News Clips

Common Cause interim co-president Marilyn Carpinteyro on Tuesday sent a letter to all members of Congress on behalf of her group and its more than 1.5 million members and supporters "in strong support of the Freedom to Vote Act and in strong opposition to the 'American Confidence in Elections' (ACE) Act," which was introduced by House Republicans earlier this month. "The ACE Act is a giant step backward and would silence the voices of everyday Americans by putting up barriers to voting and by allowing millions of dollars more in secret money to infiltrate our political system," Carpinteyro wrote. "To strengthen free and fair elections and help get big, secret money out of politics, Congress must instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act."

Some groups argue L.A. shouldn’t pick a number, but rather set the ideal level of representation. California Common Cause, a good-government advocacy organization, has urged the city to create 150,000-resident districts — the equivalent of 27 districts based on current population — and allow the number of districts to rise or fall every 10 years with population changes. A hybrid system has some potential pitfalls, warned Kathay Feng with Common Cause.  “I do think you can have a mixed system if the at-large seats are coupled with methods of casting ballots that give minority communities an ability to vote with greater voter representation,” such as ranked-choice voting, Feng added.

Officials from Common Cause California, a good government advocacy group that is co-sponsoring AB 1248 and AB 764, said they’re excited to see the “groundswell of support” for independent redistricting this year. “There are some technical amendments to do to make sure the bills don’t conflict with each other,” said Laurel Brodzinsky, legislative director for the organization. “But definitely on a policy level, it’s really exciting to see.”

In a Voting Rights Act case, Allen v. Milligan, a 5-4 majority of the court upheld that Alabama lawmakers may be required to draw a second congressional district where Black voters could elect candidates of their choice before the 2024 election. Kathay Feng, vice president of programs at Common Cause, said the case has massive consequences for minority voters nationwide. “Even though people have been very worried about the Supreme Court upending precedent in high-profile cases, in Allen v. Milligan, where the court said the Voting Rights Act still serves an important function in protecting minority voting rights, the court chose to affirm, and that is a very big deal,” Feng said. Feng noted that was one of several major cases in which conservative justices bucked colleagues such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. to rule alongside the Democratic appointees. She said those “shifting sands” could be important in major cases going forward, including where the court will hear a dispute over South Carolina’s congressional map next term. “I think we should be watching very closely to see a potential realignment, some common cause between some unusual partners on the court,” Feng said.

The state of the republic is precarious. But I am hopeful that democracy will prevail because it is resilient. We the people have faced serious threats in the past, including even the Civil War, and we have overcome them. We must continue to pass laws to strengthen our democracy in many states. In other states, we will not back down from defeating a new generation of Jim Crow laws crafted to keep targeted communities from the polls.

“We beat back the most serious legal threat our democracy has ever faced today,” said Kathay Feng of Common Cause, whose lawsuit challenging congressional districts drawn by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature triggered the case.