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A guy running for head of a borough in Taipei gave me a sack of napkins even though I’m a foreigner without voting rights. Had I attended his rally in the park that day, I could have scored a free minced pork bun. Another candidate in the neighborhood gave away wooden back scratchers. These people are frugal. In the southern city Tainan, a candidate was passing out women’s cosmetic kits. News reports cite banquets, discounted air tickets and cash handouts. The potential booty is boundless with 19,762 people running for borough heads, city councils, mayoral posts and their county-level equivalents in most of Taiwan. It’s expected to grow next week in the final approach to elections Nov. 29. Vote-buying has long fit as snugly into Taiwan’s colorful, volatile politics as campaign banners and rallies. The China-friendly Nationalists and their opponents, who are less keen on tie-ups with old foe Beijing, need whatever they can get to win the island’s notoriously close elections.

Tunisia: Only female presidential candidate takes on 22 male contenders | Middle East Eye

Outspoken, long-time judge Kalthoum Kannou is Tunisia’s first female presidential candidate. On 23 November, she will compete against 22 other contenders in the country’s first round of presidential elections since the Arab Spring’s protest wave overthrew the long-lasting regime of former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Kannou is hoping that the fact that she is a woman and politically independent will win the Tunisian voters’ confidence. However, who is Kannou, what does she stand for and what are her chances? Today, Tunisia’s young and commendable democracy has somewhat 190 political parties, most of which were established in its post-revolutionary era. However, Kannou is not happy with the current political scene; many political parties compete against each other and make promises they can’t keep, she argued passionately over coffee at her headquarters in Lafayette, an old Tunis quarter. “Focus is not on Tunisia’s best,” Kannou told me. Instead, argued the 55-year old judge, the political climate is dominated by quarrels over political ideology and that the debate is far too verbal and confrontational. What her country needs now, when Tunisia is beginning a new chapter of its young democracy, is unity. “Tunisians have had enough of politics,” explained Kannou, “That’s why I presented myself for the presidency,” she declared proudly, “an independent candidate without political affiliation.”

Voting Blogs: ‘Vote shaming’ grows in popularity for GOTV | electionlineWeekly

In the days leading up to the 2014 Midterm Election, our former colleague Dan Seligson became part of a growing trend. In his mailbox was an official-looking document detailing his voting history and comparing his voting history to his neighbors’. While the details about his voting history weren’t correct, Seligson, like many others, was none-too-pleased about the attempt to “vote shame” him. “…[F]rankly, it wasn’t an incentive to vote. It made me lash out at the organization that thought this was a good idea,” Seligson said. “I was motivated alright, motivated to tell them how much they insulted me.” Seligson isn’t alone. Since 2008, “vote shaming” or social pressure as academics and others prefer to call it has become an increasingly popular tool in the GOTV toolbox. During the 2014 election cycle, there were news reports — typically about angry voters — from Alaska to Maine to Florida and lots of places in between about voters receiving “vote shaming” materials.

California: Officials ponder all-mail voting | Sacramento Bee

When all the ballots are finally tallied from last week’s election, the proportion of Californians voting by mail is expected to break the record set in 2012, the first time more than half of the state’s electorate voted absentee. The uptick has more Californians pushing for the state to go all the way and ditch traditional polling places. Washington, Colorado and Oregon require all of their elections to be run entirely by mail, and at least 19 others permit some of their elections to be all mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. County elections officials have touted the potential increase in voter interest and significant savings from avoiding the task of recruiting and training polling place workers. And some believe an all-mail system could even help speed up and avoid some overtime ballot-counting. “I say, ‘yes, please,’” said Jill LaVine, the registrar of voters in Sacramento County. “I would love to go all vote-by-mail.” LaVine compared overseeing the current system to running two elections at the same time – one via the Postal Service and another at polling places. The latter process is so resource-heavy that her office essentially “shuts down” counting absentee votes the Friday before an election, leaving a huge pile of ballots to count in the days and weeks afterward, LaVine said. “I could direct all my money and equipment to vote-by-mail,” she said, noting that the rural counties of Alpine and Sierra issue mail ballots to everyone. “All of the expenses and problems of running two elections would be off the table. It would be smooth.” LaVine suggests it also could generate speedier election results by giving officials more time to count mail ballots before an election day. In California, seven congressional and legislative races remained undecided for a week as tens of thousands of late-arriving mail and “provisional” ballots were being tallied.

