The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for October 10-16 2016
Officials are more concerned by the discovery in recent weeks that hackers, including ones believed to be working for the Russian government, are trying to access voter registration files, perhaps to alter or delete them, in more than 20 states. Signal Magazine published a four part series on election cybersecurity focusing in turn on: voting lists, voting equipment, voter databases, and efforts to secure elections. MIT Technology Review considered ways in which the November election maybe the most secure yet, in spite of concerns about cyber-hacking. In separate legal actions, an appeals court panel refused to block a new Arizona law prohibiting get-out-the-vote groups from collecting early ballots and a U.S. District Court judge declined to order the state to count votes cast in the wrong precinct. A federal judge issued a scathing rebuke to Florida’s top election official in an order cancelling a hearing on a lawsuit over vote-by-mail ballots. Democratic legal teams successfully extended voter registration deadlines in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. A progressive advocacy group is launching an advertising campaign accusing Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who also is the Republican vice-presidential nominee, of allowing voter suppression after state police raided the offices of a voter registration program aimed at signing up African Americans. A federal judge ordered Wisconsin to provide more information to the public about how they could easily get voting credentials even if they don’t have birth certificates, but declined to suspend the voter ID law. In Bosnia, as a vote recount for the disputed mayoralty of Srebrenica began in Sarajevo, the Bosniak-led Party of Democratic Action, SDA called for a complete annulment of the local polls and voters go to the polls today in Montenegro in what analysts view as a choice between Russia and the West.