News Clips

Under federal law, presidential candidates must file monthly reports in an election year if they have raised or spent $100,000 -- or anticipate doing so during the course of the year, said Paul Ryan, an election law expert who oversees policy and litigation at Common Cause. The bigger legal jeopardy might be for the Trump campaign if evidence ever emerged that they operated in concert with West to benefit the President's reelection, Ryan said. "If the Trump campaign is asking Kayne West to do these things -- qualify for the ballot, etc. -- then arguably the Trump campaign is soliciting an illegally large, in-kind contributions to the Trump campaign in the form of every penny Kanye West spends," he said.

“He’s either violating the reporting requirements or doesn’t anticipate to spend $100,000 or more on his presidential campaign, and the latter part seems unlikely,” said Paul S. Ryan, the head of litigation at the good government group Common Cause. “He’s missed an FEC reporting deadline on August 20 and is in [likely] violation of the law.” ... But if West simply refused to comply, the FEC would have to step in and actually vote to bring him to court. Since Trump has failed to nominate enough people for a quorum on the FEC’s commission, that means the organization is totally toothless. And if his campaign continues to refuse to follow the law, it might be impossible to know exactly how deep the GOP’s involvement in West’s campaign is until well after the November election. “The law wasn’t designed to deal with the wealthy spoiler candidate who’s trying to avoid disclosure to help another candidate,” said Ryan. “Kanye West isn’t the typical candidate so this enforcement mechanism isn’t going to work for his campaign.”

Co-hosts Roy Wood, Jr. and Desi Lydic interview three contestants, including Common Cause's Vashti Hinton-Smith whose vote is suppressed by gerrymandering that split the North Carolina A&T campus into two congressional districts, diluting the voting power of students at the HBCU campus. And HBCU Democracy Fellow Jaden Peay had his vote suppressed by onerous Voter ID laws. 

“President Trump and Postmaster General DeJoy’s continued attempts to try to rig the election by undermining the USPS received a strong bipartisan warning today: don’t mess with the USPS,” Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, said in a statement Saturday. “As the nation continues to suffer from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, a robust and dependable USPS is needed more than ever.”

"What he’s laying the groundwork for is for his supporters to believe that the election is not properly conducted so they rally behind him when or if he challenges the results,” predicted Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause.

Julia Vaughn, policy director of Common Cause Indiana, said the ruling would prevent votes from being tossed out because of a flawed law. “Election laws should protect people’s right to vote and the integrity of our election system,” she said in a statement. “Indiana’s signature matching law failed to do either and wrongly disenfranchised Hoosiers.”