Iowa: Democrats hear caucus advice from GOP | Des Moines Register

Democrats considering changes in the Iowa caucus process heard advice Saturday from an unusual source: Republicans. Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Jeff Kaufmann and veteran GOP activist David Oman spoke at the first meeting of the Iowa Democratic Party’s 20-member caucus review committee. The committee was organized after Democrats drew complaints and concerns about their historically close Feb 1. caucuses. Some of the Democrats on the committee indicated an interest in borrowing from the GOP process. Some even suggested using a simple vote to determine the caucus winner rather than intricate dance of preference groups and delegate equivalents that make the Democrats’ process seem obscure and inaccessible.

New York: Elections Board Certifies Primary Vote, Rejects 91,000 Provisional Ballots | The Indypendent

After presiding over a chaotic Democratic presidential primary on April 19, the New York City Board of Elections released its certified election results Friday afternoon showing that it has rejected 91,000 provisional affidavit ballots, or about three out of every four cast that day. Diana Finch, who has served as a poll worker for nearly a decade, said the number of affidavit ballots in her Bronx election district far exceeded the usual number. “The envelopes that are provided to each election district to put the affidavit ballots in were all filled to bursting at my poll site, we had to squeeze the affidavit ballots in,” Finch told The Indypendent. “Clearly the Board of Elections never anticipated having so many affidavits.”

Editorials: The fraud of voter ID | News & Observer

A week after a federal judge upheld sweeping changes in North Carolina voting laws, The New York Times reported that studies focused on the centerpiece of the changes – the requirement of a photo ID to vote – have found that more than 1 in 10 adult Americans lack a government-issued ID and “compared with whites, the share of minorities without photo IDs is far higher.” The Times story focused on elections in Texas where a voter ID law adopted in 2013 continues in effect pending appeal despite being struck down by courts three times. The story cites the campaign of former U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, who lost his seat by a narrow margin that may well have reflected the effects of the photo ID law. “It’s tremendously undemocratic in a democratic society when you deliberately disenfranchise thousands of people,” he said. “Turnout is good for the system.”

Texas: Voter ID lawsuit abruptly withdrawn in state court | Austin American-Statesman

A lawsuit challenging Texas’ voter ID law, filed by a judge on the state’s highest criminal court, was abruptly withdrawn Wednesday, only one day after a Dallas appeals court heard oral arguments on whether the lawsuit should be allowed to continue. Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Larry Meyers, the only Democrat in statewide office after switching parties in 2013, was seeking to have the voter ID law thrown out, arguing that it exceeded the power granted to the Legislature by the Texas Constitution.

Virginia: State works to help registrars verify felons’ voting rights restored | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Trust, but verify. Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s administration is taking to heart President Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim as the state works with local registrars to verify that felons’ voting rights were restored when the governor signed an order April 22 that opened the door to full civil rights for more than 206,000 Virginians who have done their time for felony convictions. For many, verification has required nothing more than a quick search in one of two state databases fully updated a week after McAuliffe’s order to show when felons’ rights had been restored. Almost 2,100 had registered to vote by midday Thursday.

Editorials: A Second Chance and the Right to Vote | The New York Times

Republican legislators in Virginia are threatening to sue Gov. Terry McAuliffe to block his executive order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 residents who have completed their felony sentences. The lawmakers have no good legal case, and worse, such a suit would be affirming Virginia’s racist history. Virginia is one of just four states — along with Iowa, Florida and Kentucky — that continue to impose a lifetime voting ban on people convicted of felonies. In recent years, both Democratic and Republican governors have worked to lift this burden, either by streamlining the application process for individuals or trying to restore rights to specific classes of people, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies.

Editorials: Restoring Virginians’ voting rights | The Washington Post

The intent of Virginia’s ban on voting by convicted felons was to weaken the political power of black people, whose electoral clout was abhorrent to the racists who enacted the prohibition a century ago. Today, Virginia Republicans, who have done their utmost to dilute minority voting by enacting arbitrary voter-ID requirements, are animated by the same idea. Determined to block any surge in African American electoral participation in November, which would mainly benefit Democrats, they are planning litigation to challenge Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s executive order that restores voting rights to more than 200,000 former convicts who have finished serving their felony sentences. When Richmond’s GOP leaders embarked on their campaign to tighten voter-ID laws, they could cite no widespread or credible problem with fraud at the polls. Today, similarly, they can point to no constitutional language preventing Mr. McAuliffe, a Democrat, from restoring voting rights to ex-convicts — something that takes place routinely in most states.

