Egypt: Egyptians flood Obama’s Facebook page in election row | BBC News

US President Barack Obama’s Facebook page has been swamped with comments from supporters of a candidate in Egypt’s presidential election. It follows news that Hazem Abu Ismail may be barred from the poll because one of his parents held dual nationality. Egypt’s electoral commission has said Mr Abu Ismail’s late mother became a naturalised US citizen in October 2006. But his supporters are calling on Mr Obama to support their claim that the immigration paperwork is fraudulent.

Malaysia: Ban lifted, students now allowed to join politics | Channel NewsAsia

Malaysia will lift a decades-old ban on university students joining political parties. Bills to amend three laws were tabled for the first reading in Parliament on Monday. The move was part of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s social transformation plan announced last year to allow greater civil liberties to the people. Malaysia’s higher education minister, Khalid Nordin, tabled three bills in parliament on Monday to amend three laws, namely the education and colleges acts, private higher education as well as education institutions acts, basically to allow students to join political parties. But they cannot stand for election or take parts in any unlawful or illegal assemblies.

Mali: Crises-weary Malians to give incoming president a chance | France 24

Intense negotiations at two Bamako institutions have yielded a settlement in recent days to Mali’s political crisis. But do Malians believe their incoming interim president, Dioncounda Traore, can put their country back on track? A line of black Mercedes cars snakes outside a luxury hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako while inside the air-conditioned lobby clutches of military-men in camouflage uniforms huddle in discreet corners, holding hushed conversations with ascending ranks of African diplomats. Discussions done, the dignitaries and military deputies march tight-lipped to their waiting cars before they’re off in a convoy of screeching sirens, to a military base on the outskirts of Bamako. The political action in this West African capital is moving at a rapid clip these days, after diplomats from the regional West African ECOWAS bloc negotiated a power handover deal with Mali’s military coup leaders last week.

Russia: Politician on Hunger Strike – A Protest Movement’s Second Wind? | NYTimes.com

“Day 24 is over,” Oleg Shein wrote in his blog just after midnight on April 8. “Tomorrow is Day 25. We are not on a suicide mission. Nor are we on a mission to make me the mayor. We are on a mission to secure fair elections that will put an end to the mafia system of government in Astrakhan.” The politician Oleg Shein and 21 of his supporters are on hunger strike — most of them since March 16. Shein ran for mayor of Astrakhan, a city of just over half a million people in southern Russia, near where the Volga River joins the Caspian Sea. On March 4, Shein lost with under 30 percent of the vote — and, like many independent candidates around the country, he claims the election was stolen.

South Korea: Opposition admits tight election contest | AFP

South Korea’s main opposition party said Monday its candidates, who had been forecast an easy victory, now faced a tight battle with conservatives in the run-up to this week’s general election. The centre-left Democratic United Party (DUP) had been tipped for an easy win in polls on Wednesday, a key test of sentiment before a presidential vote in December, but DUP leader Han Myeong-Sook admits the race is neck-and-neck. “We are now in an emergency situation and seized with a sense of crisis,” Han told reporters. A higher voter turnout would benefit opposition candidates who are more popular among younger voters, the DUP leader said. “If you cast ballots, the people will win. If not, the administration of (President) Lee Myung-Bak will win,” Han said.

South Korea: Twitter generation may give liberals upset win | euronews

South Korea’s liberal opposition, bolstered by the under-40s and power of social media, could spring a surprise win in this week’s parliamentary elections despite opinion polls that show it tied with the ruling conservatives. Experts say traditional pollsters base their projections on owners of fixed telephone lines, whereas people in their 20s and 30s, who form 37 percent of the voting population in the world’s most wired country, rarely use them. The young, more likely to carry a Samsung Galaxy or Apple iPhone in their pockets, are mostly liberal and their views are expressed and spread online, often by their smartphones.

National: FEC Ruling Leaves Ad Uncertainty | Roll Call

A court ruling rejecting Federal Election Commission disclosure requirements as too lax has left political players unsure how much they need to report about the financing of issue ads, making the agency a battleground in the dispute over secret money in 2012. The March 30 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson orders the FEC to rewrite disclosure rules drafted after enactment of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that the court deemed inadequate. Few expect the six-member agency to comply promptly with the order. Divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats, the FEC is notorious for partisan deadlocks. It hasn’t yet mustered a quorum to weigh new regulations arising from the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, though it did say it would no longer enforce restrictions that kept labor unions and corporations from making political expenditures.

