News Clips

“We’re very hopeful that what came out in Alabama will bode well for Florida,” said Kathay Feng, vice president of programs for Common Cause, one of the plaintiffs in the federal court challenge set for next month in Tallahassee. Feng said justices signaled that the “Voting Rights Act is not dead.”

“The observers that have come into the picture since 2020 are trying to find evidence of fraud, evidence that a voter shouldn’t be there. I think that’s been the shift,” said Erin Grunze, a voting and elections consultant for Common Cause Wisconsin who previously led an election observation program at the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.

“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.” “What’s happening now is a direct result of conservatives’ decision they’d take all this underground and not meet in public,” says Heck. Given their track record, “If conservatives were the new majority there would be no question about what they’d do,” Heck adds. “They’d name a conservative chief justice and say, ‘We have a 4-3 majority, try to stop us.’” Unlike the conservatives who pushed out Abrahamson, however, the new progressive majority has stopped short of trying to replace Ziegler. Still, Heck has heard from people who worry that the new majority is being too bold and assertive. “Progressives are not really like that. We’re always saying, ‘Let’s do the right thing and the fair thing,’” he says.

“Clearly, direct democracy was being attacked, because the ability to gather folks together and collect signatures and take issues directly to the ballot was really in jeopardy,” said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio. “We would have been left with a right that couldn’t really have been used.”

Common Cause Rhode Island Executive Director John Marion Jr. credited the board's decision to dig deeper on the Matos signatures and to do it in public. "The board made that decision in the right way – after publicly debating the tradeoffs they face," Marion wrote. "We won’t know how to fix this signature process moving forward unless we know the scope of the problem now."

“It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.” Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”