Canada: Elections Canada drops plan for online voting due to cuts | CBC News

Elections Canada has abandoned plans to experiment with an online voting pilot project before the 2015 general election due to budget cuts. Elections Canada also has concerns about the security of online voting, but a new report indicates that voting irregularities happen frequently at polling stations on voting day even when paper ballots are used. A spokesperson for Elections Canada said Tuesday that experiments with online voting are postponed “for the long term,” and the reasons for the delay are due to an eight per cent budget cut that took effect this year, translating into a loss of $7.5 million per year. A plan to try out online voting in a federal byelection sometime before 2015 has been quashed.

Canada: Irregularities widespread in Canadian elections, report finds | Ottawa Citizen

More than 165,000 people seem to have voted improperly in the last election, a new Elections Canada report has found, and the system for voting needs to be overhauled, although there isn’t enough time to do that before the next election. Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand commissioned the report after irregularities in the Toronto riding of Etobicoke Centre led to a court challenge that went to the Supreme Court of Canada. Former Elections Canada executive Harry Neufeld audited 1,000 polls from the last election as well as three recent byelections, and discovered systematic errors in the processing of the 15 per cent of voters who show up on election day without having been registered.

Georgia (Sakartvelo): Did the Devil Go Down to Georgia in a Smart ID Card? | EurasiaNet.org

Everyone can sigh with relief. Georgia’s justice officials say they are not in league with the devil and have no plans to assist the Antichrist to take over the world. In a bizarre public-service announcement, Georgia’s Justice Ministry on April 20 announced that new, biometric ID cards for Georgian citizens are not a satanic creation. “The assumption that the new ID card is the seal of the Antichrist and that it contains the sign of the beast is not correct,” explained an earnest young man in a video produced by the ministry.

Iran: Presidential Office rejects allegation on record showing election fraud | AzerNews

The Public Relations Center of the Administration of the President of Iran published a press release rejecting information with reference to some president’s allies about existence of a record showing a fraud that happened during the presidential elections in 2009. On Monday, some media outlets in Iran released news about a record of Ahmadinjad’s conversation with some officials after the presidential elections. According to them, the alleged record shows that some Iranian authorities forced Ahmadinejad to announce that he canvassed 24 million votes, while his real votes were only 16 million. According to the claims, Ahmadinejad first disagreed, but they insisted upon their plan to show a large difference between the votes canvassed by Ahmadinejad and his major rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Malaysia: Amid protests, EC insists indelible ink won’t come off | Malaysia Insider

While the Election Commission (EC) has rubbished claims that motor oil or other substances could be used to remove the ink stain marking voters who have cast their ballots, it has already sparked off a storm of protests that the ink may not be as indelible as said. Reports of the oil-based lubricant as well as other substances such as egg yolk wash or merely scrubbing with water and soap could remove the indelible ink stain surfaced earlier today, hours after policemen and military personnel cast their ballots in advanced voting. “Impossible, I do not believe the indelible ink can be removed by any oil-based lubricant… the ink is made from silver nitrate. “When the ink is put on the fingernail, it will seep into the skin,” EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof told The Malaysian Insider when contacted. He said that even if the stain on the fingernail could be rubbed off, the stain would stay visible on the skin surrounding the nail for seven days.

Malaysia: Indelible ink is… delible | Straits Times

Barely hours after ‘indelible’ ink was used for the first time in Malaysia, complaints have emerged that the ink is in fact removable. This is contrary to the Election Commission’s (EC) assurance that traces of the ink would last at least seven days on the finger after being painted on with a brush. One soldier, who had marked his ballot in advance voting on Tuesday morning, said he had removed most of the ink with water alone – just six hours later, Malaysiakini reported.

Nepal: Election Commission begins registering political parties for polls | Business Standard

The Election Commission in Nepal has started registering political parties for the upcoming Constituent Assembly elections. On the first day of registration, seven political parties including CPN-UML, Unified CPN-Maoist, Nepali Congress, Sadvana Party and Terai Madhes Democratic Party have submitted applications for party registration for election purposes. The political parties in Nepal have tentatively agreed to conduct new elections, though the exact date for the elections is yet to be announced. The Election Commission has given one month’s time for registering political parties for the upcoming elections, according to sources at the Commission.

