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At a time when the freedom to vote remains under attack, Congress will provide a down payment in the omnibus spending bill to provide additional resources for election officials across the country who face a variety of threats and obstacles in helping Americans make their voices heard at the ballot box. This $75 million that Congress is allocating is only a fraction of the investment that will be required to protect our elections and the will of voters from threats both foreign and domestic.

The inclusion of the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act in the omnibus spending package is a vital first step in protecting the votes and voices of all Americans. Enacting these reforms to ensure that the will of the voters will be respected and followed is particularly important in light of Donald Trump’s announcement that he is again running for the White House and his public call to terminate the U.S. Constitution in order to overturn the 2020 election and declare himself president. We know from the January 6th Select Committee that Trump knows he lost that election, but he continues to repeat his Big Lie despite the fact that his own appointees at the Department of Homeland Security declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in U.S. history.”  

As all of his other efforts to steal the 2020 election failed, Donald Trump summoned, instigated, and ultimately set loose a violent, racist mob on the United States Capitol on January 6th. He is attempting to obstruct the committee’s work.

Common Cause is urging every member of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote “yes” in support of the Protecting Our Democracy Act (H.R. 5314), in order to provide greater checks and balances to the vast powers of the presidency in the wake of the unprecedented abuses of those powers by the administration of Donald Trump. The letter, sent yesterday to every Member of the House, emphasizes that the proposed legislation will create new mechanisms for transparency and accountability that will apply to all future presidents, regardless of their political party. The letter also notes that Common Cause plans to key-vote this legislation in our Democracy Scorecard, which we send to our 1.5 million members.  

The Cyber Ninjas report, itself, showed that Joe Biden won the presidential election in Maricopa County; that determination came after a chaotic hand-count of more than 2 million paper ballots, and closely paralleled official election results. But the central result was cloaked in other allegations intended to create new doubts about the 2020 election.