Democracy Wire

Good news this afternoon from Rhode Island, where Gov. Gina Raimondo has signed a bill providing automatic voter registration to qualified citizens doing business with state agencies.

While President Trump’s “Election Integrity” commission plots ways to make voting more difficult for millions of Americans, officials in one state – Colorado – have taken a critical step to make sure that every vote is accurately recorded and vote totals are accurately reported.

As President Trump’s “election integrity” commission meets by livestream on Wednesday, Common Cause will host a Twitter town hall with analysis and commentary on the commission from some of the nation’s leading election law experts.

A slew of recent polls make clear that most Americans, nearly 80%, support keeping the network neutrality rules that are the foundation of an open internet. These are the rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2015, under the leadership of then-chairman Tom Wheeler, that keep the big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon from determining your internet experience, because they’d rather do that themselves than let you do it. Net neutrality rules prohibit blocking or throttling content. And they keep ISPs from favoring their affiliates, corporate friends, and those who can afford sky-high broadband prices with fast lanes on the net, while the rest of us are told to travel in the slow lane.

America’s standing as the world’s leading ambassador for democratic, transparent government is in danger thanks to the ethical shortcomings of the Trump administration, the federal government’s top ethics officer argues in an interview published today.

Common Cause sued President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity this afternoon, asking a federal court to shut down commission efforts to obtain personal information about millions of voters and order the panel to return the data it has already collected to state officials.