Illinois: Vendor suing DuPage County election commission | Daily Herald

A DuPage County judge is being asked to decide whether the county’s election commission failed to give a San Diego-based company a fair opportunity to compete for a contract. Votec Corp. initially filed a protest with the county’s procurement office after the DuPage County Election Commission in November awarded Hart InterCivic a nearly $500,000 deal to supply the commission with electronic poll books, which are computerized logs to check in voters at the polls. Votec claimed in its protest that the election commission “violated and/or failed to adhere to” its procurement ordinance when it awarded the contract. But after reviewing Votec’s protest, the county’s chief procurement officer, John Meneghini, rejected it. Then an appeal of Meneghini’s decision was denied by commission Chairwoman Cathy Ficker Terrill.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 4-10 2015

EAC_260The chair of the Federal Election Commission says she has largely given up hope of reining in abuses in the 2016 presidential campaign, which could generate a record $10 billion in spending. Electionline Weekly posted an interview with the three new EAC commissioners. Three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court issed instructions to reconsider a December decision that upheld the maps, the North Carolina Supreme Court announced that it would hear arguments in August on the challenges to the 2011 redistricting maps outlining legislative and congressional districts across North Carolina. Ohio became the latest state to propose automatic voter registration. The Harris County Clerk and the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s offices successfully led opposition to a proposal for online voter registration in Texas. An editorial in the Deseret News warns of the security challenges facing proposals for an online primary in Utah. After two weeks of protests against President Pierre Nkurunziza bid for a third term, demonstrations in Burundi have degenerated into a man being burned alive in the capital, Bujumbura. The UK general election exposed flaws of the country’s “first past the post” voting system, as Conservatives won an outright majority of seats in Parliament with only 36% of the vote.

Guam: Challenge to Guam’s race-based plebiscite will go forward | Liberty Blog

The Guam legislature passed a law that allowed only “native inhabitants of Guam” to vote in an upcoming plebiscite concerning Guam’s political relationship with the United States. The plebiscite would ask native inhabitants to vote on whether Guam should seek statehood, independence, or a continued “association” with the United States. Arnold Davis is a resident of Guam, but was unable to register for the plebiscite because he was not a native inhabitant. Davis challenged the law as unconstitutional under the Fifth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The catch with this case was that the plebiscite would only occur once 70% of eligible native inhabitants registered to vote in it, and, in all likelihood, this 70% figure would never be reached. Thus,Guam argued that the case was not ripe and that Davis did not have standing to challenge the law because he could not show how he was being injured.