Monthly Archives: August 2016

A federal judge has denied Pasadena’s request to throw out a lawsuit challenging its controversial city council redistricting plan, which a group of Hispanic and Latino residents alleges dilutes the voting rights of the suburb’s growing minority population. Judge Lee Rosenthal’s ruling Wednesday after a roughly two-hour court hearing means the case continues toward trial, which Rosenthal has tentatively set for November. Wednesday’s session was one of the first significant hearings in the voting rights case, which has received national attention as emblematic of modern-day battles over the issue more than 50 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

US Virgin Islands: Territorial Voting Rights Lawsuit Faces Setback As Election Nears | Virgin Islands Consortium

Six U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands saw their hopes of being able to vote for President in November take a step backward as a federal court ruled on Tuesday that Congress can deny the right to vote for state residents who move to certain U.S. territories while protecting it for those who move to other territories or a foreign country. Still pending are plaintiffs’ claims that a similar Illinois law also violates equal protection. Lead plaintiff Luis Segovia, a U.S. citizen who lives in Guam, served an 18-month tour in Iraq with the U.S. Army followed by a 10-month tour in Afghanistan as part of the Guam National Guard, yet as things stand he won’t be able to vote for President in November. Three other plaintiffs are also veterans – two from Puerto Rico and another from Guam. Also joining the lawsuit is the Iraq Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Veterans of the Pacific, based in Guam, and the League of Women Voters of the Virgin Islands. The case is part of a broader effort to secure voting rights in U.S. territories and the District of Columbia through a new constitutional amendment.

Wisconsin: Good government group slams vote to allow ethics commission to make political donations | Capital Times

A good government group is decrying the decision made Tuesday by members of Wisconsin’s new ethics commission to opt not to ban themselves from donating to political campaigns. “Just how stupid do they think Wisconsinites are?” asked Common Cause in Wisconsin director Jay Heck, who blasted the members of the commission who voted against considering a proposal to ban themselves from making political contributions. Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board was replaced this summer with two separate commissions charged with overseeing elections, ethics, lobbying and campaign finance rules in the state. Commissioners on each board are partisan appointees, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

Australia: Northern Territory election: voters forced to wait for fully analysed costings | The Guardian

Both major parties contesting the Northern Territory election on Saturday are yet to release fully analysed costings of their campaign and other commitments. The governing Country Liberal party released its costings on Tuesday afternoon – past their own deadline of Monday but well before Labor’s release, planned for Thursday. The CLP has claimed its costings would see a positive balance of $35.78m over three years from 2018-18 and said its analysis of Labor’s commitments had found a debt of $523.51m over the same period. However, the CLP costings have not yet been assessed by Treasury, meaning voters will receive fully analysed data from both parties at about the same time. The deputy chief minister, Peter Styles, said he hoped Treasury would return the CLP costings soon.

Belarus: Central Election Commission issues voter ID requirements | Belarus News

Belarus’ Central Election Commission approved the lists of documents on the basis of which voters will be issued ballot papers at polling stations, BelTA has learned. CEC Secretary Nikolai Lozovik noted that in accordance with the established rules a ballot paper is issued by election commission staff on the basis of the two documents. The first…

China: Another candidate’s election material banned from public estates for ‘HK independence’ phrase | Hong Kong Free Press

Another pro-democracy Legislative Council election candidate has said his pamphlets were banned from being distributed at public housing estates by the Housing Department as they contained the phrase “Hong Kong independence.” Avery Ng Man-yuen, the League of Social Democrats chairman who is running in Kowloon West constituency, condemned the department’s decision outside its headquarters in Ho Man Tin on Wednesday: “Shame on political censorship, it is interfering with the fairness of the election.” Ng said the department originally agreed the pamphlets on August 11. After they were printed, his volunteers started distributing them to residents. “But on August 16 morning, Kai Ching Estate’s management office called to say the pamphlets’ approval was retracted, because pamphlets mentioned ‘self-determination’ and ‘Hong Kong independence’,” Ng said.

