United Kingdom: Date set for recount of Glasgow ward after votes not included | STV

A date has been set for a recount of votes in a Glasgow City Council ward after it emerged hundreds of ballots had not been included in the official count. Local authority elections took place on May 3 but it emerged last week that some votes in the Langside ward were not added to the final tally of votes in Glasgow. A recount of the whole ward is set to take place at around 4pm on Tuesday which could change the overall results. Returning officer George Black and senior officers involved in the count have agreed to forgo their fee from the election to pay for the recount.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly – May 7-13 2012

Electronic Voting in 2012

Marketplace notes that for the most part, that in 2012 Americans will vote on the same electronic voting machines that have caused problems over the past decades. With a dramatic speech in a late night Congressional session, civil rights icon John Lewis shamed his fellow Georgia Congressman into pulling a proposed amendment to defund enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The New York State and City Boards of Elections and ES&S released reports showing that a defect in the DS200 digital scanner – and not voter error – had been responsible for unusually high rates of  overvotes in the South Bronx in 2010. In an ongoing series on election issues, the Palm Beach Post examines the ineffectiveness of State oversight in ensuring the integrity of Florida’s elections. Having cancelled two internet voting caucuses for lack of interest, serious questions have emerged regarding the viability of Americans Elect. Following Stephen Colbert’s example, several watchdog groups are forming SuperPACs to fight SuperPACs. The Economist described the cynicism leading up to Algeria’s elections this week and Forbes considered the ramifications the elections held in several European countries last weekend.

National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace

Elections come and go and many issues change, but one seems to remain: electronic voting. Two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago — the story’s been about the same: the machines don’t seem ready for primetime, but we’re using them anyway. This week, the official verdict came back on some electronic vote-reading machines in the South Bronx that seemed a little fishy in the last congressional election, 2010. Larry Norden is with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and says sometimes the voting machine “was essentially overheating and because it was overheating, it was reading a lot of phantom votes — a vote that the voter didn’t actually cast, but that the machine saw.” The upshot is that in some districts in the Bronx, it turns out more than a third of votes weren’t counted. Things could get really scary in a state that’s gone all electronic, like South Carolina. University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell is worried for 2012: “I’m not sure there’s any real change from four years ago to now.” Seriously? What’s taking so long?

National: After Fiery Speech, Voting Rights Amendment Is Pulled | NYTimes.com

Sometimes during lengthy floor debates on bills, interesting things happen in the witching hours. Such was the case late Wednesday, when Representative John Lewis of Georgia pushed back with a fiery speech directed at an amendment offered by Representative Paul C. Broun of Georgia that would have barred the Justice Department from using money to enforce a part of the Voting Rights Act. At around 10 p.m., Mr. Lewis, a former civil rights leader, took to the podium to denounce the amendment, which sought to end financing for enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minority voters from being disenfranchised.

Editorials: Is Black and Latino Voter Registration Threatened or Not? | The Nation

On May 4 the Washington Post published what Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo called an “alarming—and darkly ironic” story stating voter registrations have dropped for African-Americans and Latino Americans. WaPo reporter Krissah Thompson wrote in her lead:

The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters.

By some accounts, it was true. Census numbers, which measured between the 2008 presidential and the 2010 midterm elections, showed that the number of African-American registered voters had fallen from about 17.3 million to about 16.1 million nationally. But the Obama campaign and a number of academics disputed the Post’s conclusion that Obama might be in trouble, instead saying the Census’s methodology is flawed and that voter registration among African-Americans and Latino Americans is actually up.

National: Civil rights groups launch voter registration drives earlier | USAToday.com

Voter registration among blacks is down from 2008, prompting the NAACP and other civil rights organizations to launch registration drives two months earlier than in past presidential election years. Leaders of the NAACP and other groups blame the decline on new state laws requiring people to produce identification to register or placing limits on who can run a voter registration drive. They also say the foreclosure and job crises have affected black Americans in large numbers. Another likely factor, said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation: The excitement over the prospect of electing the first black president has faded.

