National: Battle over ballots averted, but not forever | Reuters

They sued early and often. Voting-rights advocates, along with the U.S. Department of Justice and some political party officials, tackled potential electoral problems early this election year. Judges blocked stringent voter ID laws, lifted registration restrictions and rejected limits on early voting. As a result, Election Day 2012 escaped the legal dramas of the past. While some local skirmishes landed in court, no litigation clouded President Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But courtroom wars over the franchise are far from over.

National: Eleven House Races Too Close to Call; Many Headed for Recount | ABC News

Republicans have locked in at least 234 seats and Democrats have secured at least 190 winners in the House of Representatives. But with some ballots yet to be counted, 11 races remained too close to call, and at least seven appeared to be headed for recounts. Democrats appeared to have slight leads in at least eight races that were too close to call Wednesday morning, but a Republican campaign operative said almost all will be double-checked. One of the closest races was for California’s 7th congressional district, where Rep. Dan Lungren, the chairman of the House Committee on Administration, trailed Democrat Ami Bera by 184 votes with 100 percent of precincts reporting.

Voting Blogs: “We Have to Fix That”: Will Long Lines Be the Next Major Focus for Election Reform? | Election Academy

“I want to thank every American who participated in this election … whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that.” – President Obama, last night

Every national election seems to yield a storyline for election administration – and yesterday’s story, hands down, was the long lines that many voters faced at the polls. Just to be clear, when I say “long lines” I’m not talking about one-hour waits like the one I faced at my home polling place at lunchtime yesterday – I’m talking about epic waits, including those voters who, as the President was speaking just before 2am Eastern time, were still voting in Miami.

Florida: Still counting votes, Florida winds up not counting in 2012 presidential election | South Florida Sun-Sentinel

In the end, Florida didn’t actually matter at all. And that’s a good thing. Because even though President Obama got more than enough electoral votes to win reelection Tuesday, Florida is still officially up for grabs. No, there are no hanging chads or butterfly ballots this time. Not even any major glitches. And unlike 2000, there won’t be a recount where the future of the country hangs in the balance. But with record turnout – more than 70 percent – local elections supervisors are still trying to tally absentee and provisional ballots that could push the Florida outcome one way or the other. As of Wednesday afternoon, nine counties, including Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, were still tallying those votes.

Florida: Absentee ballots, voting delays put harsh light on South Florida election | MiamiHerald.com

As Alfie Fernandez waited six hours to vote at the West Kendall Regional Library, she already knew TV networks had called the bitterly contested presidential race for Barack Obama. But she hung in there, anyway. “I felt my vote was important,” said Fernandez, a homemaker. “We have a history of messing up votes.” Fernandez finally got to vote after midnight Wednesday, but that didn’t stop South Florida from adding to its checkered Election Day history. Thousands of voters in Miami-Dade and, to a lesser extent, Broward counties endured exhausting lines, with some like Fernandez not casting ballots until after the national race had been settled. A day later, Florida remained the only state in the union not to declare its presidential winner, and several tight local elections still hung in the balance. Miami-Dade, among four counties still counting ballots, was sorting through a last-minute surge of 54,000 absentee ballots and didn’t expect to finish the final tally until Thursday. About 10,000 had yet to be tabulated.

Florida: Votes Unclaimed in Florida, but Less Depends on Them | NYTimes.com

Another presidential election has come and gone. Only not in Florida, where through much of Wednesday the swing state’s 29 electoral votes remained an unclaimed, though largely inconsequential, prize. One day after President Obama was re-elected, Florida, where he held a slim lead, was still too close to call — stuck in postelection mode once again as several counties tallied absentee ballots. Luckily, unlike the 2000 presidential contest, when the country’s attention hung on hanging chads, this year’s election made Florida’s choice an afterthought. “After this election, Florida is worse than a laughingstock,” Billy Corben, a Miami documentary filmmaker and avid election night Twitter user, said with a smile. “We’re now an irrelevant laughingstock.” The denouement, though, was fitting in an election season that lurched from flash fire to flash fire, beginning with a 2011 move by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to reduce the number of early voting days and place 11 complex proposed amendments on the ballot.

Florida: Allen West demands recount | POLITICO.com

Florida Rep. Allen West on Wednesday demanded a recount as his bid for reelection remained too close to call, with the tea party Republican trailing his Democratic opponent by fewer than 3,000 votes. Patrick Murphy has 160,328 votes, or 50.4 percent, to West’s 157,782 votes, or 49.6 percent, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, according to The Associated Press, which has yet to call the race. West, who warned before the election of “nefarious actions” by Democrats, suggested a county election supervisor was trying to rig the election.