Florida: Elections chief concerned about aging voting machines | Palm Beach Post

Decade-old voting equipment is quickly aging in nearly half the state’s counties, and there has been a struggle at the local level to secure money to cover the replacement costs. Secretary of State Ken Detzner said he will meet next month with local supervisors of election in Orlando to determine which counties are most in need of new equipment before the 2016 elections. “It’s kind of one of those things that you don’t think about until something happens,” Detzner said this week. “We know we need to do something.” Detzner estimated that about 30 counties might need new equipment or upgrades, but he declined to specify the counties. There is no statewide accounting of equipment needs by county. Calls to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office were not returned Tuesday, but Palm Beach County acquired its current voting machines, an optical scanning system, six years ago. Before 2008, the county used a touch-screen voting system, which drew criticism because it left no paper trail. The touch-screen system, in turn, was the county’s answer to the 2000 election that brought national ridicule because of the Butterfly Ballot and problems with punch-card chads.

Australia: Politicians unanimously vote down online voting | Government News

The prospect of online and electronic voting at Australian federal elections has officially had its plug pulled for the foreseeable future. The Parliamentary Committee tasked with investigating the feasibility of digitising Australian ballots has unanimously found that a high-tech solution is still too risky, complicated and expensive to make it a reality in the near term. The probe came after the now infamous Western Australian vote counting bungle that forced the state back to the polls after ballot papers were somehow mislaid. Now in a second interim report issued by the Electoral Matters Committee, federal politicians have concluded that although there is a raft of technological improvements that could be made to the running of elections, a fully digitised solution is still a long way off. “After hearing from a range of experts, and surveying the international electoral landscapes it is clear to me that Australia is not in a position to introduce any large – scale system of electronic voting in the near future without catastrophically compromising our electoral integrity,” said the Committee’s chairman, Tony Smith MP. The Committee’s main beef with online and electronic systems – aside from the obvious threat of hacking – is that the confidentiality of how people vote could be undermined or compromised. At the moment voters physically front-up at polling booths and have their name crossed off a roll before being given two ballot papers, or more in the case of a referendum.

National: A Citizen’s Guide to Buying Political Access | New York Times

David G. Herro, a well-known money manager in Chicago, has given more than $2 million to political campaigns and causes over the last seven years. So perhaps it is not too surprising that a United States senator and other prominent politicians have dropped by his offices just to chat. “A lot of the time they just want to sit and talk,” said Mr. Herro, the son of an accountant and a nurse who raised six children in Milwaukee, and a partner at Harris Associates. “But the reason they do want to see you, eventually, is for financial support.” Just like his approach to picking investments, his strategy for giving is specific: He supports mostly Republican candidates who share his worldview that people deserve the same opportunities — including education — but that government should serve more as a referee, not an active player. He is more likely to give if a race looks to be tight. And some of his larger donations have been to a political action committee that defended Republicans who were supportive of same-sex marriage and other gay rights.

Editorials: Why Voter ID Laws Don’t Swing Many Elections | Nate Cohn/NYTimes.com

Many people have understandably blamed low turnout for the Democratic Party‘s misfortune on Nov. 4, but some have gone a step further. They argue that turnout was so low because of voter suppression, particularly laws requiring voters to present photo identification. They assert that these laws disenfranchised enough voters to decide several elections, even a Kansas governor’s contest where a Republican won by four percentage points. Voter ID laws might well be a cynical, anti-democratic attempt to disenfranchise voters to help Republicans, as Democrats claim. But that doesn’t mean that voter ID laws are an effective way to steal elections. They just don’t make a difference in anything but the closest contests, when anything and everything matters. This may come as a surprise to those who have read articles hyperventilating about the laws. Dave Weigel at Slate in 2012 said a Pennsylvania voter identification law might disenfranchise 759,000 registered voters, a possibility he described as “an apocalypse.” Pennsylvania’s voter ID law was reversed before the election, but it is not hard to see why so many thought it could be decisive when Mr. Obama won the state with a 309,840 vote margin. But the so-called margin of disenfranchisement — the number of registered voters who do not appear to have photo identification — grossly overstates the potential electoral consequences of these laws.

