News Clips

Stephen Spaulding, chief of strategy for the good-government watchdog Common Cause, said he was “sympathetic” to Clean Virginia’s “overall policy goals” but found the emailed offer “problematic” — particularly because it was sent to official state email accounts, which should not be used for campaign purposes.

“The fact is that this is really serious, and it needs the attention that a hostile invasion would get,” says Susannah Goodman, director of a voting-integrity campaign for Common Cause, the government-watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. “Because they did it with bits not bullets, we haven’t responded in the way that we need to,” she says.

Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, which helped lead the Issue 1 effort, said "even one more election using gerrymandered districts is too many." "This litigation may give Ohioans the fair districts they deserve in 2020 and may strengthen the protections of Issue 1 in the next redistricting cycle," she said.

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who has loudly opposed Sinclair's $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune, says the company is "trying to look as nonthreatening as possible and make this deal look as innocuous as possible." In early May, 21st Century Fox agreed to snap up seven TV stations from Sinclair in a $910 million deal that could help Sinclair get regulatory approval for its Tribune bid. Publicly, Sinclair leadership has denied rumors of a Fox News challenge. But Copps is unmoved: "Watch what they do and not what they say."

In March, the advocacy group Common Cause alleged that Cambridge Analytica -- the firm that, through a U.K. affiliate, obtained personal data on up to 87 million Facebook users as part of its work for the Trump campaign -- violated election law by letting foreign nationals participate in the U.S. political decision-making process. Common Cause made its complaint to the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department.

“Any payment to a candidate’s family member that seems unusually high is a red flag for me,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a liberal-leaning nonprofit watchdog group. “Candidates should exercise an abundance of caution in this area and should be prepared to publicly justify such expenses to the public, the press and, most importantly, to the FEC.”