News Clips

We got it right in Texas when we inscribed in our Constitution that “all political power is inherent in the people.” But politicians in power today are not living up to that ideal. Texas is the fourth-most difficult state to vote in by one analysis and 41st in the nation when it comes to voter turnout. We had 9.6 million registered Texas voters sit out the last election — more than the entire population of states such as New Jersey or Virginia.

“States leaving ERIC and creating their own independent registration system increases the potential for election fraud,” Katya Ehresman, the voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, testified last week. “The GOP and conservatives for years demanded the kind of results ERIC has produced, and states withdrawing from the compact undercut efforts to keep voter rolls clean and prevent illegal voting.” Ehresman also has questioned whether Nelson’s office could run its own system. She pointed to the office’s botched voter roll purge in 2019, when then-Secretary of State David Whitley used faulty data that questioned the citizenship of tens of thousands of Texas voters. The staffers who worked on that effort “are probably not the people we want to create a new system for maintaining voter rolls,” Ehresman said.

Just days after the story came out, Common Cause, a Washington-based watchdog group, filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission alleging the $130,000 payment to Daniels amounted to an unreported, illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, made in coordination with Cohen. At the time Common Cause did not know it was Cohen himself who had made the in-kind payment, but later amended the complaints to account for Cohen's claims, which the group noted exceeded the legal limit for campaign gifts by $127,000. No charges would be filed against Trump while he was still a sitting president, as is the custom rather than settled law, though Cohen did go to prison after pleading guilty to tax evasion and violating campaign-finance laws.

Lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative maps “will most definitely” be filed, said Wisconsin Common Cause Executive Director Jay Heck. As they prepare to ask the courts to evaluate political maps, lawyers will line up voter plaintiffs from areas where Democratic-leaning precincts were merged into Republican-dominated districts beginning in 2011, Heck said.

Sailor Jones, associate director of Common Cause North Carolina, alluded to those setbacks in addressing the audience. “This time, my friends, the courts will not save us,” Jones said. “Who will?”

We are being silenced in Florida, with dangerous legislation making its way through the state Legislature that could stifle the ability of everyday Floridians to speak freely. House Bill 991 and the companion bill Senate Bill 1220 would dramatically change our state’s defamation laws and allow for monetary judgments when elected officials or others think they’ve been slighted on social media or in critical press reports. By doing away with the long-held standard of proving actual malice or ill intent in a defamation case, Florida would be inviting frivolous lawsuits to proliferate and arming elected officials and others with the ability to silence outspoken critics.