Monthly Archives: February 2017

Ten years ago, as Latin America’s “pink tide” reached its high-water mark, leftwing leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa were in power across the continent. But death and election defeat have since culled their numbers and trimmed their power. Cuba is on a path of moderate reform after the death of Castro. Venezuela was lurching from one crisis to another even before Chávez succumbed to cancer in 2013. Morales’s days as president of Bolivia are also numbered after he failed in an attempt last year to change the constitution to allow him to run for re-election. This Sunday, Ecuador will also make a change, with the first presidential election in more than a decade not to be contested by Correa, who is stepping aside after winning three consecutive terms. Whether the country now follows the continental trend towards centre-right government or remains a bastion for the left is being contested in an unusually dirty campaign.

France: Did Russia Hack French Elections? Kremlin Denies Pro-Marine Le Pen Cyberattacks, Despite Emmanuel Macron Claims | IBT

Russia denied meddling in French elections Tuesday after a top aide to French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron alleged Russia hit Macron’s campaign with hundreds of cyberattacks. Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister, said last week French intelligence agencies were attempting to fortify cybersecurity surrounding the election. The announcement followed allegations Russia intended to interfere in French elections in favor of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who is sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies said they were concerned Russia would saturate the internet with bots leaving pro-Le Pen comments.

Indonesia: Unofficial Tally Points to Second Vote for Indonesia Capital | Associated Press

Unofficial counts indicate the acrimonious election for the Indonesian capital’s governor will head to a second round in April with the incumbent, a minority Christian, failing to secure the 50 percent needed for an outright win. Most of the quick counts carried out by research companies show incumbent Gov. “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, whose campaign was hurt by blasphemy charges, winning 40-43 percent of the vote. Anies Rasyid Baswedan, a former education minister who courted conservative and hard-line Muslims, trails by a couple of points. Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, the photogenic son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was in a distant third place that eliminates him from the contest. Religion and Ahok’s Chinese ethnicity, rather than the slew of problems that face a car-clogged and sinking Jakarta, dominated the campaign and transformed the election into a high-stakes tussle between conservatives, who want Islam to be ascendant in politics and society, and moderates.

Luxembourg: Government attempts to boost foreign voting with online registration | Luxemburger Wort

In an effort to attract more foreign residents to vote, Luxembourg’s government is attempting to make the process easier by allowing non-nationals to register on the electoral roll via the internet. The possibility for electronic registration has now been added to the reform of the electoral law approved by the government in the Council of Ministers. The new law will still have to pass through parliament.

National: Should Americans trust their voting tech? | FCW

Despite finding no signs of foul play during the 2016 elections’ actual ballot-casting, state officials told the Election Assistance Commission they are looking to shore up the cybersecurity of voting systems to ensure that Americans are confident in their election results. Director of the New Jersey State Department’s division of elections Bob Giles said at an EAC meeting Feb. 13 that although “cybersecurity wasn’t as big a concern” entering the 2016 election because his state’s voting machines were not connected to the internet, the attention garnered by Russia’s reported electoral influence has led to a rethinking of his agency’s cybersecurity protocols. Giles said cyber hygiene practices such as improving password strength and multifactor authentication will be included in the state’s plan to modernize its voter registration system.

National: The White House tells media to ask Kris Kobach to prove there’s voter fraud. They do. He doesn’t. | The Washington Post

Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser to President Trump, defended his boss’s continuing insistence on rampant voter fraud in the 2016 election Sunday by offering an expert witness. “I suggest you invite Kris Kobach onto your show,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud in greater detail.” Kobach is Kansas’s secretary of state and is fighting the ACLU in federal court over his state’s recent voting restrictions. (A law passed in Kansas in 2011 was credited with disproportionately keeping young and black voters from the polls.) On Monday, three networks invited Kobach on. Two pressed the issue. Kobach offered zero proof. At question is not the existence of voter fraud at all. There are certainly instances in which people vote illegally, like the woman in Texas who cast ballots in 2012 and 2014 despite not being a citizen. The question is whether fraud occurs at a large enough scale to affect election results. A teenager stealing a candy bar from a convenience store every three weeks is different than armed men emptying its safe every night. Miller suggested that Kobach could prove the latter. He barely proved the former.