New Jersey: Storm Victims Struggled to Have Their Votes Counted | ABC News

Displaced victims of the storm-ravaged New Jersey coastline faced a new challenge on Tuesday, as their attempts to vote in person, by email, and by fax failed. New Jersey, at the last minute and prompted by the displacement of residents from superstorm Sandy, was the first state to ever allow electronic voting for a significant portion of its population. Other states have allowed some electronic voting for military members or overseas residents in the past. The effort in New Jersey on Tuesday, however, showed the difficulties of maintaining an orderly and efficient election when phone lines and inboxes are overwhelmed with voter requests. “This is an unprecedented disaster,” Essex County clerk Chris Durkin told the Montclair Times. “People will be disenfranchised because of this unprecedented disaster.”

New York: Nassau to probe voting machine failures | Newsday

More than 200 new electronic voting machines in Nassau County jammed on Election Day, forcing voters to cast some 20,000 paper ballots and delaying final tabulations in some close races, election officials said. About 4 percent of the 463,000 Nassau voters who went to the polls Tuesday had to place paper ballots into emergency ballot boxes when the machines malfunctioned, said Democratic Board of Elections Commissioner William Biamonte. In 2010 and 2011, such breakdowns affected less than 1 percent of voters, he said. Similar problems were reported in New York City. Suffolk Republican Deputy Elections Commissioner Bill Ellis said the county experienced only minor issues “that were easily corrected.” Suffolk uses a different vendor than Nassau and the city.

North Carolina: Recount looms for McIntyre Rouzer | The Bladen Journal

With his hometown safety net of Lumberton ripped away from him by redistricting, incumbent Democrat U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre appears to have won a ninth term by a slim margin over Republican challenger David Rouzer. The new district for U.S. House District 7 includes Rouzer’s home base of Johnston County, Bladen County, Columbus County, Hoke County, New Hanover County and a part of Cumberland County. Bladen County went for McIntyre by a 10,839 to 5,409 margin.

North Dakota: Berg concedes Senate race, averting recount | The Dickinson Press

After a long night of watching agonizingly close results roll in, U.S. Rep Rick Berg conceded North Dakota’s tightly contested U.S. Senate race to Democrat Heidi Heitkamp Wednesday afternoon. The decision headed off a potential recount that could have cost tens of thousands of dollars and dragged the contentious campaign out for another month.Speaking before the monthly luncheon gathering of the United Republican Committee of Cass County at Fargo’s Holiday Inn, Berg total a crowd of emotional supporters the margin of about 3,000 votes between him and Heitkamp was likely to hold up.

Virginia: Long voting lines blamed on high turnout, too-few poll workers and voting machines | The Washington Post

In the District, there were technical glitches with equipment at polling places. In Montgomery County, budget constraints led to about 1,000 fewer election judges than during the previous presidential election. But there’s no question about it: Some precincts in Northern Virginia held the dubious distinction of having the most brutally long lines for voters in the Washington region on Tuesday. In Prince William and Fairfax counties, hundreds waited for more than three hours — and long after polls were scheduled to close at 7 p.m. The problems were blamed on high voter turnout, unusually long ballots, a shortage of poll workers and a limited number of touch-screen machines.

West Virginia: Jefferson County Blames Glitch For Late Returns | Wheeling News-Register

Unofficial election night results show Jefferson and Harrison counties had the highest voter turnout for the 2012 presidential election among local counties in Ohio and West Virginia. Jefferson County also was the last of the local counties to complete its ballot count, with final numbers not being reported there until after 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. Election officials blamed a computer glitch and a high number of early absentee ballots for the delay, and Jefferson County Board of Elections members are expected to meet soon to discuss election night issues. Both Jefferson and Harrison counties had voter turnouts of 66 percent.

National: Election Day Problems, Long Lines and Confusion | NYTimes.com

This is the day when voters raised on a reverence for democracy realize the utter disregard their leaders hold for that concept. The moment state and local officials around the country get elected, they stop caring about making it easy for their constituents to vote. Some do so deliberately, for partisan reasons, while others just don’t pay attention or decide they have bigger priorities. The result can be seen in the confusion, the breakdowns, and the agonizingly slow lines at thousands of precincts in almost every state.

National: How Faulty and Outdated E-Voting Machines Contributed to Voter Lines and Frustration | ABC News

“By the way, we have to fix that,” President Obama said in his acceptance speech last night. No, he wasn’t referring to a specific economic, social or policy issue. He was referring to the issue of voting lines. Long, long voting lines. Across the nation yesterday, and then subsequently across Twitter and Facebook, U.S. citizens shared frustrations, photos and information about voting lines. The images of the long queues were a dime a dozen, especially when you looked at the #stayinline hashtag on Twitter. People in states like Florida and Ohio waited up to seven hours. In other states, there were shorter, though still-frustrating two- to three-hour waits. Some experts place the blame on high turnout, but many will tell you the culprit is technology – failed and faulty e-voting machine. Gone are the days of pulling the lever. Instead now there are two main voting systems: optical scan paper ballot systems and direct recording electronic systems (DREs). Very few jurisdictions still rely on punch cards and hand-counted paper ballots.

