The ethics issues that plagued the Department of the Interior under former Secretary Ryan Zinke may have extended far beyond the former Secretary, according to a new complaint filed by the Campaign Legal Center (CLC).

Several senior members of the Department of the Interior appear to have repeatedly violated revolving door ethics prohibitions by...

As Congress holds hearings on the pro-democracy reform bill, HR 1, members of Congress are learning about public financing reforms that are new to the federal government, but have been bubbling up at the state and local level – the laboratories of democracy – for years.

Voters and legislators at the state and local level are introducing or...

In final stretch of 2018 race, $50.7 million was spent on independent expenditures subject to disclosure, but only eight percent was accounted for, according to a new CLC analysis.

A D.C. District Court decision last year held the promise of secret money becoming less secret. But new reports show that the public is still largely being kept in the...

On January 25, Texas Secretary of State Whitley issued an advisory to county registrars announcing the transmittal of a list of 95,000 people who indicated they were noncitizens at the time they applied for their driver licenses, and who are currently registered to vote. Secretary Whitley suggested that these were illegal noncitizen voters. They...

Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation at Campaign Legal Center (CLC), testified before the House Committee on the Judiciary in support of HR 1 on January 29, 2019.

Also known as the For the People Act, HR 1 is a sweeping package of reforms that offers some of the most comprehensive advances our democracy has seen in decades.

The...

On January 8, America welcomed into its electorate 1.4 million newly eligible voters as Amendment 4 in Florida took effect.

As a result of Amendment 4—passed by a sweeping majority of Florida voters in November 2018—people with past convictions in Florida (except for murder and felony sexual offenses) can vote once they complete their sentence...

In January 2019, Campaign Legal Center (CLC) released a poll that finds strong opposition to gerrymandering among likely 2020 general election voters and broad, bipartisan support for the U.S. Supreme Court to set clear rules for when gerrymandering violates the Constitution. The poll, commissioned by CLC, was conducted by a Democratic firm, ALG...

Campaign Legal Center’s (CLC) new Race in Politics Catalog is a collection of political communications, campaign materials and comments that make racial appeals to voters. Compiled over the 2017-2018 election cycle, the Catalog gathers – in one place for the first time – many different types of race-based appeals from political campaigns across the...

The Political Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA), H.R. 679, a bipartisan bill introduced by U.S. Representatives Kathleen Rice (D-NY), Mike Gallagher (R-WI), and Derek Kilmer (D-WA), addresses the abuses of campaign finance law that have become increasingly common in federal elections. Campaign Legal Center’s new issue brief describes how...

The pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now is reportedly under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. But from its inception, Rebuilding America Now has engaged in dubious legal maneuvers.

The super PAC’s close ties to the Trump campaign, its sources of funding, and its...

On January 4, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments in a challenge to North Carolina’s 2016 congressional map, which is one of the most egregious partisan gerrymanders in American history. The case has the potential to reshape future redistricting nationwide by limiting politicians’ ability to discriminate against voters who favor...

On January 3, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced HR 1, a bill to make vital, high-priority improvements to our government and election systems. Rep. John Sarbanes (MD-3), the principal author of HR 1, is the chair of the House Democracy Reform Task Force.

Among other reforms, HR 1 would: increase transparency of campaign spending...

States are often called the laboratories of democracy, but in 2018 American cities and counties were the major drivers of innovative campaign finance reforms.

Across the country, numerous localities adopted laws to expand citizen participation in the campaign process, increase transparency of political spending, and eliminate pay-to-play politics...

On December 15, President Trump announced via Twitter that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will leave office by the end of 2018. The departure comes in the midst of several investigations into Zinke’s questionable conduct and business dealings while serving as Secretary. Campaign Legal Center (CLC) has been working to hold Zinke accountable...

Today, the Tampa Bay Times published an op-ed by CLC’s Blair Bowie and partners from Alabama Appleseed, a small nonprofit that has partnered with CLC to educate the public about barriers to voting rights.

The piece calls attention to the importance of voter education and empowerment to spread the word about the passage of Amendment 4 in this year...

During the 2016 election cycle, the National Rife Assocation’s (NRA) political and lobbying arms spent over $25 million supporting Trump, mostly for television advertising, and distributed and placed those advertisements using the same network of consulting firms that placed the Trump campaign’s own advertisements.

In fact, in the final stretch of...

It is easy to cast Washington, D.C. as lethargic and unbending to reform efforts. Congress failed to pass any legislation in response to foreign interference in the 2016 election, and increasingly looks uninterested in passing any legislation at all. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has become so dysfunctional that watchdog groups, like...

This post is part of a series on Take Care and the Election Law Blog on legislation to reform U.S. elections.

The 2018 election provides us with two main insights on American democracy. First, our democratic system of government is falling down on the job. In this past election cycle, dark money flooded our digital spaces, voters faced a series...

The 2018 midterm race for Maine’s Second Congressional District marks the first federal election successfully conducted using Ranked Choice Voting.

Ranked Choice Voting (“RCV”) allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference when marking their ballots, and provides for additional rounds of tabulating votes where no candidate receives a...

Today, Campaign Legal Center (CLC), Issue One and five former lawmakers from both parties submitted comments urging the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to clarify that the ban on personal use of campaign funds should apply to leadership PACs, in order to stop politicians from using the PACs as their personal slush funds. The organizations and...

On Friday, November 9, 2018 the Maricopa County Superior Court ordered all county recorders statewide to permit voters to “cure” their signature mismatch issue by the Wednesday, November 15 deadline to fix conditional provisional ballots. The parties agreed that the “cure” period requires county recorders to provide notice to voters with supposed...