The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 2-8 2016
A series of data breaches the Philippines, Turkey and Mexico are spurring concerns that hackers could manipulate elections in the United States. Already facing a lawsuit from the League of Women Voters for his decision earlier this year to allow Kansas and two other states to require residents to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote using a federal form, EAC executive director Brian Newby has now been rebuked by the EAC’s Board of Advisors. The board – composed of election officials from around the country – approved a resolution saying that such changes should be made by the commissioners themselves. Voting was delayed at several polling sites in Hancock County Indiana after a software update from the county’s voting equipment vendor — Election Systems & Software — failed to load, while another software error caused entire races to be left off voters’ ballots at five of the county’s 12 polling sites, affecting over 2000 ballots. Civil Rights Attorneys are seeking a court order blocking enforcement of a Louisiana law, which requires naturalized citizens to provide documents proving their citizenship when they register to vote, while other residents simply must swear that they are citizens on the voter registration application. A bipartisan compromise led to the passage of a Voter ID requirement in Missouri that may face a gubernatorial veto and, in any case, requires voters to approve a constitutional amendment in November. Republican lawmakers in Virginia will file a lawsuit challenging Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s decision to allow more than 200,000 convicted felons to vote in November. The four opposition coalitions said they will not drop their demand for all the alleged irregularities to be fully investigated by the Republic Electoral Commission even though all of them made it into parliament at the April 24 polls and King Felipe VI of Spain signed a decree on Tuesday to dissolve Parliament and hold a rerun of national elections for the first time since the country’s return to democracy in the late 1970s.