Editorials: 2016: How digital balloting opens doors to election thieves, voter fraud | John P. Warren/Human Events

The constant kerfuffle about voting rights does get your attention, doesn’t it? To the left, it seems that attempts to embed a sense of order and integrity to our voting process is the right’s way of disenfranchising minorities and the elderly. To the right, every attempt to make voting easier and more remote—that is, you don’t have to be “there” to do it—represents just one more dilution what some say is our most precious right: to have our say at the ballot box. … With at least nine different kinds of voter fraud available—as defined by The Heritage Foundation (“Does Your Vote Count?”)—it seems there’s no dearth of opportunity for those with initiative to cheat the rest of us out of our voice at the polls. Some say there’s very little evidence of voter fraud, so what’s the big deal? … The ninth kind of vote fraud outlined by The Heritage Foundation is “Altering The Vote Count,” and of all of different ways our votes can be stolen, this one is the most understated, threatening, invisible, and probable. For those who might challenge that statement, my answer is that our own life experience shouts an affirmative.

Editorials: Here’s how to clean up messy voter rolls | Reid Wilson/The Washington Post

When Virginia’s Board of Elections said it would remove tens of thousands of names from its voter rolls this year, voting-rights advocates cried foul, and went to court. But while Republicans criticized Democrats for opening elections to fraud, and Democrats complained Republicans were disenfranchising thousands of voters, the spat brought up a very real concern states across the nation face: Voter rolls are messy, and someone has to clean them up. People move. People die. People get married and re-register under new names. Election administrators across the country face the tightrope of making sure their voter rolls are accurate while avoiding erasing a valid record. Seven states believe they have the answer: The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. Developed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and IBM, ERIC uses several databases to compare voters across state lines. The system compares voter list data with Department of Motor Vehicle records, Social Security Administration records, the Postal Service’s national change of address registry and other databases to match voters across state lines; if the system concludes with a high degree of confidence that a John Doe on one state’s voter roll is the same John Doe in another state, the record is flagged. “You match enough of [the data points] across records that you have a lot of confidence ,” said David Becker, Pew’s director of election initiatives. “It’s impossible for [states], based only on a name and birth date, to keep their lists up to date and identify when someone has died, for example.”

Voting Blogs: Coordination Controversy in the Twitterverse | More Soft Money Hard Law

It may have been legal, or perhaps not, depending on the facts, which are so far not fully known. But the use of Twitter to feed polling information to outside groups lends itself to various conclusions about the state of campaign finance law. The content of the FEC rule against coordination can be brought into question, or its enforcement criticized, or the problem can be passed off as another instance of shenanigans by a regulated community always exploring paths around the law. Or the issue could be, more profoundly, the very conception behind the current anti-coordination rules. The rules in place have been given considerable thought and are quite complicated. On their face, they’re not unreasonable. They attempt to distinguish between the case where a candidate is merely picking somebody’s pocket, in control of what is spent on her behalf, and the case where the spender retains control but, looking to make the most effective use of the money, wants to incorporate in this assessment the candidate’s view of the state of the campaign. The coordination rules apply where the candidate has requested an ad, or the spender and candidate have engaged in discussions about particular proposed public communications—for example, “substantial discussions in the course of which “material information” is shared that would affect the choice of content or the timing of campaign advertising. In sorting out when a discussion becomes substantial, the agency inquires into whether information has been “conveyed … about the candidate’s or political party committee’s campaign plans, projects, activities, or needs.” See 11 C.F.R. 109.21(d)(1)-(2). (These rules also apply to advertising paid for in coordination with parties, or with the “agents” of parties or candidates.

Arizona: Barber team open to legal challenge as recount looms | CNN

An attorney for Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.) is raising the prospect of a long, drawn-out battle over control of his Tucson-area district, a seat once held by his former boss Gabby Giffords, as his contest with Republican Martha McSally looks increasingly likely to head to a recount. Kevin Hamilton, Barber’s legal counsel, said Wednesday that the campaign isn’t taking “anything off the table” in potentially challenging the outcome of the race when it’s certified next month. “There are lots of potential options. There is the ability to file an election contest under state law. There’s a recount that goes forward, and as we’ve seen in other states that can affect the outcome of the election,” he said. “There’s a range of options and we’re not taking anything off the table.”

Indiana: Voter ID laws reduce Indiana election turnout | Tribune-Star

A decade ago, Indiana legislators worked hard to address an imaginary voting problem. It’s time they worked even harder to fix a real one. The Hoosier state ranks at the bottom in citizen participation in elections. This month, a mere 28 percent of the state’s voting-eligible population — a measure of people who could vote, regardless of their registration status — voted, according to early projections by the United States Election Project, based at the University of Florida. Those calculations put Indiana dead last in America in turnout. The Indiana voting system deserves most of the blame. It is true that the pathetic turnout for the 2014 election can partly be attributed to the low-profile offices at stake. Once every 12 years, the ballot features no races for president, U.S. Senate or governor. That was the case on Nov. 4. But a smaller percentage of Hoosiers cast ballots election after election, compared to residents of other states, including 2008 when Indiana turnouts peaked.

