Texas: State fights new voting supervision | SCOTUSblog

Mounting a strong counter-attack to attempts by the Obama administration and others to give federal courts new powers of supervision over Texas voting laws, officials of the Lone Star State have told a three-judge district court in San Antonio that it cannot impose that regime at this stage, or at any point unless there is new proof of “rampant” racial bias in election procedures in the state. In a fifty-four-page filing Monday evening, state officials cited the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, and told the District Court that it “cannot impose preclearance on Texas while remaining faithful to Shelby County and the constitutional principles on which it relies.”  Preclearance obligations under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the state contended, can now only be ordered if racial bias in voting in a state rises to the level of the “ever-changing discriminatory machinations that gave rise to the preclearance regime in the first place….Nothing remotely like that has occurred in modern-day Texas.”

Wisconsin: New voting bills target elderly, early voters | MSNBC

North Carolina’s omnibus bill to change election law has drawn a fair share of criticism from voting rights supporters, but Republicans in Wisconsin appear eager to give their North Carolina colleagues a run for their money when it comes to new restrictions on voting. The latest legislation comes from state Sen. Glenn Grothman, who’s pushing two bills to restrict early voting and a third that would reduce requirements on donor disclosures. One proposal would create new limits to the amount of early voting that can be offered by local elections officials, shrinking the number of hours, ending all weekend voting and allowing ballots to be cast only during regular business hours. Wisconsin enjoys some of the highest rates of voter participation in the country year after year, which has been attributed to its ample early voting period; the new proposal could significantly reduce that. The state’s chapter of the League of Women Voters is concerned that the legislation would “reduce the opportunities for voters across the state who have daytime jobs or family commitments.”

Australia: WikiLeaks founder, Senate candidate Assange says he’s proud of support in homeland | Washington Post

WikiLeaks founder and Australian Senate candidate Julian Assange says he is proud of the level of support he enjoys in his home country and has pledged to enforce transparency in Parliament if he wins a seat in elections in September. “When you turn a bright light on, the cockroaches scuttle away, and that’s what we need to do to Canberra,” the Australian capital, Assange told Nine Network television in an interview filmed in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and broadcast in Australia on Sunday. In a separate interview at the embassy, where he has taken refuge for more than a year, the 42-year-old fugitive told Ten Network that his popularity demonstrated by a recent opinion poll reflected poorly on the ruling Labor Party. The center-left government staunchly supports the U.S. condemnation of WikiLeaks’ disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Editorials: Elections in Germany: A Non-Event for Europe | Sharnoff’s Global Views

Angela Merkel, arguably the most powerful politician in the EU stands for re-election for a third term on September 22. She hopes to continue the current coalition of her conservative Christian Democrat Union (CDU) with the pro-business liberal democrats (FDP). Competing with her is Peer Steinbrück of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), who was also finance minister in Merkel’s government. His preferred coalition partner are the Greens. “Angie,” as Merkel is affectionately known, is hugely popular, but her party less so. Opinion polls now see a neck-and-neck race between Merkel’s coalition and the combined opposition, with recent momentum in favor of the Chancellor. The most likely election day scenarios are (1) the continuation of the current government (we think 50% chance), (2) a grand coalition of the CDU and the SPD with Merkel as Chancellor, as in 2005-2009 (30%) and (3) the scare scenario of SPD and Greens teaming up with the former communist Left Party (10%. The remaining 10% probability we attach collectively to various other coalition scenarios involving the mainstream parties).

Venezuela: Court Rejects Challenge to Presidential Election Results | New York Times

The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a series of legal challenges to the narrow election victory of President Nicolás Maduro, closing a chapter in what has been a bitter aftermath of the vote to replace the country’s popular longtime leader, Hugo Chávez. The court also ordered the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, who lost to Mr. Maduro by one and a half percentage points, to pay a fine of $1,698 for insulting government authority by challenging the election results and accusing the judicial system of bias in favor of the government. It said that was the maximum fine allowed. The court also asked the national prosecutor to open a criminal investigation of Mr. Capriles on charges of offending the authority of government institutions.

Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe election hit by hacking and DDoS attacks | The Inquirer

Human rightts organizations in Zimbabwe were hit by cyber attacks during and after the African country’s election last Thursday, leading to suspicions of government suppression of election monitoring. Techweek Europe reported the attacks on Tuesday, saying that some were obviously targeted while other disruptions might have been merely collateral damage. Following the election, hosting providers in the country were hit by two sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks over the weekend that took many websites that had been reporting voting results offline. Apparently the organisations hit included Fair Trade Africa, Privacy International and the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum, which also told Techweek Europe that it suspected it had been targeted by a hacking attack earlier last week.

eSwatini: Chaos At Election Nominations | allAfrica.com

The nominations process to select candidates for the forthcoming parliamentary election in Swaziland descended into chaos in parts of the kingdom. Some people boycotted the process in protest that venues selected for the nominations were unsuitable. Elsewhere equipment failures delayed the start of nomination. About 400 residents of Ebutfongweni in the Manzini region under Kukhanyeni Inkhundla said they would not participate in the nominations process because it was being conducted at Nkiliji under Chief Mkhumbi Dlamini. They said they did not pay allegiance to Chief Mkhumbi as their area was at Mbekelweni, under Chief Nkhosini. Local media reported that the residents, all of whom are registered voters, insisted that they would not participate in the process under Nkiliji after Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) officials did not show up at Ebutfongweni. They expected officers from the commission to conduct the nominations in the area as they had done so in the past.

Zimbabwe: Electoral Commission admits polls were flawed | Nehanda Radio

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has for the first time admitted that elections held last week were tainted with massive irregularities which saw 511 791 voters disenfranchised either through assisted voting or being turned away. The MDC-T led by Morgan Tsvangirai issued a statement saying the admission by the nine-member electoral commission vindicated their position that the elections were a monumental farce as “Zanu PF assisted by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and the State machinery stole the people’s victory. In the figures released by ZEC today at the request of the MDC-T, a total of 206 901 voters were assisted to vote while 304 890 people were turned away with Harare province recording the highest number of 64 483 such people,” the MDC-T said. A total of 3.4 million people voted in the disputed election.

National: Historic Civil Rights Act of 1965 Celebrates a Bittersweet Birthday | BET

It was 48 years ago today when the nation saw a landmark piece of civil rights legislation go into effect with the enacting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enacted in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, it was an act that sought to address and curtail discrimination that had existed in the United States, particularly in many of the states in the South, including many provisions to make voting more accessible for African-American citizens. The Voting Rights Act became most notable for establishing federal oversight of elections administration. It carried a key provision that prohibited various states from enacting any changes in voting laws without first obtaining approval from the Department of Justice, a process known as pre-clearance. It is that pre-clearance provision, known as Section 5 of the Act, that has long been the most controversial component of the act. The opposition to the measure grew steadily over the years, namely from Republican members of Congress who complained that it carried an unfair burden on election laws in their areas.

National: Open Source Voting Machine Reborn After 6-Year War With IRS | Wired.com

In 2006, John Seles and Gregory Miller hatched a plan to rescue democracy. At the time, the United States was pumping nearly $4 billion into new voting machines, spurred on by Florida’s 2000 presidential election fiasco. But the shift to machines built by companies such as Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Voting Systems (now called Dominion Voting Systems) had introduced all sorts of new problems. Academics were finding deep flaws in the systems, and during every election, they seemed to fail somewhere. Earlier in 2006, voting machine problems marred primary elections in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where officials scrambled to hire temp workers to reprocess thousands of unreadable optical-scan ballots. For Seles and Miller, the answer was open source software. As employees at Netscape in the late 1990s, they had helped usher in the internet age, and now they were eying another tech revolution. Voting machines seemed to be a perfect place for open source software to do what it does best: create standard pieces of technology everyone can freely share, review, and improve.

Editorials: The Voting Rights Act Is in Peril on Its Forty-Eighth Anniversary | Ari Berman/The Nation

“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson said on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The VRA quickly became known as the most important piece of modern civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. It led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters; forced states with a history of voting discrimination to clear electoral changes with the federal government to prevent future discrimination; and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials.

Editorials: Make voting easy, efficient and fair | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In his State of the Union address in February, President Barack Obama introduced Desiline Victor, who, at 102 years old, had waited in line three hours to vote in North Miami, Fla. The president lauded Ms. Victor’s commitment to democracy, but he left out a key fact about her hardship: Compared to some voters, she hadn’t stood in line all that long. In 2008, for example, students at Ohio’s Kenyon College waited as long as 10 hours to vote, with some casting ballots at 4 a.m. The 2000 election meltdown in Florida pulled the curtain back on our dysfunctional system of voting, offering a primer on just about everything wrong with American elections, from burdensome voter registration to faulty vote tabulation. The crisis inspired repeated efforts at reform. A few, such as the Help America Vote Act of 2002 — which, among other things, provided funds for better voting machines — even made a modest difference. Yet three presidential elections after the 2000 fiasco, the basic mechanics of our democracy remain deeply flawed. One reason so little has changed, clearly, is that plenty of powerful people prefer a system that makes it hard to vote. But there have been some real reforms in the states, many won with bipartisan support, and there is room for well-crafted compromises. Improving elections may not be easy, but it is possible.

