The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for December 22-28 2014

Now that a quorum of commissioners has been confirmed for the Election Assistance Commission, the co-chairs of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, Ben Ginsberg and Bob Bauer, have written letters to the new commissioners laying out some immediate short-term steps to jump-start the agency’s voting technology testing and certification process. As New Hampshire braces for another wave of White House hopefuls next year seeking votes in the first-in-the-nation nominating primary, much of the credit for the state’s hold on that position goes to one man: Secretary of State William Gardner. With roughly 44 percent of registered voters participating in 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, the impact of changes to North Carolina’s election law on the overall turnout remains unclear. With the support of both parties, the Ohio House gave final approval Wednesday to a plan to draw voting districts for the General Assembly using a bipartisan process. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that he will shrink the time violent felons must wait to seek reinstatement of their voting rights and will remove some offenses from that list. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel argues that the State’s non-partisan Government Accountability Board “remains the best model for supervising partisan elections and ethical behavior.” In the culmination of a four-year democratic transition Beji Caid Essebsi , an 88-year-old veteran of Tunisia’s political establishment won the country’s presidential election and proponents of online voting in the United Kingdom face the same concerns over security and privacy that have plagued such proposals in other countries.