New Jersey: Appeals panel revives challenge to state’s 21-day advance voter registration | NJ.com

A state appeals panel today revived a lawsuit challenging New Jersey’s requirement that residents must register to vote no later than 21 days before an election, finding ample evidence suggesting the mandate may no longer be needed or constitutional. The challenge, filed in 2011 against the Middlesex County Board of Elections and the commissioner of registrations by several Rutgers University students and statewide advocacy groups, contended the requirement “severely burdens the right to vote” of New Jersey residents. They argued that burden outweighed any interest the county, and by extension, all counties and the state, had in maintaining the advance registration requirement, which was established in order to prevent voter fraud and ensure public confidence in the system.

Australia: MPs reject e-voting over cost, integrity fears | iTnews.com.au

A committee of Australian MPs has firmly staked its opposition to the large-scale implementation of electronic voting, pointing to expensive and embarrassing failures of the technology worldwide. The House of Representatives electoral matters committee today rushed out an interim report hosing down suggestions Australia should move to electronic polls, following the controversial loss of WA senate ballots in the 2013 federal election. The panel of MPs concluded there was no feasible way of rolling out electronic voting in Australia without undermining the integrity, security and civic importance of the process – and incurring a massive cost to the Commonwealth. The committee pointed to expensive and embarrassing mishaps across the world as other nations experimented with different versions of electronically enabled polls, from static and isolated machines to full web-based voting.

Australia: Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters rules out move to electronic voting in elections | ABC

The days of voters lining up to use a pencil and paper to cast their ballot will continue, with a federal parliamentary committee ruling out a move to electronic voting. The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has released an interim report which finds there are too many risks associated with the move. It said shifting to electronic voting for federal elections was not feasible before the next election or in the near future without “catastrophically compromising electoral integrity”. The committee found machine electronic voting was vulnerable to hacking and measures to mitigate that risk would be costly and would still require voters to visit a polling booth. The prospect of voters being able to cast their ballot on the internet also seems a long way off, with questions about privacy for individual voters, security and potential coercion of voters.

Australia: Risks of e-voting outweigh benefits – for now | Computerworld

An interim report of a parliamentary committee tasked with examining the 2013 Senate ballot in Western Australia has concluded that the nation is not yet ready for the widespread use of e-voting in federal elections. In December last year the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters was given the job of examining the fiasco which saw Western Australian voters return to the poll after ballots were lost in the state’s tightly contested 2013 Senate race. “Ultimately, the committee has concluded that electronic voting can’t be introduced in the near future without high costs and unacceptable security risks,” the chair of committee, Liberal MP Tony Smith, said in a statement. “The Committee believes that it is likely that technology will evolve to the point that it will be possible to vote electronically in federal elections,” the interim report states. “At that stage the question for a future Parliament, and the voting public, will be whether the convenience of electronic voting outweighs the risks to the sanctity of the ballot. “The view of this Committee is that the answer to this question at this time is that no, it does not.”

Canada: Conservative staffer Michael Sona given 9-month jail sentence in Robocalls case | CTV

Michael Sona, the former Conservative staffer convicted in the 2011 robocalls scandal, was sentenced Wednesday to nine months in jail for what the judge called “an affront to the electoral process.” Justice Gary Hearn called his task “a difficult and troublesome sentencing.” The Crown had wanted Sona, 26, to spend at least a year and a half in custody for his role in a scheme to misdirect voters on the morning of the 2011 federal election. Sona hung his head and typed on a BlackBerry, his family members beside him in tears, as Hearn delivered his decision. Sona will also spend 12 months on probation.

Poland: Hackers, IT problems disrupt Polish local elections | My Broadband

Poland’s president on Wednesday sought to calm a row over key weekend local and regional elections after computer glitches left the final tally up in the air. Exit polls in the Sunday vote, seen as a test for the centre-right government ahead of next year’s general election, showed voters handing a surprise victory to the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) opposition. But final results have not yet been released due to repeated crashes by the PKW national election commission’s servers. “We cannot allow for the integrity of the ballot to be called into question, namely through calls for the elections to be repeated. That’s complete madness,” said President Bronislaw Komorowski. He pledged after discussing the matter with justice officials that the votes would be counted “honestly”.

