Viewers of a certain age may remember the movie the "Never Ending Story."

Well, all New Yorkers are familiar with the state's own never-ending story — redistricting. For reaction to the latest addition to this saga, Capital Tonight was joined Tuesday by Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York.

Jonathan Mehta Stein is a co-founder of The California Initiative for Technology and Democracy, a project of good government group California Common Cause, which has been advising legislators on the threats emerging technologies pose to democracy. He points to the growing use of AI in elections across the world as evidence it's no longer a theoretical, but an active practice. In the first month of 2024, deepfakes promulgating misinformation in Bangladeshi and Slovakian elections proved to be significant election disruptions. Here in the United...

Such training sessions and the election day actions for which they prepare attendees are less about ensuring integrity in Texas elections than they are about voter intimidation, according to Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nongovernmental organization that works to expand voting rights.

While he was unaware of what Pressley’s session was to cover, he said in a phone interview that such groups “seem to be going out of their way to use poll watchers to intimidate or at least harass voters of...

“It’s that baseline of service that really affects how people think about their government,” said Susan Lerner of Common Cause New York, a government reform group. “It’s not about speeches and the big issues; it’s about whether you’ve made a noise complaint and nobody gets back to you for a week.”

For Lerner, head of Common Cause, the city’s recent budget cuts — coupled with a struggle to fill vacant positions and a hiring freeze — could hurt the Adams administration’s ability to maintain the nuts and...

"It targets specific instances when the government has used APRA to stonewall specific requests, like RIDOT's decision to withhold accident data it collects from all of Rhode Island's municipalities," says John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

"With respect to the Washington Bridge emails," he said of emails for which different media outlets were charged anything from zero to $450 for the same 236 pages, "the bill would lower the costs by doubling the amount of free search time given for each...

Anne Herring, policy analyst for Common Cause Georgia, raised concerns about the latter provision.

“The governor and lieutenant governor get to vote on whether their own races will be audited,” Herring told LaHood’s committee. “That’s a little concerning to me in terms of public confidence in elections.”

“At the end of the day, this corrupt legislation means that we don’t have money we could be spending on other things,” Executive Director of Common Cause Ohio Catherine Turcer said.

HB6, in part, gave two Ohio Valley Electric Corporation (OVEC) coal plants a consistent stream of revenue, from Ohioans.

“To the tune of $153,000 per day,” Turcer said.

On Dec. 19, the North Carolina NAACP along with Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for fair and transparent elections, and a group of eight residents filed a lawsuit against Republican mapmakers, including Philip Berger, Tim Moore and the State Board of Elections, for passing allegedly racially adjusted and rushed gerrymandered maps.

Bob Phillips, the executive director at Common Cause North Carolina, said in an interview that minority communities, like the Black community, will not get to choose...

“Conducting business behind closed doors is unacceptable,” Common Cause New York executive director Susan Lerner said. “Open your doors to the people. The people who live in congressional districts deserve a say in who will represent them.”

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, said while no one was hurt, the attempt to poison or kill an election worker is despicable.

"It's to destabilize our elections and to scare the public servants who run them," Mehta Stein pointed out. "And to make all of us more fearful of participating in our democracy."

Mehta Stein blamed the rise in threats to election workers on the litany of false conspiracy theories claiming the 2020 election was rigged.

"We have to find a way...