California: In California, open primaries took the ‘politics’ out of politics | The Hill

Last month, the California legislature did something unheard of — by Washington, D.C., standards. They came together across party lines to amend and extend sweeping cap and trade emissions legislation. Business, agriculture, labor and environmentalists all had a seat at the table. By 2030, California’s population is expected to grow by five million people, yet our greenhouse gas emissions will shrink to 40 percent below 1990 levels. In this era of cynicism and gridlock, how is this possible? The answer may surprise you. It’s not because California is a “blue” state. If that were the reason, New York would be leading the country in legislative innovation, not state house scandals and indictments. Seven years ago, Californians overhauled the political system so that voters have more choices and politicians are incentivized to cooperate and innovate, not grandstand and polemicize.

Georgia: ACLU demanding changes from Secretary of State’s office | WXIA

The ACLU of Georgia is challenging Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and the secretary of state’s office over their list maintenance procedures and compliance with federal and state law. In particular, they — along with several other organizations, including the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda — are pointing out that nearly 160,000 Georgia voters who have moved within the same county have recently been threatened with being placed on “inactive” status if they did not respond within 30 days, in violation of both federal and state law.

Kansas: Appeals court to grapple with Beth Clarkson voting-machine case in Wichita | The Wichita Eagle

Is voting rigged in Sedgwick County? Is there any way to prove it is or isn’t? Those are the fundamental questions underlying a Kansas Court of Appeals case to be argued Tuesday morning in a special court session at Friends University in Wichita. The appeals court is being asked to allow a recount of votes on audit tapes from voting machines to test the accuracy of the tallies reported by Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman. Wichita State University statistician Beth Clarkson has tried for seven years to gain access to the tapes. Her request was denied by Lehman and the denial was upheld in district court. Lehman and Sedgwick County say that there is no problem with the votes and releasing the tapes would risk compromising the secrecy of people’s ballots. Tuesday’s appeal arguments will feature two prominent Wichita attorneys.

Maine: Dunlap calls for voter fraud hardliner’s resignation | CNN

A member of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is calling on a voter fraud hard-liner to resign from the panel after a controversial email he sent about the panel’s makeup became public. Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said it remains “an open question” whether the commission can continue its mission and stopped short of demanding Heritage Foundation expert Hans von Spakovsky step down — but said “certainly” he should start with an apology. At issue is an email sent by von Spakovsky to the Justice Department in February that was made public in a Freedom of Information Act request by the Campaign Legal Center last week. Von Spakovsky was named to the commission in June. In the email, which made its way to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, von Spakovsky says he had received a “very disturbing phone call” that the commission would be “bipartisan and include Democrats.”

Maryland: Election security in doubt after hearing | Capital News Service

Maryland legislators learned last week the state’s electronic balloting system may need better security measures to protect voters’ information and that the lawmakers must be the ones to add those protections. The state’s electoral board told lawmakers Sept. 6 that they are powerless to make those changes, and that any security changes must come directly from the legislative body. Last year, the state’s Board of Elections voted 4-1 to certify a new system for online ballots, even though experts in cybersecurity and computer science publicly objected. While nearly all states have a system in place for signature verification, the General Assembly did not vote last year on the topic so there was no verification system in place, leaving Maryland as the only state in the nation without one, according to a report last year by Capital News Service.

Ohio: Parties in lawsuit call Ohio purges voter suppression | Associated Press

Groups challenging Ohio’s system for removing inactive voters from rolls are disagreeing with the state elections chief’s arguments and the Trump administration’s contention that the purges are legal. The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York-based public advocacy group Demos said in their latest U.S. Supreme Court filing that targeting registered voters who fail to vote in a two-year period for eventual removal from the registration rolls, even if they haven’t moved and remain eligible, is a tool for voter suppression.