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Florida: Rick Scott Plans To Resume Voter Purge Effort In Florida | Reuters

Florida Governor Rick Scott is planning a new effort to purge non-U.S. citizens from the state’s voter rolls, a move that last year prompted a series of legal challenges and claims from critics his administration was trying to intimidate minority voters. Voter protection groups identified a number of errors in the state’s attempt to identify people who are not American citizens on Florida’s voter lists months ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November 2012. The search also sparked several lawsuits, including one by the U.S. Justice Department, which claimed the effort violated federal law since it was conducted less than 90 days before the election. “We were recently informed that the State plans to continue their efforts to remove non-citizens from Florida’s voter rolls,” Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Penelope Townsley said in a statement.

Mississippi: Stokes: Hinds County shouldn’t pay legally mandated election costs | The Clarion-Ledger

The law says the state’s boards of supervisors must pay for all county elections. But that goes out the window, Hinds County District 5 Supervisor Kenneth Stokes says, if the election costs exceed what he believes the county can afford. He and two other board members voted to ask the Mississippi Attorney General’s office to rule on whether Hinds County has to pay, with Hinds County Election Commission members warning him that ballots by law must be printed out by Friday. Stokes’ train of thought prompted an immediate threat of a lawsuit by Hinds County Republican Executive Committee chair Pete Perry. Stokes got into a shouting match today with Perry, Hinds County Democratic Executive Committee head Jackie Norris, and the Hinds County Election Commission when he said the county doesn’t have the money to pay for primary elections in September to fill supervisor seats in Districts 2 and 4. It’s estimated that costs to run the primary will be about $67,000, and that’s after both Democratic and Republican parties sat at the table together and honed costs down from about $200,000.

Mississippi: Hinds County election impasse remains | The Clarion-Ledger

When Hinds County supervisors met Tuesday afternoon to again try to decide if they’ll pay for the county’s Sept. 24 special primary elections, the person adamantly opposed to writing the check wasn’t around for a vote. District 5 Supervisor Kenneth Stokes, who Monday said the county can’t afford to pay about $67,000 for the primaries and questioned state law that requires it, didn’t return after lunch Tuesday to the Board of Supervisors’ budget hearings, which were to be interrupted at 4 p.m. so that the panel could take up the matter of the elections. He will get another chance to have his say when the board meets at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday to delve back into the matter.

New York: Fraud cases center on absentee ballots | Newsday

Absentee ballots often generate intrigue, suspicion and allegations across party lines. It is easy to see why. “Other ballots are filed at the polling place — where presumably people keep an eye on what goes on,” explained a New York elections expert. “Absentee ballots go wherever they go and then come back with somebody delivering them.” How they’re handled, and by whom, opens chances for irregularities. Last week, Frances Knapp, the Dutchess County election board’s Democratic commissioner, was accused on 94 criminal counts of misconduct and false-instrument filing. Under the law, an absentee voter may designate an agent to handle his or her ballot. Two years ago, says the indictment announced by Dutchess District Attorney William Grady, Knapp permitted the names of such designated agents “to be fraudulently changed” in the county’s computer system.

North Carolina: Voting Laws Could Hinge On Evidence Of Racism | Huffington Post

In recent weeks, civil-rights advocates and legal experts in North Carolina have contemplated a provocative question: Are the state’s Republican lawmakers racist? The answer could determine the future of North Carolina’s voting laws. If a court finds that the state’s lawmakers have engaged in a deliberate attempt to discriminate against minority voters, the federal government could require the state to clear all future election policies with the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court. That would renew the federal oversight that ended with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act. In June, a 5-4 United States Supreme Court majority struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that required jurisdictions with extensive histories of discriminating against minorities — including eight states in the South and parts of other states — to get “preclearance” from the DOJ before making changes to their voting policies.

Ohio: Officers’ voting address: Police HQ | The Columbus Dispatch

County elections officials say they think a clerical error is to blame for 19 Columbus police officers having their voting addresses listed as the Downtown police headquarters. Workers at the Franklin County Board of Elections earlier this year discovered voters who had registered their voting address as the police building on Marconi Boulevard. The registrations were caught as workers scoured the voting rolls for nonresidential addresses at the direction of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted. Husted isn’t particularly concerned about police officers registering their work addresses, spokesman Matt McClelland said. Instead, he wants local election officials to find out if people are registering the addresses of Federal Express or United Parcel Service offices where they might keep a mailbox, or other means of masking their home address.