National: Not Okay: Professor Smeared After Advocating for Election Integrity | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Imagine if someone, after reading something you wrote online that they didn’t agree with, decided to forge racist and anti-Semitic emails under your name. This appears to be what happened to J. Alex Halderman, a computer security researcher and professor of computer science at the University of Michigan. Halderman is one of many election security experts—along with EFF, of course—who has advocated for auditing the results of the 2016 presidential election. The recent attempts to smear his name in retaliation for standing up for election integrity are a threat to online free speech. Halderman, who is a frequent collaborator and sometimes client of EFF, published a piece on Medium in November 2016 arguing that we should perform recounts in three states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—to ensure that the election had not been “hacked.” To be clear, despite a report in New York Magazine, Halderman never stated that there was hard evidence that the election results had in fact been electronically manipulated. He just stated that we should check to be sure:

The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Editorials: The Latest Voter-Fraud Lie | The New York Times

“It is a fact and you will not deny it.” That unnerving remark — made on Sunday by Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser to President Trump — sums up the new administration’s attitude toward the truth: We Decide, You Report. Mr. Miller made the comment at the end of a heated back-and-forth with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who had asked him to defend Mr. Trump’s latest claim of voter fraud — that his narrow loss in New Hampshire was due to voters who had been bused in illegally from Massachusetts. When Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him for even a single example of fraud, Mr. Miller responded: “George, go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who has worked in politics there for a long time.” O.K., why don’t we? Start with New Hampshire’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who has been in office for four decades. “We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” Mr. Gardner told The Boston Globe. Or how about Tom Rath, the state’s former attorney general and a Republican, who tweeted on Sunday that “allegations of voter fraud in NH are baseless, without any merit — it’s shameful to spread these fantasies.” Even New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, who shortly before the election floated his own evidence-free claim about buses of illegal Democratic voters, has backed off.

Editorials: The Trump Administration’s Lies About Voter Fraud Will Lead to Massive Voter Suppression | Ari Berman/The Nation

After falsely alleging that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, Donald Trump debuted a new lie about voter fraud in a meeting with senators on Thursday, saying, according to Politico, that “thousands” of people were “brought in on buses” from Massachusetts to “illegally” vote in New Hampshire. Trump claimed that’s why he and former GOP senator Kelly Ayotte lost their races in the state. White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller repeated Trump’s latest lie in an interview with ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “This issue of busing voters in New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” Miller said. “It’s very real. It’s very serious.” When pressed for evidence by George Stephanopoulos, Miller said, “This morning, on this show, is not the venue to lay out all the evidence.” “For the record, you have provided absolutely no evidence,” Stephanopoulos responded. Miller could provide no evidence for Trump’s claim because there is none. “We have never gotten any proof about buses showing up at polling places,” New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who’s been in office since 1976, told The Boston Globe. “I will pay $1000 to 1st person proving even 1 outofstate person took bus from MA 2 any NH polling place last ElectionDay,” tweeted former New Hampshire GOP chair Fergus Cullen.

Editorials: Elections need oversight, not GOP deceit | NJ.com

Russian hackers tried to destabilize our election, and even if the actual damage is undetermined, it is a national security crisis that requires all patriotic hands on deck. The president says there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes in the last election, and even if it is an assertion that makes strangers back away warily, he has the power to set up a commission to look into it. And all this happened 21/2 years after a commission warned of “an impending crisis” in voting technology. So exactly what sense does it make for a congressional committee to terminate the only federal agency that is responsible for testing and certifying our voting system? Pause here for cognitive dissonance.

Alabama: Lawmaker concerned with delayed special election for Senator | WTVM

One lawmaker says the special election to replace U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ senator seat is illegal. After appointing Luther Strange to the seat, Governor Robert Bentley expressed that the special election to find a permanent replacement for the position would be held during the 2018 general election. According to Representative Chris England (D-Tuscaloosa), this is a crystal clear violation of a law. England says the law requires Bentley to call the election forthwith. By waiting until the November 2018 general election, Strange would serve more than a year and a half in the position without a public vote.

Nevada: Assemblywoman introduces voter ID bill | Reno Gazette-Journal

Amid national concerns from the president that voter fraud is rampant, a Reno assemblywoman introduced a bill requiring voter identification at the polls. Assemblywoman Lisa Krasner, R-Reno, introduced Assembly Bill 164 on Monday that would mandate voters show identification when voting. The bill also contains a provision the Department of Motor Vehicles to provide voter identification cards at no cost if a person can’t afford it. … Multiple studies show that voter fraud is not a nationwide problem. Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske has put out multiple press releases and testified in front of the Legislature that it did not occur in Nevada.

