Abuse of Power

“Make sure, regardless what happens with litigation, that your vote is counted,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, which called for Barrett to recuse herself from any potential election litigation. “To me, it seems a clear voter-suppression tactic and an effort to invalidate ballots” that a party does not think are for them. “I would hope the court would see that as an obvious power grab, but the reality is, we don’t know what the court would do,” Albert said.

Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, called the effort by the secretaries of state a “remarkable” attempt to “strong-arm Facebook.” “It’s troubling to see those overseeing elections try to stop what appears to be a successful project to register voters,” he said.

"There is no telling how many that could be but it may be tens of thousands of ballots will come in late and not be counted even if they were mailed and postmarked before or on Nov. 3," Jay Heck, the Wisconsin executive director of Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to protecting and improving voters' rights and access to the ballot, told ABC News.

“This looks like the latest example of Trump administration officials bending and breaking ethics laws and norms,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, the vice president of litigation for the group Common Cause. “This is unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”

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.