Mississippi: Tea party challenger wants a redo of Republican runoff in Mississippi | Los Angeles Times

Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi returned to the Senate on Monday for the first time since last month’s wild-ride election, but the Republican primary runoff he appears to have narrowly won remains far from over. Tea party challenger Chris McDaniel is poised to launch an unprecedented legal challenge after refusing to concede the June 24 election. McDaniel claimed widespread voter fraud after the Cochran campaign openly courted Democratic support at the polls. On Monday night, the Mississippi Republican Party officially certified Cochran’s victory, saying he won by 7,667 votes. But earlier in the day, more than 200 McDaniel supporters arrived at courthouses in the state’s 80 counties to scour voter logs for irregularities. The campaign has offered 15 $1,000 rewards for information leading to voter fraud convictions.

Mississippi: Chris McDaniel’s lawyer says a new Mississippi election could be ‘automatic.’ Is he right? | The Washington Post

Mitch Tyner is the lead counsel for failed Mississippi Republican Senate primary candidate Chris McDaniel’s effort to have the results of the state’s runoff election overturned. In a brief press conference on Monday, Tyner responded to a question about the margin between McDaniel and incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran — which was at about 6,700 at last count — with assurance.

We don’t have to have 6,700 (ineligible voters). However, I would be surprised if we don’t find 6,700. It’s very easy to see the Mississippi law holds that if there’s the difference between the Cochran camp and our camp — that vote difference — if there’s that many ineligible voters, then there’s automatically a new election.

In an e-mail to the Post, McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch said that the number of “irregularities” found on ballots was at 6,900 as of last Thursday — a number that “will certainly grow.” Most of those irregularities are of the kind that has become central to McDaniel’s case: people who apparently voted in the Democratic primary and then the Republican runoff. (More background here.) So done deal, right?

North Carolina: Mistrust in North Carolina Over Plan to Reduce Precincts | New York Times

When Alan Langley, a Republican member of the local elections board here, explains a new proposal to consolidate five voting precincts into two, it sounds procedural and well-meaning: He speaks of convenient parking and wheelchair access at the proposed polling places, and of saving more than $10,000 per election. Those precincts, however, are rich with black voters who generally vote Democratic. And when the Rev. Dante Murphy, the president of the Cleveland County N.A.A.C.P. chapter, discusses the plan, he talks of “disenfranchisement” and “conspiracy.” “We know,” Mr. Murphy said, “that this is part of a bigger trend — a movement to suppress people’s right to vote.”

North Carolina: Voting law changes fight in court | Associated Press

Sweeping changes to North Carolina’s voting law, considered one of the toughest in the nation, should be put on hold until at least after the November election, the U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge Monday. Lawyers for the Justice Department and an array of civic groups said the Republican-backed measures were designed to suppress turnout among minorities, the elderly and college students — blocs that generally vote Democratic. Supporters of the measure said they ensured fair elections, prevented voter fraud and no group was disenfranchised during recent party primaries. Representing the NACCP, lawyer Penda Hair tried to draw a direct line between the new law and voting rights won during the civil rights era. “We can never forget we are walking on sacred ground when it comes to African-American and Latino voting rights,” Hair said. “The long arm of slavery and Jim Crow still reaches into the present.”

Editorials: ‘Monster’ Voting Law Challenged in Federal Court | Ari Berman/The Nation

In March 1965, Carolyn Coleman, a young activist with the Alabama NAACP, marched to Montgomery in support of the Voting Rights Act. After the passage of the VRA, Coleman spent a year registering voters in Mississippi, where her friend Wharlest Jackson, an NAACP leader in Natchez, was killed in early February 1967 by a car bomb after receiving a promotion at the local tire plant. A year later, Coleman was in Memphis organizing striking sanitation workers when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Coleman devoted her life to expanding the franchise for the previously disenfranchised, serving as president of the North Carolina NAACP and Southern voter education director for the national NAACP. For the past twelve years, she’s been a county commissioner in Greensboro’s Guilford County. Nearly fifty years after marching for voting rights in Alabama, Coleman testified in federal court today in Winston-Salem against North Carolina’s new voting restrictions, which have been described as the most onerous in the nation. The law mandates strict voter ID, cuts early voting by a week and eliminates same-day registration, among many other things. After the bill’s passage, “I was devastated,” Coleman testified. “I felt like I was living life over again. Everything that I worked for for the last fifty years was being lost.”

