News Clips

The state doesn’t start counting until all absentee ballots are in: It's a security measure to make sure nobody voted in-person and also submitted an absentee ballot, Common Cause New York Executive Director Susan Lerner said. “People need to change their expectations and adjust to the realities of our current elections,” Lerner said. “If that means taking a little extra time, better to be efficient and accurate than to be fast and raise questions.”

It should be clear to members of both parties that the cost of ensuring that every eligible voter can safely cast their ballot is a small price for Congress to pay to preserve our democracy — and the bill is due. Continued inaction from McConnell is an abdication of Congress’s responsibility that puts our democracy at risk. Americans deserve better than partisan games right now — the future of our democracy demands it.

But to Julia Vaughn of Common Cause Indiana, there is plenty of blame to go around at both the state and local level. She noted a lack of leadership at the state level. "It seemed to me they kind of told counties, 'OK, you figure this out. We're going to allow everybody to vote by mail, and you guys just figure it out,' " Vaughn said. " 'We're going to buy some (personal protective equipment) for your poll workers, but you know you're going to be in charge of figuring out how to process this mountain of mail that's going to come at you — twice.' "  But on the other hand, Marion County waited too late to sound the alarm over problems, Vaughn said. The county also should have made a broader effort to recruit poll workers. Either way, she said, changes need to be made now in order to properly prepare for the general election. "We know that November is shaping up to be one of the biggest turnout elections ever, so take the problems we had (June 2) and multiply them by some big number," she said. "So we've got to get our act together."

“What you can see is our electorate is more engaged than it has been in a primary for decades,” said Heather Ferguson, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico. “They’ve had some time for life to slow down. ... They were watching more news, getting more input about this election. They got fired up and wanted to vote.” At the same time, Ferguson said Common Cause is taking stock of whether participation was hindered by the state’s timetable for initiating absentee ballot applications and lengthy delivery times in remote regions.

“I am trying to see today as an opportunity to show the cracks in the system that we can fix before November,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for voting rights group Common Cause. Albert said there is concern that in the November election, people who request absentee ballots will not receive them, and there will be fewer polling places as counties consolidate them in response to the pandemic. “There needs to be a rational level of consolidation that ensures that communities who especially have not used vote by mail in the past or cannot use vote by mail — such as disabled communities or people without addresses, homeless, transient — that there are enough polling locations to serve those people,” Albert said.

“The big story out of Pennsylvania is really voter confusion,” said Suzanne Almeida, interim director of government watchdog Common Cause Pennsylvania. ... In Indiana, voting rights groups said they heard from many people who reported they never received the absentee mail ballots they had requested. “That certainly contributed to long lines in Marion County,” said Julia Vaughn, policy director for Common Cause Indiana. Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, consolidated its polling places and had only 22 open on Tuesday.