Utah: Governor wishes GOP would drop lawsuit challenging new election law | The Salt Lake Tribune

Gov. Gary Herbert wished aloud Thursday that the Utah Republican Party would drop its lawsuit challenging the state’s new election law, which is driving a wedge between the party’s right wing and moderates. But he concedes that maneuvering by conservatives has probably successfully forced party leaders to proceed against his wishes — and their own. When asked at his monthly KUED news conference if the GOP should drop the lawsuit, Herbert said, “They would be wise to do that.” The suit challenges SB54, which allows candidates to qualify for a primary election by collecting signatures and/or the traditional caucus-convention system.

Utah: Suit over vote-by-mail procedures in San Juan County is headed to trial | The Salt Lake Tribune

After recent rulings by a federal judge, a lawsuit that alleges San Juan County does not provide effective language assistance and equal voting opportunities to Navajos will go to trial. The Navajo Human Rights Commission and seven members of the Navajo Nation filed suit in February 2016 claiming San Juan County had violated the federal Voting Rights Act by closing polling places ahead of the 2014 election and moving toward a mail-only voting system, hindering access to the ballot box. The defendants — San Juan County, Clerk John David Nielson, and county Commissioners Phil Lyman, Bruce Adams and Rebecca Benally — filed a counterclaim against the plaintiffs, alleging the suit is based on fabricated claims and seeking a declaration that the voting procedures comply with the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.

U.S. Territories: Administration Argues For Rollback Of Voting Rights In U.S. Territories | Virgin Islands Consotium

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago will consider 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, according to ‘We The People Project’, a non-profit that advocates for equal rights and representation in U.S. territories. According to a release issued by the nonprofit on Wednesday, on Monday, the Trump Administration unexpectedly filed a last-minute letter with the court arguing for the first time that if an equal protection violation is found, the remedy should be to strip away statutorily provided absentee voting rights that are already provided to residents of certain territories. As plaintiffs explained in a filing yesterday, the Trump Administration’s view that voting rights should be “leveled down” is unprecedented – for good reason courts are hesitant to strip voting rights provided by law. 

West Virginia: Secretary of State Warner calls for election cyber vigilance | Martinsburg Journal

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner says officials need to take a proactive role to insure the integrity of our political elections. Speaking before the Berkeley County Council on Thursday, Warner said relentless media coverage reporting Russian hacking of recent American elections may have eroded citizen confidence, and consequently affect voter turnout. “If you keep one person away from registering to vote because they don’t want their information captured somewhere, or if they keep one person from voting, because they think somehow my vote isn’t going to matter, then they’ve eroded that confidence and they’re attacking the very fundamental foundations of our democracy — which is our electoral process,” Warner said.

Editorials: Votes for corporations and extra votes for property owners: why Australian local council elections are undemocratic | Ryan Goss/The Conversation

Imagine, for a minute, an undemocratic political system. Imagine a voting system in which someone has more votes than you because they own property. Or a voting system in which corporations have a vote – and maybe even more votes than regular people. A voting system in which, as a result, the power of your vote could be diluted by votes cast on behalf of corporations. This voting system isn’t something from Britain during the Industrial Revolution, or America’s Deep South in the 1950s. Instead, as my recent paper outlines, this way of voting is a reality at local council elections in five of Australia’s six states. It’s time for this to change.

Canada: Facebook to launch ‘election integrity initiative’ to prevent meddling of votes, ahead of Canadian elections | Reuters

Facebook Inc, under pressure over its role in possible Russian meddling in last year’s US presidential election, said it plans an election integrity initiative to protect Canada’s next vote from cyberthreats. Karina Gould, Canada’s minister of democratic institutions, will speak at a launch event next week, Facebook said Thursday in a statement announcing the project. A company spokeswoman declined to discuss details of the project, which follows a warning by Canada’s electronic spy agency in June that hackers will “very likely” try to influence Canada’s 2019 elections. The agency said it is advising all political parties on how to guard against cyberthreats.

