Zambia: President Issues Warning on Election-linked Violence | VoA News

Zambian President Edgar Lungu says he is ready to use draconian means to ensure the country remains peaceful after next week’s presidential, parliamentary, local and referendum elections. Lungu from the ruling Patriotic Party says he has intelligence that members of the main opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) plan to cause havoc if the party is unable to win the polls. But in an interview with VOA, Canisius Banda, deputy leader of the UPND, says Lungu’s statement is unfortunate and regrettable. He says the president has the backing of the constitution to ensure the unity of Zambia. Banda, however, says the president would rather plunge the country into tension, violence and chaos if he uses draconian means to enforce peace.

National: How Hackers Could Destroy Election Day | The Daily Beast

Stealing and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee could be just the start. Hacking the presidential election itself could be next, a bipartisan group of former intelligence and security officials recently warned. Whomever was behind the DNC hack also could target voting machines and the systems for tabulating votes, which are dangerously insecure. “Election officials at every level of government should take this lesson to heart: our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups,” wrote 31 members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, which includes a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former secretary of Homeland Security. That echoes warnings computer security experts have been sounding for more than a decade: that the system for casting and counting votes in this country is also ripe for mischief. … Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow military personnel and overseas voters to return their ballots electronically, according to Verified Voting, a non-profit group that advocates transparency and security in U.S. elections. “The election official on the receiving end has no way to know if the voted ballot she received matches the one the voter originally sent,” the group warns. Some ballots are sent through online portals, which exposes the voting system to the internet. And that’s one of the most dangerous things elections officials can do, because it provides a remote point of access for hackers into the election system.

National: Voter-Fraud Laws Are All About Race | The Atlantic

“As close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times,” was how Fourth Circuit Judge Diana Gribbon Motz described North Carolina’s disputed new voter law, which the court struck down last week on the grounds of discriminatory intent. A ruling in the Fifth Circuit just days before reached a similar conclusion for an analogous law in Texas, acknowledging that the architects of its new voting law were “aware of the likely disproportionate effect of the law on minorities” and still did nothing about them. Just hours after the North Carolina decision, Wisconsin District Court Judge James Peterson joined in with a comparable dismantling of his state’s new voter laws, writing, “Wisconsin’s strict version of voter ID law is a cure worse than the disease.” These three decisions, written in strong and unambiguous language about discrimination and race, reflect a stunning turn in the battle for the ballot after 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder hamstrung the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the Supreme Court argued in that case that America had moved beyond its past of open racism and discrimination, the laws in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, and the judicial decisions about them, are reminders that voting in the United States has always been and still is about the omnipresent issue that has always shaped policy: race. In his decision, Peterson introduced the story of an elderly black woman, Mrs. Smith, who “was born in the South, barely 50 years after slavery” and simply could not navigate the intricate process of procuring a voter ID. Wisconsin’s ID Petition Process could not link the records of her life to a birth record, so she remained ineligible to vote under its new law that required strict voter ID. That story could be emblematic of any number of older voters of color in states with new restrictive voting laws. Indeed, it is a story akin to that of Rosanell Eaton, a black woman born in 1921 who would have had to “incur significant time and expense” in order to obtain the proper ID to be able to vote in North Carolina—even though she’d been registered to vote since the Jim Crow era. And it is a story similar to that of Alberta Currie, who first voted in 1956. Both of these women became plaintiffs in the legal challenge to North Carolina’s new voter law. All of their experiences are representative examples of a continuous onslaught of electoral racism that has existed since the 14th and 15th Amendments gave newly free black people the nominal right to vote.

National: US Courts Strike Down Voter Restrictions in State After State | VoA News

A spate of federal court rulings against voting restrictions in five U.S. states will make it easier for residents to cast ballots in the November elections but may lead to chaos at polling locations, according to legal scholars. “There may well be confusion on Election Day, even if things are implemented the way the courts have decided,” said University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen. In recent weeks, courts struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, Wisconsin’s restrictions on early and absentee voting, and Kansas’ proof of citizenship requirement. A judge blocked North Dakota’s voter ID law, and an appellate court sent Texas’ voter ID law back to a lower court with instructions to devise a way to allow those lacking state-approved identification to be able to cast a ballot. “Judges are beginning to wake up and see what some of these enacted laws are doing,” said law professor Theodore Shaw, who heads the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “The lower courts and courts of appeals are finding that these voter ID provisions are discriminatory in either intent or effect, or both.”

