Voting Rights

Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said this is the first time the group has monitored misinformation on social media during the primary season, and he had expected to find less of what he terms “cyber suppression.” “We’re talking dozens to hundreds of pieces of content — not thousands or millions — but even that I’m quite surprised at,” he said. Littlewood said it’s difficult to tell how much of the bad content comes from bad actors, as opposed to “users who just think it’s funny to say [Joe] Biden voters vote on Wednesday.”

Democracy reform, driven by the people, is on the march in states and municipalities across the nation where scores of pro-democracy reforms have been enacted. But democracy reform remains stalled in the U.S. Senate where the Republican majority ignores the will of the people. Sunday will mark one year since the U.S. House of Representatives passed its sweeping and transformative package of pro-democracy reforms in the For the People Act, or H.R. 1.

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”

Kathay Feng, executive director of Common Cause of California, said election officials were using a new system for electronically checking voter registration and for marking ballots, which created voting delays. "At the same time that there is extremely high voter turnout, people are able to ask for same-day registration, people are able to request party registration change and to indicate that they want crossover voting," Feng said. Those requests are "causing extreme delays," she said, reported at 45 to 90 minutes.

As millions of voters head to the polls today, Common Cause is working in the Election Protection coalition to help voters across the country who are having issues voting and working with election administrators to solve problems. For 50 years, Common Cause has a nonpartisan resource to voters, helping solve problems and making our elections more accessible and secure for all voters. Common Cause’s work in the 2020 Election Protection effort is focused on running field programs in targeted states where we organize and train nonpartisan volunteers to help voters and monitor issues at polling places. Common Cause also leads a social media monitoring program to flag and work with social media platforms to remove posts that spread misinformation and disinformation about people’s right to vote or posts that attempt to confuse people about when, where, and how to vote. 

“I would frankly chalk up most of the issues we’re seeing today to Texas being a state that doesn’t prioritize voting,” Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. said "Problems like the Secretary of State website crashing and the widespread voting technology issues could have been easily avoided if the state allocated resources towards election infrastructure.”