News Clips

How does a community like Homewood, Pennsylvania, address the lead in the soil that’s harming children or the proliferation of vacant lots? Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that serves as a watchdog against corruption and voter suppression for Pennsylvanians, says it starts with creating civically oriented spaces where people can learn about the democratic process and unite with others experiencing the same struggles. He came to understand this long ago: His drive for social change started when he was a community organizer at Operation Better Block in Homewood, where his job was to form a civic association. He said he realized “civic associations are really the building blocks of a strong democracy.” “If you don’t talk to one another, you can’t begin to hold an elected official or a potential candidate accountable for those issues,” Ali says.

“One America News Network 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 that urged Verizon to drop OAN. “This is a welcome change but long overdue. “No company should profit from spreading content that endangers our democracy.” Common Cause and other civil rights groups have pressured carriers to drop OAN.

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group, said a ballot review such as the one in Tarrant County “elevates the narrative that election administrators are somehow not doing their jobs properly or even worse trying to sway elections.” “It’s a really dangerous lie that is being sold to a lot of people and frankly, it’s putting election administrators in a lot of danger,” Gutierrez said. “It all stems from this lie of elections about our elections not being safe.”

Yosef Getachew, media and democracy program director at Common Cause, helped author a letter from more than 120 civil society groups to seven major social media companies, noting that "disinformation related to the 2020 election has not gone away but has continued to proliferate." The letter’s demands included consistent enforcement of civic integrity policies during both election and non-election cycles and the prioritization of enforcement around combatting what they call the big lie that says Trump won the 2020 election. "A lot of the disinformation that we're seeing now is really recycled content from the Big Lie, but it's packaged in new ways that is getting more and more attention," Getachew said. "When we're talking about the 2022 election cycle, we're seeing a lot of candidates now preemptively declare voter fraud, and this is based primarily off the Big Lie. A lot of candidates are using the Big Lie as a platform plank."

Dan Vicuña is the national redistricting manager at Common Cause, a national organization focused on expansive voting rights and government accountability. Derek Muller is the Bouma Fellow of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law, where he teaches on topics related to election law and federal courts. They took some time to talk about the concerns around cases like “Moore v. Harper,” whether the 1965 Voting Rights Act offers sufficient protections to these efforts to concentrate elections power among legislators, and the harm caused by gerrymandering.

As described by a prime advocate, the nationwide, 1.5-million-member Common Cause organization, it is "an agreement among states to guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia."