News Clips

“Having more voting rights lawyers at DOJ is extremely helpful, but as Attorney General Garland himself said, they also need Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to give DOJ the tools it needs,” said Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for advocacy group Common Cause. ... Scherb, whose organization participates in the Deadline for Democracy effort, said the legislative process is inching ahead slowly, despite Manchin’s public rejection of the For the People Act. Advocates are hopeful grassroots pressure will convince lawmakers there is strong public support for reform. “There’s certainly a lot more activity happening behind the scenes, as well as a huge public push,” he said.

Previously, voter registration was halted 28 days before any election as a precaution against possible double-voting while county clerks updated registration rolls painstakingly by hand with paper and ink, said Mario Jimenez, a policy campaign manager with the progressive good-government group Common Cause New Mexico. That is no longer necessary with advances in electronic record keeping and technology that synchronizes voter registration records with state motor vehicle databases. Jimenez believes the switch to same-day registration, if adopted in future elections statewide, will expand voter access and participation in elections and improve the accuracy of voter registration rolls.

Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for Common Cause, which advocates for expanded voter access, said that while the statewide positions come with more power, local officials generally have much discretion over how to solve common Election Day issues such as long lines, voter roll problems or trouble with voting machines. “If you have an elections official who doesn’t want to expand access to the ballot, who finds democracy disturbing to them, they’re not going to fix problems and then they’re going to multiply,” she said.

Claire Snyder-Hall, program director for Common Cause Delaware, a good-government group, said the bill would allow public bodies to deny FOIA requests that they consider “inconvenient or embarrassing.” “How will ambiguous and expansive words like “unduly burdensome,” “intended to disrupt” and “abusive” be interpreted in practice?” she asked. “The problem is that the language in the bill is so broad that it could easily be used by corrupt officials to hide information they do not want public to know about,” Synder-Hall added. ”.... It is a basic premise of our system of government that we cannot rely on the goodwill of people in power.”

“There are layers of problems here, but the basic question is whether the state parties complied with federal disclosure requirements,” Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at election reform advocacy group Common Cause, told The Daily Beast. “A ‘knowing and willful’ violation of federal campaign finance law is punishable by a fine of up to 200 percent of any contribution or expenditure involved in such violation,” Ryan said. There’s another twist: the bank accounts. In April, Axios reported that those omissions are raising new questions about whether the party treasurers—who must sign off on those accounts—knew their committees had opened an account at Chain Bridge. That could expose them legally, Ryan said. “Campaign finance law would be undermined if a state committee was using an account and not disclosing it, which treasurers must do under penalty of perjury.” Ryan said. “It would be even more severe if the RNC was setting up an account and not telling the state party about it.”

“All the Republican commissioners need to do is include the magic words ‘prosecutorial discretion’ and a court will then decline to review the action,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for litigation at Common Cause, who has regularly filed F.E.C. complaints. Indeed, Republican commissioners recently deployed that exact phrase — twice — in dismissing an investigation into whether Mr. Trump violated election laws with the payment of $130,000 to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to keep her from publicly discussing her relationship with him.