The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 31 – September 6 2015
While the drawing of legislative districts is supposed to be a once-a-decade process, the map-drawing based on the 2010 count—the most litigious in recent memory—is still dragging on. A federal appeals court ruled that the Shelby County Alabama isn’t owed any legal fees from the federal government despite winning its challenge against a core provision of the Voting Rights Act. The Shawnee County election commissioner and representatives of advocacy groups clashed over merits of the Kansas secretary of state’s plan to purge more than 32,000 voter registration applications for failure to document citizenship. A federal appeals court revived a lawsuit saying Nevada public assistance offices weren’t doing enough to help low-income clients register to vote. Eight months after the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in favor of congressional and legislative voting maps drawn by the Republican-led General Assembly in 2011, the maps were back before the court on Monday. In a Slate oped, Richard Hasen analyzed the novel legal arguments presented in the Texas Voter ID case. Two days after the Virginia legislature missed a court-imposed deadline for redrawing the state’s congressional election maps, federal judges on began the process of setting new district boundaries. After proposals for internet voting trials in nine Swiss cantons were rejected a government spokesman explained “in the area of protecting voting secrecy in particular, some serious deficiencies were noted … In the case of a cyber-attack, hackers would have been able to reveal the electors’ vote, which is not tolerable in a democracy.” In the United Kingdom, Labour Party members and supporters have protested to the party about their lack of ballot papers with less than a week to go before the party’s leadership election closes.