Abuse of Power

“Republicans will oftentimes split cities in order to dilute the votes of Democratic voters in districts that will be heavily Republican, so they want a little piece to bury under the votes of people who vote the other way,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. “Democrats, on the other hand, want to split cities because they can vote in solid Democratic patterns and they want to use them as anchors in as many districts as possible.”

This is our year to flip the script and make sure we the people drive this process, not the politicians. That’s why it’s critical that we the people have a say in how our maps are drawn. When the people are prioritized in our democracy, we will have certainty that maps are drawn to benefit us, not the politicians. State legislators must give us ample opportunity to review the maps, weigh in with our own thoughts, and voice our feedback. State legislators should outline an accessible process for multiple statewide public hearings for as many Texans as possible to be heard.

No American is above the law, not even the President. But the abuses we witnessed during Donald Trump’s presidency made it very clear that Congress must strengthen the guardrails on the vast powers of our nation’s highest office. The former administration’s actions exposed and exploited a gulf between well-established norms of presidential power and the laws that govern. The Protecting Our Democracy Act will provide greater checks and balances to the powers of the presidency while creating new mechanisms for transparency and accountability.

"Clearly it wasn’t as big of a deterrent as it needed to be to urge the mapmakers to get back to work and figure it out," said Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, one group that pushed for redistricting reform.

Government watchdog Common Cause is backing the Freedom to Vote Act, introduced by the Democrats in Congress on Tuesday, which would ban removing election officials for partisan political purposes. "His Big Lie has just been metastasizing and really undermining trust in our elections in a way that is very dangerous," Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at the organization, told AFP. But Spaulding believes the greatest remedy to electoral dark arts remains robust turnout at the ballot box. "In 2020, we had the highest voter turnout in more than a century in the middle of a pandemic, so voters really showed up," he said. "So ultimately, voters need to continue to show up in record numbers."

Common Cause Indiana executive director Julia Vaughn criticized Torchinsky’s work as “more political than legal” to assist with partisan gerrymandering. ... Legislative Republicans held nine public redistricting hearings around the state last month without any proposed maps for review. The only hearings planned with the maps in hand will start the day after they are released on Tuesday and will only be held on weekdays at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. Vaughn and other activists have unsuccessfully pushed for more hearings outside Indianapolis, arguing for more than the bare minimum required by law. “People can see, they can feel their democracy slipping away,” Vaughn said. “They are looking for you to save it.”