National: For Trump, a new ‘rigged’ system: The election itself | The Washington Post

Donald Trump, trailing narrowly in presidential polls, has issued a warning to worried Republican voters: The election will be “rigged” against him — and he could lose as a result. Trump pointed to several court cases nationwide in which restrictive laws requiring voters to show identification have been thrown out. He said those decisions open the door to fraud in November. “If the election is rigged, I would not be surprised,” he told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “The voter ID situation has turned out to be a very unfair development. We may have people vote 10 times.” Those comments followed a claim Trump made Monday, to an audience in Ohio, that “the election is going to be rigged.” That same day, in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, he beseeched Republicans to start “watching closely” or the election will be “taken away from us” through fraud.

National: Russia, the DNC Hack, and the Future of Democracy | The Atlantic

Analysts largely agree that the hacking of various arms of the Democratic Party, and the release of hacked emails that deepened divisions within the party just ahead of its presidential convention, is a big deal. But there’s less agreement about whether what we’re witnessing is fundamentally old or new. The answer to that question could shape not just the Obama administration’s response to the hack, but international norms on the limits to foreign influence in democratic elections. Put simply: If, as some reckon, Russian intelligence agencies spied on the Democratic Party and then shared looted documents with WikiLeaks in order to intervene in the U.S. election, can that be tolerated? So far, only anonymous U.S. officials and private cybersecurity companies have designated Russia as the prime suspect in the hack. The U.S. government has yet to publicly accuse the Russian government of orchestrating the breach, let alone the leaks, and Russian officials have denied any involvement in the episode. Nevertheless, some argue that the Kremlin appears to have merely extended to America a reinvented Soviet tactic that it has deployed for years at home and across Europe: Using a variety of measures—including the collection and dissemination of compromising information and disinformation—to meddle in politics, discredit the political systems of rival countries, and sow doubt, discord, and disarray.

National: Republican vote suppression efforts, packaged as reforms, fall foul of US courts | Sydney Morning Herald

Maybe in the era of Donald Trump it’s too much to expect subtlety in American politics. But you’d have thought that when the Supreme Court freed a slew of southern states – states which share a grim history of suppressing and denying black and other minority voting – from federal supervision, that any return to the days of Jim Crow discrimination would have been gradual and not a headlong rush. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 – bringing electoral laws in 15 states under Washington’s scrutiny because they were incapable of doing the decent thing. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the act, with Chief Justice John Roberts declaring that intentional racial discrimination in electoral law was a thing of the past. But now the courts have shown they are on to what these Republican states are up to in the lead-in to a bitterly contested 2016 presidential election, and the direct language in some of their decisions is astounding. In a ruling against North Carolina, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit accused the state legislature of targeting African-American voters with “almost surgical precision”.

National: Top Democratic National Committee officials resign in wake of email breach | The Washington Post

Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee will leave their posts this week amid the controversy over the release of a cache of hacked emails from the committee. Chief executive Amy Dacey, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda will leave the DNC just days after a new leader took the helm. A trove of nearly 20,000 emails were posted on WikiLeaks last month. They included some emails that raised questions about the faith of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and others that seemed to disparage donors.

Editorials: How vulnerable to hacking is the US election cyber infrastructure? | Richard Forno/The Conversation

Following the hack of Democratic National Committee emails and reports of a new cyberattack against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, worries abound that foreign nations may be clandestinely involved in the 2016 American presidential campaign. Allegations swirl that Russia, under the direction of President Vladimir Putin, is secretly working to undermine the U.S. Democratic Party. The apparent logic is that a Donald Trump presidency would result in more pro-Russian policies. At the moment, the FBI is investigating, but no U.S. government agency has yet made a formal accusation. The Republican nominee added unprecedented fuel to the fire by encouraging Russia to “find” and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from her time as secretary of state. Trump’s comments drew sharp rebuke from the media and politicians on all sides. Some suggested that by soliciting a foreign power to intervene in domestic politics, his musings bordered on criminality or treason. Trump backtracked, saying his comments were “sarcastic,” implying they’re not to be taken seriously.

