Arizona: Security concerns shut down parts of secretary of state’s elections site | The Arizona Republic

Parts of the Arizona secretary of state’s website are down for unspecified security-related maintenance, angering some candidate campaigns that received belated notice. The portion of the site dealing with online contributions to the public campaign-finance system was shut down Tuesday evening, said Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Secretary of State Michele Reagan. But it was only Wednesday morning that the office sent a notice to the Clean Elections candidates using the site’s online service for gathering the $5 contributions necessary to qualify for public financing. “Why wouldn’t you notify the candidates first?” asked Chad Campbell, a consultant for the campaign of Corporation Commission candidates Tom Chabin and Bill Mundell.

Arizona: Voting rights advocates condemn March voting process | Cronkite News

Voting rights advocates Wednesday said the March presidential preference election amounted to voter suppression and proposed renewing federal election standards to protect voters. Community leaders representing numerous advocacy groups, along with Democratic Congressional representatives, said at a forum at the Greater Bethel A.M.E. Church in south Phoenix that the long wait times at Maricopa County election sites prevented many people from voting. “Let’s just make clear what happened. There was voter suppression,” Congressman Ruben Gallego said. Maricopa County had only 60 polling places, including one serving all of south Phoenix for the March 22 election, said Gallego, a Democrat who represents the area.

Iowa: Court To Release Ruling On Felon Voting | Iowa Public Radio

The much anticipated ruling on felon voting from the Iowa Supreme Court will be released Thursday morning. Iowa has one of the most restrictive felon voting policies in the nation. It is one of three states that permanently disenfranchises someone if they commit a felony. That’s because Iowa’s constitution states anyone convicted of an infamous crime forever loses the right to vote. So what’s an infamous crime? The Iowa Supreme Court will likely tell us. More specifically, justices are asked to decide if all felonies are “infamous crimes,” or if the term applies only to a select group of felonies.

Virginia: Judge Sets Hearing on Delegate Lawsuit Aimed at Derailing Trump’s Nomination | NBC

A federal judge has ordered a hearing for July 7 in a lawsuit brought by a Virginia Republican who says a state law requiring him to vote for Donald Trump is unconstitutional. It’s the latest legal front in efforts to stop Trump at the Republican Convention. Federal District Court Judge Robert Payne of Richmond is moving quickly, ordering lawyers on both sides to respond to questions he raised Tuesday. While the pace is driven partly by the July 18 opening of the Republican National Convention, it also suggests that the judge is receptive to the claim. The lawsuit was filed by Carroll Correll, a northern Virginia Republican chosen as a delegate to the national convention, on behalf of himself and the state’s other Republican delegates. He believes that “Donald Trump is unfit to serve as President of the United States” and that voting for Trump would violate his conscience, according to court filings.

Virginia: McAuliffe lambasts “fear mongering” by Republicans over voting rights restoration | The Virginia-Pilot

Gov. Terry McAuliffe arrived at the community center in Huntersville Tuesday filled with zeal for restoring voting rights to over 200,000 felons, and zingers for Republicans who have criticized his action. “April 22 was probably my proudest day as governor. It was the right thing to do,” McAuliffe said, referring to the day he issued his executive order at a ceremony outside the Capitol. “I don’t understand the fear mongering by the Republicans. You would have thought I had burned the Capitol down.” McAuliffe was in Huntersville to hear the stories of people who had their voting rights restored. Outside, GOP lawmaker Jason Miyares of Virginia Beach waited to provide reporters a counterpoint.

Armenia: National Assembly Approves Major Amendments to Electoral Code | Asbarez

The National Assembly approved on Wednesday major amendments to Armenia’s new Electoral Code that stem from a compromise agreement reached by the government and the parliamentary opposition earlier this month. Government officials again made clear, however, that the amendments regulating the conduct of next year’s parliamentary elections will be annulled unless foreign donors pay for the purchase of special equipment needed for their implementation.

