Haiti: OAS: Irregularities did not disrupt overall Haiti elections | Associated Press

An international mission that monitored legislative elections in Haiti said Monday that there were scattered problems with violence and other disruptions during Sunday’s first round but not enough to disrupt the legitimacy of the overall vote. The Organization of American States had 28 observers monitoring Sunday elections that saw Haitians choose lawmakers for the next Parliament in a contest that was delayed for nearly four years. They visited 171 of more than 1,500 voting centers across the country of 10 million people.

Haiti: Two dead in Haiti election violence: parties | AFP

Two people were killed during Haiti’s long-delayed legislative elections, political parties said Monday, amid violence that forced some polling stations to close early. The elections, held on Sunday after a four-year delay, were meant to be a stride toward restoring consitutional order in the destitute Caribbean country. Turnout was reported to be low. Several Port-au-Prince polling stations were vandalized in the morning and 26 shut down early because of violence.

Russia: Russian Opposition Blocked From Standing in Local Elections | Newsweek

Russia’s joint Democratic Coalition, led by renowned anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny and the supporters of the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, have been refused the right to run for election across all the regions where they opted to campaign on the grounds of irregularities in their applications, Russian national daily Kommersant reports. Local council elections in Russia will be held in September and the Democratic Coalition, which is made up of several of the biggest opposition movements to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime, was due to contest four constituencies.

Turkey: Erdoğan’s ‘election war’ | Politico

Turkey sustained an unprecedented slew of militant attacks Monday, the product of a controversial “war on terror” instigated by an interim government under the guidance of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In recent weeks the Turkish military has carried out hundreds of air strikes while police have arrested more than a thousand suspects linked to ISIS, the Kurdish militant group the PKK, and far-leftist groups including the DHKP-C. Almost all suspects in Monday’s attacks belonged to the latter two groups. In total, six security personnel were killed in attacks carried out in Istanbul and the Kurdish southeastern region, raising concerns about Turkey launching anti-terror operations at a time when it has no elected government and is facing likely snap elections in November amid continuing regional unrest.

Editorials: Happy birthday to the Voting Rights Act | The Washington Post

Just two years ago, it seemed possible the Voting Rights Act would not make it to its 50th birthday. It did Thursday, and on the eve of the anniversary one court handed down a promising decision: Texas’s voter identification legislation violated the 1965 act by discriminating against minorities and the poor. So insidious a law never should have gone into effect. In June 2013, the Supreme Court struck down one of the Voting Rights Act’s most powerful provisions, a requirement that states with records of discrimination — states such as Texas — submit proposed changes in electoral procedure to the Justice Department for review (known as “preclearance”). Texas began enforcing its law the very same day. The legislation looks like bills passed in many other states since the Supreme Court’s decision: It restricts the voting pool to those who present government-issued photo ID at the polls. Those least likely to have the documentation are the state’s poor and minority residents.

California: Voting Rights Restored to 60,000 Ex-Felons | Mother Jones

Yesterday, about 60,000 former felony offenders in California were officially granted the right to vote. Earlier this week, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced that the state would settle litigation over laws that had barred low-level felony offenders under community supervision from voting. In 2011, California lawmakers passed bills to reduce overcrowding in state prisons by diverting low-level felony offenders to county jails and community supervision, in which recently released prisoners are monitored by county agencies. Then-Secretary of State Debra Bowen told election officials in December 2011 to extend the state’s ban on felon enfranchisement to those offenders, noting that being under community supervision was “functionally equivalent” to parole. Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit last year to challenge Bowen’s directive.

Connecticut: Advocates Call On Democratic Party To Drop Lawsuit, Comply With Subpoena | CT News Junkie

Common Cause of Connecticut on Wednesday called upon the Connecticut Democratic Party to drop its challenge of the state’s clean election laws. The lawsuit served Tuesday is the second since the start of the 10-month investigation into mailings the party did on behalf of Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy during the 2014 election cycle. The Democratic Party believes federal law trumps state law when it comes to the mailings, but the State Elections Enforcement Commission told the Federal Elections Commission in October 2014 that it would be wrong for federal regulators to assume they have jurisdiction over the mailing because it “glibly” includes “a stray get-out-the-vote message.” However, a draft decision by the FEC shows that it was poised in October to rule against the Connecticut Democratic Party. But the party withdrew its request for the ruling before it could be issued and went ahead and sent the mailings to prospective voters anyway shortly before the election.

