Montana: 20,000 Missoula election ballots to be recounted | The Missoulian

A missed step on the last box of ballots sent what otherwise was an uneventful election into a late-night recount. Missoula County Clerk and Recorder Vickie Zeier said the final machine-counting of 359 ballots was recorded but not saved properly to a computer memory disk. Election workers used tracking sheets to re-create the count – checking 12 ballots from one ward, 62 from another, and so on according to the list of what was in that final box.

Texas: Jim Wright gets his voter ID card; local resident not as lucky | Weatherford Democrat

Former U.S. Speaker of the House Jim Wright was able to resolve his problem obtaining a new Texas Voter ID card in time for Tuesday’s election. A Weatherford resident was not as fortunate. Wright, a former World War II bombardier, Weatherford resident and mayor, Congressman and now a Fort Worth resident, says he’s finally obtained the documents he needs to vote under new state law on Election Day. Wright told The Associated Press on Monday that he received a temporary version of a state ID that proves his identity under Texas’ Voter ID law, which gets its first major test in Tuesday’s election. Wright, 90, was turned away last week when he tried to obtain proper ID with an expired driver’s license or university faculty ID. Weatherford resident Lisa Blevins was not as lucky.

Editorials: Texas holds ’em voteless with new ID law | The Washington Post

Greg Abbott, the Republican attorney general of Texas, campaigned long and loud for the state’s new voter ID law. The law is a transparent effort to tilt elections in the state to Republicans by suppressing the minority vote, which is becoming more important as Texas’s demographics shift. So it was a rich irony that Mr. Abbott, who is running for governor, himself set off alarms as a suspicious voter the other day, along with a state judge, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, former speaker of the House Jim Wright and uncounted and unnamed others who tried to vote on a set of state constitutional amendments. The new law, passed by the GOP-dominated state legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, masquerades as a tool to combat election fraud. In fact, as in other states that have enacted similar measures, there is no statistically significant — or even insignificant — evidence of in-person fraud at the polls in Texas.

Virginia: Dead heat in Virginia attorney general’s race; recount expected | The Washington Post

The Virginia attorney general’s race was a virtual dead heat and headed for a recount early Wednesday morning, with Republican State Sen. Mark D. Obenshain clinging to a 778-vote lead over Democratic State Sen. Mark Herring with 2.1 million ballots cast, according to an unofficial Associated Press count. State election law provides for the trailing candidate to request a recount if the margin is less that 1 percent of the total vote. Speaking to reporters just before midnight, Herring (D-Leesburg) said he would request a recount. “The race for attorney general is razor-close, and the commonwealth has a process to make sure all the votes are counted, and we are going to make sure we go through that process. Right now, it’s basically 50-50 and the numbers have been moving in our direction all night. The race is far from over. And we are going to make sure we follow the process and make sure every single vote is counted.”

Wisconsin: Federal trial challenging Wisconsin’s voter ID law underway | Journal Sentinel

Minorities and senior citizens testified Monday about costly and time-consuming difficulties they faced in getting photo identification as they pressed their case to permanently invalidate Wisconsin’s voter ID law. The federal trial that kicked off Monday involves two cases and is expected to last two weeks. A Dane County judge in a different case has already blocked the law, but opponents of voter ID are pursuing the federal litigation in an attempt to ensure the requirement never goes back into effect. Assistant attorneys general defended the law in court, saying requiring IDs was a reasonable way to curb fraud and maintain public confidence in the way the state runs elections. “Voter fraud is real,” Assistant Attorney General Clayton Kawski said. “It is not a myth.” The trial began with a string of people describing the problems they had in trying to secure IDs for themselves or family members. Some of them have yet to be successful. “I cannot express the amount of time, energy and frustration it required” to get a license for her mother, Debra Crawford testified. Crawford’s mother, Bettye Jones, was the lead plaintiff in one of the cases before the court Monday. Jones died in October 2012.

