News Clips

“The country was mesmerized by Gov. Cuomo’s blunt talk about the pandemic, but he didn’t even follow the experts,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause, a good government group that has long butted heads with Cuomo. “That’s emblematic of his style: The performance looks great, but when you get into the details, there are big holes and very little substance.”

"The politician chooses their district and their voters, and if they don't like a group of their voters, they can carve them off and move them someplace else," said Michael Goff, Maryland president of Common Cause. "They can create their own safe district, what we call safe seats." Common Cause pushes states to turn census numbers over to independent commissions to draw nonpartisan congressional maps. "It's a once-in-ten-year process," said Goff. "Probably the most important political development of the next ten years is happening in the next few months, and most voters don't even know about it."

Litigation and organizing will be key components in the Democratic strategy to counter the onslaught of new election laws, "but can only go so far," Aaron Scherb, the director of legislative affairs at the nonpartisan voting group Common Cause, told Salon, calling the White House line about "out-organizing" voter suppression "insulting to the hundreds of thousands of organizers who worked tirelessly to turn out voters." ... "Certainly the White House has made the calculation that infrastructure's extremely important, which it is, but I think all rights are derivative from voting rights, and I think that needs to be a continued priority from the White House," Scherb said.  He recalled Lyndon B. Johnson traveling the country during the debate over the Voting Rights Act, seeking to put "pressure on the Senate that this is the issue that must get done." "We really need the president and the administration to use its full power of the bully pulpit," he said.

(Reuters) - On a recent evening, Tyler Daye, an organizer with Common Cause North Carolina, hosted an online seminar for residents of the city of Wilson on an important but arcane topic: redistricting. With the help of publicly available mapping software known as Districtr, Daye clicked through maps of federal and state voting districts, showing how in each case Republican lawmakers in 2011 neatly cleaved the city in two, dividing the largely Black eastern half from the mostly white western half. “When your communities are split, your voting power and representation is split as well,” he told attendees. “This attacks the very backbone, the very core of our democratic system, which is having the voters, the citizens, picking their legislators. Through this system, it’s the other way around.” ... “It’s almost like a light-bulb moment,” said Bob Phillips, the executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a voting rights organization. “We feel we’ve been able to reach people in ways we never have.”

“Where do we know people are, but they just weren't counted because of unusual circumstances?” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at the good-government group Common Cause. She noted that in addition to the significant problems caused by pandemic, this was the first time the Census Bureau pushed people to respond online, a major shift for the agency. “It’s sort of like the Hubble telescope. It’s the best that we got, but we know there’s a scratch on it,” she added. “Can we figure out exactly where the distortion is, that’s caused by that scratch on the lens?”

Jay Heck of Common Cause Wisconsin called the tax provision "one of the most glaring examples of quid-pro-quo pay-to-play politics I've ever seen." "The idea a U.S. Senator would stand in the way of a major initiative of his own party on a very specific provision of a complicated tax bill, and the fact it benefited two of his largest donors, I just think is pretty eye-opening," he said. "My goodness what a great investment for the Uihleins and Diane Hendricks."