National: Election will all be over in 12 more days, or will it? | latimes.com

Late the night of Nov. 6, or by the wee hours of Nov. 7, Americans should know the results of the presidential election, right? Probably. But the extremely tight races in several states, shifting voter identification requirements, the increased use of “provisional” ballots and automatic recount provisions in key states all expand the possibility of a prolonged, slow-motion finish. Ten states in recent years have passed laws requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification. This, in turn, has prompted lawsuits by those who say not all eligible voters can meet the requirements.

National: Blocking the Vote | NYTimes.com

The Republican Party has made voter fraud the red herring of this election. Now it turns out the party has been forced to cut its ties to a well-paid consulting firm after cases of real voter registration abuse arose in several swing states. A thorough federal investigation of the consulting firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, is needed.

National: Despite e-voting improvements, audits still needed for ballot integrity | Computerworld

Technology and process upgrades implemented since the controversial 2000 presidential election have made electronic voting machines more secure and reliable to use, the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project said in a report last week. Even so, the only way to ensure the integrity of votes cast with the systems is to have mandatory auditing of the results and of all voting technologies used in an election, the 85-page report cautioned. Rather than setting security standards for election equipment, the better approach for safeguarding ballot integrity is to hand-count a sufficiently large and random sample of the paper records of votes cast electronically, it said. “The 2000 United States presidential election put a spotlight on the fragility and vulnerability of voting technology,” the report said. “It became clear that providing robust, accurate, and secure voting systems remained an important open technical problem” for the United States. The Voting Technology Project is a joint initiative between MIT and Caltech and was launched originally to investigate the causes of the voting problems in Florida in 2000 and to make recommendations based on the findings.

National: Will Voter Suppression Tactics Threaten Free and Fair Elections? | PR Watch

he wave of new voter restrictions and scare tactics being implemented for the 2012 elections — such as voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, threatening billboards, misleading mailers and vigilante poll watchers — could intimidate countless numbers of Americans from exercising their right to vote. Republicans have proposed voting restrictions in a majority of states since 2011, including strict voter ID laws and limits on early voting and voter registration. Though many of the laws have been blunted, confusion about voting requirements could still make it harder for many Americans to exercise their right to the franchise. At the same time, the Tea Party group “True the Vote” — which has been accused of voter intimidation — is pledging to send one million observers to polling places on November 6, and has been filing largely baseless lawsuits to purge voters from the rolls.

National: Obama Campaign Uses Early Voting System to Its Advantage | NYTimes.com

Having shouted himself hoarse for two days urging supporters to vote, and vote early, President Obama flew to Chicago to do so himself this afternoon, on his way to an evening rally here in Ohio. His campaign says he is the first sitting president to vote for himself ahead of Election Day. In casting his ballot early, Mr. Obama is providing a very personal endorsement of a system that was enormously successful for him in 2008, and may be the key to his re-election hopes. His narrow win in North Carolina four years ago was driven in large part by early voters, who turned out in larger numbers than those on Election Day, and tended to support Mr. Obama. They also gave him a winning margin in Iowa, Florida and Colorado.

National: E-voting puts vote accuracy at risk in four key states | CSMonitor.com

Touch-screen electronic voting machines in at least four states pose a risk to the integrity of the 2012 presidential election, according to a Monitor analysis. In four key battleground states – Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado – glitches in e-voting machines could produce incorrect or incomplete tallies that would be difficult to detect and all but impossible to correct because the machines have no paper record for officials to go back and check.

National: Groups Use Fake Letters, Felony Threats to Suppress Vote | Bloomberg

When Phyllis Cleveland first saw the billboard on East 35th Street warning of prison time and a $10,000 fine for voter fraud, the city councilwoman concluded it had one purpose: to intimidate the constituents of her predominantly low-income ward in Cleveland, Ohio. “It just hit me in the gut when I saw it,” said Cleveland, who helped capture the attention of a coalition of civil rights groups that pressured Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings (CCO) Inc. to remove the billboards this week.

