Voting Rights

“We are dealing with a very different climate in 2018,” said Karen Flynn, the president of Common Cause. “We do not have a Department of Justice that is working hand in hand with our network to be solving these problems, we don’t have the protections of the Voting Rights Act, and we have a president that is putting out messages that can feel threatening to many voters.”

“It’s indicative of a pattern with this administration,” said David Vance, a spokesman for Common Cause, a civil rights group that helped recruit 6,500 volunteers to monitor polling locations across the country Tuesday. “It’s an effort to intimidate voters and keep them away from the polls and try to dictate which voters will turn out and which voters won’t. It flies in the face of what the DOJ has done traditionally to protect voters.” ...Said Vance, of Common Cause: “To turn out and make yourself heard is the primary weapon to combat these attempts to suppress the vote.”

“We are definitely getting a lot of reports of intimidation out of Dallas County,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas branch of the nonpartisan lobby Common Cause. At one precinct, he added, “people are just kind of yelling at voters as they are trying to approach the polls.” ... In Okaloosa and Taylor counties in northern Florida, reports arrived of voters getting text phone messages that their absentee ballots had not been received, when in fact they had, said Liza McClenaghan, board chair for Common Cause Florida.

Common Cause, the civil rights organization, for instance, helped recruit 6,500 monitors this year — double the number in 2016, a presidential election year.

"It's like a domino effect," said Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, about the voting issues in Georgia. "We expect lots of problems at the polling places because there has been a complete lack of voter education."