The Internal Revenue Service can do the nation a service on this Tax Day by moving ahead with a re-write of proposed rules regulating the political activity of non-profit social welfare organizations, Common Cause said today.

"As we saw with Jan. 6, Trump gets so much engagement that his network of high-profile politicians and influencers can keep disinformation flowing at a fever pitch. Some Jan. 6 rioters have been citing election disinformation as a reason behind their actions at the Capitol. He’d be able to essentially restart with this built-in network that can be weaponized against democracy. Either way, consistent content moderation is vital, not just at election time but during non-election periods, when platforms like Twitter and Facebook have disbanded...

“If the Bureau is now entrusted with investigating anything that could create doubt about our elections — we suggest they start, first, by investigating those who have been profiting by creating such doubt,” the group’s spokeswoman, Aunna Dennis, said in a statement.

“So many different groups and partisan extremists have been working to undermine confidence in Georgia’s elections,” she added.

Being a private entity doesn’t mean that a corporate space can do anything it pleases, particularly as shown by large social media sites that have a direct impact on elections and Democracy itself. Yosef Getachew, director of the Media and Democracy Program at Common Cause, explained the problem of “prioritizing profits over the public good.”

“Social-media platforms have been complicit in the spread of disinformation and other harmful content that has suppressed votes and sparked real-world violence,” Getachew said in...

“What we see consistently is honest mistakes made by returning citizens are penalized to the max, and true bad intentions are not being penalized to the same extent,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “And usually in those cases the defendants are white.”

"Even if this administrator isn't violating any law, it can certainly look bad if she's not performing her duties that taxpayers are funding her to do and often the perception can be just as harmful and it can call into question that public servants should be serving the public interests, not minding their own pockets," said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a non-partisan government watchdog nonprofit.

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a watchdog group, said Mr. Adams never should have hesitated in deciding to release his tax returns.

“This is not a gotcha question from the press — this is the sort of thing that real people on the street pay attention to,” she said. “The mayor shouldn’t be playing cat and mouse with something that should be an obvious transparency measure.”

“We see some of the most bare-knuckled fights over political power at the local level,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization.

“Plenty of people have tried creatively to get their way with the commission,” in California, Feng said. “But selecting a group of people who are savvy and listening for exactly that kind of thing makes them well inoculated to those lobbying efforts.”

"By inserting himself into the map-drawing process in this inappropriate and unprecedented way, Governor DeSantis began to diminish the prospect that the Legislature would timely pass a legally- and constitutionally-compliant congressional map," reads the lawsuit filed by Common Cause Florida and Fair Districts Now.

Heather Ferguson of the progressive watchdog group Common Cause New Mexico said New Mexico stands out as a “beacon of light” against states proposing to restrict voting access. She also called attention to vehicle caravans in recent elections that block or intimidate voters at polling locations.