News Clips

Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, argued the redistricting proposal lacked transparency and safeguards against a majority party power grab. "Broad bipartisan support and consensus must be attained for any nonpartisan redistricting plan to work (so) that it can be assured that it will have the trust and confidence of Wisconsin voters," he said. "Please pardon the voters of Wisconsin if they don't believe that, after 12 years of attacking, resisting and blocking any attempt or discussion of redistricting reform in the state Capitol, that Assembly Republicans have all of a sudden seen the light."

“We’re frustrated, confused and deeply disappointed,” Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of voting rights group California Common Cause, said Monday. He added: “We were hopeful that this was an opportunity for California to show the rest of the nation what it looks like to put gerrymandering behind us.” Had Newsom signed the measure, California could have become the first state to mandate redistricting commissions for local jurisdictions over certain sizes, said Dan Vicuna, national director of redistricting and representation for Common Cause.

“It’s not the ballot boxes that are the problem,” said Cheri Quickmire, executive director of the voter advocacy group Common Cause in Connecticut. “In this particular case, it seems like the problem is the leadership of campaigns that permit that kind of activity, that has staff, that has campaign staff who ... would put ballots in big envelopes and stuff them into the ballot box.”

“This was about playing games with an election, not about playing around with the language that goes directly into the Ohio Constitution,” said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio and a member of the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition’s steering committee.

One group that has decided against litigation over this year’s redistricting process is Common Cause Ohio, a left-leaning good-government group. Catherine Turcer, Common Cause Ohio’s executive director, said last week that her organization was considering filing a lawsuit against the Ohio Redistricting Commission, primarily to assert that the closed-door negotiations held by commission members violated state open-meetings law. But on Wednesday, Turcer said Common Cause Ohio decided that it would be better for them to spend their time and money on getting Ohio voters to approve a proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 that would overhaul the state’s redistricting process entirely. “This is a hard one to let go,” she said.

“He used his words to hammer at democratic institutions in ways that undermine trust and confidence, and it’s dangerous,” said Stephen Spaulding, vice president of policy at Common Cause, a nonpartisan good government group. “That is part of his playbook, which is to soften the ground to then attack the legitimate outcome of an election.”