Germany: Merkel points to grand coalition with Social Democrats | Reuters

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday welcomed the prospect of talks on a “grand coalition” with her Social Democrat (SPD) rivals and defended the record of the previous such government, saying it had worked well. Merkel’s fourth term was cast into doubt when the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) walked out of three-way coalition talks with her conservative bloc and the Greens last Sunday, causing a political impasse in Europe’s biggest economy. But on Friday, the SPD reversed a previous decision and agreed to talk to Merkel, raising the possibilities of a new “grand coalition” which has ruled Germany for the last four years, or of a minority government.

Honduras: In upset, opposition takes lead over U.S. ally in Honduras election | Reuters

A left-right coalition led by a flamboyant TV host took a surprise lead in the Honduran presidential election, initial results showed on Monday, upsetting forecasts that the crime-fighting, U.S.-allied incumbent would comfortably win. With 57 percent of ballot boxes counted, Salvador Nasralla had an almost 5 point lead with 45 percent, the first results showed, when they were released nearly 10 hours after voting ended. “I am the new president-elect of Honduras,” Nasralla, 64, wrote on Twitter after the results were announced.

Italy: Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Italy Demands Facebook’s Help | The New York Times

With critical national elections only months away, anxiety is building that Italy will be the next target of a destabilizing campaign of fake news and propaganda, prompting the leader of the country’s governing party to call on Facebook and other social media companies to police their platforms. “We ask the social networks, and especially Facebook, to help us have a clean electoral campaign,” Matteo Renzi, the leader of the Democratic Party, said in an interview on Thursday. “The quality of the democracy in Italy today depends on a response to these issues.” In a global atmosphere already thick with suspicion of Russian meddling in elections in the United States, France and Germany, as well as in the British referendum to leave the European Union and the Catalan independence movement in Spain, many analysts consider Italy to be the weak link in an increasingly vulnerable European Union.

Liberia: Liberty Party to appeal election fraud case to Supreme Court | Reuters

Liberia’s opposition Liberty Party will take its claims of election fraud to the Supreme Court this week after the electoral commission ruled on Friday that the first-round Oct. 10 vote was fair, it said on Sunday.n The appeal will likely set the West African country’s presidential election back well into December, and could result in the first round poll being re-run, which could delay the first democratic transfer of power in over 70 years by months. Ex football star George Weah was meant to face Vice-President Joseph Boakai in a run-off vote in early November to determine who will replace Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

Nepal: Nepal goes to the polls for historic vote | AFP

Millions of Nepalis headed to the polls Sunday for a historic election billed as a turning point for the impoverished Himalayan nation, hoping to end the ruinous instability that has plagued the country since the end of a bloody civil war a decade ago. The two-phase elections for national and provincial parliaments are the first under a new post-war constitution born out of a peace deal that ended the 10-year Maoist insurgency in 2006 and set the country on a path from monarchy to democracy. It took nine years after the end of the conflict for the new charter to be agreed as a series of brittle coalition governments bickered over the country’s future as a federal democratic state.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for November 20-26 2017

Last month, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to ___ voting systems manufacturers with a series of questions asking how their organizations were structured and what steps they have taken to ensure their machines are protected from cyber threats. FCW obtained the responses from five of the companies. All maintained that they had no evidence of security breaches, though overall Wyden indicated in a statement that he was not impressed with the company’s response. “These responses suggest the voting machine industry has severely underinvested in cybersecurity. It’s cause for alarm that [ES&S] refused to answer a single question about whether it is securing its systems,” Wyden said. “Given what happened during the 2016 election, voting technology companies must move aggressively to secure their products.”

Leaders of the Congressional Task Force on Election Security called on House appropriators to fund state efforts to secure voting infrastructure. In a letter, two members of the House Appropriations Committee, U.S. Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Robert Brady (D-PA) called for the $400 million that remains available under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 be used to secure state voting systems.

A U.S. District Court judge said a Justice Department attorney told the court Friday that the President’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity “will not meet in December.” The news fueled more questions about the panel’s future and its viability.

A New York Times report investigates the purging of voter rolls. They notes “[c]onservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers’ jobs harder. Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, in turn, say that the benefits are mostly imaginary, and that the purges are intended to reduce the number of minority, poor and young voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.”

Colorado became the first state in the nation after this month’s election to complete a risk-limiting election audit. Matt Masterson, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who witnessed the audit. “Colorado’s risk-limiting audit provided great insights into how to conduct more efficient and effective post-election audits. (The commission) is eager to share some of the lessons learned with election officials across America.”