Pennsylvania: Details of voter ID enforcement ban in dispute | Associated Press

Both sides in the trial over Pennsylvania’s voter-identification law agree that it should not be enforced in the Nov. 5 general election, but the judge will have to settle a dispute over the details, according to court papers filed this week. Plaintiffs seeking to overturn the 17-month-old law argue that any new court order barring enforcement of the photo ID requirement should remain in effect until the state Supreme Court resolves questions about its constitutionality. “Nothing has changed since last fall, or is likely to change in the future, that would justify lifting the preliminary injunction before the end of this case,” the plaintiffs’ legal team argued in a brief filed Monday in state Commonwealth Court.

Pennsylvania: How Much Is Voter ID Defense Costing Pennsylvania? | WESA

Pennsylvania taxpayers still haven’t seen a final tab on what the state is being charged by a private firm to defend the voter identification law in court. In fact, a contract was not publicly available until the day after closing arguments were delivered in the case. Philadelphia firm Drinker, Biddle and Reath hasn’t yet sent an invoice to the state for services rendered in 2013. The hourly rate ranges from $325 to $495. Last year, the firm was paid more than $204,000 for defense of voter ID as judges considered temporarily blocking the law.

Pennsylvania: Voter ID update | Philadelphia Inquirer

Civil rights and other groups seeking to overturn the state’s controversial voter ID law are asking a Commonwealth Court judge to block the law from taking effect until all appeals have been exhausted. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and other public interest groups are also asking Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley to prevent poll workers, come the November election, from asking voters to show ID – or even informing them that it will be required in future elections – while the case is being decided. Whatever the outcome in Commonwealth Court, the case is widely expected to be appealed to the state Supreme Court. “The uncontroverted evidence illustrates that this practice has only confused poll workers and voters, with no benefit to anyone,” the petitioners’ brief, filed Monday, reads. The state said during the trial, which concluded last week, that it had no problem extending the injunction on the law through this November’s election.

Australia: Election Commission Twitter Account Hacked | International Business Times

Early Tuesday morning the twitter account of the Australian election commission was hacked and users started to get messages from the hacked account. The hacker launched a phishing attack from the hacked account aimed at getting the login details of the users. Australian voters have been asked to ignore direct messages purportedly sent from the Australian Electoral Commission, after the commission’s Twitter account was hacked. Unsuspecting users got messages for the Election commission’s hacked twitter account with a clickable link with some messages reading “I found a funny pic of you!” by clicking this link the victims would be taken to a fake twitter page for “authentication” if the user fills in the login details the account details reach the hacker and the newly hacked account can be used to further spread the phishing scam and obtain more login details.

Germany: Spy agreements scrapped as privacy becomes election issue | Europe Online

Germany cancelled Tuesday a treaty that commits it to hand over surveillance data to France as Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s government seeks to insulate itself from the Edward Snowden disclosures rankling Germans seven weeks before elections. The cancellation is the third in five days. On Friday, similar agreements with the United States and Britain were scrapped in Berlin Foreign Ministry meetings with diplomats from those nations. The agreement related to untakings by West Germany in 1968-69 to provide telecommunications intercepts in cases where the safety of US, British and French troops based on its territory was at risk. Merkel‘s government says it is reviewing the scale of intelligence cooperation with the US National Security Agency after Snowden, who has won temporary asylum in Russia, began revelations two months ago of the PRISM programme to harvest global phone and email metadata. The Foreign Ministry, describing the old West German treaties as administrative agreements, said they were cancelled in exchanges of notes with each of the other three nations. US, British and French troops occupied Germany in 1945, and remain there as allies.

Zimbabwe: Did Robert Mugabe Steal an Election in Zimbabwe Last Week? | Pacific Standard

Last week, we reported claims by Global Witness, a London-based NGO that tracks mining and resource industries, that money from a diamond field seized by Zimbabwe’s military was funding election activities for incumbent leader Robert Mugabe. The organization claimed the money had flowed from the diamond business to higher-ups in the Zimbabwe military, and from there to Mugabe’s political party, as patronage. They didn’t give many specifics, however, on how this worked, or any evidence that they had found diamond money in the election coffers. Zimbabwe’s diamond industry operates under several sanctions for violations of the Kimberley Process, an international convention designed to prevent diamonds mined in conflict areas or under inhumane conditions—so called “blood diamonds”—from entering the market. Global Witness’ case was circumstantial. A few days later, we know that Mugabe’s party won the election, and by a large margin, though pre-election polls had shown a tight race.