National: This Election Could Be Hacked, And We Need To Plan For It | Forbes

With the Democratic National Committee cyberattack far more widespread than originally thought, fears of foreign power using cyber-espionage to influence this November’s election are growing, and real. It’s also prompted concern that hackers may shift focus to an even more vulnerable target: your vote. Voters in 43 states will cast their ballot for the next president using aging electronic voting machines, many now ten years old with dated software lacking proper security. Despite machine manufacturers’ repeated claims of their integrity, high-profile studies have shown hackers can alter vote tallies on these notoriously-penetrable machines within minutes. Tactics available to hackers are numerous and growing: A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack would disable voting machines or the back-end servers, preventing voters from participating in the election. Deleted voting records ahead of Election Day would expunge names from the registered voter rolls. And malware could be used to “steal” an election by tampering with voting machine hardware or software.

National: New Voting Technologies Create Need for Improved Infrastructure | StateTech Magazine

The days of hanging chads might be over, but new Election Day challenges have arisen to fill the void. Electronic voting machines, online voter registration portals and optical scanning devices place significant strain on data center operations. States, counties and cities must now ensure they have the infrastructure necessary to support these increasingly popular technologies — especially with the 2016 presidential election just over the horizon. But even though all states face the same Nov. 8 deadline for Election Day improvements, the varied adoption of voting innovations means no two states have the same infrastructure-upgrade needs.

Editorials: The Truth Behind Trump’s Rigged-Election Paranoia | Todd Purdum/Vanity Fair

Donald Trump has taken to saying it over and over again: that the November election is “going to be rigged,” that “crooked Hillary” and her scheming accomplices will somehow manage to steal a victory that should rightfully be his. He has said this in many ways, about the election nationwide and about the election in specific places. As he told his supporters at a recent rally in Altoona, “The only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” Only Trump himself can know whether he is saying this to pre-explain an anticipated defeat, to cast doubt on his opponent’s integrity, or simply to kick up a cloud that will further arouse the fears of the alienated Americans who have fueled his campaign all year. And he isn’t saying. But more than any of Trump’s other outlandish claims—more than any of his other inaccuracies and falsehoods—this one is dangerous. It’s dangerous because it undermines faith in the integrity of democracy itself.

Editorials: Voting Rights Is Not a Fringe Issue | Leslie Savan/The Nation

The mainstream media have treated Donald Trump’s claim that the election will be rigged against him as a dangerous threat to the very legitimacy of the American election system. And they’ve warned that his call for poll “observers” to prevent people in “certain parts” of Pennsylvania from voting “five times” reeks of intimidation. They’re right on both counts. But at the same time, the corporate media, especially on television, have largely ignored the actual attempts to rig state and local elections across the country through laws that make it much harder for certain people to vote. Voter suppression—that Republican-generated roster of voting restrictions that disproportionately impact minorities, students, and other traditionally Democratic voters–comes in many guises. There are strict voter ID laws requiring hard-to-come-by documents; illegitimate purges of the voting rolls; hurdles to voter registration; cut backs on early voting days; reductions in polling places, often resulting in three- and four-hour lines. Courts have recently blocked or weakened restrictions in six states, but voter suppression in one form or another will likely affect hundreds of thousands of people in this, the first presidential election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.

California: Voting will never be quite the same in California if lawmakers pass reforms | Los Angeles Times

Sweeping legislation at the state Capitol would make the future of California elections dependent on a major expansion of absentee ballots, one that would give local officials the power to close thousands of neighborhood polling places. In their place, counties would open temporary elections offices known as “vote centers” sprinkled throughout communities, locations offering a wide variety of elections services including early voting and same-day voter registration as well as a limited number of in-person voting booths. “We’re trying to make it easier for people to participate, given the complexities of modern life,” said state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), the author of Senate Bill 450. The proposal was passed by the Assembly on Tuesday on a party-line vote. It now heads to the state Senate and faces an Aug. 31 deadline to make it to Gov. Jerry Brown for his ultimate signature or veto.

California: Disabled California man seeks to have voting rights restored | Associated Press

A former producer at NPR who lost his ability to walk and speak asked a judge Tuesday to restore his right to vote under a new California law that makes it easier for people with disabilities to keep that right and regain it if lost. David Rector, 66, handed a letter to a court clerk shortly after an advocacy group filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department asking that California be required to notify people who have been disqualified from voting about the law in time for the Nov. 8 election. “How are these folks supposed to know about the right to get their voting rights back unless somebody tells them?” Thomas Coleman, legal director of the Spectrum Group, said outside the federal building in downtown San Diego. “The state judiciary has been dragging its feet.” For years, California judges had stripped away the voting rights of people with some disabilities, including autism, Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, “almost as a matter of routine,” Coleman said.