Following a successful trial of paper ballot voting systems in Georgia, ES&S is attempting to convince the state to spend additional funds needlessly by purchasing ballot marking devices for all voters, rather than allowing voters to mar their votes by hand. Susan Greenhalgh, the vice president of programs for Verified Voting said an election system lthat requires voters to mark ballots by hand before they’re scanned by a machine could cost Georgians as little as $30 million, saving tens of millions of dollars. “It would be unnecessarily costly for the state to spend all that money,” she said. “If you’re physically marking a ballot, there’s a pretty good chance it will be counted as the voter intended.”

More than 2,900 double votes were cast during municipal elections in York County due to a voting machine programming error. County officials said at first that the issue did not appear to affect the outcome of any races. But if vote tallies provided by the county are correct, the West York Borough Council contest might have been impacted.

A federal judge in Alexandria rejected Democrats’ emergency bid to halt the State Board of Elections from certifying the vote totals in House District 28, increasing pressure on state elections officials to act in the Fredericksburg-area contest. The elections board was scheduled to meet to certify the results on Wednesday morning, but the elections officials announced late Tuesday that they had postponed the meeting until next Monday.

After the FDP walked away from coalition talks with CDU/CSU and the Greens last weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the prospect of talks on a “grand coalition” with her Social Democrat (SPD) rivals and defended the record of the previous such government. The Guardian considered echoes of the troubled Weimar government of the 1920s in Germany’s current difficulties in coalition-buiding.

Kenya’s supreme court has upheld the victory of President Uhuru Kenyatta in last month’s controversial re-run of presidential elections, clearing the way for the 55-year-old leader to be sworn in for a second and final term next week. The country’s first attempted election was annulled by the supreme court over voting irregularities and a re-run was held earlier this month.

National: What are voting machine companies doing about cyber? | FCW

In October 2017, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent letters to five of the top voting machine companies in America asking how their organizations were structured and what steps they have taken to ensure their machines are protected from cyber threats. “As our election systems have come under unprecedented scrutiny, public faith in the security of our electoral process at every level is more important than ever before,” Wyden said. “Ensuring that Americans can trust that election systems and infrastructure are secure is necessary to protecting confidence in our electoral process and democratic government.” The questions touched on a wide range of topics related to cybersecurity, such as whether the companies had experienced a recent data breach, whether they employ a chief information security officer and how frequently their products have been audited by third-party evaluators.

National: Democrats call for states to get $400M election security upgrades | The Hill

Two House Democrats are pressing their colleagues to allot $400 million for states to upgrade outdated voting equipment and secure their election systems. Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson (Miss.) and Robert Brady (Pa.) made the appeal in a letter to leaders of the House Appropriations Committee released on Monday. “We know that Russia launched an unprecedented assault on our elections in 2016, targeting 21 states’ voting systems, and we believe this money is necessary to protect our elections from future attack,” wrote the lawmakers.  “When a sovereign nation attempts to meddle in our elections, it is an attack on our country,” they wrote. “We cannot leave states to defend against the sophisticated cyber tactics of state actors like Russia on their own.”

National: Judge: Trump voter fraud commission on ice till next year | Politico

A commission that President Donald Trump tasked with investigating his own unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud won’t meet again this year, according to court records, fueling more questions about the panel’s future and its viability. In an order Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said a Justice Department attorney told the court Friday that the President’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity “will not meet in December.” Federal rules require such committee meetings to be announced 15 days in advance, except for emergencies, so no meeting seems feasible this month, Asked about the lawyer’s reported statement Monday, the White House declined to comment on the record. However, an administration official acknowledged that a meeting of the commission before the end of the year was “unlikely.”

National: Culling Voter Rolls: Battling Over Who Even Gets to Go to the Polls | The New York Times

On its face, the notice sent to 248 county election officials asked only that they do what Congress has ordered: Prune their rolls of voters who have died, moved or lost their eligibility — or face a federal lawsuit. The notice, delivered in September by a conservative advocacy group, is at the heart of an increasingly bitter argument over the seemingly mundane task of keeping accurate lists of voters — an issue that will be a marquee argument before the Supreme Court in January. At a time when gaming the rules of elections has become standard political strategy, the task raises a high-stakes question: Is scrubbing ineligible voters from the rolls worth the effort if it means mistakenly bumping legitimate voters as well? The political ramifications are as close as a history book. Florida’s Legislature ordered the voter rolls scrubbed of dead registrants and ineligible felons before the 2000 presidential election. The resulting purge, based on a broad name-matching exercise, misidentified thousands of legitimate voters as criminals, and prevented at least 1,100 of them — some say thousands more — from casting ballots.