Editorials: Only 58% of Indigenous Australians are registered to vote. We should be asking why | Paul Daley/The Guardian

The last week of the federal election campaign opened with news that Indigenous people in Western Australia’s Kimberley region are seven times more likely to take their own lives than other Australians. If ever a revelation might halt an election in its tracks, prompt politicians and the media who trail them around Australia on their set-piece campaign operations, to pause and reflect for a day – even an hour or a moment – then a disclosure of such tragic human import should, surely, have done so. But the major party caravans just bumped along, each attacking the other with fallacious claims about alleged changes to Medicare and border protection policies. While policy argument was anchored in the illusory, there was no substantive, mainstream political engagement with this real tragedy in the Kimberley. The social, political and economic indicators of Indigenous Australian wellbeing have, since the 1950s, been an acute source of international embarrassment to Australian federal and state politicians. Indeed, international opprobrium – which rightly lumped Australia’s treatment of its first people in with South Africa’s apartheid regime – were, together with the burgeoning civil rights movement, instrumental in delivering the federal vote to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 1962.

Austria: Court to rule Friday on far-right election challenge | AFP

Austria’s Constitutional Court has said it will rule Friday on the challenge brought by the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) against its candidate’s narrow defeat in May’s presidential election. The court, which has heard from around 90 witnesses during two weeks of public hearings, said Thursday it would announce at noon (1000 GMT) whether the election result was valid or a new vote must be held. The FPOe’s Norbert Hofer, 54, topped the poll in the first round of the election in April but lost out to 72-year-old Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent backed by the Greens, by just 30,863 votes in the May 22 run-off.

Haiti: Bickering lawmakers avoid vote on interim leader | Associated Press

Haiti’s fragmented Parliament failed again Wednesday to decide what to do about the caretaker president whose term has expired but remains in office in the absence of a vote resolving the latest leadership disorder. A joint National Assembly session adjourned after grandstanding speeches, arguments over agenda items and breaks for closed-door negotiations went on for hours. No vote was taken. For two weeks, Haiti’s bickering senators and deputies have avoided a vote on whether to extend the mandate of acting President Jocelerme Privert or pave the way for another provisional leader. Privert’s 120-day mandate expired two weeks ago under the terms of a February accord that helped bring him to power.

Mongolia: Ruling party defeated in Mongolian parliament elections | Associated Press

The opposition Mongolian People’s Party has won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections in the landlocked nation where a fall in commodity prices has sent the economy into a sharp decline. The head of the national election commission said Thursday that the MPP won 65 out of 76 seats in the national legislature, formally known as the State Grand Khural. The ruling Democratic Party won just nine seats while independents and smaller parties won two seats. The MPP is the former communist party that ruled Mongolia for 70 years before the country’s transition to democracy and a free market economy after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Under Mongolian law, the majority party in parliament forms a new government and appoints the prime minister and speaker of the legislature.

Spain: Election renews political uncertainty | Associated Press

Spain’s repeat election on Sunday failed to clarify the political future of the European Union’s fifth-largest economy, with the main parties placing roughly the same as in December’s ballot, which brought six months of stalemate. The conservative Popular Party, which has ruled for the past four years, again collected the most votes in the election but fell short of the majority of 176 seats it needed in the 350-seat parliament to form a government on its own. With 97 percent of the votes counted late Sunday, incumbent Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s party earned 137 seats in parliament. That is better than the 123 it won in December but still means it will need allies if it wants to govern. Its earlier efforts to find support from rival parties after December proved fruitless.

Zambia: Newspaper Editors Arrested as Government Accused of Pre-Election Crackdown | Newsweek

Zambian police have charged three people connected with an independent newspaper that was shut down in what activists are saying is a crackdown on freedom of speech ahead of a general election. The country’s tax agency, the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA), closed The Post newspaper’s offices in the capital Lusaka on June 21, citing $6 million in unpaid taxes. But the newspaper has claimed the unpaid bill is part of an ongoing dispute and has continued to publish from an undisclosed location, posting an acerbic editorial against President Edgar Lungu on Tuesday that claimed its journalists would not be coerced into stopping production.