On January 10, at 1:30 p.m., the California Senate Elections Committee will hear AB 1413. The bill abolishes write-in space on general election ballots for Congress and partisan state office. It also makes various other technical changes that will alter the top-two system passed by the voters in June 2010, when they approved Proposition 14 by a 53.7-46.3% margin.
Debates aside over whether identification requirements to vote are ploys to disenfranchise the poor or to make voter fraud easier, there’s little chance that Colorado will institute a photo ID requirement until it cleans up its own system of issuing them, according to one local state lawmaker.
Rep. Keith Swerdfeger, R-Pueblo West, said that the complicated process of getting a state identification card has been a hurdle in passing legislation to require IDs. “I’m a believer in a state ID to vote but how do we streamline the process?” he asked.
He’s talked a few times with Jon Manley, assistant director of the Pueblo Department of Revenue office, about the problems and gotten an earful from constituents, too. The controversy over photo IDs has surfaced in a number of states.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently intervened to block a South Carolina law opponents charged was aimed at discouraging the poor and minorities to vote. In Wisconsin, charges flew from opponents of Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators facing a recent recall election that motor vehicle offices were either closed in Democratic areas or employees were told not to inform people that IDs could be obtained for free.
The argument goes that the poor, especially the elderly, will find it harder to obtain IDs if they have no way of getting to state offices or have to do a lot of paperwork.
At just before 2 a.m. on Wednesday, Iowa Republican Party Chairman Matt Strawn addressed reporters who had spent the night following the historically close Republican caucus race between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. The margin separating the candidates was small — eight votes — but he was prepared to declare a victor. “Congratulations to Governor Mitt Romney, the winner of the 2012 Iowa caucuses,” Mr. Strawn said.
Mr. Romney’s victory is unofficial — the counties have up to two weeks from the caucuses to send their final certified results to the state party. However, there is no provision for a recount in the caucuses, and the campaign which might have the most interest in pursuing one — Mr. Santorum’s — is making no effort to challenge the results. Still, given Mr. Romney’s exceptionally small margin of victory, a single discrepancy could potentially reverse the outcome. On Wednesday, a voter in the town of Moulton in Appanoose County, Iowa claimed to have found one.
The voter, Edward True, signed an affidavit which stated that he had helped to count the vote after the caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library in Moulton. Mr. True claims that the results listed on the Google spreadsheet maintained by the Iowa Republican Party differed substantially from the count that had been taken at the caucus site. Mr. Romney had received only two votes in his precinct, Mr. True’s affidavit said, but had been given credit for 22 by the state. That would be enough to flip Mr. Romney’s eight-vote victory into a 12-vote win for Mr. Santorum.
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said she hopes to complete her proposed streamlining of the state’s election system this spring, in time for this year’s primary and general elections. Johnson said the 12 bills in her “Secure and Fair Elections,” or SAFE Initiative will clean up obsolete voter lists, allow more voters to use absentee ballots, tighten up registration procedures and close loopholes in the state’s photo ID requirement for voters.
As the state’s chief elections official, Johnson also is hoping to win passage of new campaign finance laws that require advance registration to prevent political “stealth efforts” such as the fake “Tea Party” created in 2010.
She also is calling for improved training procedures for voter registration groups and tighter post-election audit procedures. Six of the bills have already been reported out of state Senate committees while another six will be heard in state House committees in coming weeks, Johnson said during a visit to Grand Rapids Thursday.
New Hampshire has had a proud tradition of hosting the first-in-the-nation Presidential Primary Election but this year’s election may be remembered more for voter confusion and a not-so-subtle attempt to deny the vote to targeted groups of New Hampshire voters.
There’s been a full scale war against voters going on in New Hampshire for the past year. America Votes and the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire have taken the lead in fighting back against every attempt to pass voter suppression legislation. So far, the current leadership of the New Hampshire Legislature has been unsuccessful when it comes to actually passing legislation but their obsessive efforts to suppress the vote are taking a toll on New Hampshire’s voters.
Bills that would have barred college students from the voting booth, ended same-day voter registration in New Hampshire and required already registered voters to show a photo ID to get a ballot on Election Day have all been defeated.
The Supreme Court will attempt on Monday to untangle the political mess in Texas created by a voting rights controversy. The case could have important political consequences, and highlights a lurking issue regarding the continued viability of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark legislation passed in 1965 to protect minorities from discriminatory voting practices.
