Germany: In German Election Campaign, Third Place Is the Real Winner | Wall Street Journal

Germany’s general election campaign kicked off in earnest over the weekend and it promises to be a nail-biter—for third place. Chancellor Angela Merkel looks like a sure bet to win a fourth term as the head of Europe’s biggest economic power when the country votes in late September. Her center-right alliance has a 15-point polling lead over its closest challenger, the center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, of candidate Martin Schulz. Merkel’s campaign slogan—“For a Germany in which we live well and happily”—channels a public mood wary of change. In a 40-minute speech to supporters in the city of Dortmund on Saturday that opened six weeks of campaigning, she didn’t even mention her opponent by name.

India: Only 24,000 overseas Indians have registered as voters | The Economic Times

A little over 24,000 overseas Indians, who are entitled to cast their ballot in India, have registered themselves as voters. Now, in a bid to attract more such Indian citizens living abroad to become voters here, the Election Commission has launched a portal which allows them to register online. The portal also has a long list of frequently asked questions to help people understand the procedure. While there are no estimates on the number of overseas Indians eligible to vote in India, only 24,348 have registered with the poll panel.

Kenya: Odinga refuses to accept election defeat, urges strike | AFP

Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga on Sunday called for a strike to support his claim to the presidency and accused the ruling party of “spilling the blood of innocent people”, despite growing pressure on him to concede election defeat. The election commission on Friday declared incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta winner of the presidential poll by 1.4 million votes. International observers said Tuesday’s election was largely fair but Odinga disputes the results, saying it was rigged. He has not provided documentary evidence. “Jubilee have spilt the blood of innocent people. Tomorrow there is no work,” Odinga told a crowd of around 4,000 cheering supporters, referring to the ruling party. He promised to announce a new strategy on Tuesday. Senator James Orengo, one of Odinga’s chief supporters, said the opposition would call for demonstrations. “When we people call you to action, peaceful action, don’t stay behind,” Orengo told the crowd in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. He also called for a boycott of Nation television and newspapers, Kenya’s largest independent media group, over their coverage of the disputed elections.

Russia: A Guide to Russia’s High Tech Tool Box for Subverting US Democracy | WIRED

A dead dog in Moscow. A dead dissident in London. Twitter trolls run by the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency. Denial of service attacks and ransomware deployed across Ukraine. News reports from the DC offices of Sputnik and RT. Spies hidden in the heart of Wall Street. The hacking of John Podesta’s creamy risotto recipe. And a century-old fabricated staple of anti-Semitic hate literature. At first glance these disparate phenomena might seem only vaguely connected. Sure, they can all be traced back to Russia. But is there any method to their badness? The definitive answer, according to Russia experts inside and outside the US government, is most certainly yes. In fact, they are part of an increasingly digital intelligence playbook known as “active measures,” a wide-ranging set of techniques and strategies that Russian military and intelligence services deploy to influence the affairs of nations across the globe.

National: Mueller Is Said to Seek Interviews With West Wing in Russia Case | The New York Times

In a sign that the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election will remain a continuing distraction for the White House, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is in talks with the West Wing about interviewing current and former senior administration officials, including the recently ousted White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, according to three people briefed on the discussions. Mr. Mueller has asked the White House about specific meetings, who attended them and whether there are any notes, transcripts or documents about them, two of the people said. Among the matters Mr. Mueller wants to ask the officials about is President Trump’s decision in May to fire the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, the two people said. That line of questioning will be important as Mr. Mueller continues to investigate whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in the dismissal of Mr. Comey.

National: ‘Let America Vote’ sets up shop in Manassas with scores of interns | InsideNova

Jason Kander might have fallen a bit short in his bid to become a U.S. senator last fall, but when he put out a call for summer help in Manassas, some of his 194,000 Twitter followers didn’t hesitate to answer. In the days since President Donald Trump’s election (and Kander’s own 3-point loss to Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.), the former Missouri Secretary of State has been crafting a new kind of political organization: “Let America Vote,” a group Kander says is designed to “create political consequences for politicians who’ve made voting more difficult or failed to stand up for voting rights.” But with the 2018 midterm elections still a long way out, the Democrat turned his eye toward the statewide races in Virginia as a good place to start. His team of organizers, largely culled from the staff of his Senate bid, saw an opportunity to make an impact in Northern Virginia and made plans to open the group’s first field office in Prince William County.