Australia: Missing votes a rare event in Australian Electoral Commission history | Sydney Morning Herald

This year’s election hasn’t been a great one for the Australian Electoral Commission. First, there were reports of ”missing” ballots in the seat of Indi. Then Clive Palmer has remained a vocal critic and made frequent attacks questioning the AEC’s integrity. Finally, last week came the revelation that 1375 votes have gone missing from the West Australian Senate recount. The first two events are less substantive. In the case of Indi, the ”missing” ballots were never missing. There was a transcription error that made it appear the ballots were missing when they never were. In the case of Palmer, the rhetoric about the AEC ”rigging” elections is unsubstantiated and so contrary to what we know about the AEC and how it operates, that I don’t know of a single political scientist or an official or politician from either major party who supports that allegation. And the major parties have long histories of witnessing how the AEC and its predecessors operate.

Canada: Candidates have until Monday to request a recount | Montreal Gazette

Montreal’s elections office issued the official results of Sunday’s municipal elections on Tuesday afternoon, which means the period for requesting official recounts has begun. After a municipal election, officials double-check that the ballot counts filled in on forms at each polling station correspond to the numbers that were reported to the Elections Montreal office by telephone immediately after counting the votes at each polling office, Elections Montreal spokesperson Pierre G. Laporte said. The process takes a couple of days, at which point the official election results are posted, he said.

Kosovo: Vote count for northern Kosovo yet to begin | B92

Roberto Gualtieri said on Tuesday that the vote count for polling stations in the four municipalities in northern Kosovo and Metohija has not begun yet. Gualtieri is chief observer of the EU Election Observation Mission. The election materials are in Priština, and our job is to monitor and analyze the process. In relation to that, the Central Electoral Commission should assess the situation and deliver a decision, Gualtieri said at a press conference. The EU Election Observation Mission condemns the attacks on the three polling stations in northern Kosovska Mitrovica, Gualtieri said, underlining that the attempts at sabotage failed. The EU mission assessed positively the electoral process in Kosovo, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) offered key assistance to the process, despite great challenges, he said.

Australia: Australian Electoral Commission apologises for lost senate votes | ABC

The Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn, in his first interview since the AEC lost 1375 ballot papers in the Western Australian senate recount, has admitted that the public’s confidence in the AEC has been damaged as a result of the debacle. Speaking with RN’s Breakfast, Mr Killesteyn said that the ‘gravity of the situation’ had not been lost on him. ‘Nearly 1400 Western Australian electors have had their Senate vote disenfranchised and I apologise unreservedly to all those electors,’ he said. ‘We’re left with a nagging and almost irreconcilable doubt about the outcome of the WA Senate election.’ Mr Killestyn added that a shift to electronic voting, where a vote is registered straight away and can’t be tampered with, was ‘inevitable.’

Kosovo: Disrupted Kosovo vote to be repeated in some Serb areas | Europe Online

“Voting material from three election centres in Mitrovica was totally unusable and the central election commission decided to annul and repeat the vote there,” commission member Nenad Rikalo said. The date for the repeat vote will be announced later, he told Serbian state television RTS. Electoral committee members prepare for voting in the municipal elections at a polling station in the ethnically divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica, Kosovo, 03 November 2013. Voting was cut short Sunday in Mitrovica when masked Serb extremists attacked officials and smashed ballot boxes. Other violations, such as intimidation of voters, also marred the day.

National: Presumed guilty: Ex-felons face barriers to voting rights | MSNBC

When the votes are tallied in Virginia’s race for governor on Tuesday, over 300,000 citizens will be missing from the voting rolls – including 20% of the state’s black population. The reason is not low turnout or voter ID, but a growing and often invisible barrier to voting that is upending elections around the country. Over 5 million Americans are barred from voting because they have criminal records, according to a report this year from the Sentencing Project. The crackdown on ballot access is so intense, a majority of states actually bar former convicts from voting even after they are released from prison.  If voting rights were restored to those former inmates, about 4.3 million more Americans would be able to vote. That is over three times margin of victory in the last House midterm elections.

