News Clips

Common Cause, the watchdog group that supports limits on partisan line-drawing, is leading the challenge to the North Carolina districts. “Whether it is Democrats or Republicans manipulating the election maps, gerrymanders cheat voters out of true representation,” Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has the opportunity to set a clear standard that will restore a meaningful vote to millions of Americans disenfranchised by gerrymanders in Maryland, North Carolina and across the country.”

“Partisan gerrymandering is not just a Republican problem or a Democrat problem, it is a politician problem,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause, a plaintiff in the North Carolina case. “Politicians have shown time and again that they cannot resist the temptation to draw maps that protect their power and party at the expense of the American people."

“Whether it is Democrats or Republicans manipulating the election maps, gerrymanders cheat voters out of true representation,” Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has the opportunity to set a clear standard that will restore a meaningful vote to millions of Americans disenfranchised by gerrymanders in Maryland, North Carolina and across the country.”

Electronic voter registration in Texas is also a focus of groups like Common Cause, a voter rights and ethics watchdog group, that has made online voter registration legislation a priority for the upcoming session, said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas. “The state should be more concerned with how few Texans are registering to vote and how few Texans are actually voting,” Gutierrez said. “We did a little better this past midterm election than we historically have ... but that isn’t a lot to brag about. It’s just simple things like online registration that will make a huge difference.”

“Nothing is 100 percent guaranteed in Albany,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group. But she added: “I think it would be very very difficult for people who were elected on the promise that they were going to heed the voice of the voter, to then turn around and just have it be old-fashioned Albany business as usual.”

In Common Cause’s five-decade history, we have held both Democrats and Republicans accountable. We do this because of moments like this, when one party has moved so far in the wrong direction that it seems like democracy reform is a partisan issue. It is not, and we shouldn’t let Republican leaders in Congress make it one.