News Clips

Although secretaries of state are important positions, they do not have unlimited power, said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for expanded voter access. “Even in states where the secretary of state has an enormous amount of power, a secretary of state cannot — by themselves — overturn a democratic election,” Albert said. “Even where these individuals may want to take actions to undermine the ability for voters to vote and have a ballot count, they are still limited by the law and checks and balances in place.”

The 1,000-plus harassing and hostile contacts made to election officials covered the period from June 2021 to June 2022. The trend continued in July, the task force told the election officials, according to Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, who attended the briefing. ... In total, 89% of the contacts made to election officials were deemed protected speech and could not be investigated. “A lot of the questions were aimed at ‘Wait. Really? You can only investigate 11% of cases?’ And them saying, ‘Yes, I'm sorry but we can only investigate things not protected by First Amendment,’” Albert said.

Verizon's move means OAN "will be left without a major carrier to spread its often harmful and dangerous disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories," said Yosef Getachew, the media and democracy program director at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. "This is a welcome change but long overdue." Getachew added: "We hope those remaining small pay-tv providers and streaming services still carrying OAN will follow suit and deprive the outlet of any platform to spread harmful conspiracy theories that have done real world harm. No company should profit from spreading content that endangers our democracy."

Yosef Getachew, Media & Democracy program director at the watchdog group Common Cause, criticized that content-neutral approach, citing Newsmax's pattern of sharing false claims — not just from guests, but employees — about fraud in the 2020 election, which a judge recently concluded the network knew "were probably false" at the time they aired. "Newsmax has amplified and aired content about the Big Lie, mischaracterized the January 6th insurrection, and is continuing to fuel election disinformation, which is damaging our democracy," Getachew told Insider. "And it's Verizon that profits off that."

Running for local office isn’t easy. But whenever the going gets tough for Amanda Gonzalez, a Democratic candidate for Jefferson County (Colo.) Clerk and Recorder, she remembers the plot to overturn the 2020 election. “When I’m downtrodden, when something isn’t going the way I thought it would, that is a huge part of my everyday thought,” says Gonzalez, 37. “There is a set of people who will actively try to undermine or destroy our democracy.” As the executive director of Colorado Common Cause, Gonzalez has spent much of her career focused on state voting-rights policy. Much of that work involved crafting reforms that local election clerks would implement, including major nonpartisan election-protection efforts in 2018 and 2020. When the Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder—the official in charge of elections in the county—decided not to run again, Gonzalez decided to run for the post herself. “If it’s not me, it’s bad actors,” she says.

Republicans appear to have cynically calculated that these “ballot security” measures to suppress the vote may be harmful to some of their own voters, but that it will block  more Wisconsinites who might vote for their political opponents.  Republicans have targeted voters who reside in urban areas like Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay. They have also homed in on college and university students by making it more difficult for that population to vote, even with a college-issued photo ID, than almost anywhere else in the nation. Most cruelly, Republicans have targeted Wisconsinites with disabilities, the elderly and the poor who must rely on public transportation and don’t have or cannot easily obtain the required photo ID needed to vote in Wisconsin. Republicans have not always behaved like this in Wisconsin. The question now is when, or even if, they will come to their senses and abandon this vicious assault on the very essence of our being as Americans, a promise that has made this state and this nation a beacon of  freedom and hope in the world: our 233-year-old commitment to free and fair elections.