Afghanistan: Election officials admit voter fraud, delay results in presidential vote | Associated Press

Former finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai has the lead in Afghanistan’s disputed presidential election, according to a preliminary tally released Monday despite allegations of massive fraud. The announcement came as Ahmadzai is locked in a standoff with his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who has refused to accept any results until all fraudulent ballots are invalidated. The Independent Election Commission acknowledged that vote rigging had occurred and promised to launch a more extensive investigation before final results are released. “We cannot ignore that there were technical problems and fraud that took place during the election process,” the commission’s chairman Ahmad Yousuf Nouristani said. “We are not denying fraud in the election, some governors and Afghan government officials were involved in fraud.”

Afghanistan: Ghani Leads Afghan Vote, But Fraud Charges Hang Over Results | Wall Street Journal

Ashraf Ghani edged closer to becoming Afghanistan’s next president after winning a majority of votes in a preliminary count of last month’s election, but officials stopped short of declaring a winner as millions of ballots could still be reviewed for fraud allegations. The country’s election commission said Monday that Mr. Ghani, a former finance minister, had won 56.4% of the vote in a preliminary count, against Mr. Abdullah’s 43.6%. But with his rival Abdullah Abdullah alleging widespread fraud in the June 14 runoff vote, the political crisis over the validity of the election’s results remained unresolved. One of Mr. Abdullah’s most prominent supporters, northern Balkh province’s powerful Gov. Atta Mohammad Noor, called late Monday for “widespread civil unrest” and warned of forming a “parallel government.” That statement drew a swift condemnation from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was speaking at the Yokota Air Base in Japan en route to high-level talks in China.

Indonesia: In Indonesia vote, ballots travel on horseback and by boat | The Malay Mail

Carrying ballot boxes on their backs, Indonesian tribesmen climbed barefoot up a mountain in a remote part of Borneo island to ensure a small village would not miss the chance to take part in tomorrow’s presidential poll. It is just one example of the great lengths gone to in the world’s biggest archipelago nation, home to some 6,000 inhabited islands and stretching around 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometres) from east to west, to organise elections.Months of painstaking preparation culminate in a weeks-long operation, with ballots taken in speedboats out to remote islands, carried on horseback along mountain paths, and in helicopters and small planes to far-flung hamlets. There will be some 480,000 polling stations set up for the vote across the world’s third-biggest democracy.  Some 190 million eligible voters will cast ballots, from the crowded main island of Java – where more than half of the country’s inhabitants live – to mountainous eastern Papua, and jungle-clad Sumatra in the west.

Editorials: Indonesia’s robust election race | The Australian

Just how far Indonesia has come along a democratic trajectory since the Suharto dictatorship was deposed 16 years ago has been demonstrated in the election for a new president. Voting takes place tomorrow. And the vibrancy, freedom and competitiveness of the campaign to elect a successor to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have done the Islamic world’s largest democracy great credit. Polls show the outcome is too close to call, reflecting how hard-fought the contest has been to win support among 170 million voters. The campaign, which has been commendably free from violence, has been fought almost entirely on secular rather than religious issues. Both candidates, Joko Widodo, 53, and Prabowo Subianto, 62, have shown themselves well equipped to take over the leadership of our most important neighbour. Mr Widodo, known as “Jokowi”, is the populist Jakarta governor with a reputation for incorruptibility and good municipal government. He is a cleanskin in what Transparency International rates as one of the world’s most corrupt nations (114th out of 177). Mr Subianto, a tough-talking former army general and commander of the notorious Kopassus special forces, was part of the Suharto establishment. He was married to the former dictator’s daughter.

