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Common Cause also ranked individual members of Congress on their pro-democracy efforts, with 101 members — all Democrats — earning a perfect score. That's a more than 70% increase over the number of members of Congress who had perfect scores (58) in the 2020 Democracy Scorecard. Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn cited the legislative filibuster as the roadblock to pro-democracy reform.  "In the end, with high levels of support in Congress and an overwhelming outpouring of public support, Congress ran into one of the reasons our democracy needs to be modernized: the filibuster," she wrote in the report.

“The problem for Republicans is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was pretty scrupulous. It did not tilt elections towards Republicans like they thought it would,” said Jay Heck, executive director of the democracy group Common Cause Wisconsin. If a Republican secretary of state presided over elections, they could tighten up rules around voting, from identification requirements to who could cast an absentee ballot and where they could drop it off — policies that, individually, might not cause a huge drop-off in voting, but together, amount to “death by a thousand cuts,” Heck said. And, if the secretary of state did assume the commission’s current power to certify the election results, they could try to disrupt that process as well. Essentially, Heck said, “Republicans are trying to weaken the Wisconsin Elections Commission for 2024 so that, when Trump runs again and Wisconsin will again be a very closely divided state, the election apparatus would be able to make decisions that would be very favorable for a Republican presidential candidate.”

Faced with clear evidence that he rallied the mob while it broke Capitol windows and became increasingly violent, he said this was not actually a “mob” but was simply “just a crowd,” like at a sporting event that just got out of hand. And when a D.C. police officer who was there trying to control the “crowd” told the court another story, Griffin continually resisted. He reverted to a claim that antifa, shorthand for left-wing anti-facists, was to blame and said the police officer who died the day after the riot died of natural causes and not from injuries suffered while being attacked with a fire extinguisher. Griffin said everything — from video clips and photos and his own postings — was taken out of context. He didn’t mean anything literally by it.

Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Common Cause, said that the increased retirements and resignations mean that the country must invest in "the infrastructure to train the next generation of election workers." "We're going to run an election and we're going to make sure people can vote -- we're just going to have to use all hands on deck," she said of the upcoming midterms. "But we should be looking towards a long-term solution of proper investment in the election system."

“A lot of people have questions about this new law,” said Amy Keith, program director for the good government group Common Cause Florida.

Meanwhile, good government groups like Common Cause Florida say some voters have come to them with confusion about casting their ballots because of new state laws restricting mail-in voting. “We’ve also seen that in many cases, in counties where under the Voting Rights Act they’re required to have signage and materials in both Spanish and English, that we haven’t seen the same level of signage in Spanish,” said Amy Keith, CCF’s program director.