Editorials: Resolving an Election In Extra Innings | Steven F. Huefner/Election Law@Moritz

As the prospects of a close Presidential election this fall show no signs of abating, it is worth reflecting on what might – and should – happen after Election Day in the event of an election that is too-close-to-call. My colleague Ned Foley has already addressed one aspect of this “what if” scenario, namely, the possibility that a swing state like Ohio, because it has a large number of provisional ballots or late-arriving absentee ballots, may not be able to declare a winner until some ten days after Election Day. But beyond that reality of the regular election processes, what if alleged errors or mistakes in the casting or counting of ballots lead to an election contest over the outcome in a particular state? How well prepared are states to handle post-election litigation on a very compressed timetable, and under the glare of the national spotlight?

Editorials: Why have an electoral college? | latimes.com

The electoral college is one of the most controversial and ridiculed parts of the Constitution. It is not just for the obvious reasons — the “wrong winner” elections of 1876, 1888 and 2000. The college has also focused the nation’s attention on a few swing states, allowing candidates to ignore a large percentage of the voters in their campaign. Today, the three largest states get little attention, except as ATMs for campaign fundraising.

Florida: Why Florida Should Not Be the “Next Florida”: Fixing the Debacle In Palm Beach County | Election Law @ Moritz

There’s a storm brewing in the Sunshine State, and once again Palm Beach County is at the center of the turmoil. The problem arises because of a ballot printing error on absentee ballots in Palm Beach County.The County contracted with an Arizona firm to produce the ballots, and the firm printed about 60,000 absentee ballots before anyone noticed the error: all of the races had a “header” over each section of the ballot except for the section for Judicial Retention elections. For example, before listing the presidential candidates, the ballot says “President and Vice President” in both English and Spanish in all capital letters and in boldface type. The Judicial Retention portion of the ballot, however, lists the candidates without any identifying header. Palm Beach County mailed out thousands of these absentee ballots to voters before catching the mistake.

Florida: Ion Sancho shows feds bogus mail sent to Florida voters | tallahassee.com

Several Leon County voters recently received scam letters purportedly sent by the Supervisor of Elections Office calling into question their citizenship and their ability to vote in the Nov. 6 general election. Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho said three voters contacted him Monday after receiving the letters, which were written on bogus Supervisor of Elections letterhead and mailed from Seattle, Wash. Sancho said he turned them over to federal prosecutors Monday to investigate as possible mail fraud. “This is just a silly, stupid trick that I hope someone gets caught for,” Sancho said.

Idaho: Why Idaho May Win And Lose Fight To Uncover Donors To Education Proposition Campaign | Boise State Public Radio

Idaho’s Secretary of State wants a court to order a group campaigning for Idaho’s ballot referenda to reveal its donors. Education Voters of Idaho gave more than $200,000 to another, affiliated group for ads supporting propositions 1, 2, and 3. Those ask voters if they want to keep Idaho’s Students Come First education laws. Education Voters refused an ultimatum from Secretary of State Ben Ysursa to reveal its donors. Ysursa maintains Idaho’s Sunshine Law says Education Voters has to disclose. Education Voters insists the First Amendment and the Supreme Court decision Citizens United says it doesn’t.

Indiana: Democratic chair wants investigation into LaPorte County voter purge | Herald Argus

The Democrat party chair is asking the federal government to get involved in the wrongful purge of 13,000 voters in La Porte County last year. Chairman John Jones said in a press release that he will be asking the U.S. Department of Justice Election Integrity Task Force to investigate exactly how the purge happened, which he said was an “effort led by Republican voters’ appointee Donna Harris, the wife of county Republican chairman Keith Harris.” Originally some 800 inactive voters were supposed to be purged in 2011. Voters are inactive if they fail to vote over two federal election cycles, meaning they have not voted since before the 2008 election that seated President Barack Obama in office. But the 13,303 who were canceled included voters who voted in Obama’s election.