At issue are two very different sets of redistricting maps drawn up to take into account new census numbers for the state: Texas has grown by 4.3 million people since the previous census, and minorities make up the majority of the growth. Because of the population growth, Texas was awarded four additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Last spring the Republican-dominated Texas legislature passed one set of redistricting maps. But Democrats and minority rights groups immediately criticized them, arguing they did not reflect the growth of minority representation. Texas, a state with a history of past discrimination in voting, is subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires the state to get approval or “preclearance” from the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C., for any election-related changes.
The Supreme Court next week will step into a partisan battle over remapping congressional districts in Texas, the court’s first review of political boundary-drawing resulting from the 2010 U.S. census, with elections ahead in November. At issue in Monday’s arguments will be whether Texas uses maps drawn by a U.S. court in San Antonio favoring Democrats and minorities, or maps drawn by the Republican-dominated state legislature, in the 2012 congressional and state elections.
Texas Republican officials appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that a lower court had overstepped its authority in coming up with its own redistricting plan and that it should have deferred to the state legislature’s plan. The Obama administration for the most part has supported the state Democratic Party and groups representing Hispanics and blacks before the Supreme Court, saying that parts of the state’s plan violated the federal voting rights law.
Both Gov. Bob McDonnell and Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling are urging the Republican Party of Virginia to rethink its plans to require voters in the party’s March presidential primary to sign a loyalty oath.
The party wanted the loyalty oath — in which primary voters would promise to support the Republican nominee for president in the November election — to help weed out Democratic voters. Virginia has open primaries, which means voters of any party can vote in any primary. But the idea of a loyalty oath has been getting resistance from Republicans, and now McDonnell and Bolling both say they think it’s a bad idea.
“While I fully understand the reasoning that led to the establishment of this requirement, such an oath is unenforceable and I do not believe it is in the best interests of our Party, or the Commonwealth,” McDonnell said in a written statement this morning. “The effect of the oath could be one of diminishing participation in the primary, at a time when our Party must be expanding its base and membership as we head into the pivotal 2012 general elections this fall.”
A state appeals court has refused to halt a legal attempt by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign committee to force state election officials to more aggressively screen signatures in a recall attempt against him. But the court also cleared the way for recall campaigns to appeal an earlier court decision in the case.
The appeals court’s action allows a hearing to proceed Thursday afternoon in the lawsuit by the Friends of Scott Walker and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, against the state Government Accountability Board. The hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in the courtroom of Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis.
The suit, citing constitutional rights to equal protection, asks Davis to order the accountability board to look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses on recall petitions, which must be filed by Jan. 17. The accountability board reviews the signatures.
A recall election for Gov. Scott Walker would cost just more than $9 million without a primary and $17 million with a primary, according to numbers released Friday. The Government Accountability Board reached those estimates after receiving information from the state’s 72 counties. The work was done after Rep. Robin Vos (R-Rochester) made a request for the information.
“The costs are significant,” said Vos. “We asked for these figures, hoping that if people knew the cost, they would think twice.” After learning the recall elections in summer 2011 cost over $2 million, Vos wanted to know what a statewide recall would run. In a letter to the GAB back in October, Vos asked for an estimate, saying he wanted voters informed before petitions were circulated for Governor Scott Walker and other elected officials.
“I believe that Wisconsin taxpayers should know the estimated cost of running a statewide election before petitions are circulated. Taxpayers need this cost estimate so they can make a better informed decision as to how their tax dollars should be spent. This is essential information because the recall election costs will have a direct impact on all county and local government budgets,” he wrote.
The Election Commission is mulling over using the electronic voting machines in the national elections riding on its overwhelming success in the Comilla city polls. Bangladesh’s smallest city corporation went to the vote on Thursday without any ballot paper to mark the first full-fledged electronic election in Bangladesh. The electronic machines were experimentally used in Chittagong and Narayanganj city corporation elections.
Citizens Committee candidate Monirul Haque Sakku, an expelled BNP leader, claimed a landslide victory and became the first mayor of Comilla with 65,577 votes, while his nearest rival ruling Awami League-backed Afzal Khan got 36,471 votes. During the daylong ballot, where a total of 169,273 voters cast their votes at 421 polling booths of the 65 polling centres from 8am to 4pm, both voters and the contestants expressed their satisfaction with regard to the EVMs.
