News Clips

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas chapter of the watchdog group Common Cause, said the showing of the film by Paxton’s office is particularly concerning because of Paxton’s longstanding embrace of unfounded voter fraud conspiracies — and his role in prosecuting electoral crimes, which are exceedingly rare. (Since 2005, the Texas Attorney General’s website says the office has prosecuted 155 people for 534 election fraud offenses — good for about 0.0048% of the 11.1 million Texas votes cast in the 2020 presidential contest alone, and not even a rounding error’s worth of all votes cast in the state over the last 17 years.) “Paxton hosting a watch party for this completely debunked work of fiction is next-level disinformation,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not like (Paxton) is a person who has no impact on elections — he is constantly doing things to impact elections. … It’s all kinds of alarming and sets off all the red flags.”

The attacks on access have targeted methods disproportionately used by people of color and younger, more Democratic-leaning voters. “These are direct attacks on voters that legislators think will vote for the other party,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “It is clearly an attack on Black and brown and low-income voters.”

The case, Moore v. Harper, arose out of a lawsuit in state court where Democratic Party-backed groups, such as the National Redistricting Foundation, and pro-democracy groups, such as Common Cause, sued the legislature claiming their redistricted maps for state and federal offices were gerrymandered. The groups argued that the state’s constitution prevented extreme partisan gerrymandering. 

Julia Vaughn, the executive director of Common Cause Indiana, said people seeking to expand election access in Indiana find themselves constantly on the defensive. “Very rarely do we get the opportunity to talk about proactive, pro-voting rights or legislative changes. We are often trying to prevent bad things from happening,” Vaughn said. “We’re like that little boy who sticks his finger in the hole on the side of a dike to stop it from flooding, but we often times don’t have enough fingers.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs, which include the N.C. League of Conservation Voters and Common Cause, won in February a landmark state Supreme Court ruling. The legislative seat boundaries also keep discriminating against Black voters, said Hillary Klein, a lawyer representing Common Cause. Klein and another attorney said legislative maps remained skewed toward Republicans and fail to give Democrats the same chance as the GOP to win governing majorities should they receive similar statewide voter support as Republicans -- a standard the state Supreme Court in February.

“We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends. Skip to appointment of special master who is familiar with New York immediately and stop wasting New Yorkers time and money with a useless bipartisan commission that defaults to the Legislature,” Susan Lerner, executive director of the good government group Common Cause New York, said in a statement.