West Virginia: Voting problems in Kanawha County may be growing | Charleston Gazette-Mail

The issue of people voting in the wrong delegate district may be bigger than the Kanawha County Clerk originally thought. Vera McCormick’s staff was able to identify 10 people who originally voted in the wrong district — one in Precinct 416, two in Precinct 175, five in Precinct 403 and two in Precinct 277. The problem comes from voters being placed in precincts that don’t correspond with the delegate district in which they live. The clerk’s office has arranged it so that when people from affected areas come in to vote, they will receive a ballot for the correct delegate district. But the problem may be bigger than what McCormick originally stated.

Australia: Prime Minister Makes July 2 Election Official | ABC

Australia’s prime minister on Sunday officially called a July 2 election and put economic management at the forefront of his campaign to win a second three-year term for his conservative coalition during an era of extraordinary volatility in the country’s politics. Kicking off a two-month election campaign, Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull said a center-left Labor Party win would prevent the Australian economy diversifying from a mining industry that had been hit hard by the Chinese slowdown and the associated falls in the prices of iron ore and coal, Australia’s most lucrative exports.

Bulgaria: Election law drama continues after presidential veto | Sofia Globe

Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borissov said on May 8 that he believed that President Rossen Plevneliev was correct to veto amendments to the Electoral Code, and he was prepared to make changes but first would have to speak to minority coalition government partner the Patriotic Front. Plevneliev’s office announced on May 7 that the head of state was sending back to the National Assembly controversial changes to the rules for voting abroad seen as limiting the franchise rights of Bulgarian expatriates. It was the nationalist Patriotic Front, part of the governing coalition agreement although it does not have seats in the Cabinet, that drove these amendments, in a move largely seen as directed against the Movement for Rights and Freedoms and its electoral stronghold in Turkey.

Japan: Age 18: 2.4 million new voters / Teachers worry about staying neutral on politics | The Japan News

“How should we respond if students ask us what we think of today’s political parties?” In late March, a Tokyo high school principal posed this question to members of the government’s Education Rebuilding Implementation Council, who were visiting the school to observe a mock election being held there. A senior official of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry who was accompanying the visitors advised, “Avoid saying, ‘I think that …. ’” With the voting age soon to be lowered to 18, teachers are worried about how to deal with political neutrality. The Fundamental Law of Education stipulates that “[Schools] must not carry out political education or other political activities in support of, or in opposition to, a particular political party.”

Lebanon: Local elections, 1st vote in 6 years | Associated Press

Lebanese voted Sunday in municipal elections in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley amid tight security and a low turnout in the capital that has recently seen the largest anti-government protests in years following a months-long trash crisis. Security was tight in the country as authorities took strict measures to guarantee that the vote passed without trouble. Lebanon was hit by a wave of bombings in recent years that killed scores of people and Syria’s civil war has spilled over in the past.

Philippines: Voting gets under way in Philippines presidential election | Reuters

Voting for a new Philippine president began on Monday with a brash challenger to the political establishment the favorite to win after campaigning on pledges to crush crime and corruption. Many voters in Manila had to line up in blazing sunshine for more than an hour to cast their votes, and there were several reports of electronic voting machine hitches, which could dash the election commission’s hope to declare a victor in 24 hours. The election campaign exposed widespread disgust with the Southeast Asian country’s ruling elite for failing to tackle poverty and inequality despite years of robust economic growth. Tapping into that sentiment, Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of the southern city of Davao, emerged as the front runner by brazenly defying political tradition, much as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has done in the United States.