Voting Blogs: Fate of Democracy in Hands Of the Electorate Following Recent Election Law Victories | Brad Blog

The good news is that over the past week two federal courts struck down multiple provisions of GOP-enacted voter suppression laws in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The cautionary news is that the rejection of 21st century Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement at the polls, and, indeed, the fate of democracy itself, may well now hinge on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. … In the first voting rights case to see a ruling come down last Friday, North Carolina NAACP v. McCrory, the good news is that a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeal struck down as unconstitutional a comprehensive GOP voter suppression scheme that the court determined had been deliberately designed to have a retrogressive impact on the right of African-Americans to participate in electoral democracy. The state Republican legislature’s scheme, the court held, was specifically designed to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Arizona: Pima elections director on ‘ballot harvesting’: ‘We’re not police’ | Arizona Daily Star

The top election officials in Pima and Maricopa counties say they will not enforce a new state law that makes “ballot harvesting” a crime. “We’re not police,” said Pima County Elections Director Brad Nelson. “People bring early ballots to us, we’re going to process them like we always have,” said Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell. And that means whether someone brings in their own ballot — or a basket full of them. Potentially more significant, both Nelson and Purcell said they will not take down the names of those who show up with multiple ballots. The law that takes effect Saturday makes it a felony, punishable by a year in state prison, to knowingly collect blank or filled-out early ballots from another person. Rebecca Wilder, spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said the only way for her office to bring charges against someone for violating the law is if there is first a report to prosecutors from a law enforcement agency. If election officials do not take names, there is nothing to provide to police and, therefore, nothing to report to prosecutors.

North Carolina: Attorney General won’t keep defending state’s voter ID law | Associated Press

North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper will no longer defend the state’s voter ID law, now that a federal appeals court has ruled it was passed with “discriminatory intent.” A 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel blocked its enforcement last Friday, ruling that the Republican-led General Assembly made changes that targeted black voters more likely to support Democrats. “Attorneys with our office put forward their best arguments but the court found that the law was intentional discrimination and we will not appeal,” Cooper spokeswoman Noelle Talley said in an email. Barring some new court intervention, the appellate ruling means the law’s restrictions will not be in place for this year’s presidential election. The ID mandate is now gone and early voting restored to 17 days, up from 10. Same-day registration during early voting and the partial counting of out-of-precinct ballots resume permanently.

North Dakota: North Dakota becomes latest state to have voter ID ‘burden’ blocked | The Guardian

North Dakota on Monday became the latest state to have its voter identification law blocked by a federal court, adding to a string of recent rulings across the US on the grounds that such measures disenfranchise poor and minority voters. North Dakota joined North Carolina and Wisconsin, where voter-ID restrictions were struck down by federal courts on Friday, victories for advocates who claim the measures are an attempt to suppress voters who tend to cast ballots for Democrats. Seven Native American voters filed a federal law suit against North Dakota claiming measures passed by the Republican-led legislature in 2013 and 2015 are unconstitutional and violate the US Voting Rights Act. The laws added restrictions to the types of identification voters can use at polling places and banned “fail-safe” provisions allowing them to vote without the required identification in certain circumstances.

Tennessee: Democrats call for changes to voter ID law | The Tennessean

Seizing on recent federal court decisions that have struck down voter identification laws in several southern states, Tennessee Democrats on Tuesday called for their Republican counterparts to make changes to state and federal laws. Citing decisions by federal judges in North Dakota, North Carolina and Texas, which have similar voter identification laws as Tennessee, U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee, quoted Abraham Lincoln. “He said that government is of the people, by the people and for the people. The people cannot express their wishes unless they vote,” Cooper said, explaining that, in the aftermath of a 2007 Supreme Court decision in Indiana, several state legislatures, including ones in the South, successfully passed laws to “not only ID voters but to suppress the vote.”

