News Clips

“The city of Los Angeles is building on the best practices from around the state and the country and really, I think, setting a gold standard for everybody to be looking for,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for the nonpartisan government accountability watchdog group Common Cause. Feng previously helped lead the effort to institute independent redistricting on the state level.

Led by Common Cause New York, the group contends the state Board of Elections erred in August when it certified for use the ExpressVote XL, a touch screen machine. The machine allows voters to mark a ballot electronically instead of on paper and ... displays selections on a summary card. Advocates said that's not enough to verify ballots independently, as required by state law. In their lawsuit, the advocates said: "As a voter cannot read a bar code, the voter's ballot is not certifiable. No voter can verify that the bar code accurately reflects the voter's selections shown on the summary card." The advocates want a court to reverse the certification, ... which would mean county boards of election couldn't purchase the ExpressVote XL. In New York, each county purchases its own voting machines, selecting from choices certified by the state.

“This proposal does not do what it needs to do and it does not create additional representation for Black voters,” Aunna Dennis of Common Cause Georgia told the Senate committee.

Buchanan joined the advocacy group Colorado Common Cause in making that argument in a brief they submitted as part of a case over whether Trump should be disqualified under a Civil War-era provision of the 14th Amendment. “This country and its institutions are at a crossroads,” the brief says. “Either the plain mandates of our Constitution will be honored and enforced in the face of partisan outcry (thus preserving the rule of law in America) or they will be subverted to avoid that same partisan outcry (eroding the rule of law accordingly). There is no third future. It would be an error of historical scale to pretend otherwise.” Buchanan and Colorado Common Cause write in their brief that Wallace got her ruling right except for deciding Section 3 doesn’t apply to the presidency, a component they say is “reversible.” “(Trump) allowed a lust for power to supersede his own Oath of Office and over two centuries of American political precedent. Mr. Trump has sought at every turn to inject chaos into our country’s electoral system in the upcoming 2024 presidential election,” they write. “He should be given no opportunity to do so in the state of Colorado.”

Skoufis on Monday held a news conference attended by government reform advocates, including Susan Lerner of Common Cause. Lerner said the state holds so many elections on various dates throughout the year — including village elections in March, school budgets in May, and primaries in June — that voters can become confused and weary. “New York state, there's a concept called voter fatigue,” Lerner said. “And unfortunately, we are fatiguing our voters.”

Nearly half of the state lawmakers from Maryland’s largest county and about 1 in 4 statewide were not originally elected to their seats. Instead, they were appointed, sent to Annapolis by a handful of local party officials, according to a recent analysis from Common Cause Maryland, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for fair elections. “The General Assembly can’t continue to allow a handful of individuals to speak on behalf of thousands of voters,” Joanne Antoine, executive director of Common Cause Maryland, said of the process. Common Cause Maryland and Maryland PIRG say there should be special elections called to fill legislative vacancies, which is what happens in Maryland if there is an unexpected vacancy in the office of the comptroller, the attorney general or the U.S. Senate.