News Clips

“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.”

“We see some of the most bare-knuckled fights over political power at the local level,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. “Plenty of people have tried creatively to get their way with the commission,” in California, Feng said. “But selecting a group of people who are savvy and listening for exactly that kind of thing makes them well inoculated to those lobbying efforts.”

“They’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying,” says Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, one of several non-partisan groups fighting for redistricting reform. Following the April 4 contempt hearing in the Ohio Supreme Court, Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told Spectrum News that the Republican strategy for the last year has been to run out the clock. “They said, ‘Oh, it was impossible to meet that (court) deadline.’ Well, yes, if you’re trying to make it impossible by stalling and wasting time.”

"This year's rushed process looks likely to cost Georgia taxpayers $580,000 a year – which will be spent chasing conspiracy theories," Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a good government group, said in a statement.

“This year’s rushed process looks likely to cost Georgia taxpayers $580,000 a year, which will be spent chasing conspiracy theories if anything and everything that creates ‘doubt’ about our elections is suddenly up for investigation,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director for Common Cause Georgia, a government accountability organization.

“It’s really outrageous on a number of fronts,” said Beth Rotman, money in politics and ethics program director at Common Cause, a national group that promotes government accountability. “This ethics agency has a job to do for everyday Americans,” Rotman said. “They have a job to do for we the people who have these laws in place, and they have a job to do and if there has been any potential issue they need to investigate, they need to be able to start to do their jobs and go forward with this without potential retribution, which is what this looks like from here.”