The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 23-29 2015
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a case involving the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s strict voter ID requirement shifts attention now to voter identification laws working their way through the courts in Texas and North Carolina. David Jefferson, computer scientist in the Lawrence Livermore’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing believes “security, privacy, reliability, availability and authentication requirements for Internet voting are very different from, and far more demanding than, those required for e-commerce,” making voting more susceptible to attacks, manipulation and vulnerabilities. The Supreme Court sided with black challengers and told a lower court to reconsider whether a redistricting plan drawn by Alabama’s Republican-led legislature packed minority voters into districts in order to dilute their influence. A bill in the Colorado legislature would allow military and overseas voters to submit ballots via fax machines and email. Election officials from Kansas and Arizona are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court decision and restore state laws requiring proof-of-citizenship documents to register to vote. Cyberattacks disabled the State of Maine’s website several times this week. The result of an Australian election is likely to be challenged after a security flaw was identified that could potentially have compromised 66,000 electronic votes and Nigeria’s presidential election was marred by hackers, failed biometric registration devices and violence that claimed at least 39 lives.