Venezuela: White House Petition Site Draws Venezuelan Crowds | Nextgov.com

The petition website designed to give citizens “a direct line to the White House on the issues and concerns that matter most” is proving popular outside the U.S. as well. An April 15 We the People petition asking the Obama administration to urge a recount in the Venezuelan presidential election skyrocketed to nearly 100,000 signatures in just two days online, making it one of the fastest growing petitions ever posted to the 19-month-old White House website. The petition has now received 124,000 signatures and is the second most popular unanswered petition on We the People. It was filed the day after Nicolas Maduro, the handpicked successor of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez, narrowly defeated challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski to win the South American nation’s top office. Capriles has challenged the result, citing voting irregularities.

National: White House to set president’s election commission in motion next month | Yahoo! News

We know little about President Barack Obama’s new Commission on Election Administration except for its structure, as outlined in the executive order that explains its task is to improve voting in America, and the names of its two appointed co-chairs: Obama’s former counsel Bob Bauer and Republican attorney Ben Ginsberg, who worked for Mitt Romney. But while it has yet to explain its methodology or get together a full staff (the executive order directs that no more than nine members are to be appointed) the commission—an idea born on election night 2012 when Obama declared we “have to fix” long lines at the polls—is about to get to work. Steve Croley, deputy White House counsel, told Yahoo News the White House is gearing up to announce the committee’s full roster next month and set the group to work. The committee, he said, will be a mix of individuals including “several people who basically run elections for a living” at the state, county or local levels, in addition to those working on the private side. No other details were offered about commissioners.

National: Obama’s campaign finance reform plans have faded | The Washington Post

President Obama’s once-broad ambitions to clamp down on the influence of special interests have been largely abandoned since his reelection, dismaying longtime allies in the campaign-finance reform movement. The predicament will be on full display Tuesday, when all five members of the Federal Election Commission will be serving past the formal expiration of their terms. The panel’s sixth seat remains vacant. The president has not made a nomination to the FEC, which enforces the nation’s campaign finance laws, in more than three years.

National: Wyden and Murkowski have a bill to fight super PACs. Does it go far enough? | Washington Post

As Ezra noted in his profile of Oregon’s senior Senator, Ron Wyden’s staff have a funny-cos-it’s-true joke about their boss. “You got a problem?” they say to one another. “Ron Wyden has a comprehensive, bipartisan solution to fix it.” Well, independent campaign spending by super-PACs is, arguably, a problem. And Wyden now has a comprehensive, bipartisan solution to fix it. It’s called the Follow the Money Act of 2013, and with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) signed on as a co-sponsor, it’s the first bipartisan piece of Senate legislation to address the growth of super-PACs in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

National: New GAO Report on Voting Accessibility | USACM Tech Policy

Almost all polling places had an accessible voting system during the 2008 elections, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). That’s the good news. The bad news: At nearly half of the polling places with an accessible voting system, voters with disabilities still faced barriers to voting independently and privately. For example, some accessible voting systems were set up at voting stations inaccessible to wheelchairs; others lacked headsets for blind and visually impaired voters to hear the audio; and some accessible voting systems were on site but not placed into use.

Editorials: Sandra Day O’Connor Regrets Bush v. Gore | New York Times

Now she tells us. More than 12 years after the fact, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it was probably a mistake for the Supreme Court to hear Bush v. Gore and anoint George W. Bush as president of the United States. “It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” Justice O’Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board on Friday. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’” She continued: “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”

Editorials: How Voter Backlash Against Voter Suppression Is Changing Our Politics | The Nation

As the 2012 election approached, Republican governors and legislators in battleground states across the country rushed to enact restrictive Voter ID laws, to eliminate election-day registration and to limit early voting. Those were just some of the initiatives that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People identified as “an onslaught of restrictive measures across the country designed to stem electoral strength among communities of color.” Why did so much energy go into the effort? John Payton, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, explained, “These block the vote efforts are a carefully targeted response to the remarkable growth of the minority electorate, and threaten to disproportionally diminish the voting strength of African-Americans and Latinos.” Civil rights groups pushed back, working with the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and other organizations to mount legal and legislative challenges. But the most dramatic pushback may well have been the determined voter registration and mobilization drives organized on the ground in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states.

