News Clips

We showed these tax records to Paul Seamus Ryan of the watchdog group Common Cause. "When casinos are giving money to one of these groups right before an election that the casino has a vested interest in, the governor's race, and then the DGA or the RGA spends the money in that race, that's a pretty clear connection."

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”

“We saw a lot of poll workers wearing face masks and also some who were very vigorously wiping down every ballot-marking system after voters finished,” Kathay Feng, Common Cause’s Los Angeles-based national redistricting director, said on a conference call with reporters. “A few voters were nervous, asking if they [should] come out to vote. But given the long lines [in California] … there are a lot of voters who are still turning out.”

Kathay Feng, executive director of Common Cause of California, said election officials were using a new system for electronically checking voter registration and for marking ballots, which created voting delays. "At the same time that there is extremely high voter turnout, people are able to ask for same-day registration, people are able to request party registration change and to indicate that they want crossover voting," Feng said. Those requests are "causing extreme delays," she said, reported at 45 to 90 minutes.

For its part, the national media must recognize the public needs facts, not spin, not false equivalencies, not Beltway conjectures that ignore the very fragile state of our democracy and the need voters have for truth. And truth is necessary, even for those who refuse the believe it right now. It matters to most of us right now and will matter to everyone eventually if we are to repair our republic and strengthen democracy.

“I would frankly chalk up most of the issues we’re seeing today to Texas being a state that doesn’t prioritize voting,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. said "Problems like the Secretary of State website crashing and the widespread voting technology issues could have been easily avoided if the state allocated resources towards election infrastructure.”