Imagine it’s the first Tuesday of November. Rather than voting at your local precinct in your municipality, you would drive to the county “polling center” to cast your ballot. In a Senate hearing on Tuesday, legislators and elections experts discussed this “polling center” concept and other possibilities to amend Pennsylvania’s current election practices, many of which have been in place since 1937.
Robert Kando, the former executive director of the state Board of Elections, is asking a federal judge to reconsider the dismissal of a lawsuit that accuses the board of violating his rights by firing him last year. Kando filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. to reverse his dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged Kando’s August firing from the $143,000-plus position he had held since 2005. Kando argued through his lawyer Richard Sinapi that McConnell misconstrued the law in ruling that Kando didn’t have a right to a “name clearing” hearing because he had been categorized as an unclassified employee, who served at the pleasure of the board as his appointing authority. He faulted the judge, too, for failing to view the facts in his favor, particularly as to his arguments that he had been denied proper notice and an opportunity to be heard.
The next stage in the legal challenge to Texas’ voter ID law begins Wednesday morning in a federal courtroom in Corpus Christi. U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who has already ruled that the Republican-backed voter ID law was enacted in 2011 with the intent to discriminate against minority voters, will confer with lawyers on how best to determine whether Texas should be penalized for violating the U.S. Voting Rights Act. One possible remedy, Ramos has acknowledged, would be to require Texas to gain U.S. Justice Department approval before making any future changes to election law or voting procedures. Ramos has ordered lawyers on both sides to be ready to discuss whether a hearing is needed on possible remedies and how long such a hearing might take, as well as potential deadlines for legal briefs.
As many as 100 election departments from cities and counties across the United States may have been penetrated by Russian hackers. That’s the revelation from a report allegedly from the National Security Agency, according to an online media outlet The Intercept, which published what it claims to be a classified report that said Russian agents at the direction of the government attacked a voting machine company and then tried to infiltrate local election boards. The FBI on Tuesday arrested a federal contractor for allegedly having leaked the NSA report to The Intercept.
In election in Mexico widely seen a test of political sentiment for next year’s presidential run-off will likely head to the court. The race for governor in the State of Mexico was largely a contest between the leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) and the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has held on to its seat for about 90 years. While a count of nearly all the votes gives the PRI candidate a narrow three-point lead, widespread accusations of voter fraud and intimidation have called the results into question. For now, both candidates are claiming victory.
A plan by Moldova to change the way it conducts elections is “inappropriate”, European rights experts commissioned to study the proposal have concluded, dealing a blow to the ex-Soviet state’s pro-European ruling coalition. The speaker of the Moldovan parliament, an ally of Prime Minister Pavel Filip, said the ruling coalition would take on board some of the technical findings, but took issue with others, saying the experts had overstepped their remit. The prime minister and his allies had been seeking to change the voting system in time for a parliamentary election next year, when his party will be in a tough fight with pro-Moscow rivals, led by President Igor Dodon, who reject closer integration with Europe.
Voting is regarded as a secret process however in case of visually-impaired in Nepal, it has been hardly so. With the second round of local elections just around the corner, many such voters in Jhapa are worried about the violation of their privacy. Despite having the right to vote, such people are not sure if their votes were cast to the candidate of their choice. Though they are allowed to take a companion with them while voting, some feel that they might have been betrayed by the companions. They doubt that their much trusted friends may take advantage of their blindness and vote for candidates of their preference instead of the voter.
