Legislative Ethics

“It’s coming from conspiracy theories and lies,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan group that advocates for expanded voter access. “It’s attempting to lower people’s confidence in elections.” Albert and others said it’s unrealistic to think election officials can count millions of ballots by hand and report results quickly, given that ballots often include dozens of races. The partisan review last summer of the 2 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, which included a hand count, took several months and hundreds of people to complete.

Longtime Tennessee public interest lobbyist Dick Williams, who heads Common Cause Tennessee, said the alleged Phoenix Solutions scheme is a “more extreme” example that likely doesn’t indicate a larger problem with the system, which can always use fine-tuning. “It’s an example that in any group of people, including legislators, you’re going to have a few people that are wanting to game the system, one way or another, and be deceitful of, supposedly, their friends even,” Williams said.

"We saw vote-by-mail applications and ballots rejected at unprecedented rates, poll sites opening late or not opening at all due to election worker shortages, and widespread technology issues," said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. Calling for federal action, Gutierrez said it won't get any easier for Texas or other states: "These issues we’re seeing today will be far bigger problems in November when we have exponentially more people showing up to the polls."

"The current process right now will not even inform the public that anything is happening one way or the other," Heather Ferguson, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico. She said the process is "completely behind closed doors and out of public view. That does not instill trust in the public in the process itself." Nor will it encourage others who may have similar complaints against lawmakers to come forward, Ferguson added.

Constitutional amendments – which must be passed in identical form in two legislative sessions before being presented to voters on a ballot – should be used sparingly. And they certainly should not be used to let one branch of government sidestep the checks and balances of the other branches. But Pennsylvania legislators are now using the amendment process to take power from other branches of government and increase their own influence.

“Today’s ruling is an unequivocal win for North Carolina’s Black voters who were most harmed by this extreme partisan gerrymander,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a statement. Riggs represented Common Cause. “At every level, North Carolina’s GOP leadership diluted representation of communities of color to entrench their own political power in ways that were both obvious and egregious,” her statement said.