Alaska: Supreme Court Rejects Interim Redistricting Plan | ktuu.com

The Alaska Supreme Court has rejected a request by the Alaska Redistricting Board to use its original redistricting plan for this year’s statewide elections, instead ordering the use of one amended after court decisions as an interim plan. The redistricting plan has been subjected to several legal challenges, with judges rejecting both an initial plan and a revised one in recent months. In its ruling on the original plan, the state Supreme Court said it improperly prioritized compliance with the federal Voting Rights Act over the state constitution, sending the plan back to be redrafted.

Kansas: Kobach concedes voter-citizenship plan dead | KansasCity.com

Secretary of State Kris Kobach conceded Thursday that Kansas won’t require first-time voters to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship ahead of this year’s elections because the Senate’s top leader effectively killed the proposal. Kobach, who pushed the proposal, declared it dead after Senate President Steve Morris assigned the legislation to a hostile committee. The House passed the bill Wednesday, and Kobach had hoped Morris would bypass a committee review, making an up-or-down vote possible in the Senate to determine whether the bill went to Gov. Sam Brownback.

Maryland: Keith Russell Judd, federal inmate who challenged Obama in West Virginia, tried to get on Maryland ballot | baltimoresun.com

Keith Russell Judd, better known as the federal inmate who scored 41 percent of the vote against President Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, wanted to be on the ballot in Maryland, too. Without Judd in his path, Obama cruised to an 88 percent victory. Blame U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett, who last year dismissed Judd’s complaint against the Maryland State Board of Elections in which he alleged he was being wrongly kept on the ballot. Bennett referred to Judd, who is serving a 210-month sentence in a Texas federal prison for extortion, as a “prolific and vexatious litigant who has filed more than 748 cases in federal courts since 1997.” Restrictions or sanctions have been placed on Judd’s “abusive filings,” Bennett wrote, by at least six courts. He concluded Judd’s claims were “frivolous and a patent ruse to waste judicial time and resources.”

New Hampshire: Sponsor says Voter ID bill in jeopardy | Concord Monitor

A voter identification bill that had the support of the Senate, town clerks and the secretary of state’s office is in jeopardy because of changes made yesterday by a House committee, said Sen. Russell Prescott, a Kingston Republican and the bill’s sponsor. The House Election Law Committee voted 13-7 to require photo identification at the polls months earlier than clerks say is feasible, and to disallow students to use their IDs to vote. The changes, if passed by the full House, would take effect immediately, for this year’s general election. Prescott’s bill pushed the start date to elections after Jan. 2013, to give voters and clerks time to get used to the new requirements. “I worked really hard with (clerks and state officials) to make a clean voter ID bill,” Prescott said yesterday. “We have a bill I think a lot of people support. I am saddened that this amendment has passed.”

New York: Overheated ES&S DS200 automates election, places 60K votes itself | ITworld

The voting machine that cast between 50,000 and 60,000 extra votes for New York gubernatorial candidates in November has a bug that causes it to misread some ballots and add additional votes to others when the machine itself overheats, according to a review by the state Board of Election. All of the so-called “over-votes” were thrown out after election workers reported an unrealistic spike in the number of votes from the machine, from manufacturer Election Systems and Software (ES&S), which apparently overheated during the hour or so the polling location was closed for lunch. In 2010 NYC’s City Board of Elections decided to replace its old lever-driven voting machines, that required voters to flip a lever to register their choices with a newer model from ES&S. Rather than flipping a lever, voters fill in oval spaces on paper ballots, then scan the ballots into the voting machine to register their choices. The machine counts votes automatically; the stored paper ballots remain serve as the source for recounts or backups for lost votes.

South Carolina: Lawyer drops bid to restore South Carolina ballot | AP/The Charlotte Observer

An attorney is abandoning his effort to reinstate nearly 200 candidates left off of June 12 primary ballots by a South Carolina Supreme Court decision, saying Friday he is focusing instead solely on allegations the state violated the Voting Rights Act in sending separate ballots overseas for federal and local races. “The court has ordered Amanda Somers to focus on the issues where she has clear standing. And that we will do,” Todd Kincannon told The Associated Press. “Amanda Somers is focused entirely on military absentee ballots from here on. It’s clear at this point the military absent ballot issue is about the only issue left in this election.” Kincannon filed a federal last suit last week on Somers’ behalf, saying the state Senate hopeful’s candidacy was thrown into question after state Supreme Court justices ruled that financial- and candidate-intent paperwork must be filed simultaneously.