Ohio: Romney/Hart voting conspiracy theory spreads | Cincinnati.com

Hamilton County officials find themselves facing an unexpected distraction as they prepare for next month’s presidential election: a conspiracy theory that investments by Mitt Romney’s political allies in a voting machine company could rig Ohio’s results.The topic began gaining traction on the Internet earlier this month, propelled largely by left-wing websites spreading the idea that Romney-linked investments in Hart InterCivic, a Texas-based voting machine firm, could somehow jeopardize the accuracy of Ohio’s vote count on Nov. 6.

Washington: Jefferson County WA ballot accidentally asks voters to pick a president of the Untied States | Peninsula Daily News

Jefferson County voters are casting their ballots for “President/Vice President of the Untied States.” “Yes, it’s a typo,” lamented County Auditor Donna Eldridge. Eldridge and her staff didn’t notice the mistake until it was brought to her attention Tuesday by the Peninsula Daily News, which had been alerted by a Port Townsend voter earlier in the day. The mistake appears on 22,596 ballots that were sent out to voters last Wednesday. As of Tuesday afternoon, 2,901 had been returned in the all-mail election that ends at 8 p.m. Nov. 6.

Ukraine: With rival jailed, Ukraine president seems set for election victory | KGMI

Ukraine geared up on Friday for an election which many commentators expect to cement President Viktor Yanukovich’s rule, despite his jailed rival Yulia Tymoshenko calling on voters to stop an imminent “dictatorship”. Yanukovich’s Party of the Regions and a union of opposition forces backing Tymoshenko were scheduled to stage their final public rallies later on Friday in the capital Kiev ahead of Sunday’s poll for a new parliament.

National: Who Created the Voter-Fraud Myth? | The New Yorker

Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt—living in the Millsdale Street house. The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 a.m. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.” “My first thought was, Oh, no!” Sharp, who is African-American, said. “They ain’t messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to vote?”

Arizona: Supreme Court voter ID case may shape the future | UPI

The fight over whether states can demand some sort of identification before allowing voters to cast ballots has finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices agreed to hear argument on Arizona’s law requiring voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship before registering. In the heat of the final days of the U.S. presidential election the case is not drawing much attention. Any argument and decision in the case won’t come until long after Election Day. And the arguments advanced by both sides in the case may seem as dry as unbuttered toast to the average American. The battle probably appeals mainly to political activists or Supreme Court wonks. But an eventual Supreme Court decision will help shape the voting landscape of the future.

Colorado: “I Voted” sticker in Arapahoe County mail may rub some the wrong way | The Denver Post

Republicans and Democrats have long been concerned about how the vote will shake out in Arapahoe County — one of the key swing counties in an undecided state — and now they have one more thing to fear: an “I Voted” sticker. More than 230,000 ballots last week were mailed to Arapahoe County’s voters in envelopes that possibly contained a participation sticker that rubbed up against the ballot and in some cases left a faint, near-linear mark that appeared exactly where voters draw a line to select their candidates.

The Voting News Daily: Think the Florida Recount Was Bad? Just Wait Until November 6, Paper prophets: Why e-voting is on the decline in the United States

National: Think the Florida Recount Was Bad? Just Wait Until November 6 | The Atlantic The movie Unstoppable is playing this week on HBO, and it’s hard not to watch even just the trailers for the action-adventure film without seeing parallels to the coming election. Folks, we are just a little more than two weeks away from…

Florida: Palm Beach County ballot flaw causes another recount | Tampa Bay Times

It’s a ballot recount in a tight presidential race that invites easy comparisons to the electoral crisis of 2000. About 27,000 absentee ballots can’t be digitally scanned because of a recently discovered design flaw. Elections workers began Monday duplicating the markings from bad ballots to new ones so that the votes could be recorded, an effort that has led some to question the accuracy of results. And it’s all happening in Palm Beach County. “By now, questions can be asked about why these type of problems keep happening in this one county,” said Ed Foley, an Ohio State University law professor and expert on election law.

