Media Center

Today, an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United States by Common Cause, The Andrew Goodman Foundation (AGF), and Equal Citizens  challenged the State of Texas’ age restriction to apply for an absentee ballot in the midst of a pandemic. The case, Garcia v. Abbott (No. 19-1389) challenges a law that restricts young Americans from accessing no-excuse vote-by-mail while making it exclusively available to voters over the age of 65. In their amicus brief, the organizations argue that the unequal treatment of youth voters in the Texas vote-by-mail program violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which bans age discrimination while voting. 

Today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman (FCC) Ajit Pai issued a statement announcing that the FCC will move forward with a rulemaking to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The announcement follows an Executive Order from the President and a petition for rulemaking from the Department of Commerce directing the FCC to adopt rules that set conditions on when Section 230 grants social media platforms a liability shield when they moderate content on their sites and when they do not.

In the runup to Election Day, Common Cause, with help from our Election Protection coalition partners, has recruited tens of thousands of nonpartisan volunteers to assist and protect voters during the 2020 election. The ranks of volunteers continue to grow daily through ProtectTheVote.net and have already more than quadrupled the totals from 2016 and 2018. The nonpartisan volunteers are already monitoring early voting sites, assisting voters, tracking and removing social media disinformation online, and even helping voters with ballot curing so that their votes will be counted as they intended. 

Today, Common Cause Texas and the Anti-Defamation League’s Austin, Southwest, and Texoma Regions (“ADL”) filed suit to block the governor of Texas from limiting drop-off sites for absentee ballots to a maximum of one per county during the state’s early voting period, regardless of the size of a county’s population or the distribution of that population. The plaintiffs argue that this order – which Governor Greg Abbott issued by proclamation on October 1 – exceeds his authority and would make it unreasonably difficult for eligible Texans to use ballot by mail.

Today, Common Cause and the Arab American Institute sent a joint letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates (“CPD”) calling for mechanisms in future debates designed to combat the spread of election disinformation and promote trust in our democratic process. 

The House is poised to pass a modified COVID-19 relief package to provide assistance to Americans whose lives have been upended by the pandemic, and to bolster pillars of our democracy strained under the national health crisis. The Senate must act after refusing to move on a more robust relief package passed by the House in May. It is past time for Senate Republicans to move to help the American people instead of focusing on trying to ram through the confirmation of another Supreme Court Justice while ignoring the plight of their constituents.