The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for November 2-8 2015
Voters in Maine, Seattle and San Francisco approved ballot initiatives that campaign-finance reform advocates hail as turning points in their movement. In The Atlantic, Joshua Douglas considered the role of state courts in defending voting rights. The Florida Senate voted down a plan proposed by the House and for the second time in three months, the Legislature will turn to the courts to redraw political boundaries needed for next year’s elections after failing to do the job itself, all while running up an $11 million taxpayer tab. Delays, mistakes and technological failures caused by electronic pollbooks in several Ohio counties have lead to concern about the state’s preparation for next year’s Presidential election. A three-judge panel in Texas rejected a motion to temporarily block a set of redistricting maps passed by the Legislature in 2013 for Congress and the Texas House. A federal judge ruled that Utah cannot force political parties to open their primaries to unaffiliated voters, a move that will allow the Utah Republican Party to continue to close its primaries and complicate a potential signature-gathering path to the primary ballot. More than 30 million Myanmar citizens go to the polls today in the nation’s most important election in 25 years and Turkey’s Islamist-rooted AK Party swept to an unexpected victory, returning the country to single-party rule in an outcome that will boost the power of President Tayyip Erdogan.