National: Internet Voting Is Years Away, And Maybe Always Will Be | TechPinions

In today’s New York Times Magazine, political writer Matt Bai grumbles in a short piece about his inability to vote online in an era where nearly everything else can be done over the Internet. “The best argument against Internet voting,” he writes, “is that it stacks the system against old and poor people who can’t afford or use computers, but the same could be said about cars.” That, he argues, is a problem that could easily be solved by the electronic equivalent of giving people rides to a polling place. If only it were so simple. Voting, alas, has unique characteristics that make internet implementations all but impossible given current technology. The big problem is that we make two demands of it that cannot be met simultaneously. We want voting to be very, very secure. And we want it to be very, very anonymous.

Editorials: How to Expand the Voter Rolls | NYTimes.com

A country that should be encouraging more people to vote is still using an archaic voter registration system that creates barriers to getting a ballot. In 2008, 75 million eligible people did not vote in the presidential election, and 80 percent of them were not registered. The vast majority of states rely on a 19th-century registration method: requiring people to fill out a paper form when they become eligible to vote, often at a government office, and to repeat the process every time they move. This is a significant reason why the United States has a low voter participation rate. The persistence of the paper system is all the more frustrating because a growing number of states have shown that technology can get more people on voter rolls. There’s no reason why every state cannot automatically register eligible voters when they have contact with a government agency. The most common method, now used in 17 states, electronically sends data from motor vehicle departments to election offices.

Alaska: Anchorage Assembly Chair Refuses Call for Outside Election Investigator | alaskapublic.org

Voters are still waiting to find out why there was a shortage of ballots during the April 3rd Anchorage Municipal Election. The Assembly has refused an outside investigator and is set to take up the matter as soon as the Clerk’s office and the Election Commission finish their reports. Anchorage Assembly Chair, Debbie Ossiander says it’s too early to appoint an outside investigator to look into the Anchorage ballot debacle. The ACLU of Alaska made the request for an outside investigator Thursday, after widespread ballot shortages and reports that voters were turned away at the polls during Tuesday’s Municipal Election.

Hawaii: Federal Lawsuit Filed Friday Challenges 2012 Reapportionment Plan | Hawaii Reporter

The State of Hawaii has a long history of refusing to count military personnel and their families for purposes of reapportioning the Hawaii State Legislature. A lawsuit filed today asks a three-judge federal court to enforce the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution and require the State to count all residents of Hawaii. The 2010 U.S. Census reported 1,360,301 residents as the total resident population of Hawaii. The Census includes military personnel, military families and students as residents of Hawaii. It also counts minors, non-citizens, and incarcerated felons. In 1965, in Burns v. Richardson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Hawaii’s use of its count of registered voters as the population basis for apportionment, a population base which effectively excluded low-registration groups such as military personnel and students, many of whom were below the pre-26th Amendment voting age of 21. Contrary to popular opinion, the Burns case does not permit the State to ignore military personnel and their families. The Court allowed counting only registered voters because there was no evidence doing so would result in apportionment substantially different from that which would have resulted if the State had simply counted everyone.

Minnesota: Voter ID: The devil may be in the details | Mankato Free Press

A party-line debate and party-line vote in the Legislature is likely to result in a major change in Minnesota voting rules, but the actual consequences remain in dispute. Democrats predict dire consequences — high costs, new restrictions that will discourage voting by certain groups, an end to Minnesota’s tradition of same-day registration — if voters approve the amendment as expected on Nov. 6. Republicans, who control the Legislature and put the issue on the general election ballot, say Democratic warnings are wildly overblown. The new requirement that voters show a government-issued ID before casting a ballot will boost confidence in elections while not substantially curtailing the right to vote, supporters of the law say. For the people who run local elections, though, the issue goes much beyond the standard partisan debate.

