News Clips

“There are two concerns with email voting," in which ballots and voter identification information are typically attached as a PDF or JPEG. "One—the ballots can be intercepted and undetectably altered or deleted. This hack was performed at DEF CON in August. And it’s something academics have long known," Susannah Goodman of Common Cause an one of the authors of the report, told Newsweek. "Second—emailed ballots can be easily spoofed in a spear phishing attack designed to put malware on a county election official’s computer.”

"Over a hundred thousand ballots were returned via the internet in the 2016 election," said Susannah Goodman, director of Common Cause's election security program. "For years, we have known that ballots sent over the internet can be intercepted and changed or deleted, and that is a major concern."

"If you can get certain policies to succeed in Wisconsin — such as voter suppression, voter ID laws, extreme partisan gerrymandering, the destruction of the public employee unions, the right-to-work — then you can do it in almost any state in the country," Jay Heck, executive director of public interest advocacy group Common Cause in Wisconsin, said. "So I think that's one of the reasons why you see so much money pouring into Wisconsin and into Walker's campaign."

“The convenience of transmitting vote totals online does not outweigh the need of the American people to be assured their votes will be accurately transmitted and counted,” said the letter, which was also endorsed by five citizen and digital rights groups, including Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Anyone who registered to vote using this tool needs to go online to verify whether or not you’re registered,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. “Just to be safe, submit another registration by mail. The process doesn’t take long.”

“Zooming out to 30,000 feet, I doubt the new broader donor disclosure standard will have any impact on big independent spenders,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a group that advocates for greater disclosure in campaign finance. “There’s an easy end run around these new broader disclosure requirements, and big spenders will undoubtedly take advantage in order to lawfully evade donor disclosure.”