The Elections Office in Fiji is recommending the interim government hold one-day elections in 2014.
The Acting Supervisor for Elections, Soro Toutou has told FijiLive that as part of the voting system, individual voters will go to a designated polling station on polling day.
As the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) gears up for about 20 million South Africans to make their cross next Wednesday, electronic voting could be in the pipeline as the commission is pondering the seemingly futuristic technology.
More than 23 million people are registered to vote in this year’s municipal elections, and the IEC has printed 70.5 million ballot papers, for the first time printing the sheets in colour. Previously, only national election ballots were printed in colour.
TN: Senate Votes To Undo Voter Confidence Act Requirements | Chattanoogan.com
The state Senate voted on Thursday to undo requirements of the Voter Confidence Act passed three years ago. Supporters said the action will ensure that more accurate voting machines would be implemented across the state as the legislature reversed requirements approved three years ago. “The strength of our political system lies in our citizens’ trust that their votes count,” Senator Roy Herron said. “Our current voting machines endanger that trust.” House Bill 386 as approved by the Senate would delete the requirement for more secure voting machines with a verifiable paper trail. The touch-screen voting machine system used in many Tennessee counties has been called by experts as “the least secure voting system” in the country. Numerous incidents of machine hacking and vote flipping by the machines have occurred throughout the country, officials said. In 2008, machines in Decatur County were reported to have changed votes in the presidential race. Full Article
KS: Lawmakers Spank Kobach On Elections Bill – Politics News Story – KCTV Kansas City
Kansas legislators are refusing to move up the starting date for a proof-of-citizenship requirement for people registering to vote for the first time or to give Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office new power to prosecute election fraud cases. The rejection of those proposals Wednesday by a bipartisan majority in the state Senate is a political defeat for the Republican secretary of state, who took office in January. It came after he successfully pushed for a law designed to combat election fraud, one he touted as model legislation for other states. That law requires voters to show photo identification at the polls, starting next year, and says anyone registering for the first time must provide a birth certificate, passport or other proof of citizenship to election officials, starting in 2013, though a Kansas driver’s license will be sufficient for many. Kobach had hoped the proof-of-citizenship rule would take effect next year and that his office would gain the power to file and prosecute election cases in state courts — and didn’t stop pushing even after Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a compromise version of Kobach’s proposed Secure and Fair Elections Act. The vote Wednesday in the Senate was 23-15 against a bill revising the election law enacted earlier this year. Some critics renewed longstanding arguments that election fraud is nowhere near as serious a problem as Kobach says it is, while others resented his efforts to revise a law that had strong bipartisan support. “You don’t unravel the deal after it’s finished,” said Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat. “And he needs to learn that.” Kobach didn’t return messages left on his cellphone and his office did not issue a statement. Full Article
Responding to last November’s highly publicized Election Day problems in municipalities including Bridgeport, where a shortage of paper ballots contributed to a days-long delay in the declaration of a new governor, the Senate has approved a bill establishing standards to ensure local registrars buy enough ballots. The 34-0 vote Thursday sent the bill to the House for action in coming weeks.
The bill says local voter registrars must certify to the secretary of the state that they have ordered enough ballots for each polling place. They also would need to show that they have considered all relevant factors in determining how many they need. Unless registrars clear their plans with the secretary of the state, they would have to order one ballot for each registered voter.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said Thursday that he’s not giving up on having a proof-of-citizenship requirement for new voters in place ahead of next year’s elections, despite the state Senate’s rejection of the idea.
State law already says that people who are registering to vote for the first time in Kansas will have to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other proof of U.S. citizenship to election officials. The rule was enacted this year at Kobach’s urging but doesn’t take effect until January 2013, a year later than he wanted.
With America facing a debt crisis, legislatures have gone spelunking for areas of government to cut. Mississippi Republican Rep. Gregg Harper has surfaced with a proposal to eliminate what Ronald Reagan once quipped was the nearest thing to eternal life: a government agency.
Harper’s bill would terminate the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which Congress created in 2002 to implement the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The act was passed primarily to distribute funds to update equipment, a job which Harper says is essentially complete. He is not the only one that believes that. Last year, the National Association of Secretaries of State reaffirmed a 2005 resolution requesting that Congress eliminate the EAC since the body had “served its purpose.”
Assam’s beleaguered main opposition Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) on Friday blamed “manipulation of electronic voting machines (EVM) by the ruling Congress party” for its rout in the assembly elections even as the Congress got a decisive mandate for a third successive term.
“We knew the Congress would do something and they did so by manipulating the EVMs. Otherwise such a result would not have come,” former two-time chief minister and senior AGP leader Prafulla Kumar Mahanta told reporters.
The Bulgarian Parliament is expected to discuss Friday the proposed amendments in the country’s Election Code after the Constitutional Court revoked some of the texts in it.
A much discussed texts among the revoked amendments is the permanent residency requirement for local elections, which provided that only Bulgarian citizens, who had lived in the respective city or town for the last 12 months, can vote for mayors and members of municipal councils. It was introduced by the ruling centrist-right GERB in an attempt to counter tampering with election results by transporting voters from one location to another – the so-called “election tourism.”
A Central Election Commission (CEC) official yesterday said it will take more time for Taiwanese people to accept and trust digitization before the government decided to ultimately replace the traditional ballot system with an electric-voting one.
“E-voting is technically feasible but the problem lies on whether or not citizens can put their trust in the system,” said Liu I-chou (劉義周), CEC vice chairman yesterday in Taipei City.
Smaller political parties can sue over a New York state law that they say is robbing them of votes because it lets candidates appear on the ballot for multiple parties, a federal judge ruled. Last September, the Conservative Party of New York State and the Working Families Party sued the commissioners of the New York State Board of Elections over its practice of counting votes when a ballot is marked multiple times.
“Fusion voting” lets candidates run on multiple platforms, but if a voter chooses a candidate on a two platforms, only the “first” party gets the vote.
Five out of six bags of ballots from first batch to be counted out of the City of Brookfield in Waukesha County, Wisconsin today were discovered “almost wide open” during Day 9 of the statewide Supreme Court election “recount.” The bags were open and unsealed, according to both photographic evidence and an eye-witnesses account from the counting room.
“When the ballot bags were taken out and placed upon the counting table, we were literally stunned,” one of the citizen observers, Mary Magnuson, a Kloppenburg volunteer, told The BRAD BLOG this morning. “5 out of the 6 ballot bags were almost literally wide open, and ballots could be clearly seen.”
Despite no credible evidence voter fraud exists on more than a minuscule scale, Republican majorities in the House and Senate are pushing for a showdown on Voter ID, first with Gov. Mark Dayton this session and then with Minnesota voters in 2012. Dayton should reject this legislation, and Minnesota voters should do the same in 2012.
We’ve opposed such measures since at least 2006, and we continue to do so simply because if applied, they will discourage — yes, even disenfranchise — many more honest Minnesota voters than the dishonest voters they will supposedly catch. (If they even can catch people; after all, look how effective photo IDs are in stopping minors from mayhem or catching illegal immigrants.)
Voters would have to show identification at the polls starting next year under a bill passed Thursday by the Rhode Island Senate. A driver’s license, a passport, military ID or a voter identification card are among the forms of identification allowed under the proposal. The bill would require the state to provide free voter identification cards. Those without identification could cast provisional ballots.
The requirements would go into effect for 2012 elections. Until 2014, voters could also use a birth certificate, Social Security card or Medicare card. The Senate voted 27-6 in favor of the legislation Thursday. The bill now moves to the House, where a voter ID bill has already been introduced.