Florida: Lawmakers set to try again on redistricting | News Service of Florida

Perhaps, as a critic of the Legislature’s first two drafts of congressional districts has said, the third time will be the charm. Lawmakers return to the Capitol on Monday to once again draw a map for each of Florida’s 27 congressional seats. It is a drama being watched in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., as shifting lines just a few miles in one direction or another could decide the futures of several members of the state’s U.S. House delegation. The session follows a July 9 ruling by the Florida Supreme Court that the state’s existing congressional map violates one of the two anti-gerrymandering “Fair Districts” amendments voters approved in 2010. Lawmakers drew the initial lines during the once-a-decade redistricting process in 2012, then tweaked them last year after Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis said Republican political operatives had managed to improperly influence the process. But the Supreme Court — which has a relatively liberal majority and has generally but not always ruled against the GOP-controlled Legislature in redistricting cases — said Lewis’ ruling didn’t go far enough and that at least eight of the districts should be redrawn. The rulings led lawmakers to agree to also redraw the state Senate map — another special session for that purpose is scheduled in October — and also has led some Republicans to question the justices’ decision.

Kansas: Some say ruling on Texas voter ID law may have implications for Kansas | The Wichita Eagle

Some experts say a federal appeals court decision overturning Texas’ voter identification law could open a new legal front to challenge Kansas requirements, but Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says he thinks the voter ID law he wrote will stand up to court scrutiny. Voting-rights organizations are projecting national implications from a decision handed down Wednesday by judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The judges ruled that Texas’ requirement for voters to show photo ID when casting a ballot has the effect of discriminating against minority voters in violation of Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act. The judges sent the case back to a lower court for consideration of remedies to fix the discriminatory effect and possibly make further findings on whether Texas intended to infringe on minority voters’ rights when it passed its photo-ID law.

Maryland: Donna Edwards breaks with party over redistricting again | The Washington Post

Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) is breaking with other Democrats again over redistricting, saying she’s open to an independent commission proposed by Gov. Larry Hogan (R). “I have long supported redistricting reforms to end the damage partisan gerrymandering does to our democracy,” she said in a statement. “I look forward to reviewing Governor Hogan’s announcement to see whether it is truly independent of partisan politics.” All but one of Maryland’s eight congressional districts are held by Democrats, thanks in part to boundaries drawn by Democratic leadership after the 2010 Census. Hogan is creating an 11-member panel to recommend a new process. The Maryland Democratic Party says the lines shouldn’t be redrawn until there’s nationwide agreement on reform.

North Carolina: Federal trial in Winston-Salem could determine meaning of Voting Rights Act | Winston-Salem Journal

The past and the present merged into one during a three-week federal trial on North Carolina’s election law that ended just a week before the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On July 13, the first day of the trial, the Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, told a crowd of at least 3,500 people gathered in Corpening Plaza that “this is our Selma,” referring to the 1965 civil rights battles in Selma, Ala. For many civil rights activists like Barber, state Republican legislators were seeking to roll back the gains of that struggle by pushing through House Bill 589, which became law in 2013 and either curtailed or eliminated voting practices that blacks have disproportionately used.

Ohio: A Trump independent run got harder Thursday night | USA Today

Donald Trump’s appearance in Thursday night’s GOP debate in Cleveland just made it harder for him to run as an independent candidate for president. Ohio is one of several states that have “sore loser” rules prohibiting a candidate from appearing on the ballot as an independent or third-party candidate after they have previously declared themselves a candidate in another party. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, has concluded that since Trump has filed with the Federal Election Commission to pursue the Republican nomination and “voluntarily participated” in the Republican presidential debate in the state of Ohio, he has “chosen a party for this election cycle” and declared himself “as a Republican in the state of Ohio,” said Husted spokesman Joshua Eck