Editorials: Is there a First Amendment right to lie in politics? | David Schultz/Cleveland Plain Dealer

Should candidates or groups say whatever they want about an opponent, issue or themselves and have it protected as a form of free speech? Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a group had a right to challenge an Ohio law banning false campaign statements. While case law suggests the law will be declared unconstitutional, there is a compelling argument that electoral lies ought not to receive First Amendment protection. There should be outer limits on what can be said in campaigns in order to promote democracy and the integrity of the electoral process. Lying is wrong; even children know it. Philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted that deceivers lie to make themselves an exception to a rule that they expect everyone else to follow. We live in a world where we conform actions, make judgments and act as if others were truthful. Liars profit by taking advantage of this trust. If trust did not exist, then business would never exist. Contracts would be meaningless, promises futile.

Editorials: Restoring the vote to convicted felons | Dallas Morning News

When right meets left over the issue of access to the voting booth, it gets our attention. Case in point is GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s support for a long-sought objective of some congressional Democrats — restoring the right to vote to convicted felons. It’s a good objective that has parallels with the growing bipartisan questions about the nation’s 40-year-old war on drugs. As drug convictions caused state prisons to quadruple in population through those decades, and federal prisons swelled by 800 percent, the number of disenfranchised citizens spiked as well. Today, about 5.85 million people nationwide have lost the right to vote because of felonies. Some of them are disenfranchised permanently, depending on the state laws where they live.

Arkansas: Voter ID law a ‘procedural requirement,’ secretary of state argues in court papers | Associated Press

A Pulaski County judge didn’t follow proper court-mandated guidelines when he found Arkansas’ new voter ID law unconstitutional, attorneys for Secretary of State Mark Martin argued in court papers. Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox ruled in May that requiring voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot violated the Arkansas Constitution by creating a new qualification to vote. He also said lawmakers did not properly approve the measure, citing a constitutional amendment that requires a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to change the voter registration process.

California: John Pérez calls for recount in tight race for state controller | Los Angeles Times

Assemblyman John A. Pérez called Sunday for a recount in the razor-close primary election for state controller, a first step in what could become an expensive and lengthy effort to salvage his campaign for one of California’s top financial posts. Pérez, a Los Angeles Democrat, trails Betty Yee, a Democratic member of the Board of Equalization from the Bay Area, by just 481 votes — or one hundredth of one percent of the more than 4 million ballots cast. “It is therefore of the utmost importance that an additional, carefully conducted review of the ballots be undertaken to ensure that every vote is counted, as intended,” Pérez said in a statement. The two controller candidates have been battling for second place in the primary in order to advance to the general election. Ashley Swearengin, the Republican mayor of Fresno, has already secured her spot on the November ballot by finishing in first place in the primary. Under California law, any registered voter can ask for a recount, but the person making the request has to foot the bill.

Massachusetts: House quietly approved amendment to help state GOP | The Boston Globe

The House Republican leadership, with the cooperation of Democratic leaders, quietly attached an amendment to an election law bill last month that would allow the cash-strapped state GOP party to raise unlimited donations to pay for an expensive legal battle with Tea Party gubernatorial candidate Mark Fisher. If the House version of the bill becomes law, the Massachusetts Republican Party can avoid a serious financial pinch caused by the nearly $100,000 in legal bills it has so far incurred in its fight with Fisher. Halfway through this election year, it now has only about $247,000 in its account, with its legal bills threatening to eat up the money it needs to mount challenges to Democrats in statewide and legislative elections this year.

Missouri: Election timing affects Missouri issues | Associated Press

Missouri’s Aug. 5 elections could provide a case study for the ability of governors to affect proposed ballot measures, both politically and legally. Five proposed constitutional amendments will go before voters this summer, instead of during the November elections, because of a decision by Gov. Jay Nixon. The governor’s prerogative is provided for in the Missouri Constitution and has been used by many chief executives over the years to shift measures off the general election ballot and on to the August primaries. Those decisions can carry political consequences and, as a recent court ruling has shown, may also have legal implications. The political ramifications are perhaps best illustrated by proposed Constitutional Amendment 1, which seeks to create a right to farm similar to what already exists with the rights of free speech, assembly and religion.

