As the Campus Outreach Coordinator for Common Cause North Carolina, an organization dedicated to fighting for voting access while also championing political reforms for fairer elections, 30-year-old Alyssa Canty, a recipient of the 2019 MTV Leaders for Change grant, is currently empowering students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in North Carolina to stay informed and participate in local, state, and presidential elections. She is gearing up to take on a new role with Common Cause National, where she will work with...

“This is part of a very clear strategy by the Texas GOP to keep the demographic changes we’re seeing in Texas from being reflected at the ballot box,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas branch of the government watchdog group Common Cause. “This is one of the ways they could use a third-party candidacy to knock off a percentage point or two from a Democrat, allowing Republicans to retain power for a bit longer than maybe they otherwise would have.”

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, said that far more is needed to secure the election system.
"Providing $250 million in additional election security funding is like asking an army to go fight a war with horses and bayonets," Scherb said.
The House passed a bill that would give states nearly three times more — $600 million.

Lawyers for Common Cause, which won the recent lawsuit forcing this new redistricting session, say Senate Republicans violated a court order by ordering members of the media and the public to stay out of the area where senators and staff are drawing maps. “As a result of Sen. Hise’s order removing citizens and journalists from the map-drawing area, members of the committee were sitting at computers and amending maps without the public able to know how or why legislators were making changes to proposed districts,” Common Cause deputy...

Just this week, a unanimous three-judge panel in North Carolina struck down that state’s legislative district maps saying they were unfairly drawn to benefit Republicans -- in violation of the state constitution.The “decision offers a framework for other states to evaluate their own redistricting,” said Stanton Jones, a constitutional lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. representing Common Cause. “There are a number of other state constitutions around the country with free elections clauses similar or identical...

Dan Vicuña Common Cause's national redistricting manager said the organization is already looking toward 2021, identifying where partisan gerrymandering may take place and where state constitutions might give them an opening to challenge it."It’s going to be an exciting time for voter empowerment after the next lines are drawn. We have a good handle on where there’s going to be single-party control, where the state constitution has been interpreted in a pro-voter matter, where we can ask the court to change precedent where that’s the...

Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, said it's not unusual people like Yang get paid to speak in front of audiences, but they usually stop accepting payments once they decide to run for federal office. "Because receiving compensation for paid speaking raises questions under campaign finance laws regarding corporate contributions," Ryan said, "most candidates steer clear of these activities."

"You're seeing that pretty much all the major candidates have problems when it comes to money in politics," Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of Policy & Litigation at Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization. "They have some gaps [between] their campaign stump rhetoric and their actual practices trying to run competitive presidential campaigns."

“His testimony in his direct (examination) is just incorrect,” said Daniel Jacobson, a lawyer who represents the redistricting reform group Common Cause NC. “The numbers are wrong.” The three-judge panel overseeing the case agreed to strike parts of Johnson’s testimony.

"This is a huge win for voting rights and against voter suppression," Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, said in a prepared statement Sunday. "These fights are not over and we continue to be vigilant in watching for attempts to amend pieces of SB 9 onto other bills."