Philippines: Voters go to polls as frontrunner pledges to kill criminals | The Guardian

Voting has begun in the Philippines in a general election that opinion surveys suggest will see a tough-taking mayor, dubbed “the Punisher” for his lax attitude to extrajudicial killings, clinch the presidency. Rodrigo Duterte, a 71-year-old ex-prosecutor, has run an obscenity-filled campaign in which he has boasted about Viagra-fuelled affairs and joked about raping a missionary. Rights groups allege Duterte allowed death squads to kill more than 1,000 suspected criminals during his two decades as mayor of Davao city, an accusation he has at times denied and at other times bragged about. Philippines’ ‘Duterte Harry’: the would-be president accused of using vigilante squads The political establishment has warned that years of solid economic growth is threatened and foreign governments have looked on with trepidation as the country is a key regional player in the South China Sea dispute with Beijing. The front-page headline of the Philippine Star newspaper on Monday summed up the anxiety: “It’s judgment day”.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for May 2-8 2016

indiana_260A series of data breaches the Philippines, Turkey and Mexico are spurring concerns that hackers could manipulate elections in the United States. Already facing a lawsuit from the League of Women Voters for his decision earlier this year to allow Kansas and two other states to require residents to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote using a federal form, EAC executive director Brian Newby has now been rebuked by the EAC’s Board of Advisors. The board – composed of election officials from around the country – approved a resolution saying that such changes should be made by the commissioners themselves. Voting was delayed at several polling sites in Hancock County Indiana after a software update from the county’s voting equipment vendor — Election Systems & Software — failed to load, while another software error caused entire races to be left off voters’ ballots at five of the county’s 12 polling sites, affecting over 2000 ballots. Civil Rights Attorneys are seeking a court order blocking enforcement of a Louisiana law, which requires naturalized citizens to provide documents proving their citizenship when they register to vote, while other residents simply must swear that they are citizens on the voter registration application. A bipartisan compromise led to the passage of a Voter ID requirement in Missouri that may face a gubernatorial veto and, in any case, requires voters to approve a constitutional amendment in November. Republican lawmakers in Virginia will file a lawsuit challenging Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s decision to allow more than 200,000 convicted felons to vote in November. The four opposition coalitions said they will not drop their demand for all the alleged irregularities to be fully investigated by the Republic Electoral Commission even though all of them made it into parliament at the April 24 polls and King Felipe VI of Spain signed a decree on Tuesday to dissolve Parliament and hold a rerun of national elections for the first time since the country’s return to democracy in the late 1970s.

National: Election fraud feared as hackers target voter records | The Hill

A series of data breaches overseas are spurring concerns that hackers could manipulate elections in the United States.Since December, hundreds of millions of voters in the U.S., the Philippines, Turkey and Mexico have had their data discovered on the web in unprotected form. In some instances, legitimate security researchers found the information, but in others, malicious hackers are suspected of pilfering the data for criminal purposes.The data breaches are raising questions as the U.S. considers whether to move toward electronic balloting. More people than ever are using the internet to register to vote and to request mail-in ballots. Some states have even become vote-by-mail only in recent years. “If you can’t keep the voter registration records safe, what makes you think you can keep the votes safe?” asked Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting.For a politically inclined hacker, insecure voter data could “very easily” create a pathway to “massive” voter fraud, said Joseph Kiniry, CEO of Free & Fair, which advocates for secure digital election systems. “If you can go in there and delete rows based on someone’s name or political affiliation, we will have a massively screwed up election process on the day,” he said.

National: Election Assistance Commission Advisory Board Disagrees With Director Over Citizenship Rule | NPR

It looks like more bad news for the new executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Brian Newby is already being sued by the League of Women Voters for his decision earlier this year to allow Kansas and two other states to require residents to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote using a federal form. The move effectively reversed a long-standing EAC policy. Now, the EAC’s advisory board — composed of election officials from around the country — has approved a resolution saying that such changes should be made by the commissioners themselves. The resolution, passed by a 13-7 vote during a two-day board meeting in Chicago, is only advisory, but clearly shows dissatisfaction with Newby’s actions. Commission Chairman Thomas Hicks says it’s now up to the commission to take the recommendation “under advisement” and decide what to do.