China: Young democracy activist among Macau election winners | Associated Press

Macau voters have elected a young pro-democracy activist to the Chinese casino capital’s legislature, as opposition lawmakers expanded their presence at the expense of candidates linked to the gambling industry. The results released early Monday are a surprising sign of faith in young people with progressive ideas among Macau’s notoriously apathetic electorate. Official results showed that 26-year-old Sulu Sou won a seat in Sunday’s election for the city’s semi-democratic legislature, making him the city’s youngest-ever lawmaker, according to local news reports.

Germany: Moscow Takes U.S. Meddling Tactics to German Vote | The Cipher Brief

In less than a week, on September 24th, the German public will vote in the country’s general elections – not only to determine who will sit in the country’s parliament, known as the Bundestag, but also who will become – or remain – Chancellor. As the economic and political European heavyweight, Germany has been seen as the anchor for an EU in crisis, making it a prime target for those seeking to undermine European unity and stability. Russia has shown a propensity for taking subtle, and not so subtle, measures to sow confusion and undercut political opponents in the West – most prominently in last year’s U.S. elections that may have helped bring the administration of Donald Trump into power. Russia’s cyber-enabled influence campaigns seek to exacerbate societal divisions by disseminating false narratives and leveraging hack-and-leak tactics that promise compromising and salacious material on critical voices.

Iraq: Supreme Court steps in to block Kurdish independence vote | The Guardian

Iraq’s supreme court has ordered the suspension of next week’s referendum on the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, as legal and political pressure mounted on the Kurds to call off the vote. “The supreme court has issued the order to suspend organising the referendum set for 25 September … until it examines the complaints it has received over this plebiscite being unconstitutional,” it said. Ayas al-Samouk, a court spokesman, said it had received several complaints, as a parliamentary source said at least eight lawmakers had called on the court to intervene on constitutional grounds.

Kenya: Election re-run in doubt amid technology issues and high court hearings | Deutsche Welle

Insiders at Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) say there is a possibility that the country’s presidential election do-over could be moved from October 17 to either the 26th or 27th, owing to issues with voting technology. French-supplied voting software known as the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (KIEMS) needs to be reconfigured before voting takes place. It is expected to be used in more than 250 parliamentary, senatorial and gubernatorial petitions filed in numerous Kenyan courts by losing candidates who wish to challenge the election’s victor. Workers at IEBC point out that the 41,883 polling stations throughout Kenya will require at least 42,000 reconfigured kits. In addition to this, there will likely be a need for extra standby kits in case technical issues occur.

Nepal: Voting peaceful in previously troubled southern Nepal | Associated Press

Tens of thousands of people voted peacefully Monday in a previously troubled southern Nepal province where ethnic violence demanding constitution changes had led to dozens of deaths in recent years. Police said there was no trouble during the voting in the No. 2 province, where security had been stepped up for the municipal and village council elections. The Madhesi ethnic group wants their provinces to have more territory than was assigned under the constitution adopted in 2015.

United Kingdom: Voters to be asked for ID in trials of system to combat electoral fraud | The Guardian

Voters in five local authorities will need to show ID before they can vote in local elections next May, in a move aimed at combating voter fraud but which Labour and the Liberal Democrats have warned could disenfranchise thousands of people. Voters in Woking, Gosport, Bromley, Watford and Slough will be asked to show ID at polling stations before being issued with a ballot paper, but the five local authorities are likely to trial a variety of systems, including showing photo ID or providing polling cards where individual barcodes could be scanned. The Cabinet Office and Electoral Commission said details were still being finalised of what photo ID would be required, as well as a system involving non-photo ID, but both would be trialled to see which was more effective and efficient.

Togo: Ruling party calls rally to drown out opposition | AFP

Togo’s ruling presidential party on Monday urged supporters to take to the streets to coincide with planned opposition demonstrations against the slow pace of political reform. Georges Kwawu Aidam, the first vice-president of the Union for the Republic (UNIR) told AFP there would be marches on Wednesday and Thursday in support of a controversial constitutional reform bill which the opposition see as not going far enough. A parliamentary panel last Friday approved the bill to revamp the constitution and introduce a presidential term limit after days of protests against the regime of Faure Gnassingbe, the scion of one of Africa’s oldest political dynasties. But the panel rejected wholesale 48 amendments proposed by opposition parties.

