News Clips

"Outside groups are making up the difference," said Aaron Scherb, a lobbyist on campaign finance and election issues for Common Cause, a watchdog group that advocates for increasing transparency in campaign finance.

Pennsylvania since 2019 doesn’t require an excuse for voting by mail. But the state is unable to provide results instantly because it doesn’t have enough people and other resources to handle the process, said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, a group supporting voting rights.

Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, representing Common Cause in the case, told the court the opponents’ arguments “hang on a hyper-literal reading of the word ‘Legislature’ that ignores that word’s context, constitutional structure, and precedent,” adding, “the original understanding of ‘Legislature’ … contemplated a governing body defined and bounded by state constitutional limits.” It’s hard to have much confidence that such originalist arguments will persuade the court’s self-described originalists.

“The ‘big lie’ has become embedded in our political discourse, and it’s become a talking point for election-deniers to preemptively declare that the midterm elections are going to be stolen or filled with voter fraud,” Yosef Getachew, a media and democracy program director at Common Cause, a government watchdog, told the Post in August. “What we’ve seen is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t really doing the best job, or any job, in terms of removing and combating disinformation that’s around the ‘big lie.’”

Voters make mistakes. Oftentimes ballots don't get returned by the deadline required by the state. But Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, says many voters also get tripped by requirements on a mail ballot. Depending on where you live, your state might require you to provide a signature that matches one on file, voter ID information such as a driver's license, or a date. She says all these "little checks" are opportunities for human error. Plus, Albert says, voting at home means you are on your own, for the most part. "You don't have an election worker there who can answer any questions you have or direct you to anyone else who can help," she says. "You are just alone on your kitchen table." Sometimes, Albert says, voters completely miss the field to provide their ID information or their signature. Other times, election officials have a hard time checking ID numbers or signatures against what's in their system. ... Common Cause's Albert says it also depends what your state allows local officials to do when they are trying to contact voters. "Some of that is set in state law," Albert says, "and some legislatures are not really interested in providing more leeway to election officials to reach out to those voters."

Bob Phillips, director of Common Cause North Carolina, said court oversight is important. He noted that every election here in the last decade was held using Republican-drawn maps that were later ruled unconstitutional, for either racial or partisan gerrymandering. “We feel strongly that the state courts should not be taken out of the equation,” Phillips said in a media briefing this month. His briefing, as well as Holder’s, focused mostly on turning the national media’s attention toward the North Carolina case. Reporters for outlets like CNN, NBC, CBS and Politico attended. Kathay Feng, who leads Common Cause’s national redistricting efforts, said it’s not only Republican-led states that gerrymander their congressional maps. She pointed to New York and Maryland as examples of Democratic gerrymandering.