Texas: Assisted voting in Hidalgo election raises questions | TheMonitor.com

One in five people who cast early ballots in Hidalgo’s City Council election brought someone else into the voting booth for help, Hidalgo County Elections Administrator Yvonne Ramon said Thursday. While Texas law allows voters to seek assistance in special circumstances, unusually high assistance rates often indicate political machines — and, critics say, voter coercion — at work. Of the 2,144 people who voted early in the Hidalgo election, 483 had help, Ramon said, about 22.5 percent of voters. “I think a majority of the people who are being assisted are school employees at Hidalgo ISD and Valley View ISD,” said Mayor John David Franz, who said he’d heard disturbing reports of able-bodied teachers asking for assistance. Members of the city’s longtime political machine, the Concerned Citizens of Hidalgo, attempt to intimidate voters by asking if they need assistance, Mayor Franz said. Anyone who refuses is “sending the signal you’re not on the team.” High rates of assisted voting and questions about the influence of political machines at the ballot box aren’t unusual in Hidalgo County.

West Virginia: Legislators eye ballot rules after felon’s primary run | MariettaTimes.com

An imprisoned felon’s surprising showing in West Virginia’s Tuesday primary has officials reviewing the rules governing how candidates get their names on the ballot. Keith Judd received more than 72,400 votes against President Barack Obama, around 41 percent of the total, providing stark evidence of the incumbent Democrat’s unpopularity in the state. Judd has run for president since at least 1996, frequently petitioning to get on the ballot in West Virginia and other states. But since 1999, he’s pursued his candidacies from federal prison: he’s serving a 17-year sentence for making threats, and is currently held at the Texarkana Federal Correctional Institute in Texas. Senate Judiciary Chairman Corey Palumbo sees this topic as ripe for legislative review during the monthly interim study meetings that begin next week.

Algeria: Islamists fall to government party in election | KFVS12

Islamists suffered a surprising defeat in Algeria’s parliamentary elections, bucking a trend that saw them gain power across North Africa after Arab Spring uprisings. The three party Islamist “Green Alliance” claimed Friday the results were rigged to keep them out of power in a country that has experienced decades of violence between radical Islamist groups and security forces. The Green Alliance was widely expected to do well, but instead it was the pro-government National Liberation Front that has ruled the country for much of its history since independence from France that dominated the election. The FLN, as it is known by its French initials, took 220 seats out of 462, while a sister party, also packed with government figures, took another 68 seats, giving the two a comfortable majority. The Islamist alliance, which took just 48 seats, less than in the last election, said the results differed dramatically what their election observers had witnessed in polling stations.

Algeria: After improved turnout, Algeria awaits election results | DW.DE

Results of parliamentary elections in Algeria are expected Friday afternoon, after authorities announced better-than-expected turnout in the ballot. Still, fewer than half the potential voters made their voices heard. The government in Algiers reported relatively high turnout in parliamentary elections late on Thursday, a surprise after a campaign that appeared to be marred by voter mistrust and disinterest. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika had billed the ballot as a piecemeal version of the rapid changes taking place in several regional neighbors, referring to it as an “Algerian Spring.” Election observers brought in by Bouteflika reported only minor negative incidents on voting day, while the government was able to announce greater voter interest than initially expected.

Dominican Republic: New York Could Decide the Dominican Republic’s Presidential Elections | Fox News

New York is shaping up to become a swing state in this year’s presidential election — not in the presidential election between Barack Obama and the all-but-confirmed Republican nominee Mitt Romney, but the one in the Dominican Republic. Thanks to a law passed in 1997, expatriate Dominicans no longer have to fly to the country’s capital of Santo Domingo to vote in presidential elections. Dominicans voted locally for the first time in 2004 and tens of thousands of Dominican expatriates registered to vote for the 2012 contest – making New York one of the island nation’s most important constituencies in the neck-and-neck election scheduled for May 20. “This quantity of voters is decisive,” said Víctor Sepúlveda, the international coordinator for the leftwing Partido Revolucionario Dominicano. “They can decide the elections.”

