Voting & Elections

Roberts’ institutional concerns were on display during the 2019 term, Common Cause attorney Sylvia Albert said. He was the justice most often in the majority, landing there in 96% of the court’s decided cases and in all but one of the 5-4 or equivalent decisions, a Bloomberg Law analysis shows. “Roberts really tried to thread the needle between the conservative and liberal sides of the bench,” Albert said.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a voting rights group, said Roberts would likely seek a compromise in such a situation because he is “concerned with his legacy and trying to find a middle ground.”

“In Virginia, the safe zone around the polling location is only 40 feet, but that safe zone is for campaigning and trying to change a person’s vote,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a voting rights group. “Outside of that, in general, there are laws against intimidation. So I would say that even if they have a right to campaign, which they absolutely do, they do not have a right to interfere with someone’s right to vote or to intimidate them.” “To me, this went beyond campaigning and they should have been removed.” ... Ms. Albert added that the demonstration underscored the need for counties and municipalities to develop contingency voting plans for all situations. “Contingency plans aren’t only if there is a hurricane or a pandemic,” she said. “It’s also if something is making my polling location inaccessible to voters. That could be power going down, that could be people protesting and blocking the door.”

“I think just like everybody else in the country, Justice Roberts is really, really hoping the election isn’t close,” said Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the good government nonprofit Common Cause. “He does not want to touch this with a 10-foot pole.”

Today, not one, but two teams of investigative journalists released major stories with some big political news – and it isn’t Common Cause or our allies who they investigated. Add to that the District Attorney in Wake County, North Carolina, who has opened a preliminary review into the same subject and it is clear, no one affiliated with Common Cause or our allies have done anything wrong. 

"The House of Representatives passed nearly 10 democracy reform bills, often with bipartisan support, this session, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked debate and markups on all of these bills and refused to allow a vote," Common Cause's director of legislative affairs, Aaron Scherb, said. The 2020 Democracy Scorecard, one of the group's initiatives, provides data on every current member of the House of Representatives and Senate, including their votes and co-sponsorships of democracy reform bills. Scherb told Newsweek that McConnell has been instrumental in blocking the current Congress from enacting laws. "There have been hundreds that have been passed by the House at this point. There have only been 158 enacted laws by this 116th Congress to this point. Yet there are hundreds of bills that have passed the House but continue to sit in Senate Majority Leader McConnell's desk, or his 'legislative graveyard' as it's been called," he said.