Montana: Supreme Court agrees to consider corporate free speech post-Citizen United | UPI.com

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider taking another bite of the corporate political free speech apple recently, accepting a petition asking justices to summarily overturn a Montana Supreme Court decision petitioners say flies in the face of Citizens United. Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision two years ago that basically negated campaign finance laws. In its ruling, the court said Congress shouldn’t be allowed to limit the amount corporations, unions and similar entities give to campaigns. In upholding a ban on corporate independent expenditures in state elections, the Montana Supreme Court determined that “unlike Citizens United, this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history.” That ruling, the petition said, raises the question for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider: “Whether Montana is bound by the holding of Citizens United, that a ban on corporate independent political expenditures is a violation of the First Amendment, when the ban applies to state, rather than federal, elections.”

New York: City elections official under fire for soliciting money from a voting systems contractor | NYPost.com

The city’s Board of Elections has suspended an employee who is a top official in the Queens Republican Party after being notified that he was caught on tape soliciting a $25,000 “finder’s fee” from a company competing for a $65 million contract in 2009, The Post has learned. Several sources said the Department of Investigation provided information to the board that Stephen Graves, first vice chairman of the Queens GOP and a $66,392-a-year board employee, asked for the money from Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems as it was battling rival Elections Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., to sell the city its first electronic voting machines. “He was recommending the use of a particular lobbyist,” said one source. “In exchange for that he wanted a finder’s fee.” The lobbyist, who was not identified, was supposed to receive $250,000 a year for five years, the source said. Dominion didn’t make any payments, and ES&S ended up winning the fiercely fought contract in a 6-1 vote on Jan. 5, 2010, with two board commissioners abstaining.

Pennsylvania: Religious questions for Pennsylvania voter ID law draw fire | PennLive.com

Nothing is sacred about your religion when it comes to getting a state identification card without a photo. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation offers ID cards for those with religious objections to being photographed. The Amish and certain sects of the Mennonite community are among those who object to having their photos taken because of their faith. To get a nonphoto ID for religious reasons, applicants must answer a series of 18 questions that delve deeply into their faiths and other personal information. Now that Pennsylvania has passed one of the nation’s toughest voter ID laws to prevent voter fraud, the scope of the questions is drawing criticism.

Wisconsin: Voter ID requirement: The face of voter suppression and discrimination | allvoices.com

Meet Ruthelle Frank an 84 year old woman living in Wisconsin. She is one of millions of people who are at risk of losing their right to vote in November as result of wide-ranging state by state efforts to deny people the access to vote. The good news is that after ten months of advocacy by the American Civil Liberties Union, she was able to vote last Tuesday in Wisconsin, but her fight isn’t over yet. A Wisconsin judge declared a state law requiring people to show photo ID in order to be allowed to vote unconstitutional before the primary, issuing a permanent injunction blocking the state from implementing the measure. “Without question, where it exists, voter fraud corrupts elections and undermines our form of government,” wrote Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess in his decision. “The legislature and governor may certainly take aggressive action to prevent its occurrence. But voter fraud is no more poisonous to our democracy than voter suppression. Indeed, they are two heads on the monster.”

Myanmar: Myanmar by-election riven with irregularities, ruling party complains | TODAYonline

Myanmar’s ruling party, which was founded and backed by the country’s former military junta rulers, yesterday complained that there were voting irregularities in last weekend’s by-election, which saw them soundly beaten by the country’s leading dissident, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, and her party. Last Sunday’s landmark by-election brought the charismatic Nobel Peace Prize laureate and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party into office for the first time when they won 43 of the 45 seats up for grabs. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) – which is comprised of many of the same former generals who seized power in 1988 and kept Ms Suu Kyi under house arrest for 15 years – won the one seat not contested by the NLD in the by-election.