Colorado: Judge tosses Denver clerk’s inactive voter suit against Scott Gessler | The Denver Post

Secretary of State Scott Gessler has won the latest but perhaps not the last battle over whether ballots should be mailed to inactive voters. Denver District Court Judge Michael Martinez sided with Gessler, who adopted a rule last year blocking clerks from automatically sending mail ballots to inactive voters in city and school board elections in a suit brought by Denver Clerk and Recorder Debra Johnson. Martinez said Denver’s status as a home-rule county did not exempt it from following state election rules. “I think it’s fundamentally an equal-treatment issue,” Gessler said. “The rules and provisions El Paso County uses needs to be the same ones that Denver uses. … You can’t have one county, for instance, that wants to leave the polls open for an hour and another that leaves them open for 20.”

Florida: Elections bill moves from consensus to contentious | News-Journal

Crunch time! Only one week left in the session and legislators must pass a budget, expand Medicaid or develop some kind of statewide alternative on the fly, and while they’re at it, fix the election law that caused a mess in 2012. And that’s just the top of the to-do list. The Senate passed an election reform bill Thursday and the House must vote on it next week or try again next year. The bill’s supporters say it would prevent a repeat of the last presidential election — the long lines, the long vote count and the long ballot.

North Dakota: Voter ID Law Threatens to Silence Native Americans | Counterpunch

One would think that if you’re a U.S. Congressman who insulted your state’s largest minority population and threatened bodily injury to their Tribally-elected leaders while in the process of verbally assaulting a Native American woman at a very public state coalition meeting for Abused Women’s Services that you would apologize.  That would be the smart, decent thing to do, right? Apparently North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer doesn’t think so.  On March 26, 2013, he spent nearly half an hour laying into Melissa Merrick, the Director of the Spirit Lake Victim Assistance Program.  She’s also a tribal member who happens to be a survivor of child sexual abuse.  During that time, Cramer reportedly stated in front of a roomful of domestic violence advocates that he wanted to “wring the Spirit Lake tribal council’s necks and slam them against the wall.”  He also called tribal governments dysfunctional, and went on a tirade against provisions in the Violence Against Women Act that are meant to protect Native American women.  His tantrum was so disturbing that attendees at the meeting got up and left.  By the time the dust settled, another Native American woman present was in tears.

Ohio: Ohio University president knocks tuition-voting bill | Athens News

A Republican budget amendment could cost Ohio University up to $12 million in lost out-of-state tuition, or otherwise make it more difficult for some college students to vote in Athens. The proposal pits these two interests against each other in the Ohio House’s substitute budget bill that has passed the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives chamber and is now under consideration by the state Senate. The provision mandates that an institution of higher learning must charge in-state tuition to any student to whom it provides a letter or utility bill that can be shown to prove residency and vote in Ohio.

Pennsylvania: State ordered to surrender data in voter-ID dispute | Philadelphia Inquirer

State transportation and election officials were ordered Monday to provide data on licensed drivers and registered voters to plaintiffs in the ongoing voter-ID dispute, hoping to answer a question that has baffled state officials for the last year: how many Pennsylvania voters do not already have photo identification cards from PennDot? Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson Jr. agreed to a motion from opponents of the state’s new voter ID law, saying their data request was relevant.

Indonesia: e-Voting simulations conducted in Indonesian elections | FutureGov

The General Election Commission of Bantaeng Regency in Indonesia conducted simulations of e-voting in the elections held on 17 April. Out of the 361 polling stations set up in the regency, 42 participated in the e-voting simulation. The votes cast under this project were not counted or publicised, but used for research purposes to test the viability of electronic voting in Indonesia, and make a recommendation to the House of Representatives about the election bill currently being drafted.

Iran: Ahmadinejad To Expose 2009 Voter Fraud If Protégé Barred From June 14 Election | Eurasia Review

As Iran gears up for its presidential election in June, the question of fraud in the 2009 election continues to haunt the country’s leadership. Baztab, a widely read news site close to former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaei, stirred up controversy on Saturday after it claimed that Ahmadinejad, Iran’s beleaguered head of government, was in possession of a tape that would prove that authorities had inflated his number of votes in the 2009 race by 8 million and thus brought his total tally to 24 million instead of his original 16 million. … Baztab claimed that Ahmadinejad had threatened to release the alleged tape should the Guardian Council, a body charged with overseeing elections, decide to bar his top aide and protégé Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei from running in the upcoming presidential election on 14 June.