Ohio: Liberal critics worry about Romney connection to voting machines in Ohio | The Washington Post

Hart InterCivic is an Austin-based voting machine company that serves local governments nationwide. Its clients include Hamilton County, Ohio, which administers elections in Cincinnati. Hart InterCivic also has in its DNA just enough traces of Bain & Co. and Mitt Romney campaign donors to trigger serious angst in the liberal blogosphere about the fate of Ohio’s must-have 18 electoral votes.

Virginia: Fairfax Democrats warn of voting machine problems | The Washington Post

Fairfax Democrats issued a warning Thursday about reports that touch-screen voting machines were malfunctioning during early voting, switching ballot selections to the opposing candidate. Jessica Tripp and Penelope Nunez move a table at Arlington Art Center, a polling center, in preparation for Super Tuesday. (Melina Mara – The Washington Post) Fairfax County elections officials said they were aware of two instances in which voters claimed the machines had changed their votes. But officials expressed confidence that both were cases of user error.

National: Electronic Voting Machines Still Widely Used Despite Security Concerns | Huffington Post

For years, researchers have been aware of numerous security flaws in electronic voting machines. They’ve found ways to hack the machines to swap votes between candidates, reject ballots or accept 50,000 votes from a precinct with just 100 voters. Yet on Nov. 6, millions of voters — including many in hotly contested swing states — will cast ballots on e-voting machines that researchers have found are vulnerable to hackers. What is more troubling, say some critics, is that election officials have no way to verify that votes are counted accurately because some states do not use e-voting machines that produce paper ballots.After the “hanging chad” controversy of the 2000 election, Congress passed a federal law that gave states funding to replace their punch card and lever voting systems with electronic voting machines. But computer scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that a variety of electronic voting machines can be hacked — often quite easily. “Every time they are studied, we find further problems,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who researches voting machine security.

National: National tribal group focuses on voter ID laws, encourages registration in Indian Country | The Washington Post

New voter identification laws in a dozen states could negatively affect voter participation in Native American and Alaska Native communities, a tribal advocacy group says. The National Congress of American Indians released a report Monday that highlights the states, including some where photo identification will be required at the polls on Election Day. Two of the states — Alaska and Florida — do not list tribal ID cards as acceptable forms of identification at the polls. Problems with other new voter ID laws include requirements that voters provide their home addresses, since some tribal communities have no street addresses, and the “barriers of cost, logistics and distance to obtaining required IDs,” the study says.

Editorials: The Fraud of Voter Fraud | The Atlantic

Jane Mayer’s article on the invention of the voter-fraud myth is required reading as we go into the last day’s of the election. Mayer zeroes in on Hans von Spakovsky, a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has been instrumental in turning gossamer, rumor and myth into state-level election law: Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name. When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted — it was just a mistake.”

California: UVote voter registration system registers fewer students, centralizes process | Stanford Daily

Stanford’s pilot partnership with UVote, a voter registration program created at Northwestern University, registered 786 students and faculty to vote this year. The California voter registration deadline passed on Oct. 22. The new voter registration program replaced less centralized student group efforts from past years, but did not register as many voters. According to Lindsay Lamont ’13, president of the Stanford Democrats, one of the most effective methods used in past years was having “dorm captains” in each residence responsible for asking students if they were registered to vote. Lamont estimates that approximately 1,000 students registered to vote in each of the 2008 and 2010 election seasons. Sixty-six percent of new voters at Stanford this year registered to vote in California. UVote staff also helped out-of-state students fill out absentee ballot requests and mailed these forms when possible.

Florida: Does Your Vote Count? The Recount Test | CBS4

In the sleepy West Coast Florida town of Inverness, as horses graze and Spanish moss hangs still on a breezeless summer day, an elections experiment was about to get underway. Lightening fast computer scanners, locked up ballots and a team of computer scientists from Boston, embarked on a first ever mission to verify that the votes cast in the August, Citrus County primary, are correct. “Believe me we are not looking for trouble but we want to verify the results independently,” said Susan Gill, supervisor of elections in Citrus County. She is one of 7 county supervisors across Florida, who agreed to allow a number of their elections to be part of the first large scale attempt to independently verify elections cast on paper ballots.