News Clips

Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, told The Daily Beast that despite the lack of transparency, he welcomed the influx of unitemized contributions. “I am a watchdog of money in politics, but my take on this may not be what one might assume,” Ryan said. He believes that in general, the growth of small-dollar donors is “a really good thing for democracy” and is “in some ways the antidote to the special interest donor.”

Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a good-government advocacy group that works on issues related to voter access, called the subpoenas approved Wednesday a “frightening violation of voters’ privacy and an egregious abuse of power.” “There’s no explanation about what they intend to do with the information, or why they think they need it,” he said in a statement. “They also have not announced any plans for security measures to protect the information from disclosure. … Pennsylvanians deserve to have their private information protected by the people they elected to office, not used as political fodder to appease lies told by a former president.”

Government watchdog Common Cause is backing the Freedom to Vote Act, introduced by the Democrats in Congress on Tuesday, which would ban removing election officials for partisan political purposes. "His Big Lie has just been metastasizing and really undermining trust in our elections in a way that is very dangerous," Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at the organization, told AFP. But Spaulding believes the greatest remedy to electoral dark arts remains robust turnout at the ballot box. "In 2020, we had the highest voter turnout in more than a century in the middle of a pandemic, so voters really showed up," he said. "So ultimately, voters need to continue to show up in record numbers."

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a nonpartisan, liberal-leaning political advocacy organization, told ABC News that such claims should be expected. "There will inevitably be claims that the election is rigged because the purveyors of the 'big lie' need these local and state elections in between the major national elections to keep up their momentum; but all of their allegations in the November 2020 election fell flat," Stein said. "There's nothing new under the sun here. And we assume that there will be lawsuits filed after the recall and they will be treated the same way as the lawsuits in the 2020 election." Stein said misinformation in the recall could also undermine and limit turnout among the voters that those who are sowing the misinformation are trying to reach. But such misinformation, he said, has "no basis in the realities of California's election administration, which has been stress-tested repeatedly and proven to be some of the most secure, most reliable elections in the nation."

Constitution Day honors our founding charter, as amended. It celebrates an enduring commitment to freedom and a democracy where all of us are supposed to have an equal voice in the decisions that affect our country, no matter our ZIP code, what we look like, or how much money we have in the bank. But from its inception, the Constitution denied democracy — at times violently — to whole swaths of people: indigenous people; enslaved people; Black people; women; the unhoused; immigrants; those who do not own property — the list goes on, as does the dishonorable legacy of excluding so many for so long. Yet with vision matched by struggle, the Constitution’s dynamism — how we understand who and what it protects — has expanded. For more than two centuries, people have worked and even died for their constitutional rights. This includes heroes like Diane Nash, who led the Freedom Riders, and civil rights litigators like Justice Thurgood Marshall. New generations of leaders today continue to labor, including in the wake of deadly police violence against Black Americans, attacks on reproductive freedom, and a gutted Voting Rights Act. And it includes the late Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten by police as he marched for the freedom to vote, and who said in his final words that “democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

Common Cause Indiana executive director Julia Vaughn criticized Torchinsky’s work as “more political than legal” to assist with partisan gerrymandering. ... Legislative Republicans held nine public redistricting hearings around the state last month without any proposed maps for review. The only hearings planned with the maps in hand will start the day after they are released on Tuesday and will only be held on weekdays at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. Vaughn and other activists have unsuccessfully pushed for more hearings outside Indianapolis, arguing for more than the bare minimum required by law. “People can see, they can feel their democracy slipping away,” Vaughn said. “They are looking for you to save it.”