Texas: A Limited Victory for Voting Rights in Texas | The New Yorker

In 2013, when the Supreme Court effectively struck down a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act, the disagreement between the five conservative Justices in the majority and the four moderate liberals in dissent was about history as much as law. For the conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., wrote, “Our country has changed” since the statute became law fifty years ago. Devices that once blocked minorities’ access to the ballot, like the voter fees known as poll taxes, had been outlawed for more than forty years. The percentages of whites and minorities who register to vote and then go to the polls are approaching parity in the South and other parts of the country where, half a century ago, they were far apart. It is no longer necessary, Roberts went on, for the federal government to pre-approve any proposed changes to election laws in states with records of entrenched discrimination, as the statute had required since 1965.

Texas: New study suggests Voter ID altered District 23 race | San Antonio Express-News

The day after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas’s Voter ID law has a discriminatory effect on elections, a new study found some evidence in our backyard. A joint study by Rice University and the University of Houston examined Voter ID’s impact on the 2014 District 23 Congressional race between Democratic incumbent Pete Gallego and Republican challenger Will Hurd. District 23 covers 800 miles of Texas borderland, and stretches from San Antonio to El Paso. Bexar County contains 42 percent of the district’s registered voters. Given that the two major critiques of Voter ID — enacted in 2011 with Republican support, and Democratic opposition — are that it has a discriminatory impact on minority voters and that the GOP pushed it in order to help their own political cause, the 2014 election in District 23 provided the research group a perfect test case. “The great thing about CD-23 was that it allowed us to look at both of those things at the same time, because it’s a Latino majority district, but it’s also one that’s politically relevant,” said Mark Jones, the fellow at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Texas: Why A Victory For The Voting Rights Act In Texas Feels More Like A Defeat | Huffington Post

It was trumpeted as a victory for voting rights, but this week’s ruling that Texas’ restrictive voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act — on the eve of the act’s 50th anniversary — was actually something of a defeat. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw it all coming. On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texas’ Senate Bill 14, which requires voters to show photo ID when voting in person, had a “discriminatory effect” on minority voters and thus violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But the court rejected the claim that the Texas Legislature had a “discriminatory purpose” when it passed the law, a determination the court said requires more “contemporary evidence” that legislators intended to discriminate against black and Latino voters. Last October, when the same case made a short trip to the Supreme Court to determine if S.B. 14 should go into effect before the 2014 election, Ginsburg had dire words for the law. A majority of the justices decided to let it go into effect, but Ginsburg disagreed. “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law,” Ginsburg wrote, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”

Argentina: Argentines vote in presidential, congressional primaries | Associated Press

Millions of voters in Argentina braved heavy rains on Sunday to weigh in on what the South American nation should look like after the departure of President Cristina Fernandez, a polarizing leader who spent heavily on programs for the poor but failed to solve myriad economic problems. Voters cast ballots in open primaries for presidential candidates who had all but sealed the nominations in their respective parties, making the exercise essentially a giant national poll ahead of the Oct. 25 elections. Because of the rains and flooding in some streets in the greater Buenos Aires area, several polling places were relocated during the day.

Haiti: First election in four years marred by sporadic violence | Reuters

Haitians voted Sunday for the first time in four years in a test of stability for an impoverished country continually rocked by political turmoil. Men armed with rocks and bottles attacked polling stations in the capital of Port-au-Prince and two dozen voting centers around the country were forced to close due to violence, according to officials. Voting was extended two hours at some polling stations that opened late or were forced to suspend voting. The Caribbean nation of about 10 million people has struggled to build a stable democracy ever since the overthrow of the dictatorship of the Duvalier family, which led Haiti from 1957 to 1986, and ensuing military coups and election fraud. The country was also devastated by an earthquake in 2010 that flattened large parts of the capital, including the presidential palace, killings tens of thousands of people.

India: Election Commission reports that India has 1866 registered political parties | The Financial Express

There has been a rush for registration of political parties, with as many as 239 new outfits enrolling themselves with the Election Commission between March, 2014 and July this year, taking their number to 1866. According to the Commission, as on July 24, there are 1866 political parties which are registered with it. Out of these, 56 are recognised as registered national or state parties, while the rest are “unrecognised, registered” parties. According to data complied by the Commission, in the last Lok Sabha election in 2014, 464 political parties had fielded candidates.

