In 2008, the Tennessee General Assembly voted almost unanimously to make elections more secure, dependable and trustworthy by requiring a verifiable paper trail for each vote. The step was long overdue — more than 30 states already have such security measures.
But three years later, secure elections in Tennessee remain at risk, and voters may never know if their votes are counted.
Wisconsin will soon have the what’s arguably the nation’s most restrictive voter ID law. The bill was passed through the the Republican-led Senate late last week and is expected be signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker on Wednesday. Voter rights advocates are worried that the new bill will keep some of the Democratic party’s key constituents away from the polls in 2012. And as more bills sweep across the country, concern is growing over the GOP’s push to fix a problem that, statistically, just doesn’t exist.
But that wasn’t a concern of Republican Governor Scott Walker last week when the bill passed the state Senate. “Requiring a photo identification to vote will go a long way to eliminate the threat of voter fraud,” Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal. “If you need an ID to buy cold medicine, it’s reasonable to require it to vote.”
With the stroke of a pen today, Gov. Scott Walker will officially solve a problem that we don’t have. If you listen to Walker and some fellow governors, they’re protecting the integrity of elections and preventing voter fraud.
If you ask most everyone else, it’s a slick way of making it more difficult for people to vote — especially people who are less likely to vote for Walker and his Republican colleagues.
Jane L. Corwin this afternoon obtained a court order from State Supreme Court Justice Russell P. Buscaglia barring a certification of a winner in the special 26th Congressional District race pending a show-cause hearing before him later this week. The Buffalo News obtained a copy of the show-cause order Buscaglia signed this morning based on a petition the Republican candidate filed Monday.
Under the judge’s 11-page order, attorneys for Corwin have until Wednesday to serve copies of the court order on the election boards of Erie, Niagara, Genesee, Orleans, Wyoming, Livingston and Monroe counties, their sheriff’s offices, the state Board of Elections and her three opponents.
Ohioans would see a shorter early voting period under a proposal Tuesday that cleared the Senate in this traditionally presidential swing state. The Republican-led Senate voted 23-10 along party lines to pass the plan, despite Democrats’ objections that parts of the bill could lead to longer lines and discourage people from participating in elections.
Supporters argue they are addressing inconsistencies in the law and want to help county officials save money at a time when they’re struggling to balance budgets. Voters would have 21 days to vote by mail and could cast a ballot in person 16 days before Election Day. That’s down from the current 35-day early voting period.
A bill overhauling Ohio election law cleared the Senate today over Democratic objections, and Senate leaders said they did not expect major problems meshing their plan with one passed last week by the House.
Voters would get less time to vote early, online voter registration would be developed and a handful of counties, including Franklin, no longer could send absentee ballot applications to all voters. Senate Bill 148 passed 23-10 along party lines.
Ohioans would have less time to vote absentee and early, and counties would be barred from mass-mailing applications for ballots to registered voters under a bill that cleared the Senate Tuesday.
Senate Bill 148, passed strictly with Republican support, seeks to reduce the number of last-resort provisional ballots cast on Election Day and sets statewide standards for when they will and won’t be counted. The bill would let voters for the first time register and update their addresses on the Internet.
A fire that destroyed 10,000 Harris County voting machines last August was the result of an electrical short, not arson, said Kevin Brolan, acting deputy chief of the Houston Fire Department’s arson division.
The fire, coming as it did just weeks before the start of early voting last fall, gave rise to speculation of arson with a political motive.
The filling period is about to begin for major political party candidates interested in running in Nevada’s special election for the 2nd Congressional District seat. But filing doesn’t guarantee a spot on the Sept. 13 ballot, because that decision remains with the Nevada Supreme Court. Secretary of State Ross Miller said declarations of candidacy will be accepted beginning Wednesday through June 30.
Miller and the Democratic Party filed notices Tuesday with the Nevada Supreme Court challenging a lower court that ruled the Republican and Democratic central committees should choose their party nominee. The Supreme Court has agreed to expedite the case.
Republican Rep. Dean Heller’s appointment to the U.S. Senate this month created a novel situation — Nevada has never had to replace a member of the House of Representatives in the middle of a term. As a result, a controversy quickly developed over how to replace Heller because Nevada law doesn’t specifically state how a special election for the House should be conducted.
