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Although secretaries of state are important positions, they do not have unlimited power, said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for expanded voter access. “Even in states where the secretary of state has an enormous amount of power, a secretary of state cannot — by themselves — overturn a democratic election,” Albert said. “Even where these individuals may want to take actions to undermine the ability for voters to vote and have a ballot count, they are still limited by the law and checks and balances in place.”

The 1,000-plus harassing and hostile contacts made to election officials covered the period from June 2021 to June 2022. The trend continued in July, the task force told the election officials, according to Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, who attended the briefing. ... In total, 89% of the contacts made to election officials were deemed protected speech and could not be investigated. “A lot of the questions were aimed at ‘Wait. Really? You can only investigate 11% of cases?’ And them saying, ‘Yes, I'm sorry but we can only investigate things not protected by First Amendment,’” Albert said.

Common Cause, news and broadcast unions and UCC Media Justice, Which petitioned the FCC to deny the Standard General-Tegna merger, told the FCC Tuesday (Aug. 2)  just what it thought of the those merging parties' defense of the deal, including that the petitioners had no legal right to challenge it. In their comments, the groups minced no words. "The Applicants and their anonymous funders located in the Cayman and British Virgin Islands have proposed a complex series of transactions designed to weaken local journalism and jack up cable subscriber fees," they said. "Grant of their pending applications will do nothing to create a more accurate, diverse or independent media." 

This decision may have consequences for voters in 2022, said Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at Common Cause, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group. (Common Cause supports PolitiFact's Spanish fact-checking in 2022.) Many people still believe the 2020 election was stolen, and candidates have been sharing that message. "By not combating this, they're helping fuel the narrative that this big lie was accurate, when it's not," said Getachew. Emma Steiner, a disinformation researcher at Common Cause, said she still sees unmarked tweets falsely claiming that mail ballot drop boxes aren’t safe. (Drop boxes are secure boxes, often placed outside polling sites or government buildings, into which voters can drop completed ballots received by mail. The boxes often have more security features than standard mailboxes and have been used in some jurisdictions for decades).  Platforms don’t share data proactively, Steiner said, so it’s hard to gauge exactly how many posts with election-related falsehoods get sent around. It took PolitiFact about 30 seconds in the Twitter search tool — trying terms like "ballot mules" and "dead voters" — to find multiple false claims about elections.

Nonprofit government watchdog group Common Cause has been one of Wolf PAC's leading opponents, successfully lobbying behind the scenes to convince state lawmakers that any constitutional convention — no matter its stated purpose — lead to chaos and unintended consequences. Common Cause also opposes a conservative-led effort to call for a constitutional convention that aims to significantly limit the size of the federal government and advance other conservative priorities. "If you think the Constitution is bad now, how do you feel when Lauren [Boebert] and Marjorie [Taylor Greene] and Ted [Cruz] rewrite it? It would just be so much worse," Viki Harrison, director of constitutional convention and protecting dissent programs at Common Cause, told Insider. "It really hasn't gained much traction, but I'm getting a little nervous about it, quite frankly."

"What we're seeing now, that we haven't really seen before, is people putting money into it. The Mark Mecklers of the world are putting money into it," Viki Harrison, director of Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent Programs at Common Cause, told Insider.  Meckler's groups, Convention of States Action and Citizens for Self Governance, have received millions of dollars from groups including the Koch-connected DonorsTrust, the Mercer Family Foundation, and groups connected to powerful conservative lawyer Leonard Leo, tax filings obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy show. "It's the first time any of these applications have had this much movement in quite some time," said Harrison, who lobbies against the convention movement in statehouses across the country.