Voting & Elections

Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, argues that Wisconsin’s ID requirements for young people violate their constitutional rights, forcing them to “jump through more hoops unnecessarily” than other citizens. At UW-Madison, Wisconsin’s largest university, student ID cards known as WisCards are not compliant with state laws for voting. Among the 13 four-year UW System schools, only four use student IDs that are also voter compliant. To comply with the law, UW System campuses offer separate voter IDs to students upon request. Heck said Republican lawmakers appear to have designed the requirements to discourage students from turning out at the polls. “Obviously a lot of college students are Republican, but their calculation is that more college students would likely vote for Democrats,” he said, adding the requirement “does give (Republicans) a partisan advantage.”

The state doesn’t start counting until all absentee ballots are in: It's a security measure to make sure nobody voted in-person and also submitted an absentee ballot, Common Cause New York Executive Director Susan Lerner said. “People need to change their expectations and adjust to the realities of our current elections,” Lerner said. “If that means taking a little extra time, better to be efficient and accurate than to be fast and raise questions.”

It should be clear to members of both parties that the cost of ensuring that every eligible voter can safely cast their ballot is a small price for Congress to pay to preserve our democracy — and the bill is due. Continued inaction from McConnell is an abdication of Congress’s responsibility that puts our democracy at risk. Americans deserve better than partisan games right now — the future of our democracy demands it.

But to Julia Vaughn of Common Cause Indiana, there is plenty of blame to go around at both the state and local level. She noted a lack of leadership at the state level. "It seemed to me they kind of told counties, 'OK, you figure this out. We're going to allow everybody to vote by mail, and you guys just figure it out,' " Vaughn said. " 'We're going to buy some (personal protective equipment) for your poll workers, but you know you're going to be in charge of figuring out how to process this mountain of mail that's going to come at you — twice.' "  But on the other hand, Marion County waited too late to sound the alarm over problems, Vaughn said. The county also should have made a broader effort to recruit poll workers. Either way, she said, changes need to be made now in order to properly prepare for the general election. "We know that November is shaping up to be one of the biggest turnout elections ever, so take the problems we had (June 2) and multiply them by some big number," she said. "So we've got to get our act together."

“Thousands of Georgians were denied the right to vote,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause of Georgia. “Our warnings were not heeded.”

“The cause of the problems is grave mismanagement of elections here in Georgia,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a civil rights watchdog. “The state failed to heed the warnings of what could happen in this election.”