National: This System Catches Vote Fraud and the Wrath of Critics | NBC

It’s been called a faulty, error-prone failure. But that might not stop this system for rooting out vote fraud from getting a national debut. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of President Donald Trump’s vote fraud commission, is looking to expand the “Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program” that he’s developed in his state to sweep possible illegal voters off the rolls. Crosscheck is a computer system designed to detect fraud by finding matches in voter registration lists shared by dozens of states and thereby detecting suspected double voters.

Editorials: Partners in Voter Suppression | The New York Times

The Trump administration moved deeper into the politics of voter suppression this week by reversing the federal government’s opposition to Ohio’s effort to purge tens of thousands of voters from the rolls simply because they vote infrequently. A federal appeals court blocked Ohio’s move last year as a violation of voting laws, in a case brought by civil rights advocates and backed by the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Now that an appeal has been accepted for this term by the Supreme Court, Trump appointees at Justice — not career professionals — have changed the government’s position to side with Ohio, in effect endorsing the purge and asking that it be allowed to go forward.

Arizona: Voter fraud in Arizona: How often does it happen, how is it stopped? | The Arizona Republic

President Donald Trump has called voter fraud an issue that may have swayed the outcome of the 2016 popular vote. Without proof, he claimed that millions of people voted illegally in the election. Through an executive order in May, he created a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission likely could replicate work done in Arizona since 2008. Since that year, state officials have examined hundreds of thousands of cases where someone might have voted twice in an election. After scrutinizing those cases, 30 were sent to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Twenty resulted in convictions. The path to those convictions started with the work of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, now run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.

Florida: Counties say purges fixing ‘excessive voter’ claims | Journal Courier

Two counties identified as having more registered voters than citizen voting age population by a watchdog organization say they have rectified the issue. In April, the watchdog group Judicial Watch sent a letter to the Illinois State Board of Elections identifying 24 counties that had more registered voters than voting-age population. Two west-central Illinois counties, Cass and Scott, have nearly or totally corrected the issue, according to officials. Scott County Clerk Sandy Hankins addressed the matter with the board of commissioners in July, noting that the state felt the county was within regulation. However, Hankins took steps to correct any problems by mailing new voter identification cards.

Indiana: After Obama’s 2008 Win, Indiana GOP Added Early Voting in White Suburb, Cut It in Indianapolis | Slate

n 2008, Barack Obama squeaked out an unexpected win in Indiana thanks in part to his huge margin of victory in Marion County, which has a large population of black Democrats. The state’s Republicans got to work right away, cutting early voting in Marion County, which includes the state capital of Indianapolis, while expanding it in a nearby suburban county filled with white Republican voters. That’s the distressing but entirely predictable upshot of a blockbuster report published by the Indianapolis Star on Thursday. The Star found that between 2008 and 2016, Republican officials reduced the number of early voting stations in Marion County from three to one, resulting in a 26 percent decline in absentee voting in the 2016 presidential election. (Early votes are cast via absentee ballots.) Meanwhile, officials added two early voting stations to the neighboring Hamilton County, which is populated primarily by white Republicans. The county saw a 63 percent increase in absentee voting in 2016. There is now one early voting station for every 100,000 voters in Hamilton County and one for every 700,000 voters in Marion County. In total, the number of people who voted in Marion County decreased by 11,261 between 2008 and 2016 and increased in Hamilton County by 27,376—this “despite an increase of registered voters in both counties,” the Star reports.

Indiana: NAACP sues Indiana, alleges law targets black, Latino voters | Associated Press

The NAACP is suing Indiana officials to block a new state law that the civil rights group says would discriminate against black and Latino voters in heavily populated Lake County by consolidating voting precincts. The lawsuit challenges a law that applies only to Lake County, which is home to Indiana’s second-largest African-American population and its largest Hispanic population. It alleges that the new law unfairly reassigns large numbers of voters to new polling locations that may be difficult for black and Latino voters with mobility issues or a lack of reliable transportation to reach. The federal lawsuit, filed Thursday by the Gary NAACP and the Priorities USA Foundation, names Indiana’s secretary of state and members of the Indiana Election Division as defendants.