Indiana: Software glitch leaves 2,012 votes incomplete in Hancock County primary | Indiana Economic Digest – Indiana

Catastrophic. Marcia Moore summed up Tuesday’s election in one word. Sitting in the basement of the Hancock County Courthouse Annex on election night, the county clerk shook her head in disgust. Software glitches. Equipment failures. More than 2,000 ballots with errors. Sixteen local contests were left in limbo Tuesday night after election workers learned late in the day that a software error caused entire races to be left off voters’ ballots at five of the county’s 12 polling sites, Moore said. And there’s no way to identify or alert the 2,012 voters who didn’t have a say in those races — a fact Hancock County attorney Ray Richardson said will likely trigger a special election to start the process over. … The software error was one of a number of problems that plagued the local election, Moore said.

Louisiana: Suit: Louisiana voter registration law is discriminatory | Associated Press

A century-old Louisiana law discriminates against foreign-born, naturalized U.S. citizens by arbitrarily subjecting them to “heightened” voter registration requirements that don’t apply to native-born citizens, civil rights groups claim in a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday. Attorneys from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Fair Elections Legal Network are seeking a court order blocking enforcement of the state law, which has been on the books since 1874. Their class-action suit claims the law is unconstitutional because it requires naturalized citizens to provide documents proving their citizenship when they register to vote, while other residents simply must swear that they are citizens on the voter registration application.

Missouri: Voter ID requirement gets final go-ahead in the Missouri Legislature | St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A measure laying out photo ID requirements at the ballot box won final passage in the Missouri Legislature on Wednesday. The bill still needs either Gov. Jay Nixon’s signature or, if he vetoes the bill, a successful veto override in the Legislature. It would take effect only if voters approve to a change to the state constitution. A separate resolution putting the proposed constitutional change on the ballot this year is awaiting approval in the Senate. Both pieces of legislation advanced out of the House early in the legislative session, but they had been stalled in the Senate until this week.

Virginia: GOP lawmakers to sue over felons’ voting rights | Associated Press

Republican lawmakers in Virginia will file a lawsuit challenging Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s decision to allow more than 200,000 convicted felons to vote in November, GOP leaders said Monday. Republicans argue the governor has overstepped his constitutional authority with a clear political ploy designed to help the campaign of his friend and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the important swing state this fall. “Gov. McAuliffe’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution of Virginia and the rule of law must not go unchecked,” Senate Republican Leader Thomas Norment said in a statement. He added that McAuliffe’s predecessors and previous attorneys general examined this issue and concluded Virginia’s governor can’t issue blanket restorations.

Serbia: Opposition Maintains Pressure over Election Flaws | Balkan Insight

The four opposition coalitions said they will drop their demand for all the alleged irregularities to be fully investigated by the Republic Electoral Commission, RIK, even though all of them made it into parliament at the April 24 polls. The coalitions around the Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Enough is Enough movement and the Democratic Party of Serbia-Dveri alliance also said they will also demand reforms of Serbia’s election legislation, which they claim is full of systematic errors. Bosko Obradovic, the president of the far-right Dveri, told BIRN that the opposition will produce a final report on the parliamentary election which will sum up all the reports issued by the RIK.

Spain: King Felipe Dissolves Parliament, Clearing Way for New Elections | The New York Times

King Felipe VI of Spain signed a decree on Tuesday to dissolve Parliament and hold a rerun of national elections for the first time since the country’s return to democracy in the late 1970s. The step followed months of political paralysis and discord over who should form a government after inconclusive elections in December. That election resulted in a fracturing of Spain’s political landscape with the emergence of insurgent parties that challenged the establishment, marking a sea change in the nation’s politics. The repeat election is now scheduled for June 26, but opinion polls suggest that the outcome of a new vote could look much like the first, which split ballots among four main parties, with no single one close to a majority. Turnout, however, could fall amid growing frustration about the intense but fruitless party squabbling.

