Some Colorado voters who believed they’d registered for this month’s caucuses via smartphone may not have done so because of technical issues. The secretary of state’s office said Friday it was investigating why some Coloradans who used certain smartphones to update their voter information couldn’t complete the transactions. Affected users couldn’t scroll to a “submit” button to finish the job.
Donald Trump claimed Saturday that he’s “asking law enforcement to check for dishonest early voting in Florida,” but neither the state’s law enforcement agency nor elections officials have received any complaints or reports of voting irregularities. Without any supporting evidence, Trump leveled his claim in two Twitter posts, suggesting the alleged activity was being done to help Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who might be closing the gap with the frontrunner in the final days of the campaign. Trump’s allegation, retweeted thousands of times, was issued on the last day of mandatory statewide in-person early voting, amid heavy turnout in urban counties where, polling indicates, Rubio is hoping to do well — especially in his home county of Miami-Dade, where 90,000 of the 1 million early and absentee ballots in Florida have been cast as of Saturday. Trump did not explain where the alleged fraud is happening and his campaign did not respond to an email for further explanation.
We have editorialized in support of the concept of Voter ID. If you want to cast a ballot with regard to the future of your government — at the local, state or federal levels — it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask that you prove you are who you say you are. Needless to say, we think any state-issued or military-issued form of identification should be sufficient to vote in that state. If you’re 18 and eligible to have that ID, that should be all you need to vote. Which is why the reports out of Kansas are a disturbing affront to citizenship. There, as of September, about 37,000 people were unable to vote.
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan hired a law firm using up to $800,000 in taxpayer money to help his administration navigate through a throng of civil and criminal investigations. Both candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have called for him to resign. On Thursday he faces a grilling by a congressional committee in Washington. And as voters went to the polls on the state’s Primary Day last Tuesday, a group led by a Detroit pastor began an effort to recall him in a statewide referendum, a repeat of the movement that in 2012 targeted a fellow Republican, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. For a man who swept into office in 2010 by promoting his résumé as a no-nonsense accountant and businessman who was above politics, Governor Snyder now finds himself in the middle of the kind of bitter partisan warfare that he has long disdained. Many Michigan voters now blame him for how he handled two of the state’s biggest debacles, the tainted water crisis in Flint and the tattered Detroit public schools.
Montana Republicans on Friday filed a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court that seeks to block non-GOP voters from participating in their primary elections in June. The nation’s high court takes up very few of the petitions it receives. If it denies the emergency application for an injunction filed by the Montana Republican Party and eight county central committees, they will have to start preparing for a trial in a lower court that isn’t likely to happen before the June elections, attorney Matthew Monforton said. “This is our last chance to prevail in the suit before the June 2016 primary,” Monforton said. Montana Department of Justice spokesman John Barnes did not have an immediate comment.
Williams Foos, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, registered to vote in Orange County in 2012 and voted in the presidential election that year. But when he showed his Pennsylvania license at an early voting site in this year’s primary, he had to cast a provisional ballot. His vote may not count. In the state’s first use of the voter ID law, some college students’ ballots may end up filling the discard piles. As of Friday, 717 people had cast provisional ballots because they didn’t have acceptable photo identification. Four of the five counties with the highest concentrations of provisional ballots from voters without approved ID were Durham, Orange, Watauga and Wake, where those voters had home addresses on or near campuses. Robeson County was the fifth. Robeson is home of UNC Pembroke, but the county’s elections director couldn’t say why it landed in the top tier of counties with voter ID questions. Durham and Orange were the leaders, by far. Each county had more than 100 voters without acceptable photo ID.
The state’s Board of Elections on Saturday rejected a request from lawyers representing legislative leaders to change the election schedule for one seat on the N.C. Supreme Court. The board held an emergency meeting Saturday morning after lawyers for Senate leader Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore on Friday asked that the candidate filing period for a seat on the Supreme Court be delayed because a case affecting that election is going through the appeals process. During a telephone discussion that lasted little more than an hour, board members raised concerns that voters already were confused by the recent remapping of congressional districts, the new voter ID requirements and other changes brought about by recent legislative and court decisions. They said they did not want to add further confusion.
A Pennsylvania judge has rejected an effort to kick Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz off the state primary ballot, ruling that the Texas senator’s birth outside of the United States doesn’t disqualify him from the ballot under the U.S. Constitution. The ruling is the latest legal victory for Mr. Cruz on the eligibility question. So-called “birther” suits have been filed in other states, including New York and Illinois. The cases in those two states were dismissed on technical grounds. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution says a president must be a “natural born Citizen.” Mr. Cruz has been a citizen from birth because his mother was one. The question is whether his birthplace, a hospital in Calgary, makes him a “natural born citizen,” a term undefined in the Constitution and by the Supreme Court.