Editorials: Voter ID laws disenfranchise women | St. Louis Post Dispatch

Republican attempts to use voter identification laws to suppress voting by people more likely to vote for Democrats has created a class of victims it probably was not intended for. Women. Even Republican women. The GOP has tried to thinly veil its efforts by claiming that voter ID laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but the figures on voter fraud — which is almost nil everywhere — show that to be a phony excuse. The real reason is to make voting more difficult for blacks, Hispanics, the young, the elderly and the poor, who traditionally tend to vote for Democrats. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act in June, several states raced to put new voter ID laws into effect. Attention initially focused on the way such laws affected African-Americans and Hispanics. Now the focus of concern is on women. To quote the governor of Texas, a state that’s making harder for women to vote, “Oops.”

Colorado: State Election Law Once Again Challenged in Colorado Courts | Examiner.com

The Colorado Election Law, HB13-1303 Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act of 2013, passed in haste last legislative session on a straight party-line vote (the Senate sponsors of the bill, Angela Giron and John Morse, were subsequently removed from office in Colorado’s first legislative recall elections in state history) has once again been challenged in court. The Libertarian Party of Colorado, joined by several individual plaintiffs, filed suit in Denver District Court (Saturday, 2 November 2013) seeking to ensure that voters in this year’s coordinated (nonpartisan) municipal and special-district (including school board) elections were able to vote – and only able to vote – on those races for which they were eligible under state statute and the provisions of the Colorado Constitution.

Georgia: Voting Rights At Risk in Georgia | Rolling Stone

In June, the Supreme Court’s Shelby v. Holder decision disarmed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, freeing nine states – mostly in the South – from having to submit election procedure changes for the Justice Department’s approval. The vast majority of voting laws that the department objected to as discriminatory came from towns and counties, rather than the state level. Since the ruling, such localities have seen both quiet changes to election code and also deep uncertainties among civil rights advocates who long relied on this key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The state of Georgia alone offers many examples. The city of Athens, for instance, is considering a proposal to eliminate nearly half of its 24 polling sites in favor of creating two early voting centers – both located inside police stations. Madelyn Clare Powell, a longtime civil rights activist in Athens, worries that some voters cannot regard police stations as neutral territory. “There is a major intimidation factor here – these police stations are seen by some in the community as hostile territory,” says Powell, citing historical tension between white police forces and minority communities in the region. Local activists also fear that the poll closures disproportionally impact neighborhoods with higher shares of minorities and college students, requiring three-hour bus rides for some public-transit dependent voters.

Minnesota: Lawsuit challenges Minnesota’s online voter registration system | Star Tribune

A group of Republican lawmakers and two interest groups who pushed for voter ID now are going to court to stop a state website that allows voters to register online. In a lawsuit filed in Ramsey County District Court on Monday, the group contends that DFL Secretary of State Mark Ritchie overstepped his ­authority when he launched the website in September. More than 2,000 Minnesotans have submitted voter registration applications since then. Dan McGrath, president of Minnesota Majority, said Monday that the lawsuit will not immediately affect anyone who used the system to register for Tuesday’s local elections. But, he said, it could be used to challenge the results of those elections, particularly in close races. The suit seeks action by mid-December. If a court found that Ritchie lacked the authority to start the website, the group could ask that votes cast by those who registered online be disqualified. More than 80 city and school board races are being held across the state on Tuesday, including mayoral contests in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Montana: Native Vote Lawsuit Heads Back to District Court and a New Judge | ICTMN

The Native voting-rights lawsuit, Wandering Medicine v. McCulloch, is headed back to Montana district court for a rematch. On October 30, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Portland, Oregon, dismissed the Montana tribal members’ appeal in the suit because it applied to reservation polling places they’d been denied for the 2012 election, and that election is over. However, the appeals panel also “vacated” the district court’s denial of the offices. In November 2012, the lower-court judge acknowledged that Montana’s Native people don’t have equal voting opportunities. However, since they have had some success electing representatives of their choice, they don’t need any more access, the judge reasoned. That judge has since retired following an unrelated scandal. Thanks to the Ninth Circuit’s decision, a new judge will hear the case and decide whether the reservation polling places should be provided in future elections.