National: Trump’s fraud commission proves a magnet for controversy | The Washington Post

As President Trump’s voter fraud commission prepared to convene in New Hampshire this week, it already faced questions about its seriousness of purpose and whether it was a hopelessly biased endeavor. Then things got worse. An email surfaced in which the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, one of the commission’s most conservative members, lamented that Trump was appointing Democrats and “mainstream” Republicans to the bipartisan panel. Its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), drew rebukes from voting rights advocates — and a couple of fellow commissioners — for an article he wrote for the hard-right Breitbart News website. The article asserted, without proof, that voter fraud had likely changed the result in New Hampshire’s most recent U.S. Senate race. A third Republican on the panel, J. Christian Adams of Virginia, later feuded on Twitter with a journalist, questioning whether she had lied about her academic credentials. She had not.

National: Senators propose 9/11-style commission on Russian interference | The Hill

A bipartisan pair of senators is moving to create a 9/11-style commission to examine the cyberattacks that took place during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced legislation on Friday to establish the National Commission on Cybersecurity of U.S. Election Systems to study the election-related cyberattacks — which the intelligence community has attributed to Russia — and make recommendations on how to guard against such activity going forward. The commission would be modeled after the 9/11 Commission tasked with investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States.

National: Experts Say the Use of Private Email by Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Isn’t Legal | ProPublica

President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission came under fire earlier this month when a lawsuit and media reports revealed that the commissioners were using private emails to conduct public business. Commission co-chair Kris Kobach confirmed this week that most of them continue to do so. Experts say the commission’s email practices do not appear to comport with federal law. “The statute here is clear,” said Jason Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration. Essentially, Baron said, the commissioners have three options: 1. They can use a government email address; 2. They can use a private email address but copy every message to a government account; or 3. They can use a private email address and forward each message to a government account within 20 days. According to Baron, those are the requirements of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978, which the commission must comply with under its charter.

National: Facebook under fire over Russian ads in election | The Hill

Facebook is under fire after revealing that a Russian group tied to the Kremlin bought political ads on its platform during the 2016 elections. Lawmakers are demanding answers, and liberal groups, who say the company failed to crack down on fake news, are seizing on the new disclosure. Even Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, has cited the ads when discussing her loss during a book tour. “We now know that they were sewing discord during the election with phony groups on Facebook,” Clinton told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “They were running anti-immigrant, anti-me, anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations. They were putting out the fake news and negative stories untrue to really divide people.” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said the company needs to be more forthcoming about the full extent of the ad buys.

Editorials: So You Want Digital Voting? Hackers Want It Even More | Kathleen Fisher/Big Think

One of the reasons why computer security is so hard is because you have to get absolutely everything right in order to have a secure system. And there’s lots of different kinds of things you can get wrong. Everything from your software was buggy, your passwords were too weak, you published your passwords accidentally, your hardware was insecure, the user made a mistake and fell victim to a phishing attack and gave their credentials to a foreign agent or a bad guy. All of those things have to be done correctly in order to have a secure system. It might seem tempting to think, you know, everybody has a cell phone so you could just use your cell phone to do voting like we do for American Idol or similar TV shows. It works for American Idol because nobody cares all that much who wins or doesn’t win. 

Editorials: Trump lied about ‘voter fraud’ … now he wants to steal people’s votes | Lawrence Douglas/The Guardian

Of the hundreds of whoppers that President Trump has told since his election, an early one remains the most toxic. In days following his electoral college victory, Trump claimed that he would have also won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Trump later refined this claim, insisting that three to five million undocumented voters threw the popular election for Clinton. By way of proof, the president waved at an outlandish story: that golfer Bernhard Langer – a German citizen, barred from voting in the in the US – had had his path to the voting booth clogged by men and women, who by skin color and accent were obviously fraudulent voters. At first, the voter fraud fantasy seemed like no more than a display of the touchiness and extravagant narcissism that led Trump, in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary, to insist that his inaugural crowds were larger than Obama’s. In fact, the lie concealed a much more ambitious and insidious political agenda. In May, with the creation of the “Presidential Advisory Committee on Voter Integrity,” Trump bootstrapped the myth of voter fraud into an institutional reality. The goal: to use the allegation of fraud to tighten voting procedures that will suppress the votes of minorities, groups that generally vote Democratic.