A high-powered coalition of attorneys has filed a federal voting-rights lawsuit against San Juan County, Utah. They’ve done so on behalf of the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission (NNHRC) and individual Navajo voters living in the county, which overlaps their reservation. The coalition includes The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, founded at the request of President Kennedy, the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Utah and international law firm DLA Piper. The lawsuit alleges that San Juan County’s 2014 switch to mail-in elections makes it hard for non-English-speaking Navajos to vote because they can’t read the English-only ballet. Further, the change is predicated on the reservation’s unreliable postal system. If a voter doesn’t receive or understand a ballot, the option of casting one in person in the largely white northern part of the county—which has the only polling place left—is a difficult and costly trek for tribal members, who mostly live at great distances from it. These unequal burdens violate the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, says the complaint, Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission v. San Juan County et al.
The State Senate passed a bill Friday that will require voters to present identification before they can cast a ballot in the 2018 election. HB 4013 passed the upper chamber on a 20-14 vote, with two Democrats supporting the measure. The bill differs from the original version which required photo identification at the polls. The Senate Committee on the Judiciary amended the bill to include 15 different forms of identification, including a voter registration card, pay stub, SNAP benefits card, TANF card, credit or debit card and a utility bill. If poll workers recognize the voter, no identification is required, the bill says.
The Republic of Congo heads to a presidential election next Sunday amid deepening distrust as President Denis Sassou N’guesso seeks to extend his already three decades in power. The country’s electoral campaign is in full swing, but the main opposition coalition, the IDC-Frocad, said authorities are preventing the candidates from campaigning. IDC-Frocad Spokeperson Guy Romain Kinfoussia said police recently threw tear gas into a meeting held by a candidate of the opposition. And another candidate was refused the right to hold a meeting in a public square. Nine candidates are running, including N’Guesso, already in power for 30 years.
German voters dealt a stinging rebuke to Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open-door refugee policy in three state elections Sunday, delivering historic gains for an upstart anti-immigrant party and showing how the migration crisis is scrambling politics in Europe’s largest economy. The populist Alternative for Germany, which focused its campaign on opposition to Ms. Merkel’s migrant policy, won nearly a quarter of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The result—several percentage points higher than recent polls had suggested—represents the party’s best total in a regional election since its founding three years ago. The party, known as the AfD, also won parliamentary seats in two former West German states, giving it representation in eight of the country’s 16 state legislatures. That strengthens the AfD’s status as a significant political force to the right of Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc—a turning point that her Christian Democrats long tried to prevent.
The days of “banging on the perspex” in the election counting hall could soon be a thing of the past under a plan to introduce vote counting software that will slash the wait for the result from days to hours. The technology is expected to be tested in the 2019 MEP and local council elections before it comes into use for all national polls. “Our voting system has needed a major overhaul for many years,” Chief Electoral Commissioner Joe Church told The Sunday Times of Malta. “There appears to be consensus from both major parties on the way forward. This will ultimately make our elections more efficient,” he added.
The September 18 Russian parliamentary elections will take place amidst a deep economic crisis, with oil at $30 a barrel, and with election rules deliberately designed to blunt and conceal voter disaffection. The Putin regime incurs risks with this strategy because it creates an opportunity for political forces to emerge that actually address the deep concerns of the people. It is virtually impossible for the scheming Putin to know from whence such a threat will come. Russia’s last parliamentary election (December 2011) sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets calling for “Russia without Putin,” in outrage over the flagrant election fraud on the part of Putin’s United Russia (dubbed the “party of crooks and thieves”). The demonstrations shook Putin, who responded by cracking down hard on dissent.
Chief Justice Bart Katureebe must have felt a sense that he had been here before as he led eight justices of the Supreme Court in Kampala on March 7 to the pre-hearing conference of a petition against the Feb. 18 presidential election. In the petition,one of the losers; former presidential candidate Amama Mbabazi is seeking nullification of the incumbent, President Yoweri Museveni’s election on 43 grounds which include non-compliance with the law, vote stealing, and intimidation of voters and agents by security forces. Justice Katureebe is the only one of the nine justices hearing the petition to have been in a similar position before. In 2006, he was on a panel that heard another petition brought before the Supreme Court against the election of the same respondents, including President Yoweri Museveni, the Attorney General, and the Electoral Commission.
