News Clips

The government accountability group Common Cause Texas called the move "another attempt to scare voters away from the ballot box by sewing doubt in the integrity of our elections." "Either this is a hasty move in response to partisan pressure, which should be discouraged from the Secretary of State's office, or it is a deceitful omission that should be looked at skeptically," Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager for the organization said in a news release. "Texas should focus on strengthening the security of our elections, not removing systems, like ERIC, that ensure checks and balances especially given the SOS office's history with illegal voter purges."

Susannah Goodman, director of election security for the government watchdog group Common Cause, says some polling sites are seeing their lines of voters grow because of issues with voting machines, including ballot scanners that need fixing. ... But Goodman stresses there are no major concerns so far. "These are things we see in every election cycle. There are glitches in the system. But election administrators have learned from the past and they have resiliency built in."

“What we are seeing are things that we usually see on Election Day,” said Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause. “Sometimes voters are going in and one of the voting machines isn’t working, or lines are a little longer.”

“The attack on Mr. Pelosi is deeply disturbing and part of a larger trend,” said Suzanne Almeida, director of state operations for Common Cause. he attack happened as a rise in threats against lawmakers investigated by the U.S. Capitol Police has doubled since the last midterm cycle, according to the Associated Press. The government watchdog group Common Cause says it is more concerned about this and not other election issues like voter intimidation because most states have systems in place to make sure voters can safely vote. “The Election Protection Coalition in most states has a plan to respond, will have volunteers at targeted polling locations, will be watching online for violent rhetoric, dis and misinformation,” Almeida said.

John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, attended Wednesday’s meeting and tweeted, “Big takeaway for me is that there was no process in place that could have caught these mistakes. It’s a new technology implementation, which is hard, but there is a lot we could have learned from other states that have had them for years.” Marion and Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, noted that the printed ballots voters received after using the touchscreen are in English, even if the voter opted to vote in Spanish. “Not only does this obviously undercut the point of having a bilingual voting process in the first place, it is in clear violation of the federal law that requires this Spanish language option in Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket,” they wrote.

The fight for voting rights goes on, even though every Senate Republican, joined by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), tried to shut it down on January 19. They refused to adjust a Senate rule best known for obstructing civil rights legislation. The filibuster rule – requiring 60 votes to advance most legislation if any senator objects – has been modified or waived more than 160 times in recent decades. Just in December, an exception was granted for legislation dealing with the debt ceiling, with the support of Manchin and Sinema and some Republicans. Yet somehow they decided voting rights were not important enough to warrant any adjustments to the rule.