Alaska: Voter Database Exposed Online | HackRead

IT security researchers at Kromtech Security Center discovered an unprotected database exposed online due to misconfiguration of CouchDB containing nearly 600,000 records belonging to Alaskan voters. “The exposed data is a larger voter file called Voterbase compiled by TargetSmart, a leader in national voting databases that contains the contact and voting information of more than 191 million voters and 58 million unregistered, voting age consumers,” said researchers. The database with 593,328 records was available to the public for anyone to download without any security or login credentials. Each record contained names, date of birth, addresses, voting preferences, marital status, income details, children’s age, gun ownership related data and points which might help decide what issue the voter might be appealed to. TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier blamed a third-party firm for the incident and told ZDNetthat “We’ve learned that Equals3, an AI software company based in Minnesota, appears to have failed to secure some of their data and some data they license from TargetSmart and that a database of approximately 593,000 Alaska voters appears to have been inadvertently exposed.”

Arizona: Agencies feuding over power to police ‘dark money’ groups | AZ Central

As next year’s statewide elections get closer, several Arizona agencies are locked in a bitter feud to determine who has the power to police so-called “dark money” groups that spend millions to influence races. The dispute is playing out in complicated legal tit-for-tats, but the heart of the fight is simple: Should the office of Secretary of State Michele Reagan or the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, a voter-created body, play the role of enforcer? And is there room for two policemen? It’s unclear how the dispute will get resolved. Ultimately, courts may have to decide.

Maryland: College Park vote on noncitizen voting rights was insufficient, city says | Baltimore Sun

It turns out that the city of College Park did not have enough votes after all to grant voting rights to noncitizens, officials said Saturday. The College Park City Council voted 4-3 with one member abstaining Tuesday night on an amendment to the city’s charter that would allow noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. But charter amendments need six votes of the eight-member council, the city announced Saturday. That rule was changed in June, and the mayor and council members said they neglected to note that they needed six votes.

New York: New law allows split shifts for elections workers | Olean Times Herald

A new state law approved this week changed one word in the state’s elections laws, but it could eventually be a way to get more poll workers, local officials said. Senate Bill S.443A, signed Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, allows for county boards of elections to split shifts of poll workers — allowing workers to take shifts shorter than the 16-hour shifts for general elections and nine-hour shifts for primary elections, as long as there is at least one poll worker from each major party working at one time. The change in the law — which changes the word “half” to “split” — won’t mean immediate relief for long poll workers’ days, but local elections officials said it could be “a step maybe in the right direction.”

U.S. Territories: Seventh Circuit hears territorial voting rights challenge | Saipan Tribune

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit heard oral arguments Friday in Segovia v. United States, an equal protection challenge by plaintiffs in Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands who would be able to absentee vote for President and voting representation in Congress if they lived in other U.S. territories or a foreign country, but are denied such rights based solely on their ZIP code. The Appeals Court panel consisted of Judge David Hamilton, Judge Ilana Rovner, and Judge Daniel Manion. Oral argument will be posted online. Earlier this week, the Trump Department of Justice filed a last-minute letter with the court arguing that the remedy to any equal protection violation should be to strip away statutorily provided voting rights that are already guaranteed to residents of certain territories.