Because there is no primary in a special election, the state Republican Party wants to pick its nominee. But the law doesn’t provide for the parties to pick their candidates for a special election.
If only Secretary of State Dean Heller had written regulations for a House special election, we wouldn’t have such controversy over filling Sen. Dean Heller’s seat.
But Heller did not, as a 2003 law instructed, write any rules, so now we have chaos, thanks to a Carson City judge’s stunning decision last week that overturned the guidelines proposed by Heller’s successor, Ross Miller. And reading through the 97-page transcript of Judge Todd Russell’s decision reveals a jurist who seemed immediately predisposed to the GOP argument that party central committees should nominate and hostile to the Democratic Party claim that it should be, as Miller calls it, a “ballot royale.”
Followed up by a contradictory order Russell telegraphed from the beginning where he was going, later trying to tamp down any speculation while having a colloquy with Deputy Attorney General Kevin Benson by urging him not to conclude “anything by my questions.”
A close friend of mine is one of the great advocates for disability rights in Columbia — perhaps all of Boone County. She recently started a discussion on Facebook concerning Missouri’s Senate Bill 3, the voter identification bill, which now sits on the governor’s desk for signature or veto.
My friend wrote that she may have to sue the state of Missouri because the bill could disenfranchise up to 300,000 Missourians. I praise her fortitude. Not many are willing to stand up for the disabled and poor.
Back in 2006, when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was up for renewal, a number of Republican lawmakers protested that its time had passed; that the states and municipalities that once worked to keep blacks away from the polls and locked into second-class citizenry had learned their lesson.
But it’s a lesson in which Florida Gov. Rick Scott and his GOP brethren are sorely in need of remediation.
Recently, Scott signed into law a bill that must be the most blatant attempt at limiting the access of black and poor people to the polls since the days when they were asked to guess how many bubbles were in a bar of soap.
Immediate steps are required on part of Election Commission of Pakistan to ensure transparency and credibility of the future elections in Pakistan.
A Delegation headed by Mr. Samson Salamat, Director of Centre for Human Rights Education, a human rights organization observing a “Decade for Democracy in Pakistan” called on the Provincial Election Commissioner Mr. Akhtar Hussain Sabir and discussed immediate steps required on part of Election Commission to ensure the transparency and credibility of the elections in future.
The Election Commission is going to sit with registered political parties once again to discuss changes to the rules on the commissioner’s appointment and to the electoral laws. The commission plans to kick off the dialogue from June 7, election commissioner M Sakhawat Hossain told bdnews24.com on Tuesday.
Reforms to the law on delimitation of electoral areas and introduction of electronic voting will also be discussed among other topics, he said.
Many locals reject UK’s plan to move from the traditional first-past-the-post system. Residents of the Turks and Caicos Islands have made it abundantly clear to officials from Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and by extension, the United Kingdom (UK) Government, that they have no appetite for any proposed changes to the current voting system that is being used to elect Members of Parliament (MPs) and governments.
This was one of the main points that emerged from the serious of consultative meetings which were held in the various islands by a team of high-level FCO experts over the past week.
The Election Commission (EC) is considering three options to avoid the publicising of any unofficial results in the next general election following such incidents happening in the recent Sarawak state election.
Its chairman Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof said the three options were banning handphones from the tallying centres, imposing statutory declarations not to publicise any unofficial results, and all the ballot papers to be counted late or at 5pm although some polling centres might close early. He said a decision on the matter would be made next month.
The Montgomery County Board of Elections recommended Voter Services’ director and assistant director be suspended without pay for misleading the Election Board about people mistakenly registered to vote.
On Wednesday, the Election Board voted 3-0 to recommend Director Joseph Passarella be suspended for two days without pay and Assistant Director Patricia Allen one day without pay.
Defense Department officials late last week announced more than $15 million in grants designed to improve how voter registration forms and absentee ballots are sent to overseas voters, in an effort to solve problems well in advance of the 2012 presidential election.
Bob Carey, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, said officials don’t have any set plans on how many grants they’ll award or exactly what the final projects will look like. The grants are open to state and local election officials, and the parameters call for using new technologies to decrease the delivery time for registration, ballot requests and changes of address.
In a milestone event for India’s electoral history, people of Gujarat recently participated in India’s first Internet election.
… According to a release, this was the second time online voting was successfully used after a trial run in September 2010. And the results were quite impressive with 77.16% of registered voters casting their votes electronically.