The U.S. and its NATO allies are preparing to influence Russia’s upcoming presidential election Russian senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee chief has said, as the U.S. continues to investigate allegations of Russian interference in the last U.S. election. Russian lawmakers and officials have begun to cast aspersions over U.S. influence on Russian elections in recent months, as the U.S.’ 17 intelligence agencies accused Russian hackers of targeting the Democratic party in last year’s vote. Parliamentary and presidential votes in Russia over the last 17 years have overwhelmingly favored leader Vladimir Putin, who has been elected for three presidential terms and one prime ministerial term in that time. None of the votes have fulfilled international criteria for free and fair elections. Lawmakers in Russia’s lower chamber have recently sought to investigate negative foreign media coverage of Russian elections as interference.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled last week that the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections were “unfair” and “compromised,” World Affairs Journal reported. “The seven-judge panel (that included a judge from Russia) unanimously ruled that there has been a violation of Article 3 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to free elections,” World Affairs said. In the case of Davydov and Others vs. Russia, the court concluded that the “fairness of the elections … was seriously compromised by the procedure in which the votes had been recounted. In particular, the extent of recounting, unclear reasons for ordering it, lack of transparency and breaches of procedural guarantees in carrying it out, as well as the results whereby the ruling party gained votes by large margins, strongly support the suspicion of unfairness.”
Federal Ministry of Science and Technology has unveiled an electronic voting machine locally made by the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI). The Minister, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, disclosed that the machine would eliminate the challenges associated with electronic voting in the country. He listed the challenges to include delay in logistics, distribution of electoral materials, ballot box snatching and disparity in results collated at polling centres with those announced by the electoral body. The minister expressed satisfaction with the performance of the machine, which was presented yesterday at NASENI headquarters. Onu added that the machine would also eliminate rigging in elections and allow the choice of the electorate to be upheld.
Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year’s presidential election, according to a government intelligence report leaked Monday that suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known. The classified National Security Agency report, which was published online by The Intercept, does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November. U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment. However, the Justice Department announced Monday it had charged a government contractor in Georgia with leaking a classified report containing “Top Secret level” information to an online news organization. The report the contractor allegedly leaked is dated May 5, the same date as the document The Intercept posted online.
Russia’s military intelligence agency launched an attack before Election Day 2016 on a U.S. company that provides voting services and systems, according to a top secret report posted Monday by The Intercept. … J. Alex Halderman, a computer security expert from the University of Michigan, is among those who have been sounding the alarm for years. “It’s highly significant that these attacks took place, because it confirms that Russia was interested in targeting voting technology, at least to some extent. I hope further investigation can shed more light on what they intended to do and how far they got,” he says. Halderman and others note that local election officials often contract with private vendors, such as VR Systems, to program their voting equipment. He says if those vendors are hacked, then malware could easily be spread to local election offices and ultimately to individual voting machines. Jeremy Epstein, another voting security expert, said that even though the NSA report describes efforts to hack into voter registration systems, once a hacker has access to a local election office’s computers, they can potentially infect other aspects of the election. “If I was a Russian trying to manipulate an election, this is exactly how I would do it,” he says.
Three days before Americans voted last November, Reality Winner joked with her sister online that Moscow’s efforts to influence the US presidential election could have an upside for her as a keen weightlifter. “When we become the United States of the Russian Federation,” she said on Facebook, “Olympic lifting will be the national sport.” Seven months later, Winner, 25, called home to Texas on Saturday to let her family know that the Russian hacking saga had ended up landing her in a far more serious situation. “She said that she had been arrested by the FBI and that she couldn’t really talk about it,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told the Guardian in a telephone interview. “I am still in shock.”
An intelligence contractor was charged with sending a classified report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to the news media, the Justice Department announced Monday, the first criminal leak case under President Trump. The case showed the department’s willingness to crack down on leaks, as Mr. Trump has called for in complaining that they are undermining his administration. His grievances have contributed to a sometimes tense relationship with the intelligence agencies he now oversees. The Justice Department announced the case against the contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, 25, about an hour after the national-security news outlet The Intercept published the apparent document, a May 5 intelligence report from the National Security Agency. The report described two cyberattacks by Russia’s military intelligence unit, the G.R.U. — one in August against a company that sells voter registration-related software and another, a few days before the election, against 122 local election officials.
Russian military intelligence attempted to cyber-attack a U.S. voting software supplier and more than 100 local election officials in the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election, The Intercept reported Monday. While there is no indication that voting machines or the result of the election were tampered with, this is the first report of its type to raise serious questions about whether Russian hackers attempted to breach the voting system. According to an NSA document acquired by The Intercept, Russian military intelligence cyber-attacked a U.S. voting software supplier, using information gained in that attack to “launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.”