National: Voting-machine glitches: How bad was it on Election Day around the country? | CSMonitor.com

Electronic voting-machine jams, breakdowns, and glitches were strewn across the Election Night landscape, creating long lines when machines simply broke down. In at least one case, a viral YouTube video purported to show a Pennsylvania machine “flipping” a vote cast for President Obama into a vote for Mitt Romney. Vote flipping occurs when an e-voting touch-screen machine is not properly calibrated, so that a vote for Romney or Obama is flipped to the other candidate. While the Pennsylvania glitch was reported and the machine reportedly taken out of service and quickly recalibrated, other flipping was reported by news media accounts in Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio.

National: Supreme Court to Revisit Voting Rights Act | NYTimes.com

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would take a fresh look at the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the signature legacies of the civil rights movement. Three years ago, the court signaled that part of the law may no longer be needed, and the law’s challengers said the re-election of the nation’s first black president is proof that the nation has moved beyond the racial divisions that gave rise to efforts to protect the integrity of elections in the South. The law “is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp,” said Edward P. Blum, director of the Project on Fair Representation, a small legal foundation that helped organize the suit. Civil rights leaders, on the other hand, pointed to the role the law played in the recent election, with courts relying on it to block voter identification requirements and cutbacks on early voting.

National: Pentagon unit pushed email voting for troops despite security concerns | McClatchy

As Election Day approaches, county clerks’ offices in 31 states are accepting tens of thousands of electronic absentee ballots from U.S. soldiers and overseas civilians, despite years of warnings from cyber experts that Internet voting is easy prey for hackers. Some of the states made their techno leaps even after word spread of an October 2010 test of an Internet voting product in the nation’s capital, in which a team of University of Michigan computer scientists quickly penetrated the system and directed it to play the school’s fight song. The Michigan team reported that hackers from China and Iran also were on the verge of breaking in. Election watchdogs, distraught over what they fear is a premature plunge into an era of Internet voting, lay most of the blame on an obscure Defense Department unit that beckoned state officials for 20 years, in letters, legislative testimony and at conferences, to consider email voting for more than 1 million troops and civilians living abroad.

Florida: After hours of waiting, last voters finally vote after midnight | MiamiHerald.com

First-time voter Andre Murias, 18, arrived at South Kendall Community Church in Country Walk at exactly 7 p.m. Tuesday. He was the last voter in line. Nearly five hours later, shortly before midnight, Murias finally cast his vote for President Obama. He and hundreds of others waited in a line that snaked down the church’s driveway and around the block. “We were surprised that it went around the neighborhood,” said Murias, a student at Miami Dade College. One poll worker, who did not want to be identified, said there were at least 1,000 people waiting to cast their ballot at the church at 7:30 p.m., 30 minutes after the county’s polling places were supposed to have been closed.

Minnesota: Voter ID amendment defeated | TwinCities.com

Minnesotans have rejected a constitutional amendment that would have required a photo ID before they could vote in future elections. With just less than 99 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday, Nov.7, support for the voter ID amendment was at 46.36 percent. “It’s starting to look like an insurmountable lead for the opposition on this,” said Dan McGrath, chairman of ProtectMyVote.com, just before midnight on Tuesday.

Editorials: New Jersey’s Vote-by-Email Meltdown | The Atlantic

When New Jersey announced over the weekend that it would allow voters displaced by the storm to vote by email or fax, many people were concerned about the possibility of hacking or other vote-tampering. “E-mail voting is insecure because it’s hard to authenticate the voter, the ballots can be intercepted and changed, and the computer servers that store them can be hacked,” Bloomberg reported. Additionally, the plan had provoked confusion among voters, as at first the state said no paper ballot was necessary, and later reneged, saying a mailed-in paper confirmation was also required.

National: Foreign election officials amazed by trust-based U.S. voting system | Foreign Policy

For the head of Libya’s national election commission, the method by which Americans vote is startling in that it depends so much on trust and the good faith of election officials and voters alike. “It’s an incredible system,” said Nuri K. Elabbar, who traveled to the United States along with election officials from more than 60 countries to observe today’s presidential elections as part of a program run by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). Your humble Cable guy visited polling places with some of the international officials this morning. Most of them agreed that in their countries, such an open voting system simply would not work.

