News Clips

“It’s the wild, wild West,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia. “I don’t know what to call Georgia right now.”

And activists on the ground noted multiple issues at the state and local levels, arguing that voters were unable to find concrete information. Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia which is the state chapter of a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on voting rights, says that multiple polling locations moved within the 48 hours before the election with little warning and didn't provide proper signage to indicate the changes in locations for voters. And when machines stopped working, some locations only had 20 emergency and provisional ballots on hand. "For us, those are voter suppression tactics at work," Dennis says. "We all need to sit down to better plan, to create an emergency preparedness plan to make elections be more efficient."

The virus “has had a grave impact, a real dent, in how we’re accessing the ballot,” said Aunna Dennis, the Georgia executive director for Common Cause, a nonpartisan grass-roots organization focused on voting rights. She said the simple question of ballot access should take precedence over any horse-race predictions. “The system is broken here in Georgia,” she said.

Suzanne Almeida, the interim director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, said adding more secure ballot drop boxes would be an easy and cheap way for counties and local election officials to increase accessibility. “Many of these reforms that we're looking at are systemic and require and require significant additional funding,” Almeida said. “It's a culture shift in Pennsylvania, as this is the first election we've ever voted by mail by these numbers. “Folks need to understand that it's better to get it right than to get it quick. That we're just not going to see the kind of results on election night, when we see 2 million absentee ballots. And that's okay, that it's not evidence of shenanigans,” Almeida said.

“What you can see is our electorate is more engaged than it has been in a primary for decades,” said Heather Ferguson, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico. “They’ve had some time for life to slow down. ... They were watching more news, getting more input about this election. They got fired up and wanted to vote.” At the same time, Ferguson said Common Cause is taking stock of whether participation was hindered by the state’s timetable for initiating absentee ballot applications and lengthy delivery times in remote regions.

“I am trying to see today as an opportunity to show the cracks in the system that we can fix before November,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for voting rights group Common Cause. Albert said there is concern that in the November election, people who request absentee ballots will not receive them, and there will be fewer polling places as counties consolidate them in response to the pandemic. “There needs to be a rational level of consolidation that ensures that communities who especially have not used vote by mail in the past or cannot use vote by mail — such as disabled communities or people without addresses, homeless, transient — that there are enough polling locations to serve those people,” Albert said.