NIST, the Center for Civic Design, Verified Voting Foundation and experts in security, accessibility, usability, and election administration have released a report detailing general principles and guidelines that can inform the design, development, deployment or selection of remote ballot marking systems. In the Washington Post, David Cole surveyed state legislation aimed at limiting voting rights that has been passed since 2008. Voting rights advocates said Monday they have sent a pre-litigation notice letter to Nevada officials, warning that the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles is failing to meet its federally mandated voter registration obligations. The New York Times examined how pending lawsuits challenging redistricting maps in North Carolina reflect nationwide battles over voting rights. An Ohio judge has granted teenagers who will turn 18 before Election Day the right to vote in the state’s presidential primary elections next week. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear a case on Texas’s voter-ID law with its full complement of judges, setting up a major voting-rights battle ahead of the 2016 elections. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies will be challenged by the right wing Alternative for Germany party in three state elections today and Uganda’s Supreme court rejected a request for a presidential vote recount by lawyers representing Amama Mbabazi in the petition challenging the results of the February 18 election.
Remote ballot marking systems are one of the new uses of technology in election administration. As part of a vote-by-mail system, they allow voters to receive a blank ballot to mark electronically, print, and then cast by returning the printed ballot to the elections office. In a recent project, NIST, the Center for Civic Design, Verified Voting Foundation and experts in security, accessibility, usability, and election administration set out to answer the question: Can we make remote ballot marking systems both accessible and secure, so voters can use and trust them? We were pleased to discover that these goals can co-exist in a well-designed system, and in many cases they support each other. Following the lead of state election directors, we started with strong principles and supporting guidelines for remote ballot marking systems focusing on the important goals for any election system.
In 2008, 57 percent of Americans voted, and Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president. In the 2010 midterms, only 37 percent voted, and Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, as well as 18 state legislatures. They learned their lesson. The following year, Republican legislators introduced 180 bills in 41 states designed to make it harder to vote. Nineteen states passed 25 laws that limited voting. They included onerous voter-identification laws and registration requirements, restrictions on early voting and increased penalties for volunteers who make mistakes in registration drives. Not coincidentally, the laws all had a foreseeably disproportionate impact on the young, the poor and minority voters — groups that tend to vote Democratic. As conservative strategist Paul Weyrich told the Republican National Convention some 30 years earlier: “I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Such a self-consciously partisan and highly coordinated strategy of vote suppression is, one might think, profoundly un-American. The nation was founded on the “consent of the governed.” “We the people” rejected monarchy for popular sovereignty. Yet as Michael Waldman deftly shows in “The Fight to Vote,” there have long been two competing strains in American politics.
Voting rights advocates claim the state is violating a federal law enacted more than 20 years ago requiring the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to register voters. Attorneys representing Mi Familia Vota Education Fund and others sent a letter this week to Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske and DMV Director Terri Albertson detailing areas of non-compliance. Across the country, implementation of the law, often called the “motor voter” law, has stagnated since it was passed in 1993, voting rights advocates and law experts say. Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, Demos, Project Vote, the ACLU and the League of Women Voters now are partnering to push for compliance in Nevada, as several of the organizations have done in other states.
The stakes are high here and nationwide. The four lawsuits over the Republicans’ 2011 redistricting plans make their case on racial grounds. But some scholars are wondering whether the challenge to the congressional districts, and cases like it, might prompt the Supreme Court to take a new look at blatantly partisan gerrymandering. Advocacy groups and the Justice Department brought the federal lawsuit challenging Republican-backed legislation that established a voter identification provision and cut or curtailed provisions that had made it easier to register and vote. Those provisions were adopted over the last 15 years and championed by Democrats. The Justice Department argues that black and younger voters were especially likely to take advantage of them. The law included a reduction in early-voting days and ended same-day registration and preregistration that added teenagers to voting rolls on their 18th birthday. If the case is decided before November, it could have an effect on turnout in a tight presidential contest here — President Obama won North Carolina by a hair in 2008, and lost it by a hair in 2012 — as well as what is likely to be a difficult re-election fight for Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican.
Ohio must let 17-year-olds vote in the state’s March 15 primary, if they turn 18 by Election Day, a judge ruled in a boost to Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s surprise win over Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary this week was driven in part by his popularity with younger voters, many of whom are attracted to his call for an economic revolution against the wealthy elite. Sanders got the support of 81 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the Michigan primary, according to CNN’s exit polls. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, reinterpreted a decades-old law by describing the primary as an election of delegates, rather than a nomination. Ohio doesn’t let voters under 18 directly elect people, Husted said. That was a misinterpretation of the law, Franklin County Court Judge Richard A. Frye said in a ruling Friday.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday it would rehear a case on Texas’s voter-ID law with its full complement of judges, setting up a major voting-rights battle ahead of the 2016 elections. Wednesday’s order underscores the increased power of the federal appellate courts while Justice Antonin Scalia’s former seat remains vacant on the U.S. Supreme Court. A potential 4-4 deadlock between the justices for the foreseeable future means the Fifth Circuit’s full ruling “may be the final word on Texas’s law,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UC Irvine law, wrote Wednesday. A three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit ruled last August that the state’s voter-ID measure violated the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned racial discrimination in election laws. Texas officials then sought a rare en banc review of that ruling, meaning the case would be reheard by the Fifth Circuit’s entire 15-judge bench. The circuit judges granted the request more than six months after it was made.
