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HuffPost: They Cried Foul On The 2020 Election — Then Advised Wisconsin's Top Election Officials
“The observers that have come into the picture since 2020 are trying to find evidence of fraud, evidence that a voter shouldn’t be there. I think that’s been the shift,” said Erin Grunze, a voting and elections consultant for Common Cause Wisconsin who previously led an election observation program at the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.
Found in: Common Cause
Raleigh News & Observer: Town hall by town hall, some stirrings of democracy in North Carolina
Tuesday’s meeting was the sixth in a series of 19 statewide town halls sponsored by the good-government advocacy group Common Cause North Carolina. Several years ago in Raleigh, Moral Mondays protesters descended on the Legislative Building to protest the legislature’s actions. That movement faded during the COVID pandemic. Now Common Cause is seeking to rally people where they live. Gino Nuzzolillo, a 25-year-old staffer at Common Cause, conceived the town hall series and led the one at Gibsonville. “We can’t keep going to Raleigh,” he said. “We have to build a base in other places.” Across the state, Common Cause said more than 30 local advocacy groups have joined the effort.
Found in: Common Cause
Wisconsin Examiner: What a temper tantrum by the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s chief justice tells us
“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.” “What’s happening now is a direct result of conservatives’ decision they’d take all this underground and not meet in public,” says Heck. Given their track record, “If conservatives were the new majority there would be no question about what they’d do,” Heck adds. “They’d name a conservative chief justice and say, ‘We have a 4-3 majority, try to stop us.’” Unlike the conservatives who pushed out Abrahamson, however, the new progressive majority has stopped short of trying to replace Ziegler. Still, Heck has heard from people who worry that the new majority is being too bold and assertive. “Progressives are not really like that. We’re always saying, ‘Let’s do the right thing and the fair thing,’” he says.
Found in: Common Cause
Boston Globe: Rejection of Ohio ballot measure signals democracy remains powerful motivator for voters
“Clearly, direct democracy was being attacked, because the ability to gather folks together and collect signatures and take issues directly to the ballot was really in jeopardy,” said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio. “We would have been left with a right that couldn’t really have been used.”
Found in: Common Cause
Providence Journal: In a reversal, RI Board of Elections will now scrutinize Matos' nomination signatures
Common Cause Rhode Island Executive Director John Marion Jr. credited the board's decision to dig deeper on the Matos signatures and to do it in public. "The board made that decision in the right way – after publicly debating the tradeoffs they face," Marion wrote. "We won’t know how to fix this signature process moving forward unless we know the scope of the problem now."
Found in: Common Cause
The Atlantic: The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio
“It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.” Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”
Found in: Common Cause
New York Times: What’s at Stake in Ohio’s Referendum on Amending the State Constitution
The executive director of Common Cause Ohio, Catherine Turcer, noted that the 1912 constitutional convention that birthed the current amendment provisions sought to check a corrupt and unaccountable government. Now, in the wake of perhaps the biggest corruption scandal in state government history — the racketeering conviction of the former House speaker Larry L. Householder for accepting $60 million in bribes — “the State Legislature should choose to actually make changes that create greater transparency and greater accountability,” Ms. Turcer said. “But they’re not. Instead, they’re playing around with the rules.”
Found in: Common Cause
Boston Globe: Spate of debates will give R.I. congressional candidates chances to carve off slices of support
John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, said the busy debate schedule will give candidates lots of chances to secure chunks of support in what is expected to be a low-turnout special election. The primary is Sept. 5, and the special election is Nov. 7. “The candidates are trying to put together small slices of the electorate into a winning coalition,” Marion said. “And whether it’s debating this week around issues of war and peace or debating last week about issues of racial equality, they are speaking to different parts of the electorate that care deeply about different issues. There might be a chance for them to stand out.” ... Another benefit will come from how debates can shape news coverage, Marion said. Without candidate forums, media coverage tends to focus on polling and the “horse race,” or on press releases and news conferences where candidates are trying to get a message out on their own terms, he said. “In debates, candidates are held accountable for their message by both the moderators and their opponents,” he said, “so the coverage is often more substantive.”
Found in: Common Cause
Washington Post: Ahead of abortion vote, Ohioans weigh making it harder to amend constitution
Proponents of the new threshold are “willing to change the rules because they don’t trust voters,” said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a nonprofit group focused on strengthening democratic institutions.
Found in: Common Cause
San Francisco Chronicle: Charley Marsteller, tireless S.F. City Hall watchdog with a link to George Washington, dies at 72
“If it wasn’t for Charley and the people he brought from Common Cause, the Ethics Commission would not have had the courage to put Proposition O on the ballot,” said Paul Melbostad, who served eight years on the Ethics Commission. Prop. O passed by a wide margin setting a $500 ceiling on donations, a limit that remains to this day. “Charley had credibility because he never sought personal gain and avoided endorsing candidates and ballot measures other than on (matters of) ethics,” Melbostad said.