News Clips

Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy and election watchdog organization Common Cause in Connecticut, says the primary will be a test for Trump supporters and mainstream Republicans. "I don’t think he should be on the ballot," Quickmire said of DiGiovanni. "I think anyone who participated in an insurrection against the U.S. government should be disqualified."

There was a push to establish statewide initiatives, referendums and recalls during the last constitutional convention in 1978. A key proponent was the good-government organization Common Cause Hawaii. In a newspaper interview at the time, Common Cause’s Carol Zachary said special interests “can better use the established legislative process than they can the entire electorate. Their defense of the present system proves that they don’t want to give people the franchise. They’re scared of what they might do.”

The reform proposals that voters adopted during the last decade to stop gerrymandering were thwarted because redistricting remained in the hands of politicians, says Common Cause Ohio Executive Director Catherine Turcer. Now, she’s supporting a new citizen initiative that would put an independent citizen commission in charge of mapmaking. She said states that redistricted through independent citizen commissions got legislative and congressional district lines that didn’t unfairly favor one party or another. “Ohioans put good rules into the Ohio Constitution, and those rules would have been adequate if elected officials had actually followed them rather than drawing lines that favored one political party,” says Turcer. “These folks are drunk on power. What do you do with someone who is drunk? You take away their keys.” Turcer, Miller, and others who back the upcoming proposal for an independent commission say legislative maps in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan became more competitive after they were drawn by an independent commission.

He described Crow as a “personal friend,” according to the disclosure form, one of several from the 1990s that is no longer publicly available but was provided to The Washington Post by watchdog organizations Common Cause and Documented.

When I was in the Supreme Court last December listening to oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, I was struck by Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions in this case that put the future of American democracy’s checks and balances at risk. Barrett doubted that the “independent state legislature theory” should give state legislatures absolute power to write laws for federal elections without facing state judicial review. And Barrett probed repeatedly about when, if at all, the Supreme Court should intervene in state court interpretations of state constitutions in these election cases.

Jay Heck, director of Common Cause, told the Wisconsin Law Journal he believes Vos’ threat of impeachment is hypocritical. “It’s such self-serving hypocrisy with Vos. Where was Vos in 2012 when conservatives all voted to dismiss illegal coordination with Walker and Club For Growth? It has been well documented that Walker engaged in coordination to raise money for his recall election, which was illegal. Candidates cannot coordinate with outside special interests, and the Legislature changed that in 2015, but I didn’t hear Vos, or conservative justices who received funding from Club for Growth, to recuse,” Heck said during an interview with the Wisconsin Law Journal. “It’s selective outrage,” Heck said, noting that Common Cause also held former Democrat Jim Doyle accountable for actions taken during his administration.