violates the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes governing the census and apportionment.

Today, the FCC majority voted to approve an Order on Remand responding to questions raised by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on the agency’s 2017 net neutrality repeal. The Court’s remand highlights the many serious questions the FCC ignored in 2017 when repealing net neutrality including the impact to public safety, broadband competition, and affordable broadband for low-income consumers. The FCC’s Order on Remand concludes that the agency’s deregulation of broadband outweighs any harms to public safety, competition,...

Facebook has demanded that New York University (NYU) shut down a research project that has been collecting data about the company’s ad-targeting practices. The NYU Ad Observatory, a project of the university’s engineering school, has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers - including many Common Cause members - to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the ads Facebook shows them. Facebook has informed NYU that the project violates provisions in its terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection from its site....

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...

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...

Today, the Supreme Court granted the FCC’s petition to review the Third Circuit’s decision to vacate and remand the agency’s actions, which rolled back several media ownership rules. The rules prohibit a single entity from owning too many newspaper, radio, and television stations within a local market.

"In June, Georgia voters were denied their right to vote when polling places ran out of ballots. If Secretary Raffensperger has taken any action to prevent that from happening again -- for example, by increasing the number of paper ballots in each polling place -- we haven’t heard about it."

Today, not one, but two teams of investigative journalists released major stories with some big political news – and it isn’t Common Cause or our allies who they investigated. Add to that the District Attorney in Wake County, North Carolina, who has opened a preliminary review into the same subject and it is clear, no one affiliated with Common Cause or our allies have done anything wrong. 

On Wednesday, Common Cause filed its reply brief in support of its motion for summary judgment in its challenge to President Trump’s memorandum requiring the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the congressional apportionment base following the 2020 Census. The brief, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Common Cause v. Trump, also urges the court to expedite proceedings so that a final judgment and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court can be completed before January  2021, when the...