Colorado: State pioneers voting safeguard | Grand Junction Sentinel

Colorado became the first state in the nation after this month’s election to complete a “risk-limiting” audit, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. Such an audit, ordered by the Colorado Legislature in 2009, is a procedure designed to provide statistical evidence that the election outcome is correct, and has a higher-than-normal probability of correcting a wrong outcome. Risk-limiting audits require human beings to examine and verify more ballots in close races, and fewer ballots in races with wide margins. “Colorado is a national leader in exploring innovative solutions for accessible, secure and auditable elections,” said Matt Masterson, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who witnessed the audit. “Colorado’s risk-limiting audit provided great insights into how to conduct more efficient and effective post-election audits. (The commission) is eager to share some of the lessons learned with election officials across America.”

Pennsylvania: York County officials say overvotes didn’t affect election results, but numbers tell different story | York Dispatch

York County officials announced their determination that a technical oversight with voting machines didn’t affect the outcome of Nov. 7 election results, but the numbers in one race indicate a possible impact. York County’s Board of Elections voted unanimously to approve the preliminary certification of the election results during its meeting Monday, Nov. 20. County election staff discovered the oversight the afternoon before Election Day that allowed a single voter to cast multiple votes for a single candidate in races where more than one candidate was elected. On Nov. 13, about 20 volunteers — all county employees — spent about five hours counting all the instances where a single voter cast two votes for the same candidate — referred to as an “overvote.”

Virginia: Federal judge rejects Democrats’ request to block certification of races but leaves door open for new election | The Washington Post

A federal judge refused Wednesday to issue a temporary restraining order to stop Virginia’s board of elections from certifying the results in two House of Delegates races in which more than 300 voters were apparently assigned to the wrong races. It is unclear how many of those voters cast ballots on Nov. 7. The ruling was a setback for Democrats, whose hopes for taking control of the chamber could rest on one of the two seats. “The job of the board is to certify the count,” Judge T.S. Ellis III of U.S. District Court in Alexandria said in a hearing conducted by telephone. “Let the state process run its course.” But the judge let the lawsuit stand, meaning Democrats could return to the court after the results are certified by the state board of elections to challenge the outcome and request a new election. “We don’t have a clear picture, exactly, of the scope of the problem,” Ellis said.

Germany: Echoes of the Weimar Republic as German politicians lose knack of coalition-building | The Guardian

Danyal Bayaz has experienced many things during his first few weeks as a new MP, but boredom is not one of them. Two months after entering Germany’s parliament as a Green party candidate, Bayaz, 34, from Heidelberg, has watched rightwing politicians give each other standing ovations for Eurosceptic diatribes, leftwingers heckle the far right as racists and a former climate activist with dyed hair form unlikely alliances with Christian Democrats in tailored suits. Last week Bayaz saw the dramatic collapse of coalition talks that would have seen his Green colleagues catapulted into government and now faces the possibility that his seat may come up for grabs again in fresh elections next spring. “Right now I am not even sure if it’s worth me getting a loyalty card here,” he quips as he orders a cappuccino in the Bundestag’s canteen. For years, German politics were both mocked and admired for being too uneventful to the point of tedium. Only recently the lack of drama inside the reconstructed Reichstag’s circular plenary chamber led to calls for a more confrontational, Westminster-style approach. But as old geopolitical certainties have crumbled over the past 18 months, Berlin’s consensual, unexcitable style of policymaking has won new admirers.

Kenya: Court upholds President Kenyatta’s election victory | The Guardian

Kenya’s supreme court has upheld the victory of President Uhuru Kenyatta in last month’s controversial re-run of presidential elections, clearing the way for the 55-year-old leader to be sworn in for a second and final term next week. After hearing two days of arguments, a six-judge bench said two petitions demanding the cancellation of the polls were “without merit”. The ruling is unlikely to end the worst political crisis in a decade in east Africa’s richest and most developed economy, which has seen more than 60 people killed in political violence in three months. Opposition leaders immediately rejected the decision, while government supporters celebrated outside the court in central Nairobi.

