“This is part of a very clear strategy by the Texas GOP to keep the demographic changes we’re seeing in Texas from being reflected at the ballot box,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas branch of the government watchdog group Common Cause. “This is one of the ways they could use a third-party candidacy to knock off a percentage point or two from a Democrat, allowing Republicans to retain power for a bit longer than maybe they otherwise would have.”

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, said that far more is needed to secure the election system.
"Providing $250 million in additional election security funding is like asking an army to go fight a war with horses and bayonets," Scherb said.
The House passed a bill that would give states nearly three times more — $600 million.

“Andrew Yang’s use of campaign funds to give ‘freedom dividends’ to supporters would push the boundaries of, and perhaps break, campaign finance law,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that promotes government accountability. “This unprecedented use of campaign funds would give rise to a bunch of novel legal questions.”

Lawyers for Common Cause, which won the recent lawsuit forcing this new redistricting session, say Senate Republicans violated a court order by ordering members of the media and the public to stay out of the area where senators and staff are drawing maps. “As a result of Sen. Hise’s order removing citizens and journalists from the map-drawing area, members of the committee were sitting at computers and amending maps without the public able to know how or why legislators were making changes to proposed districts,” Common Cause deputy...

Just this week, a unanimous three-judge panel in North Carolina struck down that state’s legislative district maps saying they were unfairly drawn to benefit Republicans -- in violation of the state constitution.The “decision offers a framework for other states to evaluate their own redistricting,” said Stanton Jones, a constitutional lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. representing Common Cause. “There are a number of other state constitutions around the country with free elections clauses similar or identical...

Dan Vicuña Common Cause's national redistricting manager said the organization is already looking toward 2021, identifying where partisan gerrymandering may take place and where state constitutions might give them an opening to challenge it."It’s going to be an exciting time for voter empowerment after the next lines are drawn. We have a good handle on where there’s going to be single-party control, where the state constitution has been interpreted in a pro-voter matter, where we can ask the court to change precedent where that’s the...

“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the group, said in an interview.

“The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections,” she added. “They have to be made public.”

“Our heads are spinning here in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, which filed the suit. “It’s a huge win, particularly for the voters of North Carolina, just to know that this entire decade they have never had an opportunity to actually vote for legislators in constitutional districts.”

Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, said it's not unusual people like Yang get paid to speak in front of audiences, but they usually stop accepting payments once they decide to run for federal office. "Because receiving compensation for paid speaking raises questions under campaign finance laws regarding corporate contributions," Ryan said, "most candidates steer clear of these activities."

“Almost every jurisdiction I can think of is grappling at some level with how much is covered and at what threshold,” Beth Rotman, the director of the Money in Politics and Ethics program at Common Cause, a government reform group, said of social media and grass-roots mobilization. She called the dilemma the “million-dollar question” for ethics officials. “At a certain smaller threshold, these activities are not the same as paid lobbyists,” Ms. Rotman said. “The challenge becomes how we as a democracy track this when it becomes...