Myanmar: Floods won’t stop election in Myanmar | The Nation

The November 8 election will not be postponed despite a provision in the Constitution to delay a poll in the event of a disaster, according to the Ministry of Information. In its announcement, the ministry said Union Election Commission (UEC) chairperson Tin Aye met UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, in Nay Pyi Taw on Thursday. Yanghee Lee asked about errors in the voter lists and the difficulties faced when correcting them in flood-affected areas and the possibility of postponing the election in those areas until a process to vote in refugee camps could be established.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for Aug 3-9 2015

On the 50th anniversary of Voting Rights Act, President Obama renewed a call for new, broader voting rights legislation and urged people to exercise their hard-won voting rights instead of staying home on election days. Ari Berman notes that 2016 will be the first presidential contest in 50 years where voters cannot rely on the full protections…

National: On 50th anniversary of Voting Rights Act, Obama renews call for new legislation | The Washington Post

President Obama, on the 50th anniversary of Voting Rights Act, renewed a call for new, broader legislation and urged people to exercise their hard-won voting rights instead of staying home on election days. Obama said that in the half-century since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act it has become impossible to hear anyone defend the idea of discrimination against certain voters. “That’s huge progress,” he said, “a normative shift in how we think about our democracy.” But he said that initiatives in state legislatures to require drivers licenses and other forms of photo identification and to make it harder to vote early were having the same discriminating effect. He said no matter how reasonable such rules may sound, they all discriminated against the poor, elderly and working-class voters who often work odd shifts or travel by bus or are single parents. Voting rights activists say that 15 states with 162 electoral votes will have new voting restrictions in 2016.

Editorials: Why the Voting Rights Act Is Once Again Under Threat | Ari Berman/The New York Times

In his opinion for the majority in the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which struck down a major section of the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that “history did not end in 1965.” But the sad truth is that voter-suppression efforts did not end, either. In 2014, the first post-Shelby election, thousands were turned away by new restrictions in states like Texas and North Carolina. A 2014 study by the Government Accountability Office found that voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee reduced turnout by 2 to 3 percent during the 2012 election, enough to swing a close vote, with the highest drop-off among young, black and newly registered voters. This could be a disturbing preview for 2016, which will be the first presidential contest in 50 years where voters cannot rely on the full protections of the act. New restrictions will be in place in up to 15 states, which account for as many as 162 electoral votes, including crucial swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia.

Florida: First draft of congressional map shakes up some districts | Miami Herald

Two Democratic congressional incumbents from South Florida would be pitted against one another and tens of thousands of people in the Homestead area would be shifted into a new district under a first draft of a redistricting map released by the Florida Legislature just days before they begin a court-mandated special session Monday to deal with the topic. Hundreds of thousands of Tampa Bay residents would have a new member of Congress in 2016, and former Gov. Charlie Crist could be well on his way to winning a seat in the U.S. House. But by almost any account, the map proposed Wednesday has a long way to go to become law. Legislators will spend the next two weeks adjusting and amending the proposal, which ultimately would still need to go back to the courts for a final approval before it could go into effect.

Oklahoma: A Rare Red-State Accord for More Voter Access | The Atlantic

Nearly a year ago, a coalition of voter-advocacy groups wrote a letter to Oklahoma’s top elections official to deliver a stark, but not uncommon, message: The state had failed to comply with federal law. Specifically, the groups charged, Oklahoma was not giving citizens receiving public assistance an opportunity to register to vote, which is a requirement of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. “We hope to work amicably with you to remedy Oklahoma’s non-compliance,” the advocates wrote. “However, we will pursue litigation if necessary.” Such warnings are often a precursor to lawsuits, the kind of knock-down, drag-out legal fights that are filled with accusations of voter suppression and partisan chicanery. In North Carolina and Texas, the courts are weighing challenges to new voter-ID laws, and the Supreme Court recently delivered voter advocates a victory when it ruled that Arizona and Kansas could not require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