North Carolina: Voter law challenged: ‘the worst suppression since Jim Crow’ | The Guardian

North Carolina’s voter identification law, which has been described as the most sweeping attack on African American electoral rights since the Jim Crow era, is being challenged in a legal hearing that opens on Monday. Civil rights lawyers and activists are gathering in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for the start of the legal challenge that is expected to last all week. They will be seeking to persuade a federal district judge to impose a preliminary injunction against key aspects of HB 589, the voting law enacted by state Republicans last August. Lawyers for the North Carolina branch of the NAACP and the civil rights group the Advancement Project will argue that the main pillars of the law should be temporarily halted ahead of a full trial next year. Otherwise, they say, tens of thousands of largely poor black voters could find themselves turned away at the polls at the midterm elections in November.

North Carolina: Hearing on voter ID law draws national attention | Winston-Salem Journal

For Rev. John Mendez, longtime activist and pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, voting is more than just casting a ballot in a particular election. “I believe that voting is important to the African-American community because it is the only place where powerless people can be powerful,” he said in court papers filed in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina as part of a trio of lawsuits challenging the state’s new election law. “It is where individuals who have been excluded and oppressed can find their voice. Voting makes you feel equal to everyone else, which is not the everyday experience for many African-Americans. At its core, voting gives individuals a sense of dignity.” Mendez and others believe that the right to vote, especially for blacks, is under attack in the form of the new election law that Gov. Pat McCrory signed last August.

North Carolina: Fight over voter ID law heads to court | Washington Times

The legal challenge to North Carolina’s voter ID law goes before a federal judge Monday, as the fight over whether the law suppresses minority votes flares up in the state’s U.S. Senate race. Opponents of the law, including Democratic incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan, contend that the identification requirement and other new voting laws create an obstacle for blacks, Hispanics and women to reach the ballot box. The support of the same voter blocs are crucial to Mrs. Hagan’s strategy to win in November against Republican state House Speaker Thom Tillis. The lawsuit, brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others, seeks an injunction against the law for the 2014 election. A hearing is scheduled Monday before U.S. District Judge Thomas D. Schroeder in Winston-Salem. Mrs. Hagan, meanwhile, will be angling to use the court hearing to vilify Mr. Tillis and rally Democratic voters.

Afghanistan: Election Dispute Draws More Calls for Vote Audit | New York Times

A growing number of Western officials are calling for an audit of the ballots cast in the Afghan presidential election, increasing the likelihood that the nation’s electoral commission will have to formally reassess the June 14 runoff vote even as it prepares to announce preliminary results. Ever since Afghans voted in the runoff, the system has been deadlocked by allegations of widespread fraud. The presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah has consistently complained that his opponent, Ashraf Ghani, with the help of the commission and other Afghan officials, rigged the vote. Mr. Abdullah spent weeks threatening to walk away from the process, and his brinkmanship now appears to be paying off. The continued political crisis has forced some international figures off the bench, despite earlier efforts to avoid the appearance of involvement in the Afghan elections.

Afghanistan: Presidential candidate Abdullah preemptively rejects election results | The Washington Post

Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah has preemptively rejected the results of last month’s election, set to be officially released Monday, saying the country’s electoral commission was involved in widespread fraud that tarnished the legitimacy of the runoff vote. “Unless the clean votes are separated from those that are fraudulent, we will not accept the election results,” Abdullah said in a televised news conference Sunday night. “We will refer to the people” on how to respond to Monday’s announcement, he said. The stakes are high for a peaceful transfer of power, which would mark the first since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The fragile government here continues to battle a nationwide Taliban insurgency as foreign troops prepare to withdraw by the end of the year.

Indonesia: Early votes cast in presidential election | The Star Online

More Indonesians from among the country’s 300,000 early voters in Malaysia have come out to cast their vote in their presidential election. After early voting in Kuala Lumpur and Johor on Saturday, it was the turn of Indone­­sians working and living in Sarawak, Sabah and Penang to go to the polls yesterday. Indonesian Ambassador to Malaysia Herman Prayitno said there were 420,643 eligible vo­ters in Malaysia. Indonesian Consul-General Djoko Hardjanto and his wife Rosa Triana were among those who cast their votes as soon as the polling station in Kuching opened at 9am.

Libya: Vote results scrapped in 24 polling stations | News24

Libya’s electoral commission announced Sunday it was scrapping the results from 24 polling stations due to fraud in a parliamentary election contested at 1 600 stations in June. An investigation has been launched and those responsible for the alleged fraud will be put on trial, said