Texas: Is voter ID failing the test already? | MSNBC

Jim Wright was once the speaker of the U.S. House, and third in line to the presidency. But Texas’ strict voter ID law nearly prevented him from casting a vote this year. With several major elections and numerous lower-profile races scheduled for Tuesday, Wright’s difficulties are the latest sign that, a year after President Obama pledged to fix America’s broken voting system, it’s more dysfunctional than ever. Wright, 90, has voted every year since 1944. But he realized last week that his driver’s license had expired. Wright has a faculty ID from Texas Christian University, where he teaches political science, but Texas’s voting law doesn’t accept university IDs. So he went Saturday to a government office to get a state ID card. But he was told he’d need to come back Monday with a certified copy of his birth certificate. Wright told msnbc that he was finally able to get his ID on Monday. But he worries about others who may not be able to take as much time. “I think you become a bit discouraged and dismayed and confused, and throw up your hands and say, ‘I’m not going to vote,’” said Wright, a Democrat who served as Speaker in the 1980s and was one of a minority of Texas congressmen who voted for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In fact, Wright said he thinks dissuading voters is the point of the law. “I do believe that there’s an apprehension on their part, unreasonably so, of too many people voting. I hate to say that.”

Texas: Voter ID Law Ensnares Former Speaker of the House, Candidates for Governor, State Judge | The Nation

Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright has voted in every election since 1944 and represented Texas in Congress for thirty-four years. But when he went to his local Department of Public Safety office to obtain the new voter ID required to vote—which he never needed in any previous election—the 90-year-old Wright was denied. His driver’s license is expired and his Texas Christian University faculty ID is not accepted as a valid form of voter ID. To be able to vote in Texas, including in Tuesday’s election for statewide constitutional amendments, Wright’s assistant will have to get a certified copy of his birth certificate, which costs $22. According to the state of Texas, 600,000 to 800,000 registered voters in Texas don’t have a valid form of government-issued photo ID. Wright is evidently one of them. But unlike Wright, most of these voters will not have an assistant or the political connections of a former Speaker of the House to help them obtain a birth certificate to prove their identify, nor can they necessarily make two trips to the DMV office or afford a birth certificate. The devil is in the details when it comes to voter ID. And the rollout of the new law in Texas is off to a very bad start. “I earnestly hope these unduly stringent requirements on voters won’t dramatically reduce the number of people who vote,” Wright told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I think they will reduce the number to some extent.”

Editorials: The Voting Fraud Bust that Proves Texas’ Voter ID Law Is Useless | Philip Bump/The Atlantic

A 55-year-old woman in Texas plead guilty to voter fraud on Monday for forging ballots in the 2012 primary election. The case will certainly become fodder in the defense of the state’s new, restrictive voter ID law. But it shows, above all else, how completely unnecessary that law actually is. According to an alert from the FBI (which we saw via Ryan Reilly), Sonia Leticia Solis faces up to five years in prison after her sentencing next February. She admitted that she obtained “multiple mail-in ballots by forging applications on behalf of individuals she represented to be disabled.” How many votes she actually completed isn’t clear, nor is the race which she was hoping to influence. The FBI notes that the race at issue “included candidates running for the U.S. House of Representatives,” and that Solis was a resident of Brownsville. That puts her in Texas’ new congressional district, the 34th, and means that she committed the fraud while voting in either the primary or run-off elections in that district for either party. Solis could have had the most effect if she’d been voting in the Republican primary in the heavily-Democratic district. That race was settled by only 223 votes. So Solis would “only” have had to come up with 223 different people that were eligible to vote that didn’t plan to, forge their applications and votes, and return each to the state.

Virginia: 38,000 Voters Removed from Virginia’s Voter Rolls | State of Elections

On Friday October 18, a federal district judge in Virginia’s northern district rejected the Democratic Party’s request for an injunction blocking the removal of 38,000 voters from the Virginia voter rolls. Democrats contended that the lists used to remove voters are inaccurate. The road to this case emerged in the spring of 2013, when the state board of elections, in an attempt to combat voter fraud, decided to examine the Virginia voter rolls to weed out voters also registered in other states. The purge was conducted using a program called Crosscheck, which matches Virginia’s rolls against voters registered in other states. Crosscheck revealed 308,000 Virginia voters with duplicate registrations. Twenty-five states use this program. Democrats contend that it is “deeply flawed.” The decision to remove voters from the rolls resulted from Virginia state code “§ 24.2-404(4) and the newly enacted §§ 24.2-404(10) and 24.2-404.4 effective July 1, 2013. These statutes collectively require the State Board of Elections” (SBE) to coordinate with other states to identify and remove duplicate voter registrations to avoid voter fraud, explained Secretary of State Board of Elections Don Palmer in an interview with State of Elections (SOE). The board then voted “to refer any alleged double voting” to the office of the Attorney General, headed by gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli.

