News Clips

We should all be able to go to work each morning without the fear that we won’t make it home to our loved ones. But our election workers don’t have that security right now, and it is our collective responsibility to change that.

Anne Herring, policy analyst for Common Cause Georgia, raised concerns about the latter provision. “The governor and lieutenant governor get to vote on whether their own races will be audited,” Herring told LaHood’s committee. “That’s a little concerning to me in terms of public confidence in elections.”

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, said while no one was hurt, the attempt to poison or kill an election worker is despicable. "It's to destabilize our elections and to scare the public servants who run them," Mehta Stein pointed out. "And to make all of us more fearful of participating in our democracy." Mehta Stein blamed the rise in threats to election workers on the litany of false conspiracy theories claiming the 2020 election was rigged. "We have to find a way to reach people who think elections are being stolen in America," Mehta Stein stressed. "And verify for them that not only are their votes being counted, but that the United States and specifically California run some of the most secure elections in the world."

Virginia Kase Solomón will be the next president and CEO of Common Cause. Currently CEO of the League of Women Voters, she will start her new role in February and will be the first Hispanic person to lead the democratic watchdog. She succeeds Karen Hobert Flynn, who died this spring after three decades with the organization.

Ahead of the election, officials can avoid some of the chaos that fraud-chasing poll watchers created in 2020 by setting clear rules and educating the public about the way tabulation processes, such as signature verification, normally work, said Suzanne Almeida, who leads political violence prevention and response work at the non-partisan Common Cause.

The bulk of the nearly 3,000 complaints that voters filed this election season with Common Cause Texas, a nonpartisan voter advocacy group, reflected procedural problems. People having difficulty figuring out where to vote, or whether they were eligible, or how they could correct a problem with their mail-in ballot. People not being told what to do with the printed ballot containing their selections. Or people, particularly in Harris County, arriving at a precinct that had run out of the paper used to print ballots. Any problem that interferes with a voter casting a ballot is an important one, of course. But it wasn't lost on Common Cause Texas Executive Director Anthony Gutierrez that most of the problems that voters faced had nothing to do with wild conspiracy theories. "We are short on Republicans who will speak out against the election deniers," Gutierrez said. Still, he wondered about the ability to find GOP figures in Texas who would sign on. Indeed, two-thirds of Texas Republicans still do not believe President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. Election deniers made strong runs for office around the country, and the massive layoffs at Twitter and at Facebook's parent company could allow even more disinformation to pour across social media platforms, potentially triggering political violence. Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, said many of us are like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, growing acclimated to rising heat instead of sensing the danger. "We are now in a pot of boiling water," he said, "and we haven't realized it."