News Clips

Federal law bars foreign interference in a U.S. election. Paul S. Ryan, vice president at Common Cause, an advocacy group that seeks stricter enforcement of campaign finance laws, compared Trump’s treatment of the Russians to how a campaign would try to evade rules against coordinating with a super PAC. “The candidate, simply in a public forum, announces what would be helpful in a campaign,” Ryan said. “And then they hear it, and they act on it.” He added, “I think it’s outrageous that a candidate for public office in the United States would even contemplate, let alone act on, encouraging foreign interference in our elections.”

“Allowing voters to vote [absentee] on Election Day and having their ballots count is just another way to increase the number of people who can be involved in the process, really, at any time, but particularly in the uncertainty of this year,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause.

Karen Hobart Flynn, president of Common Cause, said: “You cannot test election integrity rules by breaking them, any more than you can rob a bank to make sure your money is safe.”

"President Trump’s repeated requests to his followers to commit felonies are felony crimes themselves because he is inciting the commission of those crimes," said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the election watchdog organization Common Cause. "You cannot test election integrity rules by breaking them any more than you can rob a bank to make sure your money is safe."

Acknowledging problems in the Massachusetts election, Pamela Wilmot, the executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, nevertheless attributed the high primary turnout to the state’s shift toward voting by mail. “Compared to the problems we’ve seen in other states, it really was a relatively smaller percentage of the voters that faced these issues,” she said, adding that Massachusetts had benefited from a decline in coronavirus infection rates. Partly as a result, she said, “we did not experience a poll worker shortage.”

"You need to cement districts ahead of time, so candidates know where they're running, said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at Common Cause, a government watchdog organization.