The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for October 24-30 2016
Election officials are struggling to reassure voters in an election one side claims is “rigged” as the other was apparently targeted by Russian hackers and Wikileaks. Federal and state law enforcement officials say they are concerned about violence in the final two weeks of the long and bitter Presidential campaign, and well beyond that if Donald Trump loses and refuses to accept the vote as legitimate. It’s election time, so there are reports of “vote-flipping“, in which voters pressing one candidate’s name on a touch-screen machine, only to have the opponent’s name light up instead. Are the machines rigged? No, says just about every voting technology expert. “If you were actually trying to rig an election, it would be a very stupid thing to do, to let the voter know that you were doing it,” says Larry Norden, with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York. A federal appeals court is deciding whether to force the state of Arizona to count provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct. TPM looked into the Indiana State Police investigation that stymied the efforts of an organization’s effort to register African American voters. The New York Times examined claims of voter fraud on Philadelphia. Legal wrangling over Texas’ voter identification law is stirring confusion at the polls, with civil rights groups and some voters questioning how some county election officials are portraying the state’s ID requirement. Elections officials in all mail ballot states say that service changes at the US Postal Service have the potential to disrupt voting-by-mail in the first presidential election since the changes took effect last year. Initial counting after polls closed in Iceland’s election put neither the ruling Independence party’s centre-right coalition nor the Pirate party’s leftist alliance in a position to secure outright victory and voters in Moldova go to the polls to choose their president for the first time in 20 years.