New Hampshire: Sununu says he’s unaware of widespread voter fraud in the Granite State | WMUR

Gov. Chris Sununu said Monday he is unaware of widespread voter fraud in the Granite State, but he said he wants to work with President Donald Trump’s administration to “learn of any evidence they may have.” The governor issued a statement to WMUR.com after several days of a media and social media firestorm over Trump’s assertion – and the assertion of Trump’s senior White House policy adviser – that thousands of people from Massachusetts were bused into New Hampshire to vote illegally in the November election. Neither produced evidence of their claims, and a Federal Election Commission member called on Trump to produce evidence. See WMUR.com’s recent reports here, here and here.

New York: Purge outdated voter rolls? New York City tried it, with bad results | Associated Press

Whether you believe, or not, that voting fraud is a problem in the U.S., one thing is certain: Tidying up outdated voter rolls is sometimes easier said than done. Just ask election officials in the nation’s largest city. After an independent review found that New York City’s voting lists contained people who were dead or in prison, elections officials began an aggressive housecleaning purge in 2014 and 2015 that eliminated more than 200,000 supposedly invalid registrations ahead of last year’s elections. The result? A record number of complaints during the 2016 presidential primary from legal voters who turned up to cast a ballot, but found that they were no longer registered. “Democracy itself is under attack,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, declared last week soon after announcing plans to join a federal lawsuit against the board over the way the purge was handled.

North Carolina: Lawsuit seeks voting rights for black rural residents in North Carolina | USA Today

In a bid to create a better chance for black residents of rural areas to get elected to local office, a team of civil rights and private lawyers has filed what one prominent civil rights organization calls the first major voting rights lawsuit of the year. Attorneys from from the Washington-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and two private law firms filed the suit Monday in federal court in North Carolina. The suit alleges that the black residents who account for about a third of the population in Jones County, N.C., are prevented from electing candidates who represent their needs because the county elects commissioners at large rather than by district. The complaint alleges the at-large system prevents black residents from electing black candidates from their communities, and says the at-large system dilutes black voting power.

Vermont: Recount rankles Vermont GOP | Associated Press

A second Vermont recount for a state House seat has some Republicans and town clerks crying foul, but Democrats say the incumbent who lost has a right to ask the Legislature to resolve the contested election. Susan Hatch Davis, a Progressive from Washington, went to court after the November vote showed Republican Robert Frenier of Chelsea beat her by eight votes, and a recount showed he won by seven. The court refused to authorize a second recount, so Davis asked the Legislature to intervene. Now the House Republican leader is accusing Democrats of trying to steal a seat to prevent the GOP from sustaining a governor’s veto.

Editorials: Why do Virginia lawmakers want to make our elections hackable? | Dale Eisman/Richmond Times-Dispatch

When all 17 agencies in the federal government’s worldwide intelligence network agree that Russian cyber-spies penetrated voter registration and record-keeping systems in at least four states last year, you’d think that state legislators would shy away from embracing new, expensive, and vulnerable-to-hacking election technologies. And when the Department of Defense — which, despite billions of dollars invested in protecting its own computers — has fallen victim to hackers and concluded it can’t guarantee the integrity of ballots cast online by troops stationed overseas, you’d think online voting would be totally off-the-table. But in Virginia, you’d be wrong. State senators ignored warnings from a non-partisan group of computer scientists and voted 36-4 last week for an internet voting “pilot program” pushed by Sen. William DeSteph, R-Virginia Beach. SB 1490 may be the worst bill you’ve never heard of in the 2017 legislative session and it’s now halfway to passage.

Italy: Intrigue May Halt Renzi’s Comeback Bid | Bloomberg

Matteo Renzi’s chances of recapturing the Italian prime minister’s office this year may be slipping away. His push for early elections has triggered so much dissent within his own party that he may have to wait until next year for a comeback attempt. The ex-premier’s Democratic Party, the biggest force in parliament, holds a meeting of its leaders in Rome on Monday. They’ll decide whether to seek national elections this year, or wait until a vote scheduled for early 2018. Should Renzi prevail on Monday, there is the prospect of yet another European election alongside Germany, France and the Netherlands this year. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which wants a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro area, is keen to exploit its standing in opinion polls that show it neck and neck with the Democratic Party.

