News Clips

“Today’s ruling is an unequivocal win for North Carolina’s Black voters who were most harmed by this extreme partisan gerrymander,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a statement. Riggs represented Common Cause. “At every level, North Carolina’s GOP leadership diluted representation of communities of color to entrench their own political power in ways that were both obvious and egregious,” her statement said.

“January 6 was an insurrection that left dead and scores of seriously injured in its wake. It was not legitimate political discourse no matter what the GOP says,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the group Common Cause. “It was a violent attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and ignore the will of the people. It was a dangerous and irresponsible attempt to try to intimidate Congress with an angry racist mob assembled and then set loose by a man who had just lost the presidential election.” Flynn accused the RNC of attempting to normalize political violence, and she described the vote to censure Cheney and Kinzinger over their work investigating the insurrection as “anti-democratic”.

Attorney Allison Riggs, who is representing plaintiff Common Cause in the redistricting case, says that even though the state constitution doesn’t explicitly require fair elections, case law clearly does. “I’ve certainly studied the history,” she said, “and there is not a suggestion anywhere that the failure to put ‘fair’ in the constitution means that there's a presupposition that elections will be run unfairly.” Riggs says constitutional provisions have to be understood together in context. “In cases interpreting free elections, there's frequently also an equal protection claim associated with that that really talks about how we have to treat people equally and fairly,” Riggs said. “Sometimes you can miss the forest for the trees.”

Keshia Morris Desir, mass incarceration project manager at Common Cause, told me that The Paid Jailer report, which was released in January, “tries to shine a light on a blind spot in efforts toward criminal justice reform.” “We’re really trying to call attention to this issue because we usually only think about the police department when we talk about law enforcement reform, even though sheriffs are actually elected officials,” Desir said. Desir, at Common Cause, told me campaign finance reporting systems across the country are so varied and poorly run that some sheriffs’ offices responded to inquiries with handwritten lists of their political contributions. The Common Cause report includes a series of important policy recommendations, including restricting contributions to campaigns from individuals and entities that conduct or seek business with the state or city. “The reason we studied this is that sheriffs control really large swaths of the mass incarceration system, including in immigration, and they make major decisions about the health and safety of millions of incarcerated people,” Desir said. “Bringing attention to their offices presents an opportunity to strengthen disclosure laws and make other reforms to improve campaign financing” for these powerful, publicly elected officials.

Viki Harrison, director of state operations for Common Cause, said fringe groups from both sides of the aisle have called for a convention of states over the years, but her organization is opposed, noting the gathering could easily be influenced by powerful special interests. "Who's going to choose who goes to the convention?" Harrison wondered. "We already see how outside special-interest groups, big-money donors, have so much influence in elections, so why would we think this would be any different?" Supporters argued Article Five was written by the founding fathers as an option for states to respond should the federal government overstep its powers. Harrison countered they failed to create guardrails, leaving the Constitution open to unpredictable changes. "Anything that we hold dear, whether you care about education, or environmental rights or gun rights, no matter what you care about in the Constitution, if we called an Article V convention, it's up for grabs," Harrison cautioned.

Meanwhile, Common Cause New York Executive Director Susan Lerner called for public hearings on maps she called a “major disservice to the voters.” “The Legislature’s proposed congressional maps preserve the Voting Rights Act districts, but the rest of the lines are so heavily gerrymandered they will be non-competitive,” she said.