Voting Rights

Many formerly incarcerated people can vote, but they don't know it. Giving people returning to our communities a say in their future helps to distance them from the past. Common Cause proudly joins the Campaign Legal Center in an effort to register 25,000 people who are eligible to vote -- join us in creating hope in the future and imagine the moment when the people you help register put on an "I voted" sticker for the first time.

Today is National Voter Registration Day and Common Cause makes it easy to verify your vote and register if you need to. Even if you don't need to, here is why you should, and why you should share this Democracy Wire post on Facebook and Twitter urging your friends to do the same.

With Election Day now less than two months away, Common Cause released its 2018 Democracy Scorecard to chart the positions of every Member of Congress on issues vital to the health of our democracy. The reforms in question range from legislation to create a small donor matching fund system and increased disclosure requirements for outside political groups to bills to curb gerrymandering and strengthen the protections in the Voting Rights Act.

With voter registration across the country up and large turnouts in special elections leading up to the mid-terms, the folks at Mother Jones are hoping to hear from first-time voters.

The Manafort and Cohen cases are also a disturbing reminder of how differently Americans are treated by our criminal justice system depending on their skin color, wealth and status. Earlier this year, a black woman in Texas was sentenced to five years in prison for unwittingly breaking state law by voting while still under community supervision for a previous fraud charge.

The Trump Administration has confirmed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that it has fulfilled its agreement to delete the state voter data that was unlawfully obtained by Trump’s Pence-Kobach Commission -- the very relief sought in a suit brought by Democracy Forward on behalf of its clients Common Cause and individual voters Jan Cantler, Anthony Gutierrez, Thomas Kennedy and Ellen Nakhnikian. The lawsuit was filed last year against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, its Vice Chair Kris Kobach, and the Department of Homeland Security to prevent them from violating the Privacy Act and engaging in other unlawful conduct.