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Voting & Elections 01.15.2024

New York Times: Candidates Lay Groundwork For Fraud Cries Before Caucuses

“This follows the general playbook, the election denier playbook of just pre-emptively laying the groundwork for claims of fraud in the event of a loss,” said Emma Steiner, the Information Accountability Project Manager at Common Cause. “It’s sort of future-proofing.”

Media & Democracy 01.10.2024

KQED/NPR - Political Breakdown (Audio): Can Election Law Keep Up With AI and Deep Fakes?

The 2024 election will be the first where artificial intelligence, or AI, could play a big role — and not necessarily a good one. Today in Sacramento, the head of California Common Cause announced proposals to address the potential problems from things like deepfakes intended to confuse voters. Scott Shafer is joined by Jonathan Mehta Stein, head of Common Cause, to discuss threats posed by technology for this election.

Yahoo! News/The Hill: Lobbying World

Virginia Kase Solomón will be the next president and CEO of Common Cause. Currently CEO of the League of Women Voters, she will start her new role in February and will be the first Hispanic person to lead the democratic watchdog. She succeeds Karen Hobert Flynn, who died this spring after three decades with the organization.

Voting & Elections 12.10.2023

Daily Beast: ‘Absurd’: As 2024 Looms, Counties Won’t Update Voting Tech

Emma Steiner, Information Accountability Project manager at the watchdog group Common Cause, said the Albert plays a role in a broader far-right conspiracy theory about “the role of connection to the internet at polling places.” “It’s all part of this broader narrative that election workers are conspiring against voters, and that voting machines cannot be trusted,” Steiner noted. In actuality, the sensors are passive devices that listen for known intrusions on a county’s internet network, said Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause. “Elections weren’t declared critical infrastructure until 2017. To us, Albert sensors were a step in the right direction. They won’t stop an attack from happening, but they’ll tell you that bad actors are circling,” Goodman said, likening the sensor to an alarm system. “I thought it was too passive when I first heard about it.” While watchdogs like Goodman describe the Albert as a useful tool for monitoring and sharing threats, conspiracy theories caught the ear of Republicans in Ferry County, where the GOP chair authored a memo casting suspicion on the devices, the CIS, and a CIS co-founder’s work for Democratic presidential administrations.

Rolling Stone: The Dirty Tricks the GOP Is Using to Keep Abortion Off the Ballot in 2024

The landscape, meanwhile, is dramatically different in Democrat-controlled states. In Maryland, advocates have experienced virtually no resistance whatsoever, and say they are aware of no organized opposition. “We’re expecting a disinformation campaign,” says Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland. “But outside of that we’re not hearing anything at all.”

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