National: Bipartisan Harvard project issues election hacking recommendations | The Hill

A panel led by former Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney campaign officials has released a slate of recommendations for future election operations to guard themselves against cyberattacks. The final report from Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy project comes roughly a year after the 2016 November presidential election, ahead of which the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were successfully targeted by cyberattacks. The U.S. intelligence community has tied the hacks to a broader campaign by Russia to interfere in the election. Robby Mook and Matt Rhoades, former campaign managers to Clinton and Romney, respectively, positioned the project as an effort to help future campaign operations be more secure against cyber threats, regardless of their party affiliation. 

National: Judges question privacy watchdog’s right to sue Trump election commission | The Washington Post

Federal judges questioned Tuesday whether privacy advocates have the right to sue President Trump’s election-integrity commission to try to block its planned collection of millions of voter records. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit seemed skeptical of the specific harm to a privacy watchdog group trying to protect voter data the commission is seeking from 50 states and the District, including individual birth dates, political affiliations and partial Social Security numbers. Judge Stephen F. Williams asserted that the commission’s powers appeared limited to requesting — not demanding — the information from states and said its “potency seems very low.” Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg suggested the commission would have access only to publicly available voter data. “Isn’t this information already public?” he asked the attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

National: Leading Trump Census pick causes alarm | Poitico

The Trump administration is leaning toward naming Thomas Brunell, a Texas professor with no government experience, to the top operational job at the U.S. Census Bureau, according to two people who have been briefed on the bureau’s plans. Brunell, a political science professor, has testified more than half a dozen times on behalf of Republican efforts to redraw congressional districts, and is the author of a 2008 book titled “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.” The choice would mark the administration’s first major effort to shape the 2020 census, the nationwide count that determines which states lose and gain electoral votes and seats in the House of Representatives.

Editorials: With court cases looming, the fight over voting rights will only intensify | Carl P. Leubsdorf/Dallas Morning News

In the coming weeks, high federal courts will hear important cases challenging two ways Republicans have sought since Barack Obama’s election as president to restrict voting of Democratic-leaning groups. They come at a time when efforts initially focused on restrictive voter-identification laws in Texas and other GOP-controlled states have broadened to include purging voter rolls of people who hadn’t lately voted and limiting early voting in areas with large minority populations. In early December, a federal appeals court will hear the latest version of the long-pending Texas voter ID law. In January, the Supreme Court, which is already considering a Wisconsin case challenging political redistricting, will hear an Ohio case that could produce a crucial legal judgment on the ability of state officials to purge voter rolls.

Kansas: Kobach’s office reviewing security of Crosscheck database and possible cost of upgrades | Lawrence Journal World

The chief election officer in Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office said Tuesday that a multistate voter registration database that Kansas manages is being thoroughly reviewed for security concerns, but it is unknown whether Kansas will have to foot the bill to upgrade the system. “I legitimately do not know the answer to that yet,” Bryan Caskey said during a phone interview Tuesday. “We’re still evaluating all options, and one of the options is cost.” The Kansas secretary of state’s office manages a database known as the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which contains voter registration information for millions of voters in more than 25 states. In some cases, those records include the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number.

Maine: Advocates seeking to nullify delay of ranked-choice voting | Associated Press

Ranked-choice voting supporters are embarking on a referendum do-over, seeking enough signatures for a vote to nullify a legislative delay and implement the system for the June primary elections. If their efforts are successful, the state would move forward with a dual-election system — ranked-choice voting for primaries and federal races but not for gubernatorial elections or legislative races — to avoid a conflict with the Maine Constitution. The Committee for Ranked Choice Voting said it’s already halfway to a goal of collecting 61,123 signatures from registered voters by Feb. 5 for a “People’s Veto” referendum. If enough votes are certified, then the legislative delay would be stayed.

Rhode Island: Providence County will be only site in nation for 2018 census test | Providence Journal

The U.S. Census Bureau will hire as many as 1,800 census takers and supervisors for a test-run in Rhode Island next year, in preparation for the next big U.S. Census in 2020. Providence County, R.I., will be the one-and-only testing ground in the nation — in 2018 — for the next big U.S. Census in 2020 that will determine, among other things, whether Rhode Island gets to keep its two seats in the House of Representatives. How Rhode Island got chosen as the sole location for this 2018 “end-to-end” census test is not fully clear.

