Election Protection

“Ballot drop boxes are open for much longer than polling places. They aren’t staffed and they are often placed in locations that make them vulnerable for people to act in a way that you would probably not see in a polling place,” said Suzanne Almeida, who is heading a voter intimidation hotline for the advocacy group Common Cause.

Civil rights, democracy, and public interest groups are calling out the major social media companies for not doing enough to combat election disinformation and urging them to take steps to combat and curb the rampant problem in the final weeks before this year’s midterm elections. In a letter to the CEOs of Meta (Facebook), Twitter, YouTube, Snap, Instagram, TikTok, and Alphabet, the groups urged the platforms to do more to combat the proliferation of election disinformation on their platforms with a particular focus on combatting the ‘Big Lie’, preventing disinformation targeting non-English speaking communities, and creating more friction to reduce the distribution of content containing electoral disinformation.

Threats have become so commonplace that election clerks consider it a part of their job, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. "These election administrators keep saying that they report things to law enforcement or local DAs and nothing happens, like nobody's being prosecuted," Gutierrez said. Common Cause, which does election protection work, is also looking at potential ways to hold people who attack election workers accountable. What has complicated that task, Gutierrez and others say, is that numerous people in leadership positions keep casting doubt on the way elections are administered. For an elected state official to embrace that narrative, Gutierrez said, "really perpetuates this feeling that the people running our elections are doing something wrong, or trying to rig the elections. Just naturally, that's going to create an environment where you're asking for some kind of violence to happen."

Common Cause of Delaware executive director Claire Snyder-Hall says the poll monitors will be in place in Wilmington, Dover, Lewes, and Rehoboth Beach. “One of the reasons we’re happy to have the election protection field program on the ground this year is because a lot of the voting laws have changed recently,” Snyder-Hall said. Changes include an expansion of early voting, vote by mail, same-day registration, and no registration deadlines. “Consequently, we expect that some voters might be confused by all those changes, and we are here to help,” she said, adding that volunteers will be able to ensure everyone can exercise their freedom to vote. “Several years ago when I voted, it was voting in Rehoboth. I was told that I had to show a driver’s license to vote,” said Synder-Hall. “And that’s actually not Delaware law.”

John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, attended Wednesday’s meeting and tweeted, “Big takeaway for me is that there was no process in place that could have caught these mistakes. It’s a new technology implementation, which is hard, but there is a lot we could have learned from other states that have had them for years.” Marion and Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, noted that the printed ballots voters received after using the touchscreen are in English, even if the voter opted to vote in Spanish. “Not only does this obviously undercut the point of having a bilingual voting process in the first place, it is in clear violation of the federal law that requires this Spanish language option in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket,” they wrote.

Common Cause also ranked individual members of Congress on their pro-democracy efforts, with 101 members — all Democrats — earning a perfect score. That's a more than 70% increase over the number of members of Congress who had perfect scores (58) in the 2020 Democracy Scorecard. Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn cited the legislative filibuster as the roadblock to pro-democracy reform.  "In the end, with high levels of support in Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster," she wrote in the report.