News Clips

But unforeseen disruptors such as the coronavirus underscore why it is important to staff polling locations robustly, said Catherine Turcer, executive director of the Ohio branch of Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “If we have a reduction in poll workers plus people calling off sick, it could be really problematic,” Turcer said. “That’s why it makes sense to have more poll workers than you really need.”

Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said this is the first time the group has monitored misinformation on social media during the primary season, and he had expected to find less of what he terms “cyber suppression.” “We’re talking dozens to hundreds of pieces of content — not thousands or millions — but even that I’m quite surprised at,” he said. Littlewood said it’s difficult to tell how much of the bad content comes from bad actors, as opposed to “users who just think it’s funny to say [Joe] Biden voters vote on Wednesday.”

"The fact that Amendment 4 was overwhelmingly supported by Floridians let them know that Floridians have an interest in the way they're being governed," said Anjenys Gonzalez-Eilert, Florida executive director of Common Cause, the nonpartisan democracy watchdog.. "Citizens don't want to have their voices silenced, they want to participate. If you want to be the sole source of power, that would rub you the wrong way."

“Technology is a tool not a process. This recount concept is not ready for prime time,” said Liza McClenaghan, Common Cause Florida state board chair. Both Common Cause and the League of Women Voters say the technology offers promise as a way to give supervisors of elections another tool to store and track paper ballots, but they say the state’s rush to encourage counties to start using digital images of ballots for recounts is a mistake. “The proposal that the digital image generated by the software is trustworthy while the paper ‘may’ be consulted is ludicrous,’’ McClenaghan of Common Cause said.

"As long as Team Bloomberg doesn't talk to Team Biden about what it's doing -- how it's spending Bloomberg's fortune to support Biden -- it's not subject to any limits at all," said Paul Ryan, a veteran campaign-finance lawyer who is now vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause.

In some cities, purchases of new voting machines slowed the balloting as voters labored to apply the new technology to the state’s notoriously long ballot. “All over the state, we saw a lot of late openings attributed to technology issues,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, which helped run a hotline that flagged voting problems. “People were used to voting on the same machine for two decades, and there was going to be some training time required.”