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Voting & Elections 09.20.2022

Salon: Far-right "constitutional sheriffs" now turn to hunting "fraud" in midterm elections

"By creating these new bureaucracies and this new red tape," said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, lawmakers are "creating a cycle of voter intimidation." This is "a relic of the past", she went on, and too close to "what we saw in Jim Crow, with folks coming to people's doors with guns and pitchforks, trying to ask, 'Are you the registered voter here?'"  Her group has developed an election protection program meant to help dispel any doubts voters have about the election process and to ensure they don't encounter barriers while casting their ballots. But Dennis says Georgia's new law, SB 441, which authorizes state police to launch a probe into any allegations of voter fraud, worries her. Such unfounded allegations, she says, can create a "domino effect," damaging voters "who are not in areas that are inundated with news and disempowering their voices at the ballot box," Dennis said. "I think in Georgia particularly, [there] is a coordinated effort to purposely do that."

Voting & Elections 09.20.2022

Salon: Far-right "constitutional sheriffs" now turn to hunting "fraud" in midterm elections

"By creating these new bureaucracies and this new red tape," said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, lawmakers are "creating a cycle of voter intimidation." This is "a relic of the past", she went on, and too close to "what we saw in Jim Crow, with folks coming to people's doors with guns and pitchforks, trying to ask, 'Are you the registered voter here?'" Her group has developed an election protection program meant to help dispel any doubts voters have about the election process and to ensure they don't encounter barriers while casting their ballots. But Dennis says Georgia's new law, SB 441, which authorizes state police to launch a probe into any allegations of voter fraud, worries her. Such unfounded allegations, she says, can create a "domino effect," damaging voters "who are not in areas that are inundated with news and disempowering their voices at the ballot box," Dennis said. "I think in Georgia particularly, [there] is a coordinated effort to purposely do that."

Voting & Elections 09.17.2022

Bloomberg: Voter Purges May Be Illegal 90 Days Before an Election — Republicans Are Trying Anyway

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said that voters whose registration has been challenged will face different outcomes depending on their county.  “Counties are not getting proper guidance from the state on how to handle these mass challenges,” she said. 

Charlotte Observer: ‘Death knell of democracy’: A dangerous Supreme Court case, with NC at the center

“What’s at stake is really our American notion of what it means to have a responsive and participatory democracy,” Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, said. “The question is, how important is that to us? Because this one theory would threaten to dismantle those fundamental principles.” Common Cause North Carolina and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice have launched a statewide tour — holding town halls in all 100 counties — to build a movement against the case. Riggs, who will argue the case before the Supreme Court this fall, doesn’t want people to feel defeated. She believes the case is winnable.

Voting & Elections 09.15.2022

Center for Public Integrity: Voters in jail face ‘de facto disenfranchisement’

“That is creating a system where if you are rich enough, you can access your right to vote, because you’ll be able to get out of pretrial detention,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “And if you aren’t rich enough, then you can’t access your right to vote.”

Voting & Elections 09.9.2022

Salon: Election officials preparing for worst-case scenarios: Violence around the midterms

Threats have become so commonplace that election clerks consider it a part of their job, said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. "These election administrators keep saying that they report things to law enforcement or local DAs and nothing happens, like nobody's being prosecuted," Gutierrez said. Common Cause, which does election protection work, is also looking at potential ways to hold people who attack election workers accountable. What has complicated that task, Gutierrez and others say, is that numerous people in leadership positions keep casting doubt on the way elections are administered. For an elected state official to embrace that narrative, Gutierrez said, "really perpetuates this feeling that the people running our elections are doing something wrong, or trying to rig the elections. Just naturally, that's going to create an environment where you're asking for some kind of violence to happen."

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