Zimbabwe: Second Zimbabwe electoral official quits | AFP

A senior Zimbabwean election official said Tuesday he has resigned, just days after a colleague quit over the conduct of the vote that extended President Robert Mugabe’s 33-year rule. “Yes, I have resigned (from the Zimbabwe Election Commission),” law professor Geoff Feltoe told AFP. “I am going back to the university. I have always intended to do so and I am going there,” he said, referring to the University of Zimbabwe. Feltoe refused to say if his decision was related to the conduct of the hotly disputed presidential and parliamentary elections last Wednesday that gave Mugabe another five-year term.

California: Election Hack: Stealing Votes the Cyber Way | FBI

A 22-year-old candidate for student council president at California State University San Marcos hoped to guarantee victory by rigging the election through cyber fraud, but he ended up winning a year in prison instead. Matthew Weaver used small electronic devices called keyloggers to steal the passwords and identities of nearly 750 fellow students. Then he cast votes for himself—and some of his friends on the ballot—using the stolen names. He was caught during the final hour of the election in March 2012 when network administrators noticed unusual voting activity associated with a single computer on campus. A Cal State police officer sent to investigate found Weaver working at that machine. He had cast more than 600 votes for himself using the stolen identities. “Some people wanted to paint this as a college prank gone bad, but he took the identities of almost 750 people, and that’s a serious thing,” said Special Agent Charles Chabalko, who worked the investigation out of our San Diego Division after being contacted by Cal State authorities. “He had access to these students’ e-mails, financial information, and their social networks. He had access to everything.”

California: Humboldt County embraces new system for election transparency | California Forward

Want to see every ballot cast in the last election with your own two eyes? The Humboldt County Registrar makes that possible in her home near the Oregon border. Humboldt Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich responded to controversy and an outcry from residents by creating a system for anyone to request a scanned version of the vote through the Humboldt County Elections Transparency Project. In 2008, to the dismay of Humboldt County voters, 197 votes (or 0.3 percent of the total vote) disappeared due to a software malfunction. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time for this software to simply delete ballots and Crnich was rightly approached by constituents who had grave concerns regarding the voting system soon after the election results. The software is made by Diebold, a name which may conjure up memories of hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and other issues in 2004. Crnich and that same group of constituents did an audit after connecting the dots on Diebold’s spotty history and found the missing ballots. Locals thought the software was too closed off from the public and wanted a better auditing process. After pinpointing the problem, the Secretary of State’s office swiftly initiated an investigation and decertified the faulty software.

Illinois: Little changes expected in online voter registration | Quincy Herald-Whig

Voters in Illinois will have a new way to register to vote. Illinois will be able register online after Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation into law last month. Adams County Clerk Georgia Volm believes that county clerks have been preparing for online registration in recent years by assembling voters databases to check rolls when someone registers. “We have the information we need available to us that when someone goes online to register, everything will come to us automatically,” she said. “And then we will be using the checks we’ve been building in this statewide database for a number of years.” Online voter registration will start July 1, 2014.

Kansas: Brownback hesitant to weigh in on voter registration problems | Lawrence Journal-World

Gov. Sam Brownback on Monday didn’t seem to want to get involved in the controversy over the 13,000 Kansans whose voter registrations are up in the air. When asked about it, Brownback, a Republican, referred to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, also a Republican. “It’s in the secretary of state’s purview,” Brownback said. Brownback acknowledged an interest in the voting booth being “open for people.” “We’ll watch and review the process as it’s coming forward, but there is a constitutional officer that’s in charge of that.” Again, that’s a reference to Kobach.

New Jersey: Crtics say New Jersey ballot dated and unfair | pressofAtlanticCity.com

In the years since Bush vs. Gore highlighted the inconsistent, patchwork and sometimes tenuous nature of the nation’s voting system, election officials throughout the country have taken steps to improve the process. But variety still abounds since that disputed 2000 presidential race, in part because the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment allocates power to the states, generally barring federal officials from imposing a single ballot design standard. Some voters still darken circles on ballots next to their choices. Others use an iPad-like device. In Oregon and Washington, elections are done through the mail. In New Jersey, voters cast their ballot on a grid that opponents of the design say gives an unfair advantage to established powers.