Read HB 1355 – Florida’s Omnibus Elections Bill
On the heels of a historic Jacksonville mayoral election with a narrow margin of victory, Gov. Rick Scott signed a major revision to Florida’s election laws. After the law goes into effect July 1, there will be fewer early-voting days and it will be more difficult for a voter to change his or her address.
The law has drawn criticism from across the state and nation.
“This new law is going to make it very difficult for us to engage eligible voters in our Democratic process,” said Katherine Carithers, president of the Jacksonville chapter of the League of Women Voters.
Florida Governor Rick Scott’s elections chief is defending changes to election law that shrink the number of days for early voting by arguing that polling places will be open the same number of hours they are now. Yes, fewer days, Secretary of State Kurt Browning wrote in a May 23, 2011, guest column in the St. Petersburg Times. But longer hours on those days.
HB 1355, which Scott signed into law May 19, cuts the number of days of early voting from 14 to 8, makes it harder for third-party voter registration groups to register prospective voters and requires voters who change their address from one county to another on the day of an election to cast a provisional ballot, which would then be reviewed by the county canvassing board.
The North Carolina Senate will soon decide how early “early voting” can be. The state House has passed its version of a bill to reduce the amount of time polling sites can be open before elections, by one week. Republican backers of the idea suggest it will save county governments money, but the people who administer the elections say it would actually cost more.
Bev Cunningham, director of the Henderson County Board of Elections in Hendersonville, says her elections staff would be much busier, for a shorter time period.
The Indiana Supreme Court said Friday the state recount commission should go ahead and reconsider whether Republican Secretary of State Charlie White was a valid candidate for the office to which he was elected.
Democrats challenged White’s candidacy after the November election, saying he wasn’t eligible to seek the office. A Hamilton County grand jury indicted White in March on seven counts, including voter fraud and perjury, for using his ex-wife’s address on a voter registration form.
White has blamed the error on his busy schedule and new marriage and called it an honest mistake.
Ruling on an emergency transfer request, the Indiana Supreme Court today accepted Secretary of State Charlie White’s appeal against the state’s Democratic Party and ruled it won’t put a halt to the case while a recount investigation and criminal voter fraud proceedings are ongoing.
With that, the justices are allowing for the Indiana Recount Commission to rule on whether White – elected as the state’s chief election officer in November – was eligible for office because he registered using a false home address during his campaign.
Democrats quietly have prepared an omnibus election bill that would move certain races to odd-numbered years, allow them to put their tax plan on the ballot in 2011 and, perhaps, move the September House special election to November, several well-placed sources confirm.
The bill draft was being passed around late last week and Monday, with election experts reviewing it.
Update: Appeal Filed In Special Election – My News 4 – KRNV, Reno, NV
The Republican Party would suffer irreparable harm if an unlimited number of candidates were allowed to run for the 2nd Congressional District seat left vacant by Dean Heller’s move to the Senate. So stated Carson City District Judge [James] Todd Russell in a written ruling released Monday. He announced his decision Friday.
Russell was critical of Secretary of State Ross Miller’s attorneys who argued for a “free-for-all” special election, saying reliance upon a single sentence contained in an entire law “produces an unreasonable and absurd result.”
The legal reasoning used by the state’s top election official to determine how candidates will be chosen for a special election to fill Nevada’s vacant U.S. House seat was “unreasonable and absurd,” a state judge said Monday.
The 12-page written order released by Carson District Judge James [Todd] Russell codifies his verbal bench ruling last week and sets the stage for an appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Secretary of State Ross Miller said the Sept. 13 special election would be an open contest, with the 2nd Congressional District seat going to the candidate who gets the most votes.
Rindo says it would cost the university more than $100,000 to replace all student IDs.
A bill to cut down on voter fraud could have universities cutting up student IDs and starting over. Governor Walker is expected to sign a voter ID bill into law this week.
Voters would be required to have a driver’s license, state issued ID or student ID to vote. University officials say efforts to make it easier for students to vote are welcome.
State elections officials on Monday certified the results of the recount of the April 5 election for state Supreme Court, declaring that Justice David Prosser has been re-elected to another 10-year term on the court by 7,004 votes.
“I look forward to taking the oath of office and continuing to serve in a fair and independent manner as a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” Prosser said a statement.