Netherlands: Far-right outcast Geert Wilders vows to ‘de-Islamise’ the Netherlands after taking lead in Dutch polls | The Independent

The controversial right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders says he intends to govern in the Netherlands after the elections, and expects the electorate to rise up if other political parties deny him that option. In a rare 40-minute interview with broadcaster WNL, the far-right leader also compared mosques to Nazi temples and the Quran to Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf. Mr Wilders does not often sit down for in-depth interviews with Dutch media. The founder of the one-man Party for Freedom, or PVV, prefers to control the narrative through Twitter. The “Dutch Trump” knows that the media will pick up news from his timeline.

Editorials: Blue skies over Somalia | Akbar Arman/Al Jazeera

The stage seemed set for a ceremonial rubber-stamping of the status quo. Some of the new parliamentarians, many of who came through a corrupt process supported by domestic and foreign elements, started to arrive late and, at times, act unprofessionally on the floor. Key officials, including the speakers of both chambers of the Federal Parliament, were awkwardly seated under the stage where ballots were being cast for the most important election in Somalia’s history. And the event itself was being conducted in Halane district, a geographical space that is physically located in Mogadishu, but in reality is entirely a different world – it is a type of a “Green Zone” for UN agencies, diplomatic missions, and private security. But, we now know that bad optics don’t always result in bad outcomes.

National: Election commissioner to Trump: Show evidence of voter fraud | The Hill

A commissioner on the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) called on President Trump to give proof of voter fraud, after he reportedly made further claims in a meeting with senators. Trump reportedly blamed voter fraud for why both he and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) lost in New Hampshire last November during a recent meeting with a bipartisan group of senators. “The scheme the President of the United States alleges would constitute thousands of felony criminal offenses under New Hampshire law,” Commissioner Ellen Weintraub said in a statement Friday. “The President has issued an extraordinarily serious and specific charge,” added Weintraub, who is a Democrat but was appointed by former President George W. Bush in 2002. “Allegations of this magnitude cannot be ignored.” “I therefore call upon President Trump to immediately share his evidence with the public and with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly.”

National: The Supreme Court will examine partisan gerrymandering in 2017. That could change the voting map. | The Washington Post

In 2017, the Supreme Court will take up the issue of partisan gerrymandering. Depending on how the court rules, its decisions could have far-reaching implications for the partisan balance in the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures — and for the future of redistricting across the country. Gerrymandering has helped give the Republican Party a significant advantage in Congress. Because Republicans had unified control of twice as many states as Democrats when the last congressional district maps were drawn, estimates suggest that gerrymandering before the 2012 elections cost Democrats between 20 and 41 seats in the House. Partisan gerrymandering has become the norm in U.S. politics because the Supreme Court has declined to declare it unconstitutional. For three decades, a majority of justices have failed to identify manageable standards to determine when a plan rises to the level of an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

National: Veterans in US territories crowd fund the legal case for voting rights | McClatchy DC

A group of military veterans living in Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are crowd-funding their appeal to challenge federal voting laws that deny U.S. citizens living in the territories the ability to vote in presidential elections. Americans in the U.S. territories follow the same federal laws, pay billions in taxes and have some of the highest rates of enlistment in the U.S. military, but they say their equal protection rights are being violated based on where they live. People born in Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are all U.S. citizens. “I don’t feel that I am a complete person as an American,” said Rodney Cruz, a disabled veteran who served multiple tours in Iraq before his injury in 2008. “I went over, I took a bullet, I did everything that was required of me, but when it comes to electing our commander in chief every four years I’m told, ‘You can’t because you’re a nonvoting citizen.’ ” A native of Guam, Cruz is the sixth generation in his family to serve in the U.S. military. The nonprofit he founded to help veterans with mental health issues – Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Veterans of the Pacific – is a plaintiff in the case. Every election year while Cruz was deployed, he said, he felt frustrated watching fellow soldiers cast their absentee ballots.

National: Trump’s voter fraud claims are absurd, yet another analysis shows | VICE News

Just under 3 million Americans are registered to vote in two places, but the overwhelming majority of them don’t vote twice, according to a new analysis by TargetSmart, the data firm used by the Democratic National Committee for its national voter file. These findings, discussed in an interview with VICE News, discredit recent assertions by President Donald Trump that there is an epidemic of double-voting and voter fraud. Since it became clear that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in November’s presidential election, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that he came up 2.9 million ballots short because 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally. (There are 200 million registered voters in the U.S.) Five days into his presidency, Trump called for a “major investigation” into that alleged fraud but then later scaled back his effort to a “commission” led by Vice President Mike Pence to study the problem.

