The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 21-27 2016
While the country is still a long way from online voting, some states are testing the waters and building technology into election-related processes. Joe Kiniry at Free and Fair explains why using Bitcoin (or a blockchain) as an election system is a bad idea that really doesn’t make sense. Some voters in Arizona’s largest county waited five hours to vote Tuesday, after local election officials, looking to save money, slashed the number of polling places on offer. A federal judge ruled that prisoners can’t be counted for population or in drawing up boundaries of voting districts in Florida, a decision that could have repercussions statewide. The U.S. Supreme Court seeking to close Montana’s primary elections in June, meaning any registered voter will be able to select a GOP ballot. Security researchers pretty much uniformly agree that letting people vote online is a very bad idea, one that is fraught with risks and vulnerabilities that could have unknowable consequences for the future of democracy. This week, the Utah GOP gave it a whirl anyway. Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou won a second term with 92.5 percent of the vote in a run-off election that the opposition coalition chose to boycott and in Peru the frontrunner to win the presidential election next month, Keiko Fujimori, has been given the go-ahead to stay in the race after vote-buying accusations were rejected by a court.