In a new German political ad, a young woman in a dimly lighted underground crossing gazes directly into the camera. She flashes a concerned look, then references the series of sexual assaults in the city of Cologne allegedly committed by migrants on New Year’s Eve. “I want to feel carefree and safe when I go out,” the woman says in the spot. Afterward, a voice demands the deportation of criminal migrants. Sponsored by the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of key local elections this Sunday, the ad is heralding the rise of a new brand of right-wing populism in this nation still haunted by its Nazi past.
In the Supreme court yesterday, the nine justices rejected a request for a presidential vote recount by lawyers representing Amama Mbabazi in the petition challenging the results of the February 18 presidential election. The request, which can still be entertained in the course of the main hearing, sought to compel the Electoral Commission to recount votes in 45 districts, before the petition is heard. “The law doesn’t give vote recount as a preliminary relief…” said Bart Katureebe, the chief justice and head of the nine-panel judge.
A federal official overstepped his authority by allowing three states to demand proof of citizenship on the national “motor-voter” forms that help many Americans register to vote, the Obama administration and allied groups argued Wednesday in a case that pits one part of the federal government against another. The League of Women Voters said eligible voters in Kansas, Alabama and Georgia will be turned away in a pivotal election year because the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s executive director waded into a “clear question of policy” that can be tackled only by commissioners of the independent agency. “The practice is clear,” Michael C. Keats, an attorney for the league, told U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon in the District of Columbia, pleading with him to block changes to the federal form’s instructions in all three states until their lawsuit is decided on the merits.
In deep-blue Maryland, Democratic state lawmakers have shown little interest in giving up their power to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts every 10 years. The Republicans who control the legislature in Virginia are similarly unwilling. But with both states’ congressional maps under attack for unfairly favoring the majority party, a few lawmakers have come up with a new suggestion: Why don’t we give up our power together, negating the political effects? “The only way to get through this now is for everybody to give up a little bit in a partisan sense for everyone to gain a lot in terms of principle,” said Maryland state Sen. Jamie B. Raskin. The Montgomery County Democrat is calling for a “Potomac compact” in which a single, independent panel would draw congressional lines for both states.
New supreme court opinions have been as controversial as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 decision that struck down limits on corporations’ campaign expenditures, finding them to be an abridgment of free speech. Like most of the Court’s recent campaign-finance rulings, the case was decided 5–4, with Justice Antonin Scalia in the majority. Even before Scalia’s death, Citizens United featured significantly in the presidential primaries. Bernie Sanders had made its negation, through a constitutional amendment, a key goal of—and rationale for—his candidacy. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had condemned the existing campaign-finance system, and Clinton had vowed to appoint “Supreme Court justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections.” Now, with a new justice in the offing, the prospect of reversing Citizens United, among other Roberts Court decisions, seems suddenly larger, more plausible: For campaign-finance-reform proponents, the brass ring seems within reach. But the matter is not so simple. Even if Scalia is replaced by a more liberal justice, the Court’s campaign-finance rules will not be easily reversed. The precedents extending First Amendment protection to campaign spending date back to 1976, long before Scalia became a judge. The Court generally follows precedent, and overrules past decisions only rarely, even as justices come and go. A new justice will not be sufficient.
Saying it will maintain election integrity, Gov. Doug Ducey on Wednesday signed legislation to make felons out of those who collect the ballots of others to bring them to the polls. HB2023, which takes effect later this year, will allow judges to impose a presumptive one-year prison term and potential $150,000 fine for the current practice…
Elections Director Eric Spencer, the author of the controversial overhaul of Arizona’s campaign-finance laws, apparently doesn’t like pushback. He had told Senate Democrats he would share a major amendment to Senate Bill 1516 with them before it came up for a floor debate Tuesday. But, he told The Arizona Republic, he changed his mind when the state Democratic Party used a media account of the bill to do some fundraising last weekend. And when the attorney for the Senate Democrats inquired about the whereabouts of the amendment the night before the debate, Spencer reiterated his pique in an emailed reply and attached the offending fundraising pitch.
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate applauds the Iowa Legislature and Gov. Terry Branstad for making it easier for Iowa’s overseas military members and citizens to vote, and ensuring their votes are counted. The legislation, House File 2147, passed both chambers of the legislature unanimously and was signed into law by Gov. Branstad Thursday morning. The bill gives Iowans serving or visiting overseas an extra 30 days to request, receive and return special absentee ballots, extending the time from 90 days to 120 days prior to an election.