Venezuela: Opposition to Take Voter-Fraud Case to Supreme Court | Wall Street Journal

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who says recent presidential elections won by the ruling Socialist Party were marred by fraud and voter intimidation, demanded Monday that new elections be called, and said he would take his case to the Supreme Court. Speaking to reporters, Mr. Capriles acknowledged that arguing before the Supreme Court will be an uphill battle given its justices support the ruling party, but said it’s a necessary, final “local” step before he presents his case to international tribunals. “I have no doubt this will have to end up in international courts,” he said.

Venezuela: Presidential election vote recount begins | Xinhua

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) Monday began a partial recount of votes cast in the contested April 14 presidential elections, which saw Nicolas Maduro win by a razor-thin margin, local media reported. The auditing process, which is being boycotted by the opposition, calls for a technical board to inspect 12,000 ballot boxes in 30 days, as approved last Friday by Venezuela’s electoral authorities. In the next few days, auditors are to be selected and trained for the review of a random selection of 46 percent of ballot boxes that were not already audited on election day.

National: In a First, Black Voter Turnout Rate Passes Whites | New York Times

America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home. Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

Editorials: Scalia’s understanding of the Voting Rights Act is shortsighted | Gary May/The Washington Post

In the debate over the future of the Voting Rights Act , it sometimes becomes apparent that certain members of the Supreme Court are either oblivious to our nation’s recent history or willfully ignore it. Justice Antonin Scalia made this abundantly clear in his comments during the Feb. 27 oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder , statements that he repeated in a speech on April 15. To Scalia, the Voting Rights Act — especially Section 5, which requires covered states to submit any changes in voting practices to the Justice Department or a Washington court for approval — is a “racial entitlement” and a violation of state sovereignty. In his view, it unfairly and unnecessarily treats seven Southern states, plus Alaska, Arizona and parts of six others, differently from states not covered by the act. This month, according to the Wall Street Journal, he called the act a form of “racial preferment” that affected only African Americans while ignoring the white population.

Voting Blogs: Customer Service for Elections | The Canvass

Voters have a right to expect good customer service when they go to vote. And that means full service—not just fast service. Therefore, speed isn’t the number one goal for election administrators. First and foremost, elections need to meet legal obligations, says Merle King, executive director of the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, in Georgia. Boiled down, these obligations include running accurate elections in which all eligible voters can vote.  Where does that leave customer service values such as convenience and speed? These are still important, judging by recent activity. For instance, President Obama has established a bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, with a goal of improvinig voters’ experiences, and several pieces of federal legislation have been introduced, although none appear to be moving. In addition, reports and recommendations on election management are pouring forth.

California: ‘Super PACs’ negate spending limits in L.A. mayor’s race | Los Angeles Times

Strict limits on campaign contributions imposed by voters nearly three decades ago are crumbling in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, with big donors using loosely regulated “super PACs” to help candidates like never before in a citywide election, a Times analysis has found. Of the $17.5 million collected so far to support mayoral hopefuls Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti, roughly one-third — a record $6.1 million — has gone into independent political action committees that can accept contributions of any size. The rise of the parallel campaign finance system, awash in five- and six-figure donations that dwarf the limits approved by voters, has watchdogs of political influence sounding alarms.

Florida: House passes bill to exclude voter emails from public records | WUFT

In a bipartisan vote of 114-1, the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill Thursday which would exclude voter email addresses from state public records. Some say it’s to prevent people from being scammed, and all but one representative agreed. Lawmakers said they are concerned with protecting voters from being inundated by candidates and political committees that have access to their email addresses, according to the Miami Herald.

Kentucky: Special election first test of military voting law | Kentucky.com

A special legislative election in central Kentucky could be the first test of the state’ new military voting law passed earlier this year to help ensure soldiers deployed to foreign countries get to cast ballots back home. Gov. Steve Beshear set the election for June 25 to replace former state Rep. Carl Rollins, who resigned earlier this week to become executive director of the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority. The election date, some two months off as required now, will allow more time for county clerks to send absentee ballots to military personnel and others serving overseas.

Nebraska: Governor signs bill reducing in-person early voting in Nebraska | Nebraska City News-Press – Nebraska City, NE

Governor Dave Heineman has signed legislation that will reduce the period of in-person early voting in Nebraska from 35 days to 30 days, a bill that will help assure that Nebraska complies with the Help America Vote Act. State lawmakers passed an amended version of LB271, which reduced the voting period to 30 days. The bill does not impact the start date for absentee ballot requests.