News Clips

"The Alabama legislature's defiance of a clear mandate from the Supreme Court to discriminate against Black voters is so brazen, a delaying tactic seems to be the only explanation that makes any sense," says Dan Vicuna, director of redistricting and representation at the advocacy group Common Cause. "I think it's not going to sit well with the Supreme Court," he says.

Jonathan Mehta Stein, the executive director of California Common Cause, which closely monitored the redistricting process, said he believed there was also a larger political goal: “They pulled her base out from under her to have her turn down the volume on behalf of renters,” he said.

Sean McMorris, a California Common Cause program manager, said the notion of dividing the city attorney’s civil and criminal responsibilities appears to him like a “power grab.” “This seems like it could be a recipe for confusion and contention, especially if the appointed city attorney and elected city attorney clash on matters,” he said. The proposal “also seems to give the council president too much power in the appointing process, which could lead to the appearance of corruption.”

Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy and election watchdog organization Common Cause in Connecticut, says the primary will be a test for Trump supporters and mainstream Republicans. "I don’t think he should be on the ballot," Quickmire said of DiGiovanni. "I think anyone who participated in an insurrection against the U.S. government should be disqualified."

The reform proposals that voters adopted during the last decade to stop gerrymandering were thwarted because redistricting remained in the hands of politicians, says Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer. Now, she’s supporting a new citizen initiative that would put an independent citizen commission in charge of mapmaking. She said states that redistricted through independent citizen commissions got legislative and congressional district lines that didn’t unfairly favor one party or another. “Ohioans put good rules into the Ohio Constitution, and those rules would have been adequate if elected officials had actually followed them rather than drawing lines that favored one political party,” says Turcer. “These folks are drunk on power. What do you do with someone who is drunk? You take away their keys.” Turcer, Miller, and others who back the upcoming proposal for an independent commission say legislative maps in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan became more competitive after they were drawn by an independent commission.

When I was in the Supreme Court last December listening to oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, I was struck by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions in this case that put the future of American democracy’s checks and balances at risk. Barrett doubted that the “independent state legislature theory” should give state legislatures absolute power to write laws for federal elections without facing state judicial review. And Barrett probed repeatedly about when, if at all, the Supreme Court should intervene in state court interpretations of state constitutions in these election cases.