Voting Blogs: African Elections in 2012 on the World Stage and in the Classroom | Concurring Opinions

Teaching U.S. election law in the shadow of a presidential election is an election law professor’s dream. There is no better backdrop for the material or more engaging context to capture student interest in the subject.  However, as I also teach a comparative election law course that examines election law issues internationally, I had a difficult time deciding which to offer this fall in light of the seemingly record number of presidential and legislative elections this year.  On no other continent is this cloudburst of elections more evident than in Africa.  The concentration of African elections is owing  not just to Africa having more countries and democracies than any other continent; rather, the combination of the Arab spring and the happenstance of calendrical synchronicity has yielded a mother lode of elections on the continent.  Africa is evidence that, against many odds, democracy is at work. In the United States, democracy works in large part because of deeply entrenched historical values and a multiplicity of modern interests that depend on democratic institutions.  Indeed, in much of the Western world, democracy enjoys a worn expectation as a successful form of governance.  In modern Africa, however, democracy increasingly prevails because the lion’s share of its inhabitants is moving steadfastly and stubbornly against authoritarianism and the one-party state in hopes for a fairer, freer, and more equal form of government.  Simply put, democracy in Africa grows from the same soil of revolution and idealism that nourished the seeds of U.S. democracy nearly three centuries ago.  For those of us interested in the study of democracy, Africa is a place to watch in 2012.

Canada: Deliberate Denial of Service Assault Disrupts NDP Internet Voting | SPAMfighter

An advanced cyber-assault, which created chaos during the federal NDP party’s election, has been attributed to a specialized Web hacker who utilized over 10,000 PCs globally for so slackening the pace of the online-voting that it started to crawl, thus published vancouversun.com dated March 28, 2012. Actually, according to the provider of the Internet-based balloting, Scytl Canada, one Denial-of-Service assault was deliberately unleashed with the objective of disrupting the voting exercise by the NDP on 24th March 2012. It was determined that the assault successfully clogged the channel of the voting mechanism so voters had to wait long to gain access. This slackening of the voting speed thus frustrated the party’s representatives gathered at Toronto.

Egypt: Electoral commission says 23 registered to run for presidency | Al-Arabiya

Egypt’s electoral commission on Sunday said 23 people registered to run for the upcoming presidential elections, hours after the doors have officially closed for candidacy registrations. Each candidate is hoping to lead the Arab world’s most populous nation through a fragile transition following an uprising that toppled long-time president Hosni Mubarak last year. The candidates include former Arab League chief Amr Moussa, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khairat el-Shater, former Brotherhood member Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh and Mubarak’s last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq. Former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a stalwart of the Mubarak regime and seen as close to the ruling military, registered less than half an hour before the 2:00 pm (1200 GMT) deadline. Suleiman. 74, announced he planned to run on Friday, saying overwhelming public pressure had aroused his sense of soldierly duty. He had needed to collect the signatures of 30,000 eligible voters by Sunday’s deadline in order to take part.

Malaysia: Expatriates Lobby for Overseas Voting Rights | NYTimes.com

Nurul Syaheedah Jes Izman, 27, a graduate of New York University, lives in New Jersey and works on Wall Street as a financial analyst. Though she has spent her college years and all of her working life in the United States, she closely follows political developments in her native Malaysia, reading Malaysian news Web sites every day and talking with friends and family back home about the issues. But under current Malaysian law, Ms. Nurul Syaheedah will not be able to vote in the next election, widely expected this year, unless she makes the 23-hour trip home. The only Malaysians living overseas who are allowed to vote by absentee ballot are government workers, military personnel and full-time students and their spouses. “The right to vote is a basic right of all citizens,” Ms. Nurul Syaheedah said in an e-mail. “No one should be disenfranchised in this time and age, even from a different location overseas. We are all rightful stakeholders in our nation.”

South Ossetia: Ex-KGB man Tibilov wins presidency in South Ossetia | chicagotribune.com

A pro-Russian former KGB officer appeared set on Sunday to win a presidential election run-off in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia, where Moscow is seeking to re-assert control. Preliminary results announced by the election commission showed Leonid Tibilov, 60, leading human rights ombudsman David Sanakoyev with about 55.8 percent of votes against his rival’s 41.3 after 67 percent of the ballots had been counted. The tiny region of about 30,000 people declared independence after a 2008 war between Russia and Georgia but remains heavily dependent on Moscow’s financial help and military protection amid growing dissatisfaction over how funds are spent.

