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Candidates seeking more than one possible office at the same time face the additional burdens to “be very careful in their allocations,” said Beth Rotman, money in politics and ethics program director at Common Cause. “Here, that would be demonstrating in Illinois, and also federally, that the candidate is complying with two sets of rules at the same time. … You have a higher burden, because you can essentially make a mistake in either direction.” ... “Some agencies are better than others at actually taking a look at whether campaigns are complying,” Rotman said. “Campaigns have to be very vigilant. It’s not necessarily the case that anyone is doing anything wrong.”

"It is clear from the evidence made public by the January 6th Committee that Rep. Perry does not respect the will of the voters. No elected official should remain in office, if they do not respect the voters who put them there. We must not continue down this path," said Khalif Ali, Common Cause Pennsylvania executive director.

On May 17, as several states held their primary elections, Jesse Littlewood searched the internet using a tool called CrowdTangle to spot the false narratives he knew could change perceptions of the results: damaging stories about ballots being collected and dropped off in bulk by unauthorized people, who the misinformation peddlers called “ballot mules.” Littlewood, the vice president for campaigns with the voter advocacy group Common Cause, easily came across dozens of posts showing a “Wanted” poster falsely accusing a woman of being a ballot mule in Gwinnett County, Georgia. He raised alarm bells with Facebook and Twitter. “This was going to lead to threats and intimidation of this individual who may be an elections worker, and there was no evidence that this person was doing anything illegal,” Littlewood said. “It needed to be removed.” Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook owns the search tool Littlewood used, and the company has for months kept its plans for CrowdTangle a mystery. Meta has been reducing its support for the product. The company is expected to eventually scrap it, and has declined to say when it plans to do so. Not knowing the future of CrowdTangle or what Meta chooses to replace it with, Littlewood said, endangers planning for future elections. The group has thousands of volunteers working in shifts to identify false information online, and CrowdTangle is indispensible to the process. Common Cause’s work “would be impossible to do without a tool that looks across Facebook,” Littlewood said. CrowdTangle gives insight into posts on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit too. “And we all know that the midterms are testing grounds for 2024, when the level of disinformation will be even higher.” Researchers don’t just rely on the tool, but on the companies reacting to the harmful content reports they make. Twitter removed the misinformation Littlewood flagged in May; on Facebook, which didn’t respond to his warning, at least 16 of the posts remained in mid-June. Facebook took them down after media outlets, including ProPublica and Bloomberg News, reached out.

Yosef Getachew, a director at the nonprofit public advocacy organization Common Cause, whose group studied 2020 election misinformation on social media, said the companies have not responded. “The Big Lie is front and center in the midterms with so many candidates using it to pre-emptively declare that the 2022 election will be stolen,” he said, pointing to recent tweets from politicians in Michigan and Arizona who falsely said that dead people cast votes for Democrats. “Now is not the time to stop enforcing against the Big Lie.”

“We are thrilled that Governor Baker signed the VOTES Act into law today,” Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, said in a written statement. “At a time when many states are making it harder to vote, this new law will modernize our elections and make our democracy more accessible and equitable.”

"One of the upsides, even when you have a lousy commission, is that you have created enough of a record for the court to review and be able to create some alternative that is fair," said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at the voting rights organization Common Cause. The court battle has gotten ugliest in Ohio, where voters will be casting ballots in congressional districts that the state Supreme Court says were unconstitutionally drawn. Feng pointed to an "escape hatch" the legislature created in the competing proposal it put forward for creating a commission, where "even if a partisan or racial gerrymander has been found, a court may not impose a remedy by itself." "It has to go back to the legislature to be drawn," Feng said. "And so that circular, multi-layered stages of Dante's Hell has been imposed on Ohio."