News Clips

“We are seeing the kind of incidents that are likely to happen in every election be blown up to mean there is something fundamentally wrong with Pennsylvania election administration and we can’t trust the Department of State or the counties to give us an accurate count,” said Suzanne Almeida with Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that advocates to expand access to voting. “There are any number of reasons why that’s not true.”

Now, in states where ballot rejection data is publicly available, local election offices and non-partisan voter rights groups are enlisting volunteers to help with the curing process. According to Izzy Bronstein, a grassroots organizer with watchdog organization Common Cause who helps run its Election Protection volunteer coalition, volunteers can reach out to voters to let them know that their ballot might need curing, and then walk them through that process. ... Bronstein said volunteering for ballot cure phonebanking typically starts with  a 15-minute individualized training session, and then you’ll be ready to hop on a Zoom call with fellow volunteers, where everyone can pop in and ask questions as needed. She also said the dialer software connecting volunteers with voters who need their ballots cured should be familiar to anyone who’s phonebanked previously. “The difference is the script,” Bronstein said. “The process is just a little bit more complicated than a regular ‘Get Out the Vote!’ script.”

“There are a lot of eyes on the state that’s leading to a sense of increased voter anxiety,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a voting rights group that is involved in some of the litigation. “There’s a universe of potential litigation out there, and I would be very surprised if we don’t see at least some of it after Nov. 3.”

Sylvia Albert is the director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a national nonpartisan group that runs the Election Protection initiative, which coordinates a coalition of more than 100 organizations to facilitate voting across the country. Albert says that forms of physical intimidation at the polls, including protesters or the illegal threat of violence, have long been used to suppress votes, since the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Threats like these were most recently seen during the 2016 presidential and 2018 midterm elections. "We saw a few isolated incidents, but those isolated incidents were quick. We dealt with them and voters were allowed to vote," Albert explained.

Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, said that "many" of the voters affected by the rule change rely on public transportation. “Many of the Texans who qualify to vote absentee have disabilities and are elderly, and they rely on public transportation,” Gutierrez said in a statement. “With only one drop-off site per county, these voters would face challenges in travel that might make it impossible for them to vote. The drop-off site limit will also make the one site in each country prone to lines and crowds, endangering voters’ health.”

“The idea behind offering greater access to mail ballots during the pandemic is to allow people to have the choice to vote in a way that minimizes their risk of contracting covid,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, a voter-advocacy group that recently prevailed in its efforts to suspend a requirement for voters to obtain signatures from two witnesses or a notary for mail ballots in that state.