News Clips

Lawsuits challenging Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative maps “will most definitely” be filed, said Wisconsin Common Cause Executive Director Jay Heck. As they prepare to ask the courts to evaluate political maps, lawyers will line up voter plaintiffs from areas where Democratic-leaning precincts were merged into Republican-dominated districts beginning in 2011, Heck said.

“Bad actors could easily abuse this data,” wrote Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director of All Voting is Local Action, and Jenny Guzman, program director of Common Cause Arizona, in a mid-March Arizona Republic commentary. “This is not a far-fetched reality.”

“When the Republicans rewrote the laws in 2015 … they did it with the expectation that it would advantage them. They felt that the sources of money they could rely on, both outside groups and big contributors, would mean they would always have financial advantages in races like this. Just the opposite has happened,” said Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “That is the reason why [Wisconsin Democratic party chair] Ben Wikler and the Democrats have been able to be such a powerhouse.”

Sailor Jones, associate director of Common Cause North Carolina, alluded to those setbacks in addressing the audience. “This time, my friends, the courts will not save us,” Jones said. “Who will?”

We are being silenced in Florida, with dangerous legislation making its way through the state Legislature that could stifle the ability of everyday Floridians to speak freely. House Bill 991 and the companion bill Senate Bill 1220 would dramatically change our state’s defamation laws and allow for monetary judgments when elected officials or others think they’ve been slighted on social media or in critical press reports. By doing away with the long-held standard of proving actual malice or ill intent in a defamation case, Florida would be inviting frivolous lawsuits to proliferate and arming elected officials and others with the ability to silence outspoken critics.

“ERIC was somehow bad because some people here characterized Pew as this ultraliberal foundation funding all of this ultraliberal and crazy stuff," said Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana. The organization was a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the state in 2017. “[IDEA] was a political stunt. And our voter rolls continue to need attention,” Vaughn said. “We gave up on trying to convince [Indiana state officials] to join ERIC a long time ago. They proactively said, ‘We don’t want anything to do with this.’ And we’ve got other fights to take on here. And now nobody’s paying attention to the issue.”