Residents of a mutinous Kazakh oil town will be excluded from a parliamentary election this month due to a state of emergency imposed after the deadliest riots in the Central Asian state for decades, the Central Election Commission said on Friday. The cancellation of elections in Zhanaozen, where at least 16 people were killed last month in clashes between protesters and riot police, will effectively deny a voice to around 50,000 potential voters in the Jan. 15 election.
“This decision can only be based on fear that the party in power would receive absolutely nothing in a real vote,” said political analyst Aidos Sarym. “Fearing any kind of surprise, and aware that the population is embittered and negatively inclined toward the authorities, the powers-that-be have simply decided to exclude this region.”
Taiwan’s presidential campaign has taken a dark turn, with the opposition challenger accusing intelligence services under the control of incumbent President Ma Ying-jeou of tracking her campaign events for political advantage.
The allegations — unproven and denied by Ma — conjure up memories of Taiwan’s unsavory one-party past, when Ma’s party, the Nationalists, used their total control of the state apparatus to persecute opponents. While the island has since morphed into one of Asia’s most dynamic democracies, many senior civil servants may still believe that serving the top political echelon involves cutting corners.
“Even if the president did not give an order for monitoring, the heads of intelligence were appointed by him, and they could take the elections as a good time to return the favors,” the mass-circulation Apple Daily said in an editorial published Friday.
Iowa: Moulton man challenges Iowa caucus results | Des Moines Register The Republican Party of Iowa says it has no reason to doubt the accuracy of results it reported from the state’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses despite a claim of an error that would change the outcome. The final vote count reported Tuesday gave former Massachusetts Gov.…
The Republican Party of Iowa says it has no reason to doubt the accuracy of results it reported from the state’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses despite a claim of an error that would change the outcome. The final vote count reported Tuesday gave former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney an eight vote victory over former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. The Iowa GOP reported Romney edged Santorum in a see-saw battle by 30,015 to 30,007.
Since then, however, a Moulton man has called those results into dispute. Edward L. True has filed a notarized statement claiming Santorum is the real winner and that there was an error in the caucus results from Appanoose County. According to True, the number of votes Romney received from Washington Wells Precinct were inflated by 20 when recorded by the state GOP.
True, who said he hopes the discrepancy is a simple mistake, reportedly helped count the votes and kept a record of the outcome to post to Ron Paul Facebook pages. He said he noticed the error when he looked at the state GOP website.
If his claim is accurate, then Santorum was the winner with 30,007 votes to Romney’s 29,995 rather than 30,015. Late last night, The Gazette received a report of a discrepancy in the vote totals that were reported in the Illyria and Westfield townships in Fayette County. The report could not immediately be verified.
Caucus night was chaotic in many places, with hundreds of voters, candidates showing up and the throngs of media who followed. The world’s eyes were on Iowa. But in the quiet town of Moulton, Appanoose County, a caucus of 53 people may just blow up the results.
Edward True, 28, of Moulton, said he helped count the votes and jotted the results down on a piece of paper to post to his Facebook page. He said when he checked to make sure the Republican Party of Iowa got the count right, he said he was shocked to find they hadn’t.
“When Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes and I’ve got a 20-vote discrepancy here, that right there says Rick Santorum won Iowa,” True said. “Not Mitt Romney.” True said at his 53-person caucus at the Garrett Memorial Library, Romney received two votes. According to the Iowa Republican Party’s website, True’s precinct cast 22 votes for Romney. “This is huge,” True said. “It essentially changes who won.”
California’s distant spectator seat in the presidential nominating arena is, in part, the result of misplaced spending priorities in Sacramento. We bought a ticket in the nosebleed section because Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature refused to spend an estimated $100 million for a separate presidential primary early in the nominating process.
Instead, they combined presidential balloting with the regular state primary on June 5, long after the Republican nomination surely will have been nailed down, most likely by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. That means Republican voters in the nation’s most populous state will probably have no voice in whom the party nominates for president. They can only shout a meaningless cheer or catcall.
“Cost is always a problem,” says state Sen. Bob Dutton (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who stepped down Wednesday as Senate minority leader. “But sometimes you can be penny wise and pound foolish. It’s hard to put a price on democracy. “Frankly, I don’t think we’re treating the voters of California the way they ought to be treated.”