Editorials: Voter ID laws are reaction to nonexistent problem | Greg Williams/The Tennessean

The usual “voter identification law” proponents merely cherry-pick others’ empirical data that specifically lend credibility to their arguments, and often they reject even the proper context. For years, Hans von Spakovsky (a former federal election commissioner and U.S. Justice Department official, currently a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow) has juxtaposed the Pew Center’s numbers with a 2000 Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation of Georgia voting records. That newspaper reported initially having exposed 5,400 instances of the deceased being recorded as having voted. Von Spakovsky has used this source repeatedly to support his argument and has proffered that this article’s findings are “substantial to me.” Consistent with von Spakovsky’s routine, Jane Mayer, a New Yorker investigative journalist, noted he did not mention in their interview that the article’s findings were revised. Mayer’s investigation found that the Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after Georgia’s secretary of state’s office indicated the vast majority of those cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. The newspaper admitted that even its lone specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot did not prevail. A living voter’s ballot was credited to a dead man whose name was almost identical.

Voting Blogs: EAC hosts public hearing on accessibility | electionlineWeekly

It has been 14 years since the implementation of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It has been almost that long since election officials across the country have worked to implement (and in many cases, replaced and re-implemented), new voting machines, polling place procedures and improved access to polling sites. Yet, at a public hearing in Boston last week, it became clear that while HAVA has succeeded in many ways – including the mandatory addition of polling place machines that allow voters with a variety of disabilities to vote independently and with confidence that their vote counted – the experience of voting has lagged behind the vision laid out by HAVA.

Alaska: Judge challenges attorneys as campaign finance trial wraps up | Alaska Dispatch News

A weeklong trial in a lawsuit challenging the state’s campaign contribution limits came to a close Tuesday, with U.S. District Judge Timothy Burgess asking probing questions of attorneys defending the state’s limits on nonresident contributions and expressing some concern limits set at least a decade ago haven’t risen with inflation. Kevin Clarkson, attorney for the plaintiffs who say their free-speech rights are hurt by the donation caps, said in his closing arguments the state never overcame a fundamental hurdle, proving the $500 maximum a person can give to a candidate per year is the proper amount to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption, as the law intends. Proving why that number is correct is the state’s “first step,” but the state never met that obligation, he asserted. The constitutional challenge — brought in November by Alaska Republican Party District 18, Alaskans Aaron Downing and Jim Crawford and Wisconsin resident David Thompson — challenges the $500 limit and three other contribution caps. The Alaska Public Offices Commission is named as the defendant.

Connecticut: Online Vote Reporting Test Promises Timely Results At Last | Hartford Courant

On Election Day 2014, Connecticut was among the last states in the nation to learn who its next governor was because of its antiquated voting system. In 2010, the gubernatorial vote tally took three days. So congratulations are in order to the 104 municipalities that successfully participated in a trial run last week of the online vote reporting system hosted by the secretary of the state’s office. Shortly after 8 p.m., election officials in many towns started entering Democratic and Republican primary results in the system, even though participation was voluntary this time around. It offered a good look at how solidly Donald J. Trump was winning the state and at the town-by-town battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Florida: Cybersleuth’s hacking of elections websites draws criminal charges | Tampa Bay Times

The young cybersleuth says he exposed security lapses on Florida elections websites, but the state says he committed a crime. David Levin, 31, of Estero, a political consultant and owner of a computer security firm, was booked Wednesday on three felony charges of unauthorized access to computer systems. Each count carries a maximum five-year prison sentence. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Levin illegally gained internal access to websites of the state Division of Elections and the Lee County elections office, which together hold data on more than 12 million Florida voters. The FDLE said that after Levin gained access to the Lee County site in December, he used the login credentials of supervisor of elections Sharon Harrington to access the state elections website.

Georgia: Justice Department wants suit alleging Georgia illegally purges voters | Atlanta Journal Constitution

The U.S. Justice Department has asked a federal judge to deny a request to dismiss a lawsuit accusing Georgia of illegally bumping voters off the state’s rolls ahead of the 2016 presidential election. In a court filing, U.S. Attorney John Horn and members of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division indicated concerns with the state’s policy toward kicking voters off the rolls due to inactivity. The filing came in response to a request by Georgia officials to dismiss the suit after it was filed in February.