Kansas: 16-year-old is running for Kansas governor seat | Kansas City Star

He won’t even be able to vote, but a 16-year-old Wichita high school student says he’s serious about his bid to run for governor of Kansas. Jack Bergerson has filed to run as a Democrat in the 2018 race for governor of Kansas, saying he wanted to give people another option, The Kansas City Star reported . And it doesn’t faze him that he won’t even be old enough to vote in the election. “Under Kansas law, there is no law governing the qualifications for governor, not one,” said Bryan Caskey, director of elections at the Kansas secretary of state’s office. “So there’s seriously nothing on the books that lays out anything, no age, no residency, no experience. Nothing.” When Bergeson, a junior at The Independent School in Wichita, found out about the lack of requirements, he thought, “Oh, I could do that.”

Michigan: Republicans fight subpoenas in straight-ticket lawsuit | The Detroit News

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekhof and other Republican legislators are fighting subpoenas that could force them to testify and expose internal debate over a controversial law to ban straight-ticket voting. The legal drama is unfolding more than a year after a federal judge first suspended the straight-ticket ban in the run-up to the 2016 election, ruling the change could disproportionally burden African-American voters and limit their opportunity to participate in the state’s political process. Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson and Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office are fighting to implement the ban ahead of the 2018 election cycle, arguing it would neutrally apply to voters of all races. The case is scheduled to go to trial in late December.

Michigan: Six months later, AG probe into double voting drags on | The Detroit News

A prosecutorial probe is continuing six months after state election officials referred 31 cases of potential double voting to Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office in an effort to root out voter fraud. A statewide audit released in February found that 31 Michiganians appeared to vote twice in the November presidential election — once by absentee ballot and once in person on Election Day. The discoveries led then-state Elections Director Chris Thomas to refer the cases to Attorney General’s office for the first time in at least 36 years. Thomas told reporters in February it was part of a “far-reaching” anti-fraud effort to “aggressively root out illegal voting” after the state’s investigation into voting irregularities in Detroit found mismatched vote totals in the Nov. 8 election. Half a year later, Schuette’s office is still looking into the cases and has no updates on the investigation, said spokeswoman Andrea Bitely.

Pennsylvania: Why Pennsylvania sends too many Republicans to Washington – and why that could change | Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania sends too many Republicans to Washington. That’s not a partisan attack. It’s just math. Of the 18 Pennsylvanian members of the House of Representatives, 13 are Republicans and 5 are Democrats. That split should be more like 11 to 7 or even 10 to 8 if the districts were drawn without attempts at favoring Republicans, according to recent expert analyses. It’s all about the map: Several lawsuits are attempting to get various state legislative and congressional maps declared unconstitutional on the basis of partisan gerrymandering, the idea that one political party drew the lines in a way that benefited them unfairly. The lawsuits rely on a set of tools that for the first time could convincingly identify skewed maps and persuade the courts that a state’s map goes too far in favoring one party. A federal court has ruled Wisconsin’s state legislative map unconstitutional, the first victory in a partisan gerrymandering case in three decades.

Texas: Senate approves mail-in voter fraud bill, repealing nursing home law | The Texas Tribune

The Texas Senate on Friday voted 21–10 to approve a House-amended version of Senate Bill 5, a measure that broadens the definition of mail-in voter fraud and ups the penalties for those who commit it. Since it was first passed in the Senate earlier this summer, the bill has been altered to repeal a nursing home voting provision that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law. That law, House Bill 658, would have created a process for collecting absentee ballots at thousands of Texas nursing homes, effectively turning those facilities into temporary polling places during early voting to discourage voter manipulation. The proposal now heads to the governor’s desk for his signature or veto. According to state Rep. Tom Oliverson — who championed the nursing home law — Abbott’s office now supports repealing it, just months after he signed it and praised it on Twitter as “a bi-partisan effort targeting voter fraud at nursing homes.” Abbott’s office has not returned requests for comment this week.

Angola: Electoral Campaign Kicks off its Last Election Week | Prensa Latina

The campaign for the August 23’s general election in Angola begins today for last week. It can be decisive in the search of the vote for next parliament. Since the official election beginning of last July 23, 22 days ago, the presidential candidates of the six leading forces traveled nationwide to present their programs, some more elaborate than others, with change as a more repeated expression. While the ruling People´s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) holds the word ‘change’ in its draft, the rest of contenders are seeking out to replace the party that has been running the nation for nearly 42 years.

