The Maine House and Senate passed L.D. 1417, a bill protecting Maine’s elections from the potential for and appearance of corruption by prohibiting direct corporate contributions to candidates. On June 17, 2021, Maine's governor signed this much-needed legislation into law.
This newly enacted law helps to ensure that candidates and elected...
Campaign Legal Center welcomes nine new members to our team for the summer: our 2021 class of summer law interns. The summer interns are current law students who will work with CLC's full time staff to help advance our work, including pushing for the enforcement of campaign finance laws, and against felony disenfranchisement and partisan...
Throughout our history, we have fought to ensure more Americans have our right to vote honored and that every American can cast our vote and have it counted.
But today, a handful of extremist politicians are working to put up barriers to silence our voices based on what we look like or where we live. Many have already done so.
To protect...
Danielle Lang, Campaign Legal Center’s (CLC) director of voting rights, testified before the U.S. House Committee on House Administration on June 11, 2021, about the deliberate and unnecessary barriers to voting that state and local lawmakers have erected in recent years and the need for legislation to protect Americans’ right to vote.
In 2013, the...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has achieved a victorious settlement in a lawsuit filed to prevent New York from erroneously rejecting voters’ mail ballots. Due to the changes in state law that this lawsuit inspired, the rejection rate for mail ballots fell from 14% in the 2018 general election to 4% in the 2020 general election, and nearly 9,000...
A Campaign Legal Center (CLC) complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in September 2020 has apparently led the FBI to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s political fundraising activities, according to an article from The Washington Post published on June 3, 2021.
Last year, CLC uncovered several instances between 2015...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has filed suit in federal court against the state of Kansas and a local District Attorney to block anti-voter provisions in H.B. 2332.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of VoteAmerica and the Voter Participation Center, two nonprofit charitable organizations focused on encouraging voters to vote by mail, seeks to block...
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has upheld the state of Michigan’s voter-approved independent redistricting commission (IRC) as constitutional in Daunt v. Benson, allowing it to proceed with public input as the data is collected from the 2020 Census.
The decision is a shot in the arm for the movement to adopt IRCs as a viable...
With the For the People Act (H.R. 1/S. 1) under consideration in the Senate, some politicians in Washington are nervous about losing their power over the redistricting process because the bill ends gerrymandering at the congressional level.
The bill, which enjoys majority support among voters, would take away the power of politicians to pick...
With the New York City mayoral primary election less than a month away, people are starting to pay increased attention to the election not only because of the candidates who are running or because of the vast amounts of money that are being spent but also because of the way that New Yorkers will get to select their preferred candidates.
For the...
After litigation brought by Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the Census Bureau produced a briefing memo for former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross about the bureau’s plan for estimating the undocumented immigrant population.
This was the first public disclosure showing the extent to which the Trump administration made efforts to carve out the...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) on May 20, 2021, asking for an investigation into possible House rules violations by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy may have rented an apartment at below market rate from an influential political consultant and pollster, Frank Luntz, in...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) sent a letter to Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner Sean Cooksey urging the FEC to strengthen rules concerning lawmakers’ use of their leadership PACs for personal expenses.
A leadership PAC is a political action committee (PAC) controlled by a federal candidate or officeholder that is supposed to be used...
On May 19, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed suit against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over its yearlong failure to enforce federal law against Big Tent Project Fund (Big Tent Project), which undermined voters’ right to know who is paying to influence our votes and our government.
Big Tent Project was a Democratic nonprofit group...
On May 12, 2021, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against a mysterious entity, Tomfoolery, LLC, which gave $75,000 to a Texas-based super PAC entirely focused on supporting Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, an unsuccessful candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Texas.
Lone Star...
Gov. Doug Ducey has signed the anti-voter bill S.B. 1485 into law. This new law creates deliberate barriers for Arizonans trying to exercise their right to vote by effectively eliminating the state’s permanent early voting list (PEVL).
Before today, the PEVL allowed Arizonans to automatically receive a mail ballot from their county recorder every...
Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the anti-voter bill S.B. 90 into law on May 6, 2021. This sweeping law decreases Floridians’ ability to exercise the freedom to vote by placing restrictions on vote-by-mail, drop boxes, voter registration and nonpartisan election protection and voter assistance efforts.
S.B. 90 Is An Attack on Vote-By-Mail
Under the...
Now that the Census Bureau has released the apportionment counts for state seats in the House of Representatives, the next phase in the 2020 census cycle has taken center stage: state redistricting.
Although in a typical census cycle, the Census Bureau would have already released state redistricting data by the end of March, the COVID-19 pandemic...
Legislative district maps will be redrawn this year, and it’s important that Americans have fair representation, regardless of where they live or what they look like.
To help raise awareness about fair redistricting in 2021, CLC organized #OurFairMaps Day on April 30 to get people talking on social media on about why redistricting and Fair Maps...
Paul Smith, vice president, strategy and litigation at Campaign Legal Center (CLC) testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights on April 27, 2021 about the ways the U.S. Supreme Court has gone astray in its decision making process in two important cases for our democracy.
Smith’s...
President Biden will deliver a speech before the joint session of Congress on April 28 – an opportunity for him to outline what policies he will prioritize in the coming year and set the tone for his presidency.
In this first major speech, Biden should state his commitment to making the promise of democracy real for us all and the importance of...