Poland: Opposition Calls for Local Vote Rerun After Tally Glitch | Businessweek

Poland’s political opposition called for a repeat of Nov. 16 local elections and for the State Election Commission to be fired after its new computer system prevented it from tallying the ballot on time. Voting results for Poland’s 16 regional assemblies can’t be determined within three days of the vote after a technical error prevented the printing of totals from individual precincts, the commission said late yesterday. Exit polls by Warsaw-based researcher Ipsos showed the opposition Law & Justice party took 31.5 percent of the vote, compared with 27.3 percent for the ruling Civic Platform, scoring its first victory since 2005.

Solomon Islands: Police investigate ballot box theft as vote counting underway | ABC

Police in Solomon Islands have recovered a ballot box after it was briefly stolen by an election official following yesterday’s historic polls. Vote counting is underway in the country’s general election, the first to be led by the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force. The 10-year Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was reduced to a police mission supporting local police last year. Solomons police confirmed a ballot box was stolen by an election official as a boat was being loaded to go to a central counting station. The incident happened near Auki, in the eastern part of the island of Malaita.

National: 2014 Midterms Defined by Low Voter Turnout | The Pew Charitable Trusts

In the aftermath of the midterm elections, there’s no shortage of easy explanations for the outcome, and everyone’s an expert. Pundits say the Democrats didn’t allow President Barack Obama to campaign enough, or featured him too much. They didn’t talk enough about the economy. They went too negative, or weren’t negative enough. The Republicans ran better, less extreme candidates. Variously, gerrymandering, vote suppression, vote fraud, or big money made the difference. Of course, the real reasons are far more complex. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll comb through the data to learn more, but right now one fact is painfully clear: Citizens showed up to vote at lower rates than in any federal election since the middle of World War II. Preliminary data indicate that national turnout was below 37 percent. That means nearly 2 in 3 eligible voters, or approximately 144 million American citizens—more than the population of Russia—chose to sit this election out. The nation hasn’t seen turnout this low in any federal general election since 1942. Even in recent midterms, when the turnout was remarkably low, it still exceeded 40 percent, meaning millions more Americans voted in 2006 and 2010 than in 2014.

National: Facebook shutting down a key path Obama used to reach voters | Yahoo News

Barack Obama’s reelection campaign pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material. But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken. “It’s a fairly significant shift,” said Teddy Goff, who was Obama’s digital director in 2012, and oversaw the effort that helped the Obama campaign gain a Facebook following of 45 million users that year. Goff’s team used Facebook and other tools to register more than a million voters online and to raise $690 million online in 2011 and 2012. “The thing we did that will be most affected — by which I mean rendered impossible — by the changes they’re making is the targeted sharing tool,” Goff said. More than 1 million Obama supporters in 2012 installed the campaign’s Facebook app. These supporters were given the option to share their friend list with the Obama campaign. Goff said most of the app users did so. And when they did, Goff’s team would then “run those friend lists up against the voter file, and make targeted suggestions as to who [supporters] should be sharing stuff with.”

Voting Blogs: Court Rulings Impact Elections in 2014 | The Canvass

Users of a different kind of gavel have been busy setting rules for voters and election administrators in 2014. Courts, and not legislatures, have been the major force shaping state election laws this year, with some key rulings landing just days before voters headed to the polling places. And it’s not just district circuit justices who have been asked to rule on litigation about photo ID requirements for voters, early voting and same-day voter registration. Several notable rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court this year have addressed how elections are run. And some of those decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court have hardly settled election matters. The brief court orders in a few October cases— often two sentences— have addressed simply the timing of changes to the elections process; these cases are still to be decided on their merits by the courts with jurisdiction.