Australia: Deputy Prime Minister Can Claim New Zealand Citizenship. Too Bad for Him. | The New York Times

The citizenship scandal that has roiled Australia’s Parliament threatened to claim its biggest casualty on Monday after the deputy prime minister was revealed by the New Zealand government to be a New Zealander, unbeknown to him. The Australian Constitution prohibits people with dual citizenship from holding seats in the national legislature. Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, 50, the leader of the right-leaning National Party, has served in the House of Representatives since 2013, after serving eight years in the Senate. He is also the minister of agriculture, the source of a well-publicized dispute over dogs brought into Australia in 2015 by the actor Johnny Depp.

Egypt: Moussa rejects calls to extend presidential terms | Associated Press

The head of the panel that drafted Egypt’s 2014 constitution, possibly the most progressive in the country’s history, denounced calls to amend the charter on Saturday, saying in a carefully-worded statement that parliament should focus instead on implementing it. Amr Moussa, a respected statesman and a former foreign minister and Arab league chief, was apparently responding to calls by some lawmakers to extend by two years the four-year term the president serves in office. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has less than one year left in his first term. He has yet to say whether he is running for a second term, but he is widely expected to do so in June 2018. The constitution stipulates the president can only serve two terms. The relevant clause cannot be amended unless the change “brings more guarantees,” according to the constitution. Moreover, any amendment must be approved in a nationwide referendum before it comes into force.

Kenya: Flying rocks, teargas and a dead child: the grisly aftermath of the Kenya election | The Guardian

Mid-afternoon, and black smoke trails above the grey tenements. Broken glass, burned tyres, rubble and makeshift barricades block roads. Charred spars mark where a stall once stood, incinerated in confused clashes overnight. Police, armed with batons and assault rifles, cluster around their trucks. Angry men shout slogans and wave fists. The morning has seen much violence: teenagers throwing rocks, police firing teargas. During the night, Mathare, a sprawling slum in Nairobi, has echoed to the sound of gunfire and police helicopters. There have been many casualties, some fatal. Now there is a pause. The police are waiting. So too are the youths they have pursued through the narrow lanes for almost 18 hours – since the Kenyan election commission declared Uhuru Kenyatta, in power since 2013, had won the presidential polls held on Tuesday by a substantial margin.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for August 7-13 2017

Writing in the New York Review of Books Daily, Sue Halpern points out that the hacking of voting machines at this year’s Defcon convention should come as no surprise. “Since computerized voting was introduced more than two decades ago, it has been shown again and again to have significant vulnerabilities that put a central tenet of American democracy—free and fair elections—at risk.” Her extensive examination of the background of electronic voting in the US comes to the conclusion that we should be voting on paper ballots and performing rountine post-election audits to verify the accuracy of election results.

A group of advocates including representatives of Common Cause and the League of Women Voters has called on the Delaware Elections Director to expedite the process of replacing the state’s aging voting equipment. First deployed in 1996, Delaware’s 1,600 Danaher Shouptronic 1242 voting machines are among the oldest in the nation and have outlived their expected lifespan, creating a growing list of potential problems. The computer operating system used to create electronic ballots, for instance, is no longer supported by Microsoft, meaning security updates are no longer available. Delay in the report of a state task force created last year to study the issue could push replacement back from 2018 to 2020.

An investigation by the Indianapolis Star suggests that state and local Republican election officials have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas. Democrats are challenging the state’s early voting system in a lawsuit alleging the secretary of state and legislative supermajority have launched a concerted effort to suppress the Democratic vote, a debate that is also playing out on the national front.

Facing a deadline for re-drawing 28 legislative districts found to be unconstitutional last year, North Carolina Republican legislators adopted rules for drawing new district lines. Federal courts found that the current lines were drawn in a way to unfairly disenfranchise black voters. As the News & Observer notes “[w]hile racial gerrymandering is illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed political gerrymandering, and one of the new rules is that legislators may consider past election results when drawing the new lines.” The Republicans insist that they are not including race as a factors in the new redistricting effort. Democrats were incredulous. Quoted on WRAL Rep. Mickey Michaux asked “[d]o you understand that, by not using race, you’re defeating your own purpose? The districts were declared unconstitutional because of race. If you don’t use race to correct it, how are you going to show the court that they’re not still unconstitutional?”

