News Clips

“It is stunning to me that this bill has moved forward,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas. “Countywide voting is the solution to so many problems.” “If we end countywide voting, we are just ramping up more and more confusion for Texans,” Gutierrez said. He pointed to a study by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs, which found that confusion over voter ID laws kept some people from voting in Harris County.

The North Carolina state court ruling “makes it even more clear that the Supreme Court needs to make a decision about whether or not that legislature should be able to rule over federal elections without any checks or balances or if we still want courts to have a role,” said Kathay Feng, the vice president of programs at the good government group Common Cause. Common Cause is one of the parties in the federal lawsuit opposing the ISL theory. “We need to have a definitive answer from the Supreme Court,” she continued.

When it comes to paying back the government for travel, “it’s always somewhat of an opaque process for how it’s reimbursed,” said Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at the watchdog group Common Cause. “It’s a little bit more of an art than a science.”

Only one party in the case, Common Cause, argued for the Supreme Court to decide the issue — and rule against North Carolina. In a brief filed Thursday, the group argued that the mere fact that North Carolina’s high court ruled in the case means the U.S. Supreme Court can still decide it. “Petitioners’ core contention before this Court is that the Elections Clause prohibits state constitutions—and state courts—from imposing limits on the authority of state legislatures over congressional redistricting. But the North Carolina Supreme Court has now twice rejected that contention,” the brief said.

"Mr. Santos' breathtaking scope of lies has left his constituents -- and all New Yorkers -- gasping for air and calling for accountability. Now that the Eastern District of New York has appropriately indicted him, Mr. Santos should resign. It's been clear for a long time that the voters have been defrauded, and Mr. Santos' seat in Congress is tantamount to an ill gotten gain: he should not be allowed to profit from the fruits of his deception. Voters deserve a representative who doesn't lie and deceive their way into power, and unfortunately they have waited too long for Mr. Santos to do the right thing and resign," Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause/NY said.

“I don’t think that any New York City resident would question whether the real estate interests were giving this money out of the goodness of their heart, or if they felt they were going to get access in return,” said Susan Lerner, head of Common Cause New York, a good government group. “This is just an end run around the limits,” Lerner said. “And it’s wrong.” With City Council elections coming up this year and state races again on the horizon in 2024, Lerner, the good government watchdog, argued that Lewis-Martin’s quiet work to get allies elected to state government will turn off voters at home. “The fact these are city races doesn’t undercut how toxic this is to the principles undergirding our campaign finance laws,” she said.