A massive overhaul of how Orange County voters cast ballots will be considered Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors, but some Republican leaders concerned about potential voter fraud want any changes postponed. Elections officials here and in other states that have implemented similar changes counter that by saying the upgrades make voting systems more secure. “There’s no better time to make these changes than now,” said Neal Kelley, county Registrar of Voters, who says the new approach would save the county between $10 million and $20 million. The “vote center” system he’s proposing would do away with the approximately 1,000 precinct polling places typically set up in the county for each election. Instead, the county would create new vote centers and distribute mail-in ballots to every registered voter.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley said Monday that Russian operatives hacked into the State Board of Elections last year to view voter database files, a potential move toward trying to make voters distrust the state and federal election system. Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, also warned of a potential “constitutional crisis” over executive privilege between President Donald Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court as part of multiple investigations into possible collusion between agents of the Russian government and Trump’s presidential campaign. Quigley’s declaration of Russian involvement in the hacking of the state elections board marked the first time the country had been definitively identified as behind the attack last year, though it had been widely suspected.
Protected by Maine’s high court, a key group of Democrats looks open to eventually joining Republicans in repealing the state’s pioneering ranked-choice voting law before the 2018 election. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued a unanimous opinion in May finding the law unconstitutional after it passed with 52 percent support from voters in 2016, saying it violates a provision allowing elections to be won by a plurality — and not necessarily a majority — of votes. The opinion is non-binding, but it threw the law into question and led to dueling legislative proposals to deal with the problem: Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls, wants to repeal the law, while Sen. Catherine Breen, D-Falmouth, wants to amend the Constitution to allow it. With legislative Republicans and Gov. Paul LePage united on repealing the law, Democrats hold the cards on whether it’ll survive and, if so, in what form. Some key Democrats are open to repeal.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday faulted North Carolina again in a racially tinged voting rights case, upholding a lower court’s ruling that Republican lawmakers mapped state legislative districts in a way that diluted the clout of black voters. But the justices also threw out another ruling by the same panel of three federal judges ordering special elections by November to fill the state legislature seats at issue in the dispute. The high court, with no recorded dissents, sent the case back to the lower court to reconsider whether special elections are necessary. The Supreme Court in January put the matter of special elections on hold while it decided whether to hear the state’s appeal of the ruling.
The Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling that struck down 28 state House and Senate districts in North Carolina because they violated the rights of black voters. But the justices rejected the court’s order to redraw the districts and hold a special election. The action by the justices Monday sends the matter back to the lower court, which could order new districts in time for the regular cycle of elections in 2018.
About 26,000 people across Pennsylvania — 17,000 in Philadelphia alone — may not have received voter registration cards until after the November Presidential election because their voter registration applications were processed late, according to a new report released this week by a nonpartisan conglomerate of organizations that advocate for election reform. The report released by Keystone Votes, a group of about 40 organizations, cited data from the Pennsylvania Department of State and concluded that thousands of Pennsylvanians who attempted to register to vote on time may not have received any confirmation that their registration was approved prior to Nov. 8, 2016. The group also reported that due to the late processing, those people may have been “relegated” to supplemental voter rolls, instead of appearing in the main voter roll book at their polling location.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the embattled former state Board of Elections executive director that accused his once employer of violating his rights by firing him. U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell Jr. granted the board’s motion to dismiss after hearing arguments at Roger Williams University School of Law in April. Kando sued the board in September, arguing that he was fired a month earlier without proper notice. He alleged violations of due process and the state Open Meetings Act.
Authorities have issued their first arrest warrant in the Dallas County voter fraud case that roiled the May municipal elections in West Dallas and Grand Prairie, causing 700 suspicious mail-in ballots to be sequestered. Miguel Hernandez, 27, of Dallas, is wanted on a charge of illegal voting, a third-degree felony. He is accused of visiting a woman around April 10 and collecting her blank absentee ballot, then filling it out and forging her signature on it before mailing it to the county, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. Authorities say they plan to make more arrests in the case. Last month, Assistant District Attorney Andy Chatham and Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole named two persons of interest in the investigation, neither of whom was Hernandez.