National: Obama Urges Restoring Voting Rights Provisions | The New York Times

President Obama used the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act on Thursday to urge Congress to restore key elements of the law, arguing that court decisions and state statutes that discourage “certain kinds of folks” from voting are threatening to erode the fundamental promise of the civil rights-era bulwark. A half-century after the measure outlawed practices that barred blacks or other minorities from voting, Mr. Obama said the nation had “conceptually” rejected discrimination in balloting, a mark of “huge progress.” But, he said, “In practice, we’ve still got problems,” including laws requiring that voters show identification before casting ballots and limiting early voting, which Mr. Obama said may appear neutral, but actually “have a disproportional effect on certain kinds of folks voting.”

National: Voting rights activists press for weekend vote, online registration | The Hill

Civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King III, are amping up the pressure on President Obama and the 2016 White House contenders to tackle low voter turnout by overhauling the rules governing the nation’s elections. The advocates are marking Thursday’s 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) with a rally on the National Mall calling for new efforts to knock down what they consider to be barriers to the polls. The activists want lawmakers to consider online registration and an expansion of the voting window to include a weekend, which they argue would make it easier for people to cast their ballots. Behind King and Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador and civil rights activist who now heads the voting rights group Why Tuesday?, the activists have challenged each of the 2016 presidential candidates to outline their ideas for addressing the low voter turnout that’s plagued recent elections — a request that came with an unveiled threat to call out those who ignore the plea.

National: Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency | Wired

Imagine an election – a close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome. In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.” Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010, two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a simulated search engine that displayed real articles.

Editorials: Restore voting rights | Rep. John Lewis and Sen. Patrick Leahy/Los Angeles Times

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the bill many historians regard as the most influential legislation passed by Congress in the last half-century. It transformed our nation by opening access to the ballot box to racial and ethnic minorities, the disabled, seniors, non-English speakers, poor and rural voters. On Aug. 6, 1965, our nation took a historic step by creating a more fair, more just democracy. Even though the 15th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War, established that the right to vote should not be “denied or abridged,” state and local laws often nullified that mandate. The participation of millions of Americans in any part of the electoral process was rendered nearly impossible. The journey to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the legislation that equalized voting access, took almost 100 more years. Throughout the struggle, foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement were told to wait and to be satisfied with slow, incremental change. But as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter From Birmingham City Jail,” the word “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.'” And so civil rights advocates pushed ahead with courage against enormous odds — organizing, marching, standing day after day in unmovable lines trying to register. Hundreds went to jail in nonviolent protests, some shed blood, and others even died for the precious right to vote.

Florida: Brown sues to stop Florida redistricting | Orlando Sentinel

Implying that a secret, racist agenda may be in play to eliminate Congressional districts drawn to represent black voters, U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown, D-Jacksonville, filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to stop Florida’s redistricting effort. On Wednesday the Florida Senate released a proposed map that would redraw many of Florida’s 27 Congressional districts to comply with an order from the Florida Supreme Court. That order came following a lawsuit that charged the state’s 2011 redistricting map had been gerrymandered, drawn to assure that certain seats would always be won by one party or another. Brown’s district would be most affected under the proposed map. And her district was specifically cited for change in the Florida Supreme Court order. The new proposal would lop off District 5’s snake-like appendage that meanders from Jacksonville south to Orange County, taking in black communities along the way. Instead, the map proposes District 5 stretch due west from Jacksonville to Tallahassee.

Editorials: Voting against another Florida election disaster in 2016 | Panama City News Herald

With the 2016 presidential election on the horizon and the ghosts of elections past still haunting it, you would think Florida would have an acute sense for ensuring its voting processes are working as smoothly and efficiently as a Ferrari engine. A recent report, though, indicates the state still is operating like a ’74 Gremlin. The state auditor general, an independent officer hired by the Legislature, recently identified seven weaknesses with Florida’s voter registration system, a computerized database of voter information. … To summarize, the state’s voter database is at risk of failing and/or being compromised. That would make for some potentially chaotic voting scenarios in a high-stakes national election — everything from valid registered voters being denied the opportunity to cast a ballot, to allegations of voter fraud. Hanging chads would seem quaint by comparison.