News Clips

“A lot of people have questions about this new law,” said Amy Keith, program director for the good government group Common Cause Florida.

“The ‘big lie’ has become embedded in our political discourse, and it’s become a talking point for election-deniers to preemptively declare that the midterm elections are going to be stolen or filled with voter fraud,” said Yosef Getachew, a media and democracy program director at the liberal-leaning government watchdog Common Cause. “What we’ve seen is that Facebook and Twitter aren’t really doing the best job or any job in terms of removing and combating disinformation that’s around the ‘big lie'.”

Meanwhile, good government groups like Common Cause Florida say some voters have come to them with confusion about casting their ballots because of new state laws restricting mail-in voting. “We’ve also seen that in many cases, in counties where under the Voting Rights Act they’re required to have signage and materials in both Spanish and English, that we haven’t seen the same level of signage in Spanish,” said Amy Keith, CCF’s program director.

Not every member of my generation has given up on democracy. Motivated by the turmoil of present day American politics, we have taken to political activism. Protests are a peaceful way to express concern or disagreement. However, activism can only push the political agenda so far. While protests bring attention to issues, they don’t always force politicians to enact the change citizens want. We’ve got to follow up our protests with informed voting in every election and persuade our peers to do the same.

“This is a tale as old as time. Everybody knows there is a massive transparency problem at the heart of California’s legislative process,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a good government watchdog. It may be old hat for longtime members of the Capitol community, but Stein said that every time a new employee joins his organization, they are shocked to discover that there is a process where bills can be killed or amended with zero public scrutiny. “It is just so established that it doesn’t get scrutinized in the way that it probably should,” he said.

The 2020 election and its aftermath revealed the dangers posed to our democracy by disinformation. We saw how President Trump used social media platforms to assemble and incite the mob on the Ellipse on January 6th and then turn it loose on the Capitol where Congress was at work certifying the election victory of his opponent. The results were shocking, and they were tragic, and they could easily have been far worse. We must ensure they are not repeated in 2022, or 2024, or ever again.