Campaign Finance

“This is money that was contributed to a campaign for a purpose of getting them elected or re-elected to a specific office,” said Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin. “And once a member of Congress has decided they’re no longer going to run for that office, it seems to me that any leftover money ought to be liquidated, that the money should either be donated to a charity, maybe given back to the U.S. taxpayers in the form of a contribution to the debt.”

Common Cause Hawaii’s program manager, Camron Hurt, emphasized the need for more comprehensive changes to make Hawaii’s elections free from outside influence, more competitive and more popular. “I think those (other reforms) are all tools to fix the same wheel. Right. So I think we fixed parts of the wheel, but the wheel still isn’t moving as efficiently as it can,” Hunt said.

Today, a New York judge rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to have criminal charges against him thrown out for hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels to keep their affair secret on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. The trial will begin six years after Common Cause filed complaints related to the payments with the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on March 25.

Jonathan Mehta Stein is a co-founder of The California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, a project of good government group California Common Cause, which has been advising legislators on the threats emerging technologies pose to democracy. He points to the growing use of AI in elections across the world as evidence it's no longer a theoretical, but an active practice. In the first month of 2024, deepfakes promulgating misinformation in Bangladeshi and Slovakian elections proved to be significant election disruptions. Here in the United States, AI-generated content is met with considerable concern on the heels of rising political violence and distrust in election processes. "All of these new technologies that can deceive voters and undermine elections are coming on the heels of other depressing trends," Stein said. "In our democracy, trust in institutions and in the media are all-time lows. Beliefs that our elections are being run securely and votes are counted accurately are in doubt among huge percentages of the American population."

Ishan Mehta, media and democracy program director for Common Cause, said the calls in New Hampshire last month represented "only the tip of the iceberg" and warned that "it is critically important that the FCC now use this authority to fine violators and block the telephone companies that carry the calls." Mehta called on Congress to pass the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, which would prohibit the distribution ofdeceptive AI-generated audio, images, or video relating to federal candidates in political ads. "We hope that both the House and the Senate will follow the example of the FCC," said Mehta, "whose Democratic and Republican commissioners recognized the threat posed by AI and came together in a unanimous vote to outlaw robocalls utilizing AI voice-cloning tools."

The alcohol industry is at it again. For three decades the industry, its powerful lobbyists and its allies in the hospitality industry have been successful in staving off increases in the state’s alcohol excise tax with arguments about how even a modest increase will hurt restaurants and local breweries. Increased prices for alcohol won’t result in less drinking anyhow, they say. The argument was most recently echoed in an Albuquerque Journal editorial. Meanwhile New Mexico is No. 1 nationwide in alcohol-related deaths and alcohol now accounts for one in five deaths of working age New Mexicans. Treatment programs are hard to come by, and not only families are paying the price. A recent study by the UNM Department of Economics says that excessive alcohol consumption costs New Mexicans $2.77 per drink in the form of crime, domestic violence, DWI and Medicaid payments.