News Clips

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of the Texas chapter of the watchdog group Common Cause, said the showing of the film by Paxton’s office is particularly concerning because of Paxton’s longstanding embrace of unfounded voter fraud conspiracies — and his role in prosecuting electoral crimes, which are exceedingly rare. (Since 2005, the Texas Attorney General’s website says the office has prosecuted 155 people for 534 election fraud offenses — good for about 0.0048% of the 11.1 million Texas votes cast in the 2020 presidential contest alone, and not even a rounding error’s worth of all votes cast in the state over the last 17 years.) “Paxton hosting a watch party for this completely debunked work of fiction is next-level disinformation,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not like (Paxton) is a person who has no impact on elections — he is constantly doing things to impact elections. … It’s all kinds of alarming and sets off all the red flags.”

This is not a common policy across the country, and only a few states do something similar due to logistical challenges associated with pre-processing of ballots, according to Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for the nonpartisan voter advocacy group Common Cause.

Common Cause Rhode Island and the League of Women Voters of Rhode Island sued the state to strip signature requirements for good. “It was waived in 2020 and for fall elections, and sure enough, we set a record for number of mail ballots,” said John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. “Part of that is that it was the height of the pandemic. But we think we’re going to see a permanent shift in an increase of voting by mail.”

The attacks on access have targeted methods disproportionately used by people of color and younger, more Democratic-leaning voters. “These are direct attacks on voters that legislators think will vote for the other party,” said Sylvia Albert of Common Cause. “It is clearly an attack on Black and brown and low-income voters.”

The case, Moore v. Harper, arose out of a lawsuit in state court where Democratic Party-backed groups, such as the National Redistricting Foundation, and pro-democracy groups, such as Common Cause, sued the legislature claiming their redistricted maps for state and federal offices were gerrymandered. The groups argued that the state’s constitution prevented extreme partisan gerrymandering. 

“Oregon generally embraces a positive voting environment,” said Kate Titus, executive director of Common Cause Oregon. “All of these little changes around the edges help.” Titus said the state could revisit further expanding its automatic voter registration system to allow registration to occur through other state agencies in the coming years.