The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly January 23-29 2012

Elizabeth Drew’s essay in the New York Review of Books considers the impact of Citizens United and new laws restricting registration and voting on the 2012 elections. At the Overseas Voter Foundation’s annual summit, Pew released a report on improvements for overseas and military voters. The New York Times examined Shelby County Alabama’s challenge to the Voting Rights Act and Samuel Issacharoff wrote about the Supreme Court’s Texas redistricting decision. In an election dominated by issues of transparency and public oversight of election administration, voters in Saguache County Colorado voted overwhelmingly to recall the county’s election chief. Election administration failures in Iowa may threaten the first-in-the-nation status of the State’s caucuses. In a referendum, Croatian voters chose to proceed with membership in the European Union and Ireland seeks to put an end to an expensive experiment with electronic voting.