The question of partisan gerrymandering is at the heart of a Supreme Court case to be heard this Fall that challenges the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, concluding that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. This week Texas joined 15 other states in supporting Wisconsin in a high-profile Supreme Court case that chllenges limits on state lawmakers in drawing political maps to advantage one party.

In a closely watched voting case in Ohio, the Justice Department has reversed its previous position to side with the state in allowing the purging of voters from the rolls for not answering election mail and not voting in recent elections. Justice attorneys took the opposite position from the Obama administration in a case that involved the state’s removal of thousands of inactive voters from the Ohio voting rolls. In New Zealand as many as 60,000 voters may be scrubbed from the rolls ahead of next month’s general election for failing to respond to a similar mailing.

In a party-line vote, the Texas House approved a bill that would increase penalties for mail-in election crimes that included an amendment that would repeal a recently signed overhaul of rules for absentee balloting at nursing homes. A bill with rare bi-partisan support, the nursing home bill was an attempt to simultaneously remove opportunities to commit ballot fraud while expanding ballot access to nursing home residents. Supporters of the nursing home bill suspect that it was precisely the bi-partisan support that led to the effort to repeal.

Widespread protests have led to dozens of deaths after Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga claimed that results from last weeks elections had been manipulated to allow victory for the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta. Odinga claimed hackers broke into election commission computer systems and databases overnight to “create errors”. International election observers as well as delegations from the EU, the African Union and the US have urged politicians defeated in Kenya’s fiercely contested polls to concede gracefully without taking their struggle to the streets.

National: Russian Cyberattack Targeted Elections Vendor Tied To Voting Day Disruptions | NPR

When people in several North Carolina precincts showed up to vote last November, weird things started to happen with the electronic systems used to check them in. “Voters were going in and being told that they had already voted — and they hadn’t,” recalls Allison Riggs, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. The electronic systems — known as poll books — also indicated that some voters had to show identification, even though they did not. Investigators later discovered the company that provided those poll books had been the target of a Russian cyberattack. There is no evidence the two incidents are linked, but the episode has revealed serious gaps in U.S. efforts to secure elections. Nine months later, officials are still trying to sort out the details. … At first, the county decided to switch to paper poll books in just those precincts to be safe. But Bowens says the State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement got involved “and determined that it would be better to have uniformity across all of our 57 precincts and we went paper poll books across the county.”

Editorials: Our Hackable Democracy | Sue Halpern/The New York Review of Books

The recent news that thirty electronic voting machines of five different types had been hacked for sport at the Def Con hackers’ conference in Las Vegas, some in a matter of minutes, should not have been news at all. Since computerized voting was introduced more than two decades ago, it has been shown again and again to have significant vulnerabilities that put a central tenet of American democracy—free and fair elections—at risk. The Def Con hacks underscored this. So did the 2016 presidential election, in which the voter databases of at least twenty-one and possibly thirty-nine states, and one voting services vendor, came under attack from what were apparently Russian hackers. Last September, then-FBI Director James Comey vowed to get to the bottom of “just what mischief” Russia was up to, but, also sought to reassure lawmakers that our election system remained secure. “The vote system in the United States…is very, very hard for someone to hack into because it’s so clunky and dispersed,” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee. “It’s Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop in the gym. These things are not connected to the Internet.” Comey was only partially correct. Clunky and dispersed, American elections are run by the states through three thousand individual counties, each one of which is responsible for purchasing and operating the voting machines set up by Mary and Fred. But Comey missed a central fact about many of those machines: they run on proprietary, secret, black-box software that is not immune to hacking, as Def Con demonstrated. 

Delaware: State needs new voting machines, advocates say | Delaware State News

It’s Nov. 6, 2018. Election Day. More than 100,000 Delaware voters have already cast their ballots with just one hour until polls close when suddenly the state’s election system goes down. Software experts are able to quickly restore it, but it’s too late: All the votes have been wiped out. The system failure has invalidated votes all across the state, and now the integrity of the election is at stake. While unlikely, this scenario is possible, and it’s a big part of the reason why advocacy groups are urging state officials to fund the purchase of new voting machines. Delaware has about 1,600 Danaher ELECTronic 1242 voting machines, purchased in 1995. Those machines were state of the art 22 years ago, but they’re now outdated and, according to some, in desperate need of replacement. “We need a voting system that inspires public trust,” said Jennifer Hill.