Wisconsin: State and local elected officials brace for voter confusion this fall | Wisconsin State Journal

State and local election officials are bracing for another round of voter confusion after two federal judges struck down several voting-related laws recently. Neither ruling will affect next week’s fall primary election, but they have potentially wide-ranging implications on the November vote for president, U.S. Senate and state legislative races, said Michael Haas, the state’s top elections administrator. “Our main message at this point is that people understand that nothing changes these rules for the August election,” Haas said. “We, as well as the municipal clerks, will be doing our best to educate voters after the primary and as soon as we can.”

Editorials: Paper ballots still safer than digital vote | The Courier-Mail

It took a month but we got there. Counting for the House of Reps has finished and the last seat, Herbert in north Queensland, has finally been decided. But keyboard critics are already pouncing. Not on Labor or the LNP but on the very system itself. Here we are in 2016, they say, 20 years after the internet entered our lives, and we’re still voting with pencil and paper. We wait for weeks for something a machine could do in seconds. Online voting could do away with postal and absentee votes and the lost ballots that forced a re-run of the 2013 West Australian Senate poll could be avoided. If we can enrol to vote, study and transfer money electronically, surely we can trust online ballots? No, we can’t.

China: Pro-independence candidate banned from Hong Kong election | Nikkei Asian Review

Edward Leung, a member of pro-independence party Hong Kong Indigenous, was barred Tuesday from competing in the city’s legislative elections Sept. 4 on grounds that his political views run afoul of Hong Kong’s de facto constitution. The 25-year-old is a leading figure in the “localist” movement, which calls for the democratization of Hong Kong and distance from mainland China. Leung received 15% of the vote in a February by-election, thanks to his popularity among youths, and was widely expected to win a seat on the Legislative Council if he ran next month. Many think Beijing was unwilling to have a pro-independence lawmaker on the city’s assembly and had Leung disqualified by the Electoral Affairs Commission. Doubts over the sustainability of the “one country, two systems” policy, which grants Hong Kong autonomy on most issues except diplomacy and defense, are expected to grow further.

Iraq: Demand for reform reaches Iraq’s electoral commission | Al-Monitor

A group of Iraqi legislators plans to submit a petition to the speaker of parliament requesting the deposition of executive council members of the Independent High Electoral Commission with an eye toward the commission’s dissolution. The group objects to the commission having been formed based on the quota system, as a result of members being nominated by the parliament, and thus in a corruptive manner. More than 100 members of parliament from the Al-Ahrar bloc, affiliated with the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Reform Front, close to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, signed the petition July 19. The move, coming less than a year before local elections, seems to have become a ritual preceding every election. This time, the demand is being packaged as part of the ongoing push for political reforms. At a protest in Baghdad on July 15, Sadr, leader of the Sadrist movement, had called for the commission to be dismissed because of its basis in the partisan, sectarian quota system. He is calling for a technocratic electoral commission with members appointed by the judiciary, a proposal that would require new legislation.

National: Hacking An Election: Why It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Might Think | NPR

The recent hacking of Democratic Party databases — and strong suspicions that the Russian government is involved — have led to new fears that America’s voting systems are vulnerable to attack and that an outsider could try to disrupt the upcoming elections. A cyberattack on U.S. elections isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Just a week and a half ago, Illinois election officials shut down that state’s voter registration database after discovering it had been hacked. In June, Arizona took its voter registration system offline after the FBI warned it too might have been hacked, although no evidence of that was found. In May, security analyst David Levin was arrested after he gained access to the Lee County, Fla., elections website. Levin said in a YouTube video he was only trying to show how vulnerable the system was: “Yeah, you could be in Siberia and still perform the attack that I performed on the local supervisor of election website. So this is very important.” The county says the problems were later fixed.

National: The Same Russian Hackers Hit the DNC and the DCCC, Security Firms Say | Foreign Policy

Cybersecurity companies studying the breach of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have found evidence indicating that the same group of Russian hackers breached both groups’ computer systems. According to ThreatConnect and Fidelis Cybersecurity, two security firms that have been studying the activities of a hacker group dubbed Cozy Bear, hackers from that organization used some of the same internet infrastructure to attack the two Democratic groups. Cozy Bear hackers utilized an email address identified by German intelligence as one used by the group to register an internet domain that was then used in the attack on the DCCC. According to Justin Harvey, the chief security officer at Fidelis, the finding provides 90 percent certainty that hackers working on behalf of Russian intelligence carried out both the DNC and the DCCC attack.

