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Today, Common Cause is launching a new effort to ensure voters’ right to know where presidential candidates stand on practical solutions to the challenges facing our democracy. The Our Democracy 2020 campaign will focus getting every presidential candidate in the Democratic and Republican primaries to respond to a 17-question survey and inject the high priority conversation on the need for democracy reform in the presidential campaign. 

Today, after a week of confusion and contradiction in the Trump Administration, the President announced that he will not pursue a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. To protect a fair and accurate Census, the decision to not add the citizenship question is important.  However, in issuing an executive order to government agencies to hand over citizenship data, President Trump is engaging in an abusive power grab. Attorney General Barr reinforced the Administration’s intent to collect citizenship data for the purposes of reapportionment and redistricting. Using citizenship data to erase millions of people from apportionment and redistricting violates the Constitution.  

Any action by President Trump to add the citizenship question to the 2020 Census is an illegal, desperate, and ill-fated attempt to further undermine a fair and accurate national headcount. Judges in New York, California, and Maryland, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, have already rejected the Trump administration’s lies about the need for the citizenship question.  

Common Cause is tracking which members of Congress have read, or not read, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian attacks on the 2016 presidential election. The new easily searchable “Will Congress Act?” website (willcongressact.org) allows people to see whether their Members have read the report and contact them to ask that they read it if they have not. 

Now that the Trump Administration’s attempted whitewash of their motives for demanding a citizenship question have been exposed, they are scrambling to contrive a new reason. As the documents of GOP gerrymanderer Thomas Hofeller turned over to attorneys in the Common Cause v. Lewis case show, the purpose of the question has always been to advantage "Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" in redistricting to the detriment of Latinos and other families of color. Combined with recent statements by ICE officials indicating plans to use census information for immigration enforcement, the true motives - anti-Latino, racial animus - driving addition of the citizenship question is increasingly undeniable.

Previously undisclosed documents obtained by Common Cause in its North Carolina partisan gerrymandering lawsuit were filed today in the federal action challenging the addition a citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census. The documents, which were filed by the private plaintiffs in Department of Commerce v. State of New York, reveal for the first time the secret role played by the longtime Republican redistricting expert, the late Dr. Thomas Hofeller, in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question and the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Act rationale for it. The documents further show that Dr. Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that the citizenship question would significantly harm the political power of Latino communities and be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”