Egypt: Expats pleased to participate in elections | gulfnews

Fifteen months after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians overseas will go to the polls for a week from Friday to vote in a new president, amidst confusion whether the presidential elections will be suspended or not. Around 60,000 out of more than 300,000 Egyptians living and working in the UAE are registered to cast absentee ballots in Egypt’s embassy in Abu Dhabi and consulate in Dubai in the first free elections since Mubarak was ousted in February last year. It is estimated that more than eight million Egyptians are working and living abroad, but nearly 600,000 are registered voters overseas. On Wednesday, an Egyptian administrative court issued an unexpected ruling to suspend the presidential elections due later this month.

Russia: Election committee confirms fraud | UPI.com

Roughly 17 percent of the complaints registered with Russian election officials over the March presidential contest were confirmed, authorities said. Vladimir Putin secured a third non-consecutive term in office during March presidential elections. Sergei Danilenko, a Russian election official, said Friday 268 of the 1,564 complaints registered by the Central Election Commission “were confirmed,” reports Russia’s state-run news service RIA Novosti.

South Carolina: Federal judges could decide to delay South Carolina primaries | Anderson Independent Mail

A three-judge panel will meet next week to consider delaying South Carolina’s June 12 primaries in the wake of a state Supreme Court decision that removed nearly 200 candidates from ballots. U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie heard arguments Thursday from an attorney for Amanda Somers, who says her candidacy was thrown into question after justices ruled financial- and candidate-intent paperwork must be filed at the same time. Since Somers was ultimately allowed on the ballot, Currie questioned her ability to sue. The judge allowed a state Senate candidate from Edgefield who was tossed off, Republican John Pettigrew, to join the suit.

National: John Lewis objects, and Paul Broun backs away from attempt to gut Voting Rights Act | ajc.com

My AJC colleague Daniel Malloy in Washington sends this report of a confrontation between two Georgia members of Congress that you may not have heard about: Around 10 p.m. last night, as House debate over a contentious spending bill stretched on, Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, approached with an amendment to end all funding for U.S. Department of Justice enforcement of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. This is the provision that requires states like Georgia to submit new election laws – last year’s statewide redistricting, for instance — for federal approval to ensure against disenfranchisement of minorities. Broun argued that this is a hammer held over only a few select states, and noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has suggested that the law has outlived its usefulness.

Editorials: Indie Block – Americans Elect Near the End? | TIME

When Americans elect announced last July that it was pouring millions into placing a third-party presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, the political world snapped to attention. Barack Obama’s longtime political adviser David Axelrod revealed his concern by publicly criticizing the group, while pundits gushed. “Watch out,” declared New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote that Americans Elect might change politics the way the iPod changed music. So far, Americans Elect is looking more like the Zune than the iPod. The group canceled a May 8 online caucus after no candidate met the necessary criterion of 1,000 backers in each of 10 states. More voting scheduled for later this month may also be scratched; it’s possible that Americans Elect won’t nominate a single candidate. That might say more about this well-intentioned effort’s shortcomings than it does about the durability of our two-party system. Founded by a group of political centrists, including former investment banker Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect had a promising plan: “break gridlock” and challenge “special interests” by helping elect a President beholden to no party. It invited people to join online, nominate candidates and ultimately select one through Internet voting. (To be eligible, candidates needed credentials meeting the group’s somewhat subjective criteria.)

Voting Blogs: A/B Testing: Could, Would It Work in Elections? | Election Academy

Every now and then, a really interesting piece rolls through my Twitter feed; earlier this week, it was a Wired piece about the growing use of “A/B testing” on the web:

Welcome, guinea pigs. Because if you’ve spent any time using the web today — and if you’re reading this, that’s a safe bet — you’ve most likely already been an unwitting subject in what’s called an A/B test. It’s the practice of performing real-time experiments on a site’s live traffic, showing different content and formatting to different users and observing which performs better.

