News Clips

The voting advocacy group Common Cause will rely on thousands of volunteers like Bowers to identify misinformation floating around online and push for Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to take down the most egregious falsehoods. False claims about voting times, locations or eligibility, for example, are banned across Twitter and Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram. During the 2020 election, platforms applied fact checks, labeled or removed more than 300 pieces of popular, false content that Common Cause turned up. More recently, in Texas, more than 100 volunteers worked four-hour shifts to monitor false claims coming out of the state’s primary election in March. The most frequent conspiracy theory shared that night claimed that staffing shortages at polling locations were deliberate, Bowers noted. “Texas is kind of the playbook for things to come,” said Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst for the group. “My major concern is that local issues, like with these staff or ballot shortages, will be amplified by influencers or partisan actors with a national platform as signs of malign interference in elections; it’s a pretty recognized pattern from 2020.”

"Even if this administrator isn't violating any law, it can certainly look bad if she's not performing her duties that taxpayers are funding her to do and often the perception can be just as harmful and it can call into question that public servants should be serving the public interests, not minding their own pockets," said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a non-partisan government watchdog nonprofit.

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a watchdog group, said Mr. Adams never should have hesitated in deciding to release his tax returns. “This is not a gotcha question from the press — this is the sort of thing that real people on the street pay attention to,” she said. “The mayor shouldn’t be playing cat and mouse with something that should be an obvious transparency measure.”

“I think we’ve now saw sort of a crack or a fissure in what has been sort of a tradition of Republican commissioners acting as a bloc and citing prosecutorial discretion, vagueness of the law, and a whole host of rationales for their refusals to move forward on any sort of enforcement,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel at Common Cause. Spaulding previously worked as a senior aide for a former Democratic FEC commissioner. But Friday’s decision will not end dark money entirely, Spaulding notes. “For super PACs, there’s still plenty of ways for dark money to infect the system,” he said. “This doesn’t wave a magic wand,” he continued, citing nonprofit groups, trade associations and other differently incorporated LLCs that could continue to evade heightened disclosure requirements.

But without a listing of clients that might have paid Walker or the company more than $5,000, the true picture of Walker’s finance is incomplete, said Stephen Spaulding with government watchdog group Common Cause. “According to this candidate’s financial disclosure form, no person or entity paid more than $5,000 for any services provided by him — at the same time, he disclosed an interest in an LLC valued at more than $25 million and that provides ‘business consulting and professional services,’” Spaulding said. “This may raise questions for voters trying to screen for conflicts of interest who want to know more about who got what from the consulting and professional consulting firm that bears his name and pays him millions in shareholder income.”

Beth Rotman, national director of money in politics and ethics at watchdog Common Cause, told CNBC that new ethics laws governing Supreme Court justices should require them to disclose more details of their spouses’ consulting contracts. “Disclosure must be robust for it to be truly meaningful in this context so financial disclosures should include consulting contracts. As you have seen already, when justices complete their annual reports, they list information that does not give a complete view of their spouse’s financial ties,” Rotman said in an email. “It is key to meaningful disclosure that the rules be updated to include the source and amount of any spouse’s consulting contracts over a reasonable minimum threshold.”