Media Center

Today, Common Cause, Verified Voting, and The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law released a report on Rhode Island’s pilot program to identify the most effective methods to implement the risk-limiting audits (RLA) required by the state for the 2020 election. The three organizations were part of a working group that helped the state design and run the pilots earlier this year.

Today, Common Cause released a new report on the impact of denying voting rights to people with past felony convictions and what must be done to strengthen their voting rights. “Zero Disenfranchisement: The Movement to Restore Voting Rights” documents the racist history of felony disenfranchisement laws, the new movement to repeal them, and provides several personal stories of individuals affected by these voter suppression efforts.

Today, the Select Committee on Intelligence in the United States Senate released its long-awaited report on Russian interference into the 2016 elections in the wake of former special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s warnings yesterday that threats to the nation’s election infrastructure are serious and ongoing. Common Cause hailed the report itself as well as the bipartisan and effective work of the Committee as it addressed the critical and growing threat to our democracy.

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.