The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 24-30 2015
As Saudi Arabia prepares to allow women to vote for the first time, the US marked the 95th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which guarantees all American women the right to vote. The Election Assistance Commission has ruled that states are free to use federal grant money intended to improve how elections are run in order to pay for criminal investigations of potential voter fraud. In Alabama a three-judge federal court today asked plaintiffs if they could draw a new redistricting map that would strike the delicate balance of protecting majority black districts while not using race as the main factor, while a Florida judge said he did not have the authority to resolve the map dispute without the approval of the state’s Supreme Court, which ruled in July that the current redistricting map was unconstitutional. Also this week, a judge in Kansas denied a move by Secretary of State Kris Kobach to quash a lawsuit challenging the state’s two-tier voter registration system and said Kobach has exceeded his authority with the way he runs elections. Pennsylvania has become the latest state to launch an online voter registration application. Canada’s upcoming election will be a test of the Fair Elections Act, the controversial and sweeping legislation that has introduced changes to how Canadians prove they are eligible to vote, the way elections are financed and how voting shenanigans are investigated and Golos, Russia’s only grassroots election-monitoring organization, has been fighting an exhausting battle to prove it does not receive foreign funding.