South Ossetia: Rebel South Ossetia holds run-off election | AFP

Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia held a run-off vote Sunday to elect a leader after months of political turmoil. Former local head of the KGB security service Leonid Tibilov was facing human rights commissioner David Sanakoyev after falling short of the 50 percent required to win in the first round, with 42.5 percent of votes last month. Residents of South Ossetia’s main town Tkhinvali slowly gathered at polling stations to cast ballots after polls opened at 8 a.m. local time on the day when the mostly Orthodox Christian region celebrates Palm Sunday. About 35,000 people are registered voters at the 84 polling stations in the impoverished region where a heavy Russian military presence remains after the 2008 war with Georgia.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly April 2-8 2012

Democracy in Berma

The Australian publication The Age and Reuters provided international perspectives on two key issues affecting the 2012 US elections: spending by SuperPACS and Voter ID requirements. The New York Times considered a recent ruling that will result in more disclosure of campaign spending by nonprofits. A constitutional amendment requiring a photo ID at the polling place will be on the ballot this November in Minnesota. Computerworld looked at the miscounted votes in a recent local election in Palm Beach County. A DHS official warned that Internet voting is not ready for live elections – a reality reinforced by the recent NDP leadership contest in Canada – and Burma celebrated the electoral victory of former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Voting Blogs: Imagine no campaign donations. It’s easy if you try. | Enik Rising

Imagine, for a moment, that you didn’t need to raise money to run for office, that the government would pay you to run. Who would that help? Would it encourage more moderate candidates, who are usually pressured out of nomination contests by party money because they don’t stand for anything? Or would it enable the extremists, whom are normally de-funded due to concerns about their toxic views? Well, we actually don’t need to imagine. Arizona and Maine had just such a system in place for state legislative elections during the last decade. So Michael Miller and I collected roll call votes from those states and compared those who first got elected through “clean” funding with those who achieved offices through traditional funding methods. We report the results in our new paper “Buying Extremists,” which we’re presenting next week at the meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.

National: The big money men buy a voice in American politics | The Age

THE video begins like this: wispy clouds drift over the great American outdoors. Cranes build an office block. Trucks roar down the highway. ”Capitalism made America great,” says a gravelly voice. ”The free market. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream.” A family walks through a wheat field, where the Stars and Stripes waves briskly. ”But in the wrong hands, those dreams can turn into nightmares.” And storm clouds gather over the wheat field. The attack ad goes on to paint Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a corporate raider of the worst ilk, making his millions through stripping assets and staff from honest American businesses. It was exquisitely timed to upset Romney, as rival Republican Newt Gingrich accelerated his run towards his South Carolina primary win on January 21. But Gingrich’s name was not mentioned, nor did he endorse the ad (or later accept responsibility for its errors and exaggerations). It was paid for by a group called Winning Our Future.

Alaska: Investigations Launched into Anchorage Election Disenfranchisement | Alaska Dispatch

A roiling round of election second-guessing ramped up Wednesday as the Anchorage Municipal Clerk’s office tried to determine how a mayoral election in which 27 percent of the registered voters showed up could have resulted in widespread ballot shortages, and others tried to understand why sentiment on a controversial ballot measure flip-flopped less than a week before the vote.  While allegations of disenfranchisement grew louder, with anecdotes of voters being turned away at the polls, some things appeared certain — including results of the mayoral election.  Although contender Paul Honeman isn’t conceding yet, incumbent Mayor Dan Sullivan — who led by a whopping 21 percent with nearly all precincts reporting — declared victory. “I’m concerned, like everybody, that some voters may have been disenfranchised, but the margin is significant enough that I think I can declare victory,” Sullivan said at a press conference. He appeared to be one of the few happy voters out there.

Alaska: More than 50 Alaska precincts ran out of ballots in Tuesday’s election | necn.com

A city review of this week’s Anchorage election shows that nearly half of the 121 voting precincts ran out of preprinted ballots at some point. Late Friday, the city clerk’s office said it had finished a preliminary review of all the precincts. It found that 55 of the 121 experienced ballot shortages in Tuesday’s election. In addition, nearly 6,100 questioned ballots were cast, compared with about 1,000 in last year’s election. Most of the questioned ballots were cast before ballot shortages occurred. Questioned ballots are issued if a voter lacks identification, is not on the registry, has moved within the past 30 days or is voting in a place other than a home precinct. The clerk’s office says more than 1,400 additional unscanned ballots were cast. In those cases, the voter signed the register, but used a ballot that could not be scanned by machine. Those are not questioned ballots.