The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for November 16-22 2015
Security Intelligence considered voter registration and voting technology challenges presented by the 2016 election. An editorial by Ari Berman focuses on new measures to tighten access to the ballot, such as requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, shutting down voter-registration drives, curtailing early voting, disenfranchising ex-felons, purging the voter rolls, and mandating government-issued photo IDs to cast a ballot. The Florida Senate recommended to a Leon County judge a plan for the chamber’s 40 districts that was never voted on by either the House or Senate during a recent special redistricting session. Iowa Democrats are increasingly worried the state party may not be prepared for the caucuses, putting Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status at risk. A U.S. District Judge heard opening statements in a legal dispute over changes to the Ohio’s voting laws that plaintiffs claim places burdens on voters that outweigh any benefit to the state. Wisconsin Assembly Republicans sent Gov. Scott Walker bills rewriting campaign finance laws and replacing the state’s ethics and elections board with two new commissions. Amid violent protest, Haitian elections officials have rejected requests to form an independent commission to verify the preliminary presidential election results, saying the law doesn’t grant them the authority to do so and The House of Lords has backed giving 16 and 17 year-olds the vote in the upcoming in-out EU referendum in the United Kingdom.