Voting Rights

“The most serious curtailment to voting rights and turnout in Wisconsin is due to the extreme and restrictive photo voter ID law,” said Jay Heck, director of Common Cause, a non-partisan government accountability group in the state.

With increased public scrutiny of the security, accessibility, fairness, and overall integrity of voting and elections as we approach 2020, Sylvia Albert joins Common Cause as its National Director of Voting & Elections. Albert brings more than a decade of professional experience in public interest law and public policy campaigns expanding ballot access, reducing barriers to participation, and combating voter intimidation among historically disenfranchised communities. She has also done extensive work on fair housing issues serving as a program analyst and an advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the Obama Administration.

“Chairman Cummings was an American hero. He used his power for good and fought for the voices of everyday Americans. He recognized that the right to vote was sacred and fiercely decried efforts to suppress the vote. He was a humble statesman who called out injustice and sought to make the world a better place for his constituents and for all Americans. He will be dearly missed by Common Cause and our 1.2 million supporters.”

“Nobody understands what that legal gobbledygook means,’’ said Liza McClenaghan, state chair of Common Cause Florida, one of several groups that have asked state officials to update their forms to reflect the changes to state law. “It is confusing. If they had had even an emergency hearing, they would have 90 days to go through the regulatory process and they could have gotten comments on how to make this understandable.’’

As the Campus Outreach Coordinator for Common Cause North Carolina, an organization dedicated to fighting for voting access while also championing political reforms for fairer elections, 30-year-old Alyssa Canty, a recipient of the 2019 MTV Leaders for Change grant, is currently empowering students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in North Carolina to stay informed and participate in local, state, and presidential elections. She is gearing up to take on a new role with Common Cause National, where she will work with schools all over the country. “I hope to take the program we have in North Carolina....and do similar work in other states in order to involve young people, and especially people of color, in politics,” she told MTV News. “My major professional goal is to create a larger base of engaged individuals.”