Independent election observers praised Sunday’s running of the nationwide commune elections as largely smooth and peaceful, even while noting a raft of problems, including unauthorized officials at polling sites, intimidated observers and soldiers being brought to vote at some polling stations by the truckload. Dubbed the “Situation Room,” the coalition of NGOs that teamed up to send some 14,000 observers across the country described the voting as “smooth, safe and peaceful” but marred by “some minor irregularities.” Recounting one of the day’s most flagrant breaches, Koul Panha, director of the Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia, said 12 observers across two communes in Kandal province’s Loeuk Dek district were pressured into abandoning their duties by local authorities.
Election officials in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho on Sunday investigated why armed soldiers had been deployed at many polling stations on voting day. The army has often been accused of interfering in politics in Lesotho, a landlocked African country of two million people that has been hit by attempted coups and instability in recent years. “The nation, the voters and even the observers were surprised… they felt that some voters were intimidated,” Independent Electoral Commission spokesperson Tuoe Hantsi told reporters. “The law dictates who should be at the polling stations, and (the soldiers) caused confusion.”
A hotly contested state election in Mexico is heading to court after the president’s cousin was declared the victor amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation, vote buying and misuse of public resources. Alfredo del Mazo Maza, the candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), was declared the winner after early results in the state of Mexico gave him a two-point lead over Delfina Gómez of the leftwing National Regeneration party (Morena). But with the vote so close, Morena – led by the populist firebrand Andres Manuel López Obrador– is refusing to accept the initial results. The full count will not be completed before 7 June, after which Morena will almost certainly seek that the election be annulled.
A country once again buffeted by terrorism will go to the polls Thursday in the latest test of the relationship between mass violence, carried out with the most everyday of tools, and democratic debate over security and ties to the outside world. Saturday’s attack, which left seven people dead, marked the third major terrorist strike in Britain in as many months — the first unfolding steps from Parliament and the second outside a packed pop concert in Manchester. Each was claimed by the Islamic State. The latest assault, in which three suspects mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge before slashing their way through a nearby market, inserts an unpredictable new dynamic — the fear and uncertainty sowed by terrorism — into this week’s contest, which was already tightening.
Susan Rice, former President Obama’s national security adviser, on Sunday dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Frankly, he’s lying,” Rice said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The reality is — as all of our intelligence agencies have come together to affirm with high confidence — the Russian government at the highest levels was behind the very unprecedented effort to meddle in our 2016 presidential election.” Rice said the country needs to understand how and why that happened. The country also needs to find out whether there is “any evidence to suggest that there were those on the American side who facilitated that meddling,” she said, referring to allegations that members of President Trump’s campaign colluded with Moscow.
President Trump does not plan to invoke executive privilege to try to prevent James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, from providing potentially damaging testimony to Congress on statements the president made about an investigation into his former national security adviser, two senior administration officials said Friday. Mr. Trump could still move to block the testimony next week, given his history of changing his mind at the last minute about major decisions. But legal experts have said that Mr. Trump has a weak case to invoke executive privilege because he has publicly addressed his conversations with Mr. Comey, and any such move could carry serious political risks. One of the administration officials said Friday evening that Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Comey to testify because the president had nothing to hide and wanted Mr. Comey’s statements to be publicly aired. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a decision that had not been announced.
For the most part, the Constitution speaks in generalities. The 14th Amendment, for example, instructs the states to provide all persons the “equal protection of the laws.” But obviously, this cannot mean that states are always forbidden from treating a person differently than any other person. Children can, of course, be constitutionally barred from driving, notwithstanding the Equal Protection Clause. Thus, there is a need within our constitutional system to refine the Constitution’s abstract provisions. Otherwise, public officials and the people would not know what is permitted and what is forbidden. The process of refinement has devolved principally (although not exclusively) to the courts. It is the courts that have told us that the Equal Protection Clause permits the states to discriminate on the basis of age in issuing driver’s licenses, but ordinarily does not permit the states to treat persons differently on the basis of their race.