Pennsylvania: More than 2,900 double votes found in York County recount | WITF

More than 2,900 double votes were cast during municipal elections in York County due to a voting machine programming error. County officials said at first that the issue did not appear to affect the outcome of any races. But if vote tallies provided by the county are correct, the West York Borough Council contest might have been impacted. West York Councilwoman Shelley Metzler finished fifth of six candidates vying for four seats. But she might have placed fourth – and secured another term – if she had received enough of the 32 “over votes” cast in the council race, a closer review by WITF/Keystone Crossroads found.

South Carolina: Voters’ group getting head start on redistricting | SCNow

Voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around, according to a voter education group. This seems to be the rally cry of the League of Women’s Voters of South Carolina, whose local members held an information meeting last Thursday at the Hartsville Memorial Library. The meeting went over the age-old problem of gerrymandering, where elected officials attempt to keep voting districts favorable to one side of party affiliation or the other. “Representative of both major political parties seek partisan advantage from gerrymandering,” said information from the meeting. “This is not a problem associated with one or another political party. Incumbent protection has also shaped South Carolina’s districts.”

Virginia: State again delays certification of elections, as Democrats file third lawsuit in disputed House race | The Washington Post

Democrats hoping to win control of Virginia’s House of Delegates filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block the state Board of Elections from certifying a tight race that has been clouded by ballot mix-ups. The Virginia House Democratic Caucus filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria – the third complaint Democrats or their allies have filed over that key legislative race since the Nov. 7 election. All the lawsuits claim that voters had been disenfranchised for various reasons; the first two were dismissed. Late Tuesday, the elections board decided to postpone a Wednesday meeting to certify results in the 28th District and in the adjacent 88th District, said Edgardo Cortés, the state commissioner of elections.

Wyoming: Murray announces plan to evaluate Wyoming’s voting equipment | Casper Star Tribune

Wyoming voting officials have started looking into replacing aging election equipment across the state. A panel of state officials has been convened to determine whether new machines are needed and how much replacement would cost, as well as where to seek funding. “The State of Wyoming is responsible for providing citizens with an election process that can be trusted. Wyoming is leading the charge with this Task Force to ensure that no county is left with voting equipment at risk of deteriorating,” State Election Director Kai Schon said in a statement.

International: E-Government Sounds Great Until the First Hack | Bloomberg

A group of Czech security researchers earlier this year discovered a way to steal identities from electronic ID cards used in a number of countries, known in the cryptography industry as a ROCA vulnerability. So far, the vulnerability has caused problems in Estonia — the country with perhaps the most comprehensive e-identification and e-government system in the world — and in Spain. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a tireless promoter of his country’s e-democracy, has said that other countries and institutions have the same problem, too; they’re just not talking openly about it. He’s very likely right. The discovery poses an important question: Could we perhaps be overeager to adopt technological solutions to problems that don’t necessarily require them?

Cuba: Final Prepared Details for Upcoming Municipal Elections | teleSUR

Last details are being set up in Cuba ahead of the election on Nov. 26 for the People’s Power Assembly seats, after the electoral commission organized a trial run of the election or voter. Among the activities are reviewing voter lists, checking updated electoral manuals, testing lines of communication, and reviewing responsibilities for electoral board members. Cubans will choose representatives from over 27,000 candidates that will compete for 605 assembly seats.

Germany: Germany moves closer to snap election | Politico

Germany moved a step closer to a snap election after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s efforts to form a government with smaller parties fell apart and the Social Democrats refused to step into the breach. Europe’s biggest economy and pre-eminent political power was plunged into deep political uncertainty late Sunday night after the collapse of exploratory talks involving Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, plus the liberal Free Democrats and the Greens. That left the Social Democrats (SPD) as the only viable junior partners who could give Merkel a parliamentary majority. But SPD leaders voted unanimously Monday not to reprise the “grand coalition” of the last four years with Merkel’s conservatives, having recorded the worst result in their history in September’s general election. An extended period of political limbo in Germany means a range of decisions on the national and EU level will be on hold — most notably on French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposals to overhaul the eurozone.

Liberia: Electoral commission says fraud claims lack evidence | The Star

Liberia’s electoral commission said on Monday that claims of fraud brought by a presidential candidate in last month’s election did not have sufficient evidence, delivering a preliminary conclusion of an investigation. Former footballer George Weah was initially set to face Vice-President Joseph Boakai to determine who will replace Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. But third-place finisher Charles Brumskine and his Liberty Party contested the outcome of the first round, claiming gross irregularities, and the Supreme Court this month suspended the run-off until the electoral commission can investigate Brumskine’s claim.