Editorials: Feel The State Tremble | Josh Marshal/TPM

It may not seem terribly important right now with all the stories roiling the campaign. But I think there’s a good chance it’s the most important. Over the last 48 hours Trump’s allies, surrogates and now Trump himself have forcibly injected the topic of voter fraud or ‘election rigging’ into the election. Longtime TPM Readers know this topic has probably been the publication’s single greatest and most consistent focus over fifteen years. The subject has been investigated countless times. And it is clear that voter fraud and especially voter impersonation fraud is extremely rare – rare almost to the point of non-existence, though there have been a handful of isolated cases. Vote fraud is clearly the aim in what is coming from Trump allies. But Trump’s own comment – “I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest” – seems to suggest some broader effort to manufacture votes or falsify numbers, to allude to some broader conspiracy. Regardless, Trump is now pressing this issue to lay the groundwork to discredit and quite possibly resist the outcome of the November election.

Editorials: Take politicians out of election law | Joshua A. Douglas/The Hill

It’s been a good couple of weeks for voting rights. Judicial opinions have struck down or limited strict voter ID laws in several states, showing that politicians cannot be trusted to write laws that effect our elections. In the past two weeks, courts in Wisconsin, Texas, and North Carolina have rooted out partisan abuses by invalidating or limiting strict voter ID laws. These decisions show that politicians do a poor job of crafting election rules. Most often, the main motivation is to discriminate against members of the opposite political party, often with racial overtones as well. Indeed, North Carolina argued (unsuccessfully) that benign politics, not race, motivated its voter ID law. But why should the issue of how best to run our elections turn into partisan warfare? Why must litigants and the courts spend their resources to root out these abuses? Politicians think they can win by rigging the election system in their favor. A Republican staffer in Wisconsin revealed that state Republicans were “giddy” when they passed a new voter ID law that they believed would help Republicans win in the state. A Pennsylvania lawmaker was quoted in 2012 saying that the state’s new voter ID law would help win the state for Governor Romney. Democrats have sued Arizona because they fear that the state’s voting rules will harm their supporters come November.

Editorials: Why the Supreme Court likely won’t revisit Shelby County. | Zachary Roth/Slate

Friday was a great day for voting rights. In fact, it was probably the best day voting rights advocates have had since 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. First, a federal appeals court struck down North Carolina’s voting law—seen by many as the most regressive in the nation—finding that Republican lawmakers intentionally discriminated against black voters in drafting the bill. Hours later, a federal court told Kansas it couldn’t stop people from voting in state and local elections this fall simply because they failed to show proof of citizenship when they registered. Not long after, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional a range of strict voting rules imposed in Wisconsin. Along with other recent decisions against voter ID laws in Texas and Wisconsin, Friday’s rulings suggest a new assertiveness by the courts in fighting off the most egregious state-level barriers to the polls. Even the high court—though unlikely to overturn its disastrous 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder any time soon, even with a fifth liberal member potentially on the court after the election—is poised to join the wave by issuing a ruling significantly strengthening voting rights before too long.

Editorials: Defend democracy by restoring the Voting Rights Act | Vanita Gupta/The Washington Post

“Now we can go with the full bill.” That was a North Carolina legislator’s promise, just hours after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision invalidating powerful protections against discriminatory voting rules. Out went the modest proposal. In came a bill designed to shrink the electorate. The legislature passed a law targeting specific practices — including same-day registration and early voting — that had helped drive recent surges in minority voter turnout. The law was aimed directly at the ways that communities of color participated in the electoral process. It took three years, but on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit struck down the North Carolina law. The court wrote that the law “target[s] African Americans with almost surgical precision” and found that, “because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.”