Wisconsin: Voter ID law heads to trial | Washington Post

Opponents of a Wisconsin law requiring voters to show photo identifications at the polls will have their day in federal court Monday in a case likely to have an impact on other states that have amended their voting laws in recent years. Civil-rights groups sued over the Wisconsin law, initially passed in 2011, after a 77-year old woman couldn’t provide the documents necessary to receive a Wisconsin driver’s license. The Advancement Project, a voting-rights group based in Washington, contends the voter ID law places an outsized burden on minorities. The case also includes a challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union, which says elderly and low-income voters are disproportionately impacted. The case is the first to come to trial after the Supreme Court struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act used to determine whether states must seek Justice Department approval before making changes to election laws.

Wisconsin: Walker withdraws elections board nomination | Associated Press

Gov. Scott Walker wants to replace, without explanation, the former judge who led the nonpartisan elections board during Walker’s recall in 2012, raising questions about his motives for the unusual move. Walker’s office today provided The Associated Press with a copy of the governor’s Oct. 24 letter withdrawing the nomination for Senate confirmation of Judge David Deininger. Walker spokesman Tom Evenson had no comment on why the governor made the move. A Senate committee was to vote on the nomination Tuesday. “I feel like I’ve been fired and I don’t know why,” said Deininger, a former Republican lawmaker who was first appointed to the Government Accountability Board in 2008 by then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat. The board was established to be a nonpartisan arbiter of the state’s election and ethics laws, but some of its decisions have so angered Republicans they have called for it to be abolished and reconstituted.

Wisconsin: Voter ID trial begins | Politico

Voter ID advocates and opponents alike will be watching Wisconsin on Monday as a new federal trial on the state’s photo ID law begins. The case is the first federal trial under the Voting Rights Act since the Supreme Court struck down part of the law in June, and it’s one of the first cases to challenge voter ID under what’s known as Section 2 of the VRA. Section 2, which was unaffected by the Supreme Court’s decision, prohibits procedures that discriminate based on race and other protected groups. “I think that everyone’s going to be looking at what happens in Wisconsin,” said Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law and political science professor and author of Election Law Blog. “Whoever’s on the successful side will say, ‘See, we told you,’ and whoever’s on the losing side will either say the court got it wrong or point to factual differences [in their state], but it will be important because it’s one of the first Section 2 challenges to the voting ID law.” The trial covers two challenges to the law, one brought by the group Advancement Project, which argues that the Wisconsin law is particularly burdensome on voters of color, and another brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which focuses on minorities as well as elderly, student, low-income, disabled and homeless voters.

Australia: West Australian voters likely to be forced back to the polls after AEC admits ineptitude in Senate ballot | Telegraph

The Australian Electoral Commission has admitted its incompetence will send almost 2.5 million voters back to the polls. Despite yesterday declaring six politcal “winners” amid farcical scenes in the Western Australia Senate race, the AEC hinted it would challenge its own result after losing 1400 votes. The challenge would likely trigger a fresh poll. Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn apologised for the lost ballot papers, conceding it was likely they had been lost forever, and hinted he would petition for a fresh election. “I’m obligated to declare the result, irrespective of the fact that these ballots are missing. Legally, I just have no other choice,” he said. “Nearly 1400 West Australian electors have had their Senate votes disenfranchised and I apologise unreservedly to all of those electors,” Mr Killesteyn told ABC Radio before the result was handed down.

