News Clips

"It gives an opportunity for folks who are not themselves independently wealthy," says Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause in Connecticut, which advocates for public financing. The funds also free up policymakers from some of the constant fundraising that often goes hand in hand with holding office, she adds. "They don't have to go around with their hands out saying, 'Please give me money.'"

Julia Vaughn, the policy director for the political watchdog group Common Cause Indiana, has routinely criticized Indiana law on matters concerning lawmakers’ conflict of interest for its vagueness and because it allows individual lawmakers to determine their need for an ethics hearing. "Ultimately I think Sen. Perfect's constituents should be able to decide if this is outside the boundaries, or if it's not," she said, arguing transparency is the most important aspect of the process.

“I’m optimistic that if Rhode Island is successful in proving that a precinct-based voting system can be efficiently audited, that other states with similar systems will take the leap,” says John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, who served as the initial force behind the state’s audit requirement. “I wasn’t sure that we’d be able to execute on that and have it go as smooth as it did,” he told the group at the conclusion of the pilot in January. “But,” he added, “I’ve walked away with the confidence that we can.”

The details of Stone’s allegedly illegal activities laid out in the indictment implicate the Trump campaign, and perhaps President Trump himself, in illegally soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national—namely, hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton, in the possession of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and originating with Russian military intelligence hackers.

Something similar happened last fall in Delaware, where the Voting Equipment Selection Task Force also voted to replace its aging touch-screen machines with a variant of the ExpressVote system. When Jennifer Hill, at Common Cause Delaware, a government-accountability group, obtained all the bids from a public-records request, she found that “the Department of Elections had pretty much tailored the request for proposal in a way that eliminated venders whose primary business was to sell paper-ballot systems.” Hill also noted that a lobbyist for E.S. & S., who was “well-connected in the state,” helped “to shepherd this whole thing through.” 

Aaron Scherb, the legislative affairs director at the nonprofit government watchdog Common Cause, said a comprehensive review of the program is long overdue especially in light of the Trump administration's decision to pull American troops out of countries like Afghanistan and Syria. "I think a GAO audit on the effectiveness of the program as well as a potential Department of Defense inspector general report would go a long way to determine how necessary and useful this program is, as the U.S. military continues to draw down in certain countries and regions around the world," Scherb said.