National: Scattered e-voting issues as Barack Obama wins re-election | Computerworld

U.S. President Barack Obama won re-election Tuesday night, topping 270 electoral votes to defeat Republican challenger Mitt Romney just after 11 p.m. yesterday. Romney held a small lead in the battleground state of Virginia, but most election observers said he had to win both Florida and Ohio, as well as Virginia, to beat Obama. Just after 11 p.m., Ohio was called for Obama and those electoral votes effectively sealed the election’s outcome. Obama also held a slim lead in Florida. The Republican Party was projected to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives, according to CNN and other news reports, but it appeared that Democrats will remain a slim majority in the Senate.

Editorials: Hard to follow the money | Ruth Marcus/The Washington Post

Specialty Group Inc. of Knoxville, Tenn., has a peculiar specialty: political anonymity. The company filed for incorporation in late September. Within a few weeks, it had donated nearly $5.3 million to FreedomWorks for America, a conservative super PAC allied with former House majority leader Dick Armey. What is Specialty Group? Where does its money come from? From the public record, it’s impossible to tell. The Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Responsive Politics reported that the company’s registered agent is a Knoxville man, William S. Rose Jr.After news reports about the donation, Rose issued a statement describing Specialty as his investment firm, detailing his gripes with President Obama and assailing “prying media who seem hellbent on asking a private citizen about private facts.” He declined to answer questions about the source of the funds and described Specialty’s business as “my family secret.” And here is the most disturbing thing about the Specialty contributions: By the degraded standards of the 2012 campaign, they are a model of transparency.

Florida: Miami-Dade will not have full results until Wednesday | MiamiHerald.com

Miami-Dade will not report full election results until Wednesday, election supervisors said Tuesday night, as dozens of polls remained open four hours after closing time. Lines were so long in some polling places, that the last voter did not leave the West Kendall Regional Libary until a few minutes after 1 A.M. At 10:50 p.m., 90 percent of the precincts had closed in Miami-Dade. That meant that at least 80 precincts were still plagued by lines four hours after the polls closed, as people waited six hours or longer to cast their ballots. Adding to the local election woes were the 18,000 absentee ballots that came in on Tuesday. Those had yet to be processed and were not expected to be counted until Wednesday, according to Deputy Supervisor Christina White.

Minnesota: Voters turn back voter ID amendment | Duluth News Tribune

Minnesota voters on Tuesday turned back a proposed constitutional amendment to require a photo ID for voting, a measure that had once been seen as a likely winner. With 99 percent of precincts reporting, the amendment had 1,344,758 “yes” votes, or 46 percent. That was short of the 50 percent or greater total necessary for passage. “No” votes totaled 1,522,860, or 52 percent, with blank ballots – which count as “no” votes” – totaling 41,785, or 1 percent. The Minnesota vote went against a trend in other states to approve voter ID.

Minnesota: Bachmann-Graves recount possible | MPRN

Democrat Jim Graves, declared the loser of the 6th Congressional District race against Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, tweeted early Wednesday that a recount is likely. “See you in a few hours,” he said. Graves was trailing Bachmann by about 3,900 votes with 99 percent of precincts reporting on Wednesday morning. The Associated Press called the race for Bachmann just before 4 a.m.

New Jersey: State extends email voting to Friday | POLITICO.com

The election will last until Friday — at least for some voters in New Jersey. State officials announced Tuesday afternoon that they will continue to accept email and fax ballots through Friday night, after election supervisors there reported they were overwhelmed by requests from voters displaced by Hurricane Sandy. The state is seen as securely enough in Obama’s column that many expect that he’ll be able to be called as the winner of the state’s electoral votes nonetheless. Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) announced last Saturday that voters affected by the storm could use an email ballot process set up for overseas voters. However, many voters reported this week that email boxes designated to receive the ballots were already full and not able to accept any more ballots. In addition, some voters said they’d gotten no response to their emailed requests for ballots.

New Jersey: Storm Victims Struggled to Have Their Votes Counted | ABC News

Displaced victims of the storm-ravaged New Jersey coastline faced a new challenge on Tuesday, as their attempts to vote in person, by email, and by fax failed. New Jersey, at the last minute and prompted by the displacement of residents from superstorm Sandy, was the first state to ever allow electronic voting for a significant portion of its population. Other states have allowed some electronic voting for military members or overseas residents in the past. The effort in New Jersey on Tuesday, however, showed the difficulties of maintaining an orderly and efficient election when phone lines and inboxes are overwhelmed with voter requests.

New Jersey: Election Official Uses Hotmail to Collect Voter Ballots | Bloomberg

As if voting by e-mail weren’t insecure enough, an election official in New Jersey has now instructed citizens who can’t get their ballots through to swamped government e-mail servers to send them instead to his personal Hotmail account, according to BuzzFeed. You read that right: Hotmail. For voting. The vote-by-e-mail idea came about as a result of the destruction leveled on New Jersey by Hurricane Sandy, and the concept by itself has some merit as a what-else-are-you-going-to-do emergency measure in a disaster zone.