Germany: Post-election conundrum awaits Germany’s Merkel | Reuters

Barring an upset, the main uncertainty surrounding Europe’s most important election this year is not whether Angela Merkel will continue to lead Germany after next week’s vote, but who with and how long they will take to get going. Although a surprise cannot be ruled out in the wake of any Russian interference, pollsters say they are confident about their surveys, which show Merkel’s conservatives winning the most seats in the Bundestag lower house. The far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is set to enter parliament for the first time, and some experts have said it may gain more support than the roughly 10 percent polls suggest, an alarming prospect for many at home and abroa

Kenya: Chaos and glitches: Covering Kenya’s disputed election | Reuters

A round-the-clock vigil at the official tallying station, spot checks on the vote count at local polling centers and an encounter with a 102-year-old woman who stood in a queue overnight to be the first in line to cast her ballot all formed part of Reuters’ reporting on Kenya’s disputed election in August. As Kenya geared up for its historic election, the Reuters team in Nairobi devised a comprehensive strategy to provide fast and accurate election coverage. Our journalists who had been schooled by contested elections in 2007 and 2013 were keenly aware that the Aug. 8 election would play out against a backdrop of potential violence and allegations of fraud. “Kenya has a history of heavily problematic elections,” says Nairobi bureau chief Katharine Houreld. “So every Kenyan wanted to understand the electoral process. Everybody needed to know how exactly it was going to work – because that meant the difference between safety and needing to flee for your life.”

Russia: In Moscow, Putin’s opponents chalk up a symbolic victory | Politico.eu

Russia’s liberal opposition is on a high after achieving a series of unprecedented victories in the Kremlin’s backyard at local council elections — including in the wealthy Moscow district where Vladimir Putin cast his own ballot. The United Democrats coalition — spearheaded by Dmitry Gudkov, a former opposition lawmaker, and Yabloko, Russia’s oldest anti-Putin party — claimed 14 districts in the September 10 elections, in some cases winning with a landslide. Opposition candidates held just one district before Sunday’s vote. The majority of the districts won by the coalition lie in the very heart of Moscow. In the Tverskaya district, home to some of the city’s wealthiest residents, the opposition took 11 out of 12 council seats. The coalition also recorded a clean sweep of seats in the Gagarinsky district, the Red Square neighborhood where Putin is registered to vote.

National: America’s shameful history of voter suppression | Andrew Gumbel/The Guardian

When Kris Kobach was first running for office in Kansas in 2010, he claimed he’d found evidence that thousands of Kansans were assuming the identities of dead voters and casting fraudulent ballots – a technique once known as ghost voting. Kobach even offered a name, Albert K Brewer of Wichita, who he said had voted from beyond the grave in the primaries that year. But then it emerged that Albert K Brewer, aged 78, was still very much alive, a registered Republican like Kobach, and more than a little stunned to be told he’d moved on to the great hereafter. No evidence emerged that anyone had ghost voted in Kansas that year. Seven years on, as Donald Trump’s point man on reforming the US electoral system, Kobach has not backed away from those same scare tactics – no matter that he is frequently called a fraud and a liar, and his allegations entirely baseless. On the contrary. Backed by a president who, days after assuming office, claimed that 3 to 5 million fraudulent ballots had been cast for Hillary Clinton, Kobach is enthusiastically spreading stories of voter impersonation on a massive scale, of out-of-state students voting twice, and of non-citizens casting illegal ballots.

National: Democrats on Voter Fraud Panel Join Those Criticizing It | The New York Times

President Trump’s voter fraud commission met in New Hampshire on Tuesday to discuss what members characterized as declining confidence in elections. But the most telling discussions of the session addressed declining confidence in the commission itself. As protesters outside the meeting accused the panel of promoting voter suppression, New Hampshire Secretary of State William M. Gardner, a Democrat on the commission, warned that “the specter of extreme political partisanship” threatened to undermine whatever work it was doing. And Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, another Democrat on the commission, dressed down the commission’s Republican vice chairman for what he called reckless statements about supposed voter fraud in New Hampshire.

National: Kobach comes under fire as panel meets in New Hampshire | The Washington Post

President Trump’s “election integrity” commission, a source of roiling controversy since its inception, convened here Tuesday amid fresh discord over an unfounded assertion by its vice chairman that the result of New Hampshire’s Senate election last year “likely” changed because of voter fraud. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) largely defended an article published Friday in which he pointed to statistics showing that more than 6,000 people had voted in a close election here using out-of-state driver’s licenses to prove their identity. He suggested that was evidence of people taking advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and heading to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. New Hampshire only requires voters to state their “domicile,” a looser standard than residency, and college students and others routinely vote without state-issued driver’s licenses.