State Rep. Mark Pafford, D-West Palm Beach, has introduced a bill that would reverse some of the controversial measures in the elections law passed by the Florida Legislature last year. Groups opposed to the state’s new elections law have called it a “voter suppression” effort, arguing that the new rules could reduce turnout among young, disabled, minority and low-income voters.
Among the many controversial provisions in the last elections law were restrictions on the amount of time that a third-party registration group has to turn in a voter registration form, a provision that refers an accused third-party registrar of violating the election law to the attorney general, a limit on the shelf-life of ballot initiative signatures, a provision requiring a voter who moves within the same county to fill out an affirmation form and provisions limiting early voting days in the state. Pafford’s bill would reverse all of those.
On the Sunday before the 2008 presidential election, church goers in Florida streamed from the pews to early voting places to cast their ballots. The so-called Souls to the Polls campaigns were a windfall for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and the Democrats. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, more than 32 percent of those who voted early on that last Sunday before Election Day were African American, and nearly 24 percent were Latino. Moreover, according to a report released by the Florida State Senate, 52 percent of people who voted early in the 2008 election were registered Democrats.
“Preachers would preach a great sermon and then march to the polls with their congregations,” said Hilary Shelton, senior vice president for advocacy and policy at the NAACP.
But voting laws passed in Florida last year have limited early voting, including on the Sunday before Election Day. Opponents say the early voting limitations are part of a broader effort by Republican-led legislatures across the country to suppress the black, minority and elderly voting blocs, groups expected to be key to President Obama’s bid for reelection in 2012. The efforts include new voting laws passed in more than a dozen states, some requiring government-issued identification to vote and others limiting third-party voter registration drives.
The town has asked other small towns across the state, including Ware and Whately, to back state legislation that could impact the way presidential contests are decided, but similar bills in other states have been lightning rods for partisan anger.
House Bill 00200, sponsored by state Rep. Robert M. Koczera, D-New Bedford, would make it possible for the state to split its 11 Electoral College votes between candidates. The legislation calls for each Congressional district to choose an elector and for two electors-at-large to represent the whole state. This matches the number of congressmen and senators. Erving selectmen contend the bill would add weight to each person’s vote.
Wednesday was the first session of the 2012 Nebraska Legislature and already there is heavy debate. LB 239 would require voters to show an identification before casting a ballot in an election. Some groups in Omaha think this bill will make it difficult for youth, elderly, minority and the poor to vote.
Bubba McCrimon has been voting for more than 30 years and he has never had to show his ID. He is against this proposed bill. “To say it’s racism is harsh, to say it’s targeted its harsh, to say it’s going to take away lot of opportunities that is easy to say,” McCrimon said. He and others at a news conference this morning want to stop this bill from ever becoming a law.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to wade into the hot-button debate over corporate cash in politics again, just in time for the 2012 election season. The conservative group American Tradition Partnership announced plans Thursday to appeal a Montana Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state law banning corporations from spending to directly support or oppose candidates.
Campaign finance experts predict that the court will almost certainly address the ruling, since it’s seen as a direct challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that allowed corporations, unions and other special interests to use their treasury funds to make or fund political ads that support or oppose political candidates.
… At least one justice on the Montana court isn’t expecting the state law to stand. “Citizens United is the law of the land, and this Court is duty-bound to follow it,” said Montana Supreme Court Justice James Nelson, one of the two dissenting judges in the 5-2 ruling issued on Dec. 30. “When this case is appealed to the Supreme Court, as I expect it will be, a summary reversal on the merits would not surprise me in the least,” he wrote. But campaign finance reform advocates see opportunity in re-opening the contentious debate at the federal level.
Upstate counties are getting a clearer idea of how much South Carolina’s Republican Presidential Primary will cost their taxpayers. Spartanburg County Voter Registration Director Henry Laye says his estimate now is that the Republican Presidential Primary will cost the county about $55,000 (significantly lower than his original projection of $106,000).
He still believes the state should reimburse the county for overtime for poll workers (since the election will be held on a Saturday), cost of fuel involved in dropping off and picking up voting machines at the precincts (about $1200), and maintenance and testing of voting machines. Laye says he had budgeted for these expenses. Oconee County’s Voter Registration Office did not, according to the chairman of that county’s Board of Elections. Hence the office’s request to Oconee County Council for $10,000.
