News Clips

ALBANY — Common Cause NY and ethics-minded lawmakers remain committed to preventing former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other misbehaving elected officials from spending the campaign war chest they amassed while in office. "This is one instance, unfortunately among many, and it's time to deal with this gap of law," Common Cause NY Executive Director Susan Lerner said Tuesday at the Capitol.

“It takes us in the wrong direction. It’s another way to confuse voters to put additional obstacles in their way,” Common Cause Indiana executive director Julia Vaughn told The Daily Beast.

Suzanne Almeida of Common Cause, a frequent litigant opposing gerrymanders, noted that courts in Republican states like Ohio have joined ones in deep Democratic states like New York in striking down partisan maps. “If I ran the world,” Almeida said, there’d be national standards against gerrymandering to ensure skewed maps in one big state don’t tilt the entire congressional map. But a Democratic proposal for just that foundered in Congress earlier this year. So, Almeida said, ”we are taking the wins that we can take.”

“If the Bureau is now entrusted with investigating anything that could create doubt about our elections — we suggest they start, first, by investigating those who have been profiting by creating such doubt,” the group’s spokeswoman, Aunna Dennis, said in a statement. “So many different groups and partisan extremists have been working to undermine confidence in Georgia’s elections,” she added.

Being a private entity doesn’t mean that a corporate space can do anything it pleases, particularly as shown by large social media sites that have a direct impact on elections and Democracy itself. Yosef Getachew, director of the Media and Democracy Program at Common Cause, explained the problem of “prioritizing profits over the public good.” “Social-media platforms have been complicit in the spread of disinformation and other harmful content that has suppressed votes and sparked real-world violence,” Getachew said in a statement. “Their actions have allowed high-profile disinformation spreaders and other bad actors to continue using social media to spread content designed to undermine trust in our elections. With midterm elections fast approaching, platforms must adopt these safety protocols, including the robust and consistent enforcement of their civic-integrity policies 365 days a year.” 

“What we see consistently is honest mistakes made by returning citizens are penalized to the max, and true bad intentions are not being penalized to the same extent,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “And usually in those cases the defendants are white.”