National: Kobach: Commission may not recommend changes | Associated Press

The vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s commission on election fraud on Tuesday dismissed criticism that the panel is bent on voter suppression, saying there is a “high possibility” it will make no recommendations when it finishes its work — and even if it does, it can’t force states to adopt them. Trump, a Republican, created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May to investigate his unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. Democrats have blasted the commission as a biased panel determined to curtail voting rights, and they ramped up their criticism ahead of and during the group’s daylong meeting in New Hampshire. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, said some voters have canceled their registrations or been hesitant to register since learning the group has asked state governments to provide data on individual voters. “Their voting suppression impact has already begun,” he said on a press call organized by the Democratic National Committee.

National: Donald Trump May Restrict Voting Rights Ahead of 2020 | Newsweek

A member of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was pushing fake news before its second meeting was even able to kick off on Tuesday afternoon. In an op-ed published by Breitbart just ahead of the meeting, Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, again asserted a debunked claim that more than 5,000 people in New Hampshire cast illegal votes during last year’s election. His suggestion that there was rampant voter fraud in the region was swiftly rebuked by the state’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who said New Hampshire’s election results were “real and valid.” By the end of the day, though, it became clear that several of the group’s members have a common goal: to publicize every known case of voter fraud from before and during the 2016 election and to clamp down on anything that made them possible ahead of the 2020 vote.

National: Texas lawyer Trey Trainor nominated for Federal Election Commission | The Texas Tribune

President Donald Trump is nominating Trey Trainor, an Austin lawyer well-known in Texas politics, to serve on the Federal Election Commission. The White House announced Trainor’s appointment late Tuesday night. He must be confirmed by the Senate. Trainor is a longtime attorney specializing in election law, campaign finance and ethics. He has served as the lawyer for the conservative nonprofit Empower Texans, defending it during its long-running battles with the Texas Ethics Commission over whether it should have to disclose its donors. Trainor originally supported U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the 2016 presidential primary, but once Cruz dropped out, Trainor helped pave the way for Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention. Trainor served as general counsel to the RNC platform committee, a job that put him on the front lines of the party’s efforts to quell an anti-Trump uprising on the floor.

Editorials: Voters Need a Digital Defense | Jimmy Carter/The New York Times

Technology threatens to fundamentally change the nature of elections and democratic governance. New media forms, including social media, are fueling political polarization as people communicate with general audiences and narrowly focused groups, without the deliberation typical of traditional forms of communication. Hacking, misinformation, “fake news” and cybersecurity threats are expanding the power of a few while undermining public confidence in the accuracy of mass media and information. Politicians are using detailed voter information to play to their bases, allowing them to ignore the rest of their constituents. Democratization, which had advanced steadily for decades, is now threatened by the rise of authoritarian governments and the closing of the political space to civil society, journalists and others.

Voting Blogs: Pence-Kobach, the First Day of Hearings, and the Von Spakovsky Affair | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Pence-Kobach Commission just conducted its first public hearing, and its leadership may have hoped to use the occasion to recover a degree of credibility or measure of respectability for its operations. If that was the plan, it did not work out well. The Vice Chair Kobach started the day in retreat from claims, published the Friday before, about illegal voting in the last New Hampshire Senate election. This is the latest example of his utter disregard of the facts and appetite for sweeping, false claims that have been enough to disqualify him as a serious participant in the national discussion of voting rights.It certainly makes a mockery of his leadership of a presidential Commission supposedly conducting an impartial inquiry into the risks of illegal voting. Then the Campaign Legal Center released an informative email that it obtained by FOIA request to the Department of Justice for materials relating allegations of voting fraud in the 2016 election.

Voting Blogs: Modernizing voting system guidelines and testing | Center for Civic Design

If you have ever looked at the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), you might be overcome by the sheer size of the document and the level of detail included. If your state requires federal certification for the voting systems you use, the VVSG 1.0 (2005) or 1.1 (2015) are the specifications used to test the voting systems against. We all learned a lot from the process of creating and refreshing the VVSG over the years. In the meantime, so much has changed. The technology has changed, the market of voting technology has changed, laws have changed — elections have changed. We all learned a lot from the process of creating and refreshing the VVSG over the years. In the meantime, so much has changed. The technology has changed, the market of voting technology has changed, laws have changed — elections have changed. On September 12, 2017, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), a committee formed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), adopted a new version of the VVSG, which they’re affectionately calling VVSG 2.0.