Kosovo: Rerun of Vote Expected | Wall Street Journal

Violence that forced voting stations to close early on Sunday in the Serbian-dominated city of north Mitrovica and led to the destruction of ballots is likely to prompt Kosovo authorities to order a rerun of elections there, officials said on Monday. While violence was a blow to European Union-brokered peace efforts between Serbia and Kosovo, regional and European officials stressed that elections went smoothly in the rest of the country and there was significant turnout of ethnic Serbs in southern Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians dominate. On Tuesday, the EU’s election mission will issue its preliminary verdict on the conduct of Sunday’s elections. Decisions on whether and how to boost security in the north in coming weeks are still being considered, officials said.

Nepal: Protests heighten tensions ahead of election | theguardian.com

Protests and logistical challenges are heightening tensions before a scheduled 19 November national poll in Nepal that is seen as critical to the country’s stability and development, say analysts. Voters are to choose a new constituent assembly (CA), which serves as the country’s parliament. The previous assembly dissolved in May 2012 after failing to produce a much-anticipated postwar constitution. Citizens have looked to a new constitution to help the country emerge from the 1996-2006 civil war that killed more than 15,000 people. But the contentious issues that stalled its drafting, including how to structure the state and share power, remain unresolved. In January 2013, the UN noted that high-level political stagnation was allowing the “slow but persistent deterioration of democratic institutions and effective governance”. The humanitarian costs of the constitutional stalemate are high. Without it, several pieces of legislation, including a disaster management act and the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission, have been on hold. Meanwhile, logistical challenges and threats of violence loom over the polls.

National: Republicans target minor parties after election losses | Washington Post

Republican legislators and political activists in several red states are taking steps to make it harder for minor party candidates to make the ballot after a string of elections Democrats won with less than 50 percent of the vote. The Ohio legislature voted earlier this week to require minor parties to collect signatures of 1 percent of the number of voters who cast ballots in the last gubernatorial or presidential election. Libertarians and Green Party members complain that the rule — which would require them to gather about 56,000 signatures to make the 2014 ballot — sets an impossibly high standard. In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed legislation earlier this year to require candidates running for Congress to collect enough signatures to represent one-third of 1 percent of registered voters in their respective districts. That’s a 40-fold increase in the number of signatures Libertarian Party candidates would have to collect.

Arizona: Measure to overturn new Arizona election law qualifies for ballot | Los Angeles Times

A ballot measure to overturn a Republican-backed state bill that made sweeping changes to Arizona election law was certified this week as having more than enough valid signatures, but on Friday opponents vowed to challenge those signatures in court. The effort to block the measure is the latest round in a growing fight in Arizona that revolves around voter participation and allegations of fraud. Democrats contend that the Republican-led Legislature passed the measure in June as part of a bigger movement to make it more difficult for minorities to vote and third-party candidates to run in the state. Republicans said the law was needed to curb voter fraud and streamline the voting system. Opponents of the law quickly got to work on qualifying a measure for the ballot in the next general election. On Tuesday, Arizona officials announced that the measure had the necessary signatures required for the 2014 ballot.

Colorado: Libertarian Party of Colorado sues for voting rights | Washington Times

The Libertarian Party of Colorado filed suit in Denver District Court Friday, seeking immediate relief from the inherent conflicts in and unlawful implementation of HB 1303, the Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act. It is also widely known as the Voter Fraud Bill for its “catch me if you can” approach to voting integrity. The suit claims that the new law disenfranchises voters because of the way it changes residency requirements. Since the requirements of the law conflict with local election codes, county clerks have implemented the law in different ways, making things even worse. The defendants in the case are Secretary of State Scott Gessler, county clerks Gilbert Ortiz (Pueblo County), Wayne Williams (El Paso), Jack Arrowsmith (Douglas), and Matt Crane (Arapahoe), representing a defendant class of all Colorado County Clerk & Recorders.

Connecticut: Same-day voter registration debuts Tuesday | Danbury NewsTimes

Those who haven’t registered to vote by Election Day still have a chance to sign up and have their voices heard. For the first time, Connecticut is offering Election Day registration for Tuesday’s municipal elections, making it one of 11 states to do so. “The right to vote and access to elections is a paramount right and responsibility of our democracy,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement released Friday. “Same-day voting helps to ensure that all citizens have a voice in their government.”