Missouri: St. Louis judge waits to make ruling on vote fraud case until state certifies election results | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A judge will wait to rule on a vote fraud case involving absentee ballots for the state representative race in the 78th District until results are officially certified from the Secretary of State’s office. Circuit Judge Julian L. Bush on Monday could have dismissed the case filed by Bruce Franks, who lost in the Aug. 2 Democratic primary to incumbent Penny Hubbard. Instead, Bush issued a stay, keeping the case alive. It’s basically a procedural move preventing Dave Roland, the attorney for Franks, from having to refile his official challenge to the election results. He is claiming that a high number of improper absentee ballots tilted the election in Hubbard’s favor.

Virginia: Governor Restores 13,000 Felons’ Voting Rights, This Time One by One | Governing

Individual orders have gone out re-restoring voting rights for some 13,000 former felons in Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced Monday. Included with each mailing: A voter registration form. This first round of new restorations covered most of the people who, following McAuliffe’s mass restoration order in April, registered to vote in Virginia. A few of those cases remained under review as of Monday, the administration said. The state Supreme Court nullified McAuliffe’s April order a month ago, agreeing with GOP legislative leaders who had sued the governor over an unconstitutional exercise of his restoration powers. Only individual orders are valid, the court said.

Wisconsin: Ethics Commission members can make political donations to those they regulate | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin’s newly created commission charged with overseeing the state’s ethics, lobbying and campaign finance laws voted Tuesday to allow its six partisan appointees to continue making donations to the very candidates they are regulating, rejecting a proposal to ban such giving. State law allows members of the Ethics Commission to give to partisan candidates, and the three Democrats and three Republicans on the panel have donated in the past. Two commissioners who wanted a ban on such donations said continuing to give money would look bad. They were outvoted, 4-2, by commissioners who said their votes would not be swayed based on political donations they’ve made. “I don’t want to be limited in giving contributions,” said Milwaukee attorney David Halbrooks, a Democrat. “I don’t think it will ever affect my analysis.”

Ghana: Electoral Commission says Ghana not ready for electronic voting | GhanaWeb

The Electoral Commission (EC) has said Ghana is not ready for an electronic voting system despite technological advancement in the 21st Century. The Chairperson of the commission, Charlotte Osei, said they arrived at the conclusion based on recommendations from the Special Reform Committee tasked to investigate the possibility of the system. Ghana has since 1992 improved on its electoral processes. In 2012, the EC for the first time adopted biometric registration and verification in capturing voters’ information to enhance the processes.

Russia: Putin’s Election Grip Is So Tight Even His Nemesis Khodorkovsky Can Take Part | Bloomberg

The last time Vladimir Putin’s political party won national elections, ballot-stuffing allegations sparked the biggest protests of his rule. Five years on, Putin appears to be so confident in his hold on power that even his most dogged adversary is welcome to challenge United Russia in next month’s parliamentary polls — Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the London-based former oil billionaire who was charged with murder in absentia in December. Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison, is back doing what he says got him jailed in the first place: supporting Putin’s opponents. All but one of the 19 candidates he’s grooming have been accepted by authorities overseeing the vote. Since being freed in 2013, Khodorkovsky has vowed to use what’s left of his fortune to hasten the end of the Putin era, though he admits the Kremlin’s grip on the electoral process is so strong it has nothing to fear, for now.

Seychelles: Electoral Commission strikes registration of two political parties following court order | Seychelles News Agency

The Seychelles Electoral Commission has announced its decision to strike the names of two political parties from the official registrar in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling delivered earlier on Tuesday. Supreme Court Judge Durai Karunakaran had given the Electoral Commission 24 hours to comply with a court order upholding a previous ruling prohibiting the registration of Linyon Sanzman and Lafors Sosyal Demokratik (LSD) as political parties. The decision comes barely two weeks before parliamentary elections set for September 8 to 10 on the island nation. Tuesday’s ruling mean only three parties – Parti Lepep, the Seychelles Patriotic Movement and Linyon Demokratik Seselwa, along with three independent candidates — will stand in the upcoming polls.