Editorials: Republicans Hold On to a Myth to Hold On to Power | The New York Times

Given the increased political power Republicans won in the last elections, from Washington to red-state legislatures, voters might expect the party to feel that the nation’s voting procedures are working quite well. Yet this is far from the case, as triumphant Republicans are using their enhanced clout to continue their campaign playing up the mythical threat that voter fraud abounds in the nation. The newest and loudest zealot in this cause is, of course, President Trump, with his scurrilous claim that millions of illegal ballots cost him a popular vote majority. His baseless claim only encourages the renewed efforts at voter suppression reported to be underway in a score of Republican-dominated statehouses intent on making it harder for citizens to register or vote. Mr. Trump is trying to sell the false idea that he was fraudulently denied a clear mandate. Republican state legislators, in turn, are no more convincing but just as cynical in insisting that elaborate new ballot protections are needed — protections that effectively target poor people, minorities and students, who tend to favor Democratic candidates.

Editorials: The next GOP assault on voting rights | E.J. Dionne Jr./The Washington Post

When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren last week as she was reading Coretta Scott King’s 1986 letter denouncing Jeff Sessions, he jogged the memory of another Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. William R. Keating. “I went to bed that evening seeing what was occurring,” Keating said in an interview, “and when I woke up in the morning, my mind immediately went back to the outrage of an amendment that had been passed in the House,” almost entirely with Republican votes. The amendment, introduced by Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and approved on May 9, 2012, was aimed at preventing the Justice Department from using its funds “to bring any action against any state for implementation of a state law requiring voter identification.” In other words, even if the Department of Justice thought a voter ID law discriminated against African Americans or Latinos, it could not sue to protect them.

Florida: Aaron Bean revives bill proposing elected Secretary of State | Florida Politics

There may be one more statewide office for Florida voters to select the occupant of soon. Senate Joint Resolution 882, filed by Aaron Bean, proposes an amendment to the Florida Constitution for direct election of Florida’s Secretary of State starting in the 2022 election. The Bean bill also would elevate the Secretary of State to a Cabinet position in June 2019. The language of the legislation denotes a perceived flaw in the current model: “Currently, the secretary is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Governor and is not a Cabinet member.

New Hampshire: Comments by senior White House adviser that voter fraud in New Hampshire is ‘widely known’ create firestorm | NH1

Three days after President Donald Trump made unsubstantiated claims that thousands of people bused in from Massachusetts voted illegally in the Granite State in last year’s election, his senior policy adviser repeated the allegations, but didn’t offer any proof. And the new charges, made by White House Policy Adviser Stephen Miller on the Sunday talk shows, once again sparked a massive amount of push back and conversation on social media. In a contentious interview on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Miller repeated the President’s claim that he would have won New Hampshire if it were not for “thousands” of people being bused there. Trump lost the fight for the Granite State’s four electoral votes by just under 3,000 votes to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. “Go to New Hampshire. Talk to anybody who’s worked in politics there for a long time. Everybody’s aware of the problem in New Hampshire,” Miller responded when asked by Stephanopoulos to produce evidence of the voter fraud. “Having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real, it’s very serious,” Miller added.

New Hampshire: Stephen Miller’s bushels of Pinocchios for false voter-fraud claims | The Washington Post

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller appeared on ABC’s “The Week” on Sunday, spouting a bunch of false talking points on alleged voter fraud. (He also repeated similar claims on other Sunday talk shows.) To his credit, host George Stephanopoulus repeatedly challenged Miller, noting that he had provided no evidence to support his claims. But Miller charged ahead, using the word “fact” three times in a vain effort to bolster his position.

Here’s a guide through the back and forth.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on, though, to the question of voter fraud as well. President Trump again this week suggested in a meeting with senators that thousands of illegal voters were bused from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and that’s what caused his defeat in the state of New Hampshire, also the defeat of Senator Kelly Ayotte. That has provoked a response from a member of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, who says, “I call upon the president to immediately share New Hampshire voter fraud evidence so that his allegations may be investigated promptly.” Do you have that evidence?

North Carolina: Judges hear arguments over restricting governor’s powers | Associated Press