Editorials: The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement | Brent Staples/New York Times

The state laws that barred nearly six million people with felony convictions from voting in the midterm elections this month date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Southern lawmakers were working feverishly to neutralize the black electorate. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and cross burnings were effective weapons in this campaign. But statutes that allowed correctional systems to arbitrarily and permanently strip large numbers of people of the right to vote were a particularly potent tool in the campaign to undercut African-American political power. This racially freighted system has normalized disenfranchisement in the United States — at a time when our peers in the democratic world rightly see it as an aberration. It has also stripped one in every 13 black persons of the right to vote — a rate four times that of nonblacks nationally. At the same time, it has allowed disenfranchisement to move beyond that black population — which makes up 38 percent of those denied the vote — into the body politic as a whole. One lesson here is that punishments designed for one pariah group can be easily expanded to include others as well. The history of disenfranchisement was laid out in a fascinating 2003 study by Angela Behrens, Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza. They found that state felony bans exploded in number during the late 1860s and 1870s, particularly in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ostensibly guaranteed black Americans the right to vote. They also found that the larger the state’s black population, the more likely the state was to pass the most stringent laws that permanently denied people convicted of crimes the right to vote. These bans were subsequently strengthened as the Jim Crow era began to take hold.

Editorials: The SCOTUS Should Reject Alabama’s Legislative Districts | Jim Sleeper/The Washington Monthly

With roughly 80% of Alabama whites voting Republican and 90% of African-Americans voting Democrat, it’s been easy for the state’s legislative leaders to deny they had any explicitly racial intent in compressing black voters into a few electoral districts and “whitening” the neighboring districts to elect more Republicans. Districting along party lines is the prerogative of whatever party controls the process, and if citizens are voting in racial blocs, what can a loyal Republican or Democrat line-drawer do but follow that pattern — and perhaps even intensify it when “voting rights” laws facilitate the design of “majority-minority” districts to enhance non-white voters’ opportunities to elect “candidates of their choice”? That’s the gist of Alabama’s defense this week in a suit brought by the state’s Legislative Black Caucus. The Supreme Court must decide whether the line-drawers acted racially, and therefore unconstitutionally, or for purely partisan purposes. But poor leadership on both sides of this question has intensified racial polarization even when voters have tried to transcend it, even in the Deep South. The Court should rebuff line-drawers in a way that points beyond both racialism and partisanship in districting.

Arizona: Barber’s bid to delay vote canvass rejected | Arizona Republic

Lawyers for U.S. Rep. Ron Barber asked Pima County on Tuesday to delay finalizing the canvass of the Nov. 4 election, with the campaign saying it had sworn statements from 132 voters that they were disenfranchised by poll-worker errors. Pima County rejected the request and finalized the canvass of votes at midday Tuesday. Barber, a Democrat, is locked in one of the closest elections in Arizona history with Republican challenger Martha McSally, whose lead in the race is a minuscule 161 votes out of more than 219,000 cast. If nothing changes, the race will head to Arizona’s first-ever general-election recount for Congress. A recount will not start before Dec. 1.

District of Columbia: Election Over, Workers Keep Counting Ballots — Thousands Of Them | WAMU

“It’s exhausting.” That’s how Clifford Tatum, the executive director of the D.C. Board of Elections, describes the work that has taken place after the Nov. 4 general election. Though the campaign signs are coming down, public attention has shifted away and most of the top-ticket races — mayor, attorney general, D.C. Council seats, the marijuana legalization initiative — were settled after votes were tallied on election night, work has since continued for Tatum and his staff. That’s because as with every election, the elections board is charged with counting every ballot that’s properly cast. The bulk of those come during early voting or on Election Day — 25,750 residents voted early, while 125,606 voted on Nov. 4. But for those residents living outside the city, or those who fall into a number of categories that may require that they vote using a special — or provisional — ballot, their votes are counted in the two weeks following the election. For the general election, that adds up to a lot of ballots — close to 6,000 absentee ballots and over 20,000 special ballots.

Florida: Drive to restore voting rights for ex-felons coming to Florida? | SaintPetersBlog

A coalition of groups in Florida are preparing to try to get a constitutional amendment on the 2016 ballot in Florida that would restore the voting rights of most individuals with past felony convictions upon completion of their sentence. These groups include the ACLU of Florida, the League of Women Voters, Faith in Florida and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. The proposed constitutional amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense. The state’s current policy regarding ex-felons was an issue that Charlie Crist occasionally discussed during the recent gubernatorial campaign. When he took office after being elected in 2007, the then Republican governor was able to persuade a majority of the Florida Cabinet to change the policy to provide ex-offenders convicted of less serious offenses the right to regain their rights without a hearing, while those convicted of crimes such as murder required a more thorough investigation and a hearing. But that was repealed in 2011, when newly elected Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the process was too easy for released felons. Shortly after she made those comments, she and the rest of the Cabinet scrapped the process and set a minimum of a five-year waiting period.

Florida: State House rejects elections returns for District 64 | Miami Herald