National: There’s work to be done to make US elections secure — and it has nothing to do with voter ID | Public Radio International

Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the government was considering classifying voting systems part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” a designation currently held by systems such as the electric grid and banking networks. The announcement comes on the heels of reports of a vast infiltration of Democratic Party servers. “Everything we know about voting machines — electronic ones, computerized ones, is they’re not very secure,” says tech security expert Bruce Schneier. “They are not tested, they are not designed rigorously and in many cases there’s no way to detect or recover from fraud. So there really is a disaster waiting to happen.” Aviel Rubin, a professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University, agrees. “Unfortunately, I think the thing that’s improved the most in the last 10 years is the sophistication of the hackers and the number of incidents that we see that are occurring daily. If you look at the news you see that ransomware is becoming pretty common,” Rubin says. “The big change that I’ve seen has been just how sophisticated the hackers are today. And they’re sponsored by countries like Russia and China, which is a much more formidable adversary than we had in the past.”

National: In-person voting fraud is rare, doesn’t affect elections | PBS NewsHour

Donald Trump’s newest campaign ad begins with a warning: “In Hillary Clinton’s America, the system stays rigged against Americans.” The commercial, which aired Friday as part of his $5 million swing state ad buy, harkens back to a claim Trump has been hammering for weeks — that the general election is rigged against him. The questionable claim looks to mobilize Republicans, with the all-important start of early voting in some states just weeks away. The presidential nominee has voiced strong support for North Carolina’s stringent voter ID law — struck down as discriminatory, but to be appealed — saying without it, voters will cast ballots “15 times” for Democrat Hillary Clinton. He also launched a new effort on his website last week seeking volunteers to root out fraud at the polls. That ID law Trump referred to had involved a broader package of restrictions — among them, reducing early in-person voting, which is popular among blacks in particular. At the same time, it exempted tough photo ID requirements for early mail-in voters, who were more likely to be white and Republican.

National: After DNC Hack, Cybersecurity Experts Worry About Old Machines, Vote Tampering | NPR

Security experts say that Russian hackers have broken into the computers of not only the Democratic National Committee but other targets as well. This has raised a new wave of concerns that on Election Day, the votes themselves could be compromised by hackers, potentially tipping the results. Most states have returned to paper-backed voting systems in recent years, but that still leaves vulnerable a number of states that rely solely on machines. Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, tells NPR’s Scott Simon that without these paper-backed systems, up to 15 states could be putting their election results at risk. That’s a possible reach of 60 million voters — “enough to swing an election,” Tufekci says. In my old workplace — at Princeton University at the Center for Information Technology Policy — we had this lounging area with comfy couches, and researchers had decorated the place with a voting machine that had been hacked to play Pac-Man instead of counting votes. … And when they hacked this, the machine had been in use in jurisdictions around the country with more than 9 million voters.

National: Report: Online Voting Carries Security Risks | The Daily Dot

In 2016, people are increasingly doing everything online. Dating has moved to Tinder, your bank is now a smartphone app, and schoolyard bullies are basically giving virtual wedgies. In that respect, it may seem odd online voting hasn’t become ubiquitous; however, a new report shows that electronic voting is fraught with problems. According to the report, released this week by a trio of nonprofit organizations—the Verified Voting Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Common Cause—online voting systems necessarily create a link between a voter and his or ballot. That link runs counter to the system of secret ballots the United States has almost universally employed for well over a century. Entitled Secret Ballot At Risk: Recommendations for Protecting Democracy, the report notes that 32 states, along with the District of Columbia, employ some form of online voting. Only Alaska allows all of its citizens to vote online; most other states restrict the privilege to active U.S. service members stationed overseas.

National: America scrubs millions from the voter rolls. Is it fair? | News21

The cleansing of America’s voter registration rolls occurs every two years and has become a legal battleground between politicians who say the purges are fair and necessary, and voting rights advocates who contend that they discriminate. Voting rights groups repeatedly have challenged states’ registration purges, including those in Ohio, Georgia, Kansas and Iowa, contending that black, Latino, poor, young and homeless voters have been disproportionately purged. In Florida, Kansas, Iowa and Harris County, Texas, courts have ordered elections officials to restore thousands of voters to the registration rolls or to halt purges they found discriminatory. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act mandates that state and local elections officers keep voter registration lists accurate by removing the names of people who die, move or fail in successive elections to vote. Voters who’ve been convicted of a felony, ruled mentally incompetent or found to be noncitizens also can be removed. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported that 15 million names were scrubbed from the lists nationally in 2014.

