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Money & Influence 04.25.2022

Boston Globe: US Supreme Court lets R.I. election finance disclosure law stand

John M. Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, hailed the Supreme Court decision saying, “It’s good news for Rhode Island because it means that this fall Rhode Islanders will know the sources of money trying to influence their voters.” Marion described the 2012 Rhode Island law as “groundbreaking,” saying it was modeled after the proposed “DISCLOSE Act” introduced by US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat. Marion said the US Supreme Court was closely divided in the Citizens United case, but at the same time, eight of the nine justices upheld disclosure requirements – thereby rejecting the idea that the First Amendment protects the anonymity of donors in independent spending. “The Supreme Court has historically been very supportive of disclosure of campaign finance as a protection against corruption,” Marion said. “That is why this is important that the law remains strong.”

Voting & Elections 04.24.2022

New York Times: Charges Dropped Against Tennessee Woman Who Was Jailed Over Voter Fraud

“What we see consistently is honest mistakes made by returning citizens are penalized to the max, and true bad intentions are not being penalized to the same extent,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “And usually in those cases the defendants are white.”

Voting & Elections 04.23.2022

Associated Press: In election misinformation fight, ’2020 changed everything’

The voting advocacy group Common Cause will rely on thousands of volunteers like Bowers to identify misinformation floating around online and push for Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to take down the most egregious falsehoods. False claims about voting times, locations or eligibility, for example, are banned across Twitter and Meta’s platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram. During the 2020 election, platforms applied fact checks, labeled or removed more than 300 pieces of popular, false content that Common Cause turned up. More recently, in Texas, more than 100 volunteers worked four-hour shifts to monitor false claims coming out of the state’s primary election in March. The most frequent conspiracy theory shared that night claimed that staffing shortages at polling locations were deliberate, Bowers noted. “Texas is kind of the playbook for things to come,” said Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst for the group. “My major concern is that local issues, like with these staff or ballot shortages, will be amplified by influencers or partisan actors with a national platform as signs of malign interference in elections; it’s a pretty recognized pattern from 2020.”

Kansas City Star/McClatchy: 'I'm increasingly concerned': New WyCo administrator still doing work for Kansas City

"Even if this administrator isn't violating any law, it can certainly look bad if she's not performing her duties that taxpayers are funding her to do and often the perception can be just as harmful and it can call into question that public servants should be serving the public interests, not minding their own pockets," said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a non-partisan government watchdog nonprofit.

New York Times: Will Eric Adams Release His Taxes? A Soft ‘No’ Is Now a Qualified ‘Yes.’

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a watchdog group, said Mr. Adams never should have hesitated in deciding to release his tax returns. “This is not a gotcha question from the press — this is the sort of thing that real people on the street pay attention to,” she said. “The mayor shouldn’t be playing cat and mouse with something that should be an obvious transparency measure.”

San Antonio Express-News: Could the highly political redistricting process be more independent? San Antonio may find out

“We see some of the most bare-knuckled fights over political power at the local level,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. “Plenty of people have tried creatively to get their way with the commission,” in California, Feng said. “But selecting a group of people who are savvy and listening for exactly that kind of thing makes them well inoculated to those lobbying efforts.”

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