The article notes that A/B testing (explained in further detail here) has been around for a little more than a decade, most notably by giants like Google and Amazon, who use the procedure to test and tweak virtually every aspect of their online experience.

Alaska: Deputy city clerk fired in Anchorage election aftermath | adn.com

Anchorage Assembly chairman Ernie Hall fired a key planner in the troubled April 3 election Wednesday, though the city clerk responsible for overseeing the election remains on the job. Hall said he told deputy clerk Jacqueline Duke she was being dismissed Wednesday. The city clerk and deputy clerk are among the employees who serve at the will of the Assembly. Hall made the decision to remove Duke himself but had been talking with other assembly members about it, he said. The city clerk’s office oversees elections and came under fire this year after ballots ran out at more than half of all voting precincts on April 3. On Tuesday, the assembly voted to pay a retired judge $35,000 to investigate what went wrong and recommend ways to avoid similar problems in the future.

Arizona: Election officials oppose redrawing districts | Arizona Daily Star

Election officials from around the state are lining up to oppose a bid by a Republican-backed group to get a court to force new lines to be drawn for this year’s legislative elections. Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne, who is leading the charge, filed legal papers late Wednesday to intervene in the federal court lawsuit. The county’s position is a panel of judges being convened to look at the work of the Independent Redistricting Commission should keep its hands off the lines, at least for the time being. Osborne said the issue has nothing to do with politics. She said it does not matter to her who runs for the Legislature and where their districts are. And Osborne said she takes no position on the charge by critics of the commission that the maps are biased against Republicans. The problem, she said, is timing.

New York: Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box | ReformNY

The New York State Board of Elections, New York City Boards of Elections, and voting machine manufacturer ES&S each released reports yesterday detailing the results of an investigation into the abnormally high numbers of lost votes attributed to “overvoting” in the South Bronx in 2010. The upshot is that a machine defect led to “phantom votes” on at least one machine used in the 2010 election, resulting in some candidates receiving more votes than they should have, and the choices of many more voters being voided when the machines detected both actual and phantom votes in the same contest. Now that the reports on how this happened are out, election officials must make sure that what happened in the Bronx in 2010 does not happen again in the future. Voting machines record overvotes when they detect more than one candidate selected for a contest. In such cases, no vote is recorded for any candidate in the overvoted contest, regardless of the voter’s actual intent. The Brennan Center first uncovered a high number of overvotes in the South Bronx while reviewing documents produced for discovery in a litigation it brought against the State and City. It published its findings in Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes; the report notes that in some election districts up to 40% of the votes cast did not count.

Florida: Despite state oversight, vote-counting errors abound in Florida | Palm Beach Post

Harri Hursti may be the best-known hacker you’ve never heard of. Largely unknown to the voting public, the Finnish computer programmer gained national notoriety among elections officials in 2005 when he broke into voting equipment in Leon County – at the supervisor of elections’ invitation – just to show it could be done. Hursti has since gone on to examine voting systems for other states. His conclusion: “Some systems are better than others, but none is nearly good enough.” In fact, a decade’s worth of Florida vote counting has been tripped up by technology of all makes and models, despite a state certification process designed to guard against such problems. Nationally, studies of the secret code underpinning election software have uncovered an array of troubles.

Idaho: Potential perfect storm of changes await Idaho voters next week | electionlineWeekly

Recently, an election official noted that “uncertainty is the enemy of election administration.” This year in Idaho, which holds its primary on May 15, not only has uncertainty been an enemy, but so has change. In addition to redistricting, the state legislature made several major changes to how Idahoans vote and that has left many local election officials scrambling to implement the changes and explain them to voters. This year will be Idaho’s first-ever closed primary. Every voter will have to declare a party affiliation for the first time. About a week before the election, the secretary of state’s office figured that about 85 percent of the state’s voters had yet to officially declare a party. “Redistricting and closed primaries have the potential of creating a perfect storm,” said Christopher Rich, clerk for Ada County. “We have done substantial outreach with the media and they have been very helpful in explaining closed primaries and directing the public to our web site for further information.” According to Sara Staub, Bingham County clerk, her county sent out new registration cards to registered voters, precinct by precinct and asked that they fill them out and designate their party so that this could be done prior to the primary election.