Indiana: Republicans limit early voting in Democratic Marion County, encourage it in GOP strongholds | Indianapolis Star

State and local Republicans have expanded early voting in GOP-dominated areas and restricted it in Democratic areas, an IndyStar investigation has found, prompting a significant change in Central Indiana voting patterns. From 2008 to 2016, GOP officials expanded early voting stations in Republican dominated Hamilton County, IndyStar’s analysis found, and decreased them in the state’s biggest Democratic hotbed, Marion County. That made voting more convenient in GOP areas for people with transportation issues or busy schedules. And the results were immediate. Most telling, Hamilton County saw a 63 percent increase in absentee voting from 2008 to 2016, while Marion County saw a 26 percent decline. Absentee ballots are used at early voting stations. Population growth and other factors may have played a role, but Hamilton County Clerk Kathy Richardson, a Republican, told IndyStar the rise in absentee voting in Hamilton County was largely a result of the addition of two early voting stations, which brought the total to three.

Maryland: College Park postpones decision on allowing non-citizens to vote | The Washington Post

The city of College Park, the Washington suburb that is home to the University of Maryland’s flagship campus, postponed a vote Tuesday on whether to extend municipal voting rights to noncitizens while it weighs whether to hold a referendum and let voters decide. The City Council had been expected to vote on whether noncitizens would be allowed to participate in the city’s November election but opted to wait until its Sept. 12 meeting to decide. The measure comes as leaders in some of Prince George’s County’s more liberal-leaning jurisdictions and in neighboring Montgomery County struggle to create policies that protect undocumented immigrants without getting in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

North Carolina: Legislators OK redistricting rules. Democrats aren’t happy. | News & Observer

North Carolina’s legislative leaders adopted rules Thursday that they will use when drawing new election district lines, after 28 districts were ruled unconstitutional last year. The current lines were drawn in a way to unfairly disenfranchise black voters, federal courts found. While racial gerrymandering is illegal, the U.S. Supreme Court has so far allowed political gerrymandering, and one of the new rules is that legislators may consider past election results when drawing the new lines. Rep. David Lewis told a joint meeting of the House and Senate redistricting committees that the process “will be an inherently political thing.” Democrats opposed that rule, along with another one that says the new maps can be drawn in such a way to protect incumbents. “It just seems ridiculous to me that you get to say, ‘We will protect the incumbents elected using unconstitutional maps,’ ” House Minority Leader Rep. Darren Jackson, a Wake County Democrat, said.

Ohio: Justice Dept. Backs Ohio’s Effort to Purge Infrequent Voters From Rolls | The New York Times

The Justice Department has thrown its weight behind Ohio in a high-profile legal fight over the state’s purging of infrequent voters from its election rolls, reversing the federal government’s position under the Obama administration that the practice was unlawful. The move was the latest in a series of changes the department has made in how it enforces civil rights law under the Trump administration. The dispute centers on an aggressive practice used in Ohio, a crucial swing state in presidential elections, that removes voters who sit out three election cycles and fail to respond to a warning. Last year, when the state sought to delete several hundred thousand registrations of infrequent voters ahead of the presidential election, civil-liberties groups filed a lawsuit against Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted. After the Obama-era Justice Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief calling the purging practices unlawful, a federal appeals court ordered Ohio to let those people vote.

Texas: House passes law increasing penalties for mail-in ballot fraud | Dallas Morning News

The Texas House approved a bill Thursday that would increase penalties for mail-in election crimes. Senate Bill 5 by Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, was approved by a vote of 92-39 despite vociferous opposition from House Democrats who spent hours on Wednesday trying to amend and kill the bill. The bill now heads back to the Senate where lawmakers can accept the changes the House made or appoint committees to hash out the differences before passing it along to Gov. Greg Abbott to sign into law. Abbott, who has promised to fight voter fraud, made it one of his priorities for the special legislative session. The issue received little attention during the regular session, despite being the primary way experts believe voter fraud occurs. But it gained traction after allegations of mail-in ballot fraud in West Dallas and Grand Prairie this spring.