News Clips

House watchers suggest that the 116th Congress might also have a chance at denting public corruption. House Resolution 1, the first bill introduced this year, is a sweeping proposal aimed at money in politics, voting reforms and ethics. Those issues have broad bipartisan support in many states and localities, according to Aaron Scherb, legislative affairs director at government watchdog Common Cause. “I think a lot of the reforms at the national level will help advance the ball for when there is a more favorable political climate after 2020,” he says. 

“There are two concerns with email voting," in which ballots and voter identification information are typically attached as a PDF or JPEG. "One—the ballots can be intercepted and undetectably altered or deleted. This hack was performed at DEF CON in August. And it’s something academics have long known," Susannah Goodman of Common Cause an one of the authors of the report, told Newsweek. "Second—emailed ballots can be easily spoofed in a spear phishing attack designed to put malware on a county election official’s computer.”

"Over a hundred thousand ballots were returned via the internet in the 2016 election," said Susannah Goodman, director of Common Cause's election security program. "For years, we have known that ballots sent over the internet can be intercepted and changed or deleted, and that is a major concern."

“The convenience of transmitting vote totals online does not outweigh the need of the American people to be assured their votes will be accurately transmitted and counted,” said the letter, which was also endorsed by five citizen and digital rights groups, including Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"The presence of these modems in the tabulator means that they are connected to the internet, and therefore present a tangible risk to the integrity of our voting system. The presence of these modems in the absence of a well-defined strategy for mitigating the risk they present, undermines confidence in the voting system,″ said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

Damon Effingham, acting director of the government watchdog group Common Cause, described the incident as "a catastrophic failure" of access to voting. "For decades, the MVA has been one of the main avenues for Americans to register to vote," Effingham said in a statement. "Tonight's news represents a catastrophic failure by the MVA in their duty to ensure every eligible Marylander has access to their right to vote." Effingham pointed out that the provisional ballots won't be counted until the second Wednesday after Tuesday's primary.