Florida: Activists push to restore voting rights to ex-felons in Florida | Orlando Sentinel

Altamonte Springs resident LaShanna Tyson has been invited into the White House, but she can’t help pick the person who lives there. Tyson lost her voting rights back in the late 1990s, when she was convicted as the getaway driver in a deadly convenience store holdup. It was the first crime on her record, and as she served her sentence, she dreamed about one day being reunited with her three children, going back to college and reclaiming her place in society. After 13 years behind bars, she walked out of prison, but the freedom she expected wasn’t waiting for her on the other side. As one of more than 1.6 million Floridians barred from voting because of a felony conviction, she gathered Monday in Orlando with a group of activists and community leaders pushing to overhaul laws that are among the nation’s most restrictive for ex-felons looking to re-enter the polling booth. “There was a system set up to keep me and others like me from getting jobs, from getting housing, from getting second chances, and even from being able to vote,” the 45-year-old woman said.

Michigan: State elections officials ask judge to delay straight-ticket voting ruling as they appeal | The Detroit News

State election officials are asking a federal judge to delay implementing a court order that strikes down Michigan’s new law banning straight-ticket voting while they appeal the case. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette filed an emergency motion late Friday asking U.S. District Court Judge Gershwin A. Drain to stay the four preliminary injunctions he issued against state election officials on July 22 that ban enforcement of the new law. Schuette, in a motion filed by his staff, said he is requesting a decision on the motion by Tuesday “due to the upcoming election deadlines, which are Aug. 16 for final ballot language for the Nov. 8 election and Sept. 24, the day all ballots must be ready to send overseas to members of the U.S. armed forces and to absentee voters. “Defendant is irreparably harmed by having a statute enacted by its elected representatives enjoined so close in time to the pending election,” Schuette wrote.

Missouri: Voter ID laws are falling. But Missouri is still trying. | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Not to rush the general election on primary day, but come Nov. 8, Missouri voters will be asked to approve a voter ID measure. The constitutionality of voter ID was cast in severe doubt by three federal courts during the past two weeks, so Missourians should be prepared to vote no and save the state some money. Amendment 6, as it will be titled on the November ballot in Missouri, would require voters starting next year to present a government-issued photo ID before casting ballots. Such measures in other states have failed federal court challenges. Amendment 6 would force Missouri to spend a lot of money defending a law that doesn’t deserve to be defended. It is the fruit of a decade-long effort by Republican lawmakers to make it harder for many Missourians to exercise their rights to vote. In 2009, then Secretary of State Robin Carnahan estimated the number at 240,000 and identified most of them as minorities, the disabled and elderly.

North Carolina: Board Of Elections Scrambles To Undo Voter ID Law | WUNC

Officials with the North Carolina State Board of Elections are scrambling to undo three years of work on the state’s voter identification law ahead of the November election. The move comes after the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday struck down a North Carolina law that would have required a government-issued photo ID to vote in the November election. The panel said the law discriminated against black voters. Governor Pat McCrory and top Republican legislators have promised to appeal the decision.

Rhode Island: Will North Carolina voter ID ruling affect Rhode Island law? | Providence Journal

Jim Vincent, president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, is hailing a federal appeals court ruling that strikes down a North Carolina voter ID law that judges say was “passed with racially discriminatory intent.” “Justice was served,” Vincent said Monday. “I am extremely concerned about voter suppression in this year’s presidential election, given how close it could be.” North Carolina is one of about a dozen swing states in the presidential race. Vincent said he’s unsure how Friday’s decision — combined with recent federal court rulings against voter ID laws in Texas and Wisconsin — could affect Rhode Island’s 2011 voter ID law. “Because it’s the least intrusive voter ID law, it may be the most difficult to overturn,” he said. But Vincent said Friday’s ruling bolsters his argument that Rhode Island’s law was based on scant evidence of voter fraud. And he said it underscores his questions about why Rhode Island simultaneously made it easier to vote by mail ballot, when mail ballot fraud is more common than impersonation at the polls. “The state of Rhode Island is in a state of confusion,” he said.

Wisconsin: State Attorney General seeks to restore full voter ID law | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel sought to restore the state’s full voter ID law Monday, asking a federal appellate court to take emergency action. The Republican attorney general’s action Monday came in the wake of a ruling last month by a federal judge in Milwaukee that pared back the photo ID law by allowing voters without identification to cast ballots by swearing to their identity.