Voting & Elections

The state's statute assumes that people who don't vote, whatever their reason, have moved and purges them from the voter rolls; in upholding it, the high court "ignores the history of voter suppression" connected with such purges across the country, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a scathing dissent.

“Every American deserves the chance to make their voice heard in our elections without fear of election officials targeting them because of their voting history,” said Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn. “But regardless of how the Court dressed up today’s ruling, the narrow majority just took another hostile step against the right to vote. The laws in most states are more protective of infrequent voters than the one the Court approved in Ohio. Still, many partisan officials are doubtless already studying this morning’s decision as a blueprint for disenfranchising political opponents. And we are prepared to fight back against further erosions to the right to vote.

“We are pleased by the Court’s decision ― it will protect the freedom to vote for thousands of Hoosiers who risked unlawful disenfranchisement from the deeply flawed Crosscheck Program,” Common Cause Chief of Strategy Stephen Spaulding said Friday. “Common Cause is committed to doing everything it can to ensure that every eligible voter can make their voice heard in our democracy.”

“The fact is that this is really serious, and it needs the attention that a hostile invasion would get,” says Susannah Goodman, director of a voting-integrity campaign for Common Cause, the government-watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. “Because they did it with bits not bullets, we haven’t responded in the way that we need to,” she says.

Tomorrow’s White House briefing by law enforcement and intelligence officials to discuss a confidential informant’s interactions with Trump campaign officials in 2016 cannot be a closed partisan meeting and must include members of both political parties through the “Gang of Eight.” Despite President Trump’s assertions on Twitter, the entire U.S. intelligence community has concluded beyond a doubt that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And it has been widely documented that numerous members of the Trump campaign, including the President’s own son, took meetings throughout the campaign with Russians and other foreign nationals offering assistance to the campaign.

In March, the advocacy group Common Cause alleged that Cambridge Analytica -- the firm that, through a U.K. affiliate, obtained personal data on up to 87 million Facebook users as part of its work for the Trump campaign -- violated election law by letting foreign nationals participate in the U.S. political decision-making process. Common Cause made its complaint to the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department.