Delaware: Election Commission to send bids for new voting equipment | Delaware First Media

Delaware will put out a request for bids on new voting machines by the end of month. Delaware’s current voting machines have been in use since 1996. The state has about 1,600 voting machines. Considered state of art when they were purchased more than twenty years ago, they’re now outdated. A 2015 report by the Brennan Center for Justice notes that the machine models Delaware uses are no longer being made and have outlived their expected lifespan. …  Manlove adds Delaware will probably have to wait until 2020 for the new voting machines because the purchasing process will take some time.

Maryland: Supreme Court denies speedy appeal of Maryland gerrymandering case | Frederick News-Post

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear a Maryland gerrymandering claim at the same time as a similar challenge from Wisconsin. The court issued an order Wednesday denying the motion of Republican plaintiffs to have their case before the court at the same time as Democratic plaintiffs from Wisconsin. In U.S. District Court, the plaintiffs — who include three Republican voters from Frederick County — argued that the redrawn districts amount to an unconstitutional violation of their First Amendment right to free speech. The case arrived at the Supreme Court after two U.S. District Court judges denied 6th District voters’ request for a preliminary injunction to require a new map before the 2018 election. The judges also decided to place a hold on the case until the Supreme Court considered the Wisconsin case.

Maine: Dunlap blasts head of election integrity commission over N.H. voter fraud assertions | Portland Press Herald

A day after admonishing the vice chairman of President Trump’s election integrity commission for making unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in New Hampshire, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said it is becoming clear that most of his fellow commissioners define voter fraud not as violations of voting laws but as having policies that make it easy for people they don’t want to see voting having too easy a time doing so. “Maybe I’m being too cynical,” Dunlap said Wednesday, “but they are looking at voter fraud as being if legislatures are making it too easy for people who don’t own property in a town to register there.” Dunlap – who has been criticized by fellow Democrats for participating in the voter fraud commission – emerged as one of the panel’s most vocal critics during its meeting Tuesday at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. He said Kris Kobach’s suggestion that thousands of people had acted illegally when they registered to vote in New Hampshire using out-of-state licenses was a “reckless statement to make” and factually untrue.

New Hampshire: Facts Win: Why a New Hampshire judge blocked the state’s new voter suppression law | Slate

On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump’s “election integrity” commission was preparing to meet in New Hampshire when a state court issued a major ruling: New Hampshire’s harsh new voting restrictions, which would impose fines and jail time on voters who fail to provide certain documentation, cannot be enforced in Tuesday’s special election. According to the court, the law’s penalties likely violate the state constitution, which guarantees all adult residents “an equal right to vote in any election.” The court’s order constituted an oblique rebuke to the commission’s very purpose. New Hampshire’s GOP-controlled legislature passed its voter suppression law in response to Trump’s allegations that mass voter fraud swung the state against him in 2016. Trump formed his voter fraud commission to prove that such fraud gave his opponent millions of illegal votes in the Granite State and beyond. Just last week, commision co-chair Kris Kobach claimed he had “proof” that votes were stolen in the state. Now a court has examined the evidence—and found no such proof. The decision is a well-timed reminder that this administration’s wild claims of voter fraud cannot stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.

North Carolina: Legislative maps done, GOP eyes judicial districts | Associated Press

With approval of new North Carolina legislative districts behind them, House Republicans returned Tuesday to Raleigh to advance their efforts to redraw election districts for trial court judges and local prosecutors. Unlike a federal court’s mandate to approve House and Senate districts before a Sept. 1 deadline, Republicans in the chamber aren’t being forced to perform redistricting on the boundaries for Superior Court and District Court judgeships and for district attorneys. In fact, a judicial expert from the UNC School of Government told representatives at the first meeting of the House judicial redistricting committee that wholesale changes to judicial maps haven’t been completed since the advent of the state’s modern court system in 1955.

Ohio: Lucas County Elections Board says it overcame computer malfunction | The Toledo Blade

Despite an equipment malfunction that threatened to delay the vote-counting Tuesday, the Lucas County Board of Elections finished reporting the Toledo primary election earlier than most years, Director LaVera Scott said Wednesday. The board reported a 100 percent count at 11:15 p.m. “We were done earlier in this election than we’ve ever done in a primary,” Ms. Scott said. The computer that hosts the board’s vote-tabulating database broke down about 6 p.m., just 90 minutes before the polls were to close. The computer server was purchased in April, 2015 for $6,974 and is serviced and under warranty by the board’s elections contractor, Dominion Voting Systems Co., of Denver. Ms. Scott said Dominion emailed an apology and promised the county a new server for the November election.