“We thought either the state or the Republican Party would cover the whole cost of this election,” said Robert Brock, chair of Oconee County’s Board of Elections. County council will vote on the expense at a meeting later this month. The statewide cost of ballots, poll workers, data processing and other expenses related to the Jan. 21 primary is expected to total about $1.5 million, according to state election commission spokesman Chris Whitmire.
With less than three weeks until South Carolina’s GOP presidential preference primary, state elections officials say they lack the cash to pay for it. But they say they are not letting that deficit prevent them from preparing for the vote.
The cost of ballots, poll workers, data processing and other expenses related to the Jan. 21 Republican primary is expected to total about $1.5 million, state election commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said Tuesday.
But the commission currently has only about $1 million earmarked to cover these costs, Whitmire said. That amount includes more than $800,000 set aside by the South Carolina legislature and $180,000 in filing fees from the nine GOP candidates whose names will appear on the ballot.
As the election season intensifies, the Supreme Court will hear a dispute Monday involving the fairness of new voting districts drawn by the Texas Legislature. The case arises as several challenges from other states and localities have been made against the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. Advocates on both sides are watching the Texas case for signals from the court on whether a decades-old provision intended to ensure equality at the polls should stand.
In Texas, a San Antonio-based federal court blocked the Legislature’s voting-district maps, saying they could not be used until officials had ensured, based on the 1965 law, that they didn’t harm the interests of Hispanics and blacks. Texas contends the lower court judges wrongly drew a new, interim plan for state House and Senate districts and Texas’ 36-member U.S. House of Representatives. State lawyers say the judges should have deferred to the legislative plan even though it had not been cleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Myanmar’s election commission has given the green signal to the country’s main Opposition party to contest upcoming by-elections. A month after National League for Democracy (NLD) decided to rejoin national politics, its leader Aung San Suu Kyi and 20 other members applied for the party’s registration to the Union Election Commission on December 23.
NLD spokesman Nyan Win told media on Thursday that it got the approval of the Election Commission, and registered to participate in the April by-elections. Suu Kyi, who earlier said the party would contest all the 48 seats to which by-elections are held, in which she also would be a candidate, has not yet officially announced her decision. In an interview to BBC on Thursday, the Nobel laureate said she was optimistic Burma would hold “full democratic elections” in her lifetime.
The Bombay High Court on Thursday asked the Maharashtra Election Commission to consider including the column for ‘Negative Vote’ in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) so as to ensure secrecy.
A division bench headed by Justice D D Sinha was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by Thane based doctor Mahesh Bedekar stating that when secrecy is maintained while a voter casts his vote for a candidate, the same should also be ensured when a person wants to cast a negative vote.
“By casting a negative vote, the voter decides not to vote for any of the available candidates. When a voter wishes to do so, he or she is asked to fill out a separate form and a register is also maintained with name and details of the voter. Chances of the person being harassed is there,” Sanjeev Gorwadkar, petitioner’s advocate argued.
Politicians may become involved in the work of in a commission looking at States reform in Jersey. Privileges and procedures (PPC), which sets rules for politicians, backed overturning a bar on them taking part. The PPC, which set up the Electoral Commission, challenged the States’ backing of ex-deputy Daniel Wimberley’s argument it should be independent.
On Wednesday, the PPC also backed equalising the number of politicians and non-politicians sitting on it. The non-politicians would almost certainly be local, but the positions would be open to people who do not live in Jersey but have a connection with the island.
The clock is ticking as the registration deadline fast approaches for Mexican expatriates to vote in their country of origin’s presidential election this year. Although Mexican election officials are confident a late rush of applications will mean greater absentee participation than in the 2006 election, preliminary reports of the number of applications received indicate few expatriates will vote in the 2012 race.
According to Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), 14, 776 voter registration applications had been received as of December 20. That’s out of a potential voter pool of an estimated four million migrants. Opened in October, the registration window for Mexicans living abroad closes on January 15-more than four months before the July election.
Editorials: Looking Ahead to the End of this New Year | Edward B. Foley/ElectionLaw@Moritz Will the rules, particularly recent changes in the rules, governing elections make a difference in the outcomes next November? Possibilities include the effect of changes in campaign finance laws or the laws governing voter identification and other aspects of the vote-casting…