News Clips

Heather Ferguson, executive director of New Mexico Common Cause, said an ethics commission will help build trust in government. Aside from investigating possible corruption, she told the Santa Fe New Mexican that a commission would serve as an educational tool for officials seeking to avoid violating laws. She said the panel should be able to provide opinions much faster than the state attorney general's office, which also weighs in on questions from lawmakers and others.

"Initiatives are a good thing overall," said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for the government watchdog group Common Cause. "But nefarious tactics are sometimes used by both parties to try and hijack the process ... to get a certain outcome in certain elections." Scherb said partisan use of the measures is growing. It's a tactic that can be especially potent in midterm elections, where turnout is smaller — typically 40 percent, compared with 60 percent in a general election nationally.

"The population in the state has increased and grown above the national average," Atlanta-based attorney, and Common Cause Board Member, Emmet Bondurant recalled thinking. "And yet the number of registered voters [was] going down."

But most versions of the meme suggest insisting on a receipt as well. A receipt allows voters to follow up and check if their vote has been counted, said Allegra Chapman, senior counsel and director of voting and elections for Common Cause, according to Snopes.

“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."