Editorials: Decertifying Virginia’s vulnerable voting machines is just the first step | Fredericksburg Free Lance Star

The Virginia State Board of Elections has belatedly decided that all electronic touchscreen voting machines still in use throughout the commonwealth cannot be used for the Nov. 7 general election because they are vulnerable to hacking, even though they are not connected to the internet. This revelation is not new. For more than a decade, computer scientists at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and other top universities have demonstrated that hackers can surreptitiously change votes on these machines without leaving a trace. In 2005, Finnish computer programmer Harri Hursti successfully hacked into Diebold voting machines that were in a locked warehouse in Leon County, Fla., under the watchful eyes of elections officials, a feat still referred to today as the Hursti Hack. But it took another demonstration of successful hacking at the DEFcon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas this summer to finally convince board members that they needed to immediately decertify all touchscreen voting machines still in use in Virginia. Better late than never, as the old saying goes, but that left 22 cities and counties that still use them to tabulate election results in the lurch. Decertification should have happened years ago.

Wisconsin: Fight over electoral district boundaries heads to Supreme Court | Reuters

It is a political practice nearly as old as the United States – manipulating the boundaries of legislative districts to help one party tighten its grip on power in a move called partisan gerrymandering – and one the Supreme Court has never curbed. That could soon change, with the nine justices making the legal fight over Republican-drawn electoral maps in Wisconsin one of the first cases they hear during their 2017-2018 term that begins next month. Their ruling in the case could influence American politics for decades. Wisconsin officials point to the difficulty of having courts craft a workable standard for when partisan gerrymandering violates constitutional protections. Opponents of the practice said limits are urgently needed, noting that sophisticated technological tools now enable a dominant party to devise with new precision state electoral maps that marginalize large swathes of voters in legislative elections.

China: Some voters remain apprehensive over Macau’s political system | 澳門每日時報

Around 57 percent of the registered voters cast their votes yesterday at 37 polling stations spread across the city. While many agree the voting process was easier than four years ago, some residents are still skeptical over Macau’s voting procedures, and others are unaware of Macau’s controversial voting system. Speaking to the Times, several voters criticized the SAR’s voting system, arguing that the 14 directly elected seats in the Legislative Assembly (AL) are not enough. They suggested that the 12 seats nominated by the functional constituency system should be reduced to allow for more directly elected seats. “There are not enough direct selections. It doesn’t make sense that the government can have that many appointed representatives,” said a 60-year old resident who refused to be identified.

Germany: How does the German general election work? | Deutsche Welle

Germany has a notoriously complex voting system for electing its Bundestag, or lower house. The system seeks to combine the benefits of both direct and proportional representation while guarding against the electoral mistakes of German history, which saw political fragmentation during the Weimar Republic between WWI and WWII. The 2009 and 2013 parliamentary elections saw a significant drop in German voter turnout to around 70 percent, but with the rise of the populist movement that draws on non-voters in all democratic states, the numbers are expected to rise this year. This year, 61.5 million people age 18 and above are eligible to vote in the national election, according to figures from Germany’s Federal Statistics Office. Of those, 31.7 million are women and 29.8 million are men with some 3 million first-time voters. Over a third of Germany’s voters – 22 million – are over 60 years old, meaning the older generation often has particular sway over the election outcome.

Iceland: Prime Minister calls snap election after coalition party quits over ‘breach of trust’ | Reuters

Iceland’s prime minister called for a snap parliamentary election on Friday after one party in the ruling coalition quit the government formed less than nine months ago. The outgoing party, Bright Future, cited a “breach of trust” after Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson’s party allegedly tried to cover up a scandal involving his father. That leaves the country, whose economy was wrecked by the collapse of its banking system nearly a decade ago, facing its second snap election in less than a year. The outgoing government would be the shortest-living in Iceland’s history. The previous government was felled by the Panama Papers scandal over offshore tax havens.

Iraq: Kurdistan refuses current US-backed alternative to referendum | Rudaw

Top Kurdish leadership have decided to refuse the current US-backed alternative to the referendum as it did not “include the necessary guarantees” that can convince the people of Kurdistan to postpone the vote, a statement from the High Referendum Council that is headed by President Masoud Barzani read Sunday night. While it praised the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations to have offered to present the alternative, the meeting said that it did not meet their demands. “The process of the referendum will continue because the suggestions that have been presented until now don’t include the necessary guarantees that could meet the satisfaction and conviction of our people,” the statement read as it explained that the Referendum Council assessed the alternative.