National: OSCE rights group requests 500 international observers to monitor US presidential vote | Reuters

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe aims to send 500 international observers to observe November’s US presidential election, a tenfold increase from the number the group deployed in 2012. A coalition of more than 200 US civil rights groups urged the OSCE in a letter released on Tuesday to provide even more than the 500 observers the OSCE requested based on an assessment it conducted in May. The actual observers will be dispatched by the international security and rights organization’s 57 participating states. The letter from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said the OSCE’s role was “even more critical” in light of the US Justice Department’s July announcement, first reported by Reuters, that it would deploy election observers to far fewer polling sites this year than in previous elections. Civil rights advocates say voters are more likely to face racial bias at the polls in November than they have in 50 years, because of voting laws that several states passed after the US Supreme Court struck down part of the landmark anti-discrimination 1965 Voting Rights Act three years ago. Supporters of the laws say they are necessary to combat voter fraud.

Editorials: Voting machines should be seen as critical democracy infrastructure | Gregory Miller/The Hill

At the Open Source Election Technology Foundation (OSET), a 10-year old Silicon Valley based nonprofit election technology research institute, we are encouraged by valuable dialog underway about how to protect America’s aging and vulnerable voting machinery and evolve our systems with technology for ease and confidence. Setting aside some misunderstanding about the challenges elections officials face in administering a nationwide patchwork quilt of election technology, there is a critical mass on the left and the right discussing how to protect our “critical democracy infrastructure.” Part of the problem is that by design, our nation’s voting infrastructure is a balkanized system comprised of a small number of vendors’ machinery, combined with a variety of ways of casting and counting ballots. While a large-scale national attack is highly unlikely, such would be unnecessary to derail a general election. In fact, it only requires a targeted attack of a few machines in a key county of a swing State.

California: Restored voting rights sought for California disabled people | Associated Press

As the November presidential election neared, it looked like David Rector would once again be unable to vote. Five years ago, a judge ruled that a traumatic brain injury disqualified him. Then the 66-year-old former NPR producer learned about a California law that makes it easier for people with developmental disabilities to keep and regain the right to vote. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, protects that right if they can express a desire to vote. On Tuesday, Rector will seek to have his voting rights restored, and advocates representing him and others who have been disqualified will file a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department asking that California be required to notify them of the new law in time for the Nov. 8 ballot.

California: Ballot selfies are illegal, but this Bay Area legislator says they shouldn’t be | Los Angeles Times

Beyonce’s done it, Sean Hannity’s done it, and we all know Kim Kardashian has done it too. Now a Bay Area lawmaker wants all California voters to be able to do it too, without the threat of arrest. That is, take selfies in the voting booth. A new bill sponsored by Assemblyman Marc Levine (D-San Rafael) would legalize so-called “ballot selfies” and allow citizens to share photos of themselves voting on social media. “People are taking pictures of their dogs, they’re taking pictures of their dinner, so let’s take pictures of voting,” Levine said in an interview. “It’s time to make voting cool and ubiquitous, and ballot selfies are a powerful way to do that.”

Kansas: Kobach asks court to exclude voters over citizenship proof | Associated Press

Kansas is asking a federal appeals court to keep thousands of people who haven’t yet provided the documents to prove they are U.S. citizens from voting in November’s election. Judges from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver are set to hear arguments Tuesday in the legal fight over how the state enforces its proof-of-citizenship requirement for voters who register at motor vehicle offices. Since 1993, states must allow people to register to vote when they apply for or renew their driver’s licenses. The so-called motor-voter law says that people can only be asked for “minimal information” when registering to vote, allowing them to simply affirm they are citizens.

Mississippi: Voter ID laws: Why black Democrats’ fight for the ballot in Mississippi still matters | The Conversation

This fall, we are faced with the question of who will become president. And equally important – who can vote? Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states have enacted laws making it harder to vote. In the most extreme cases, they require citizens to present government-issued ID to cast their ballots. Recently, these laws have been successfully challenged in the courts. This summer, federal courts overturned voting laws in North Carolina and North Dakota. In North Carolina, the court ruled against a state law requiring voters to present government-issued ID. The law also restricted, among other things, early voting and had a disproportionate effect on African-American voters. A federal judge ruled that the North Dakota voter ID law had a harmful impact on the ability of Native Americans to cast their vote. Looming over the controversy about voter ID laws is the history of voter suppression and the movement to open the ballot box to African-Americans. As a scholar in African-American history, I believe that today’s debate can be understood only by considering struggles of African-Americans for the vote in the past and in particular by looking at the story of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Texas: State Prosecuted 15 Illegal Voting Cases But None Involved Impersonation | News21