Texas: Report: Few high schools in Texas comply with voter registration law | Austin American-Statesman

No private high schools and just 14 percent of public high schools in Texas requested voter registration forms for their students from the Secretary of State, according to a report released Wednesday by the Texas Civil Rights Project. The organization as well as the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law found that 198 out of 1,428 public high schools requested the forms. In total, the organizations said, six percent of high schools in Texas requested forms. Schools can receive the forms from other organizations, such as the county, but the Texas Civil Rights Project argued during a press conference Wednesday that the state’s low youth voter registration and turnout rates prove that’s not effective even if that’s the case.

Utah: Voting rights lawsuit over Navajo voting rights in San Juan County to advance to trial | Utah policy

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Jill Parrish issued a decision in Navajo Nation Human Rights Council v. San Juan County, et al, allowing the lawsuit to proceed to a trial on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims that San Juan County is not providing effective language assistance to Navajo-speaking voters and is providing unequal voting opportunities to Navajo voters. The plaintiffs, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Council and several individual members of the Navajo Nation, are represented by counsel from DLA Piper, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, ACLU of Utah, and the ACLU Voting Rights Project. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs challenged San Juan County’s decision to switch to a mail-only voting system and offer in-person early voting only in the majority white part of the County.  After plaintiffs sued in early 2016, the County announced it would reopen a limited number of polling places for election day voting and in future elections. Plaintiffs continue to assert that the County is violating the federal Voting Rights Act and the United States Constitution.

U.S. Territories: Trump administration pushes for fewer voting rights for territories | Pacific Daily News

The Trump administration is arguing in federal court that, if one U.S. territory doesn’t have the same rights as the others, then all of them should be stripped of those rights, according to a group pursuing lawsuits in federal court related to territorial rights. According to Neil Weare, a former Guam resident, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago on Friday will consider an equal protection challenge by plaintiffs in Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Weare is president and founder of We the People Project, a non-profit that advocates for equal rights and representation in U.S. territories. According to Weare, the plaintiffs would be able to cast absentee ballots for president and voting representation in Congress if they lived in other U.S. territories or a foreign country, but are denied those rights based solely on their ZIP code.

Verified Voting in the News: Board of Elections Ends Use of Touch-Screen Voting Machines | Wall Street Journal

Election administrators in Virginia ordered the state’s remaining touch-screen electronic voting machines be taken out of service in advance of the coming statewide election, after hackers demonstrated vulnerabilities in an array of election technology at a recent security convention. Virginia, one of two states holding statewide elections for governor and state legislature this year, won’t use any touch-screen machines in the Nov. 7 general election after the State Board of Elections voted Friday to revoke the certifications on all such systems still being used in the state. Virginia will switch to paper ballots counted and processed by computerized scanners. James Alcorn, chair of the board, said in a statement the move was “necessary to ensure the integrity of Virginia’s elections.” … The decision by Virginia to stop using touch-screen electronic voting machines marks a victory for advocates who have long criticized paperless electronic voting systems as insecure and potentially vulnerable to tampering and mischief.

Angola: Court Upholds Government Poll Win | AFP

Angola’s constitutional court on Wednesday upheld the ruling party’s landslide win in last month’s election which will usher in the MPLA’s fourth decade in power and rejected opposition claims the poll was flawed. The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola won 61.7 percent of the vote, and 150 of the 220 seats in parliament, the country’s electoral commission said in its final results. President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, 75, who has ruled since 1979 and is reportedly in poor health, will hand over to former defence minister Joao Lourenco at the presidential inauguration expected on September 21.

Brazil: Government tries to prove e-voting is safe | ZDNet

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) and the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) have signed a cooperation agreement to apply best practices to the technology supporting voting processes in the country. According to the TSE, the involvement of the Brazilian Computer Society aims at “establishing means of integration, research and improvement of computing” at the electoral tribunal. … Flaws found in the Brazilian electronic voting system in the general election of 2014 pointed to the possibility of fraud. At the time, two of the top computer science universities in Brazil suggested that it is possible to easily break the secrecy of the machines and unscramble the order of votes recorded by the devices.