Abuse of Power

Paul Seamus Ryan, of the nonprofit group Common Cause, said it was legal for candidates to rent things from their own business — as long as they appeared to be paying market rates and not overcharging. But, Ryan said, he had never seen anyone do it at the scale Trump has. “It’s extremely unusual. Unprecedented, in my experience — 20 years or so, watchdogging money in elections,” said Ryan, an election-law expert.

Tonight, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s direction, Senate Republicans did profound damage to the Senate and the Supreme Court of the United States. They subverted the serious and deliberative constitutional obligation that we (and many others) called on them to uphold just 38 days ago. Instead, they rushed through Committee hearings and made a mockery of advice-and-consent by ramming Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through to a lifetime appointment only eight days before Americans finish voting and after more than 60 million Americans have already voted. In so doing, Senate Republicans excused her incomplete answers to basic questions—demurring on whether “climate change is happening” (it is) and whether voter intimidation violates federal law (it does). They smothered Justice Ginsburg’s “most fervent wish” that her replacement be considered after the election. And they did so at the expense of millions of Americans suffering from the coronavirus pandemic who desperately needed the Senate to negotiate and pass COVID relief legislation.

The groups are also planning for Election Day itself. The nonpartisan grassroots group Common Cause is appointing “election protection volunteers,” which it describes as “voters’ first line of defense against restrictive election laws, coronavirus-related voting disruptions, or anything else that could silence their voices.” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, told BuzzFeed News that the volunteers will monitor the polls from outside voting stations while others watch for online disinformation and field calls to a hotline set up to take reports of voting problems, which could be anything from a lack of wheelchair access to illegal campaigning inside polling stations to explicit voter intimidation. In 2016 and 2018, the group had about 6,500 volunteers; this year, the number went up exponentially to more than 36,000. Albert said the thousands of unarmed volunteers outside polling stations will be trained to handle situations in which they face intimidation or violence, although she believes that anything of the sort is unlikely to happen.

“Putting all your eggs in one basket seems like a very bad idea—and it’s avoidable. We’ve seen what happened in the primaries,” said Sylvia Albert, the national director of voting and elections at the good-government organization Common Cause. ... Even in states that have dramatically expanded mail voting, cuts to in-person Election Day voting sites could lead to disenfranchised voters — and could disproportionately impact poor and nonwhite voters as well as younger voters who are less likely to live at the same address they did in the last election. “You cannot fault voters for being hesitant about vote-by-mail. Obviously I think it’s a great option, but that’s what it is — an option. Voters should be able to choose whichever way they want to vote,” said Albert, Common Cause’s national director of voting and elections.

Watchdog groups argue Trump’s handling of the hiring process is more evidence that lawmakers and future presidents must institute rules to limit the reach of military contractors and other special interests. “Given the hundreds of conflicts of interest flouting the rule of law in the Trump administration, certainly these issues have gotten that much more attention and are that much more salient now than they were four years ago,” said Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan good-government group.

“I would be very happy if it wasn’t not coming down to Pennsylvania, if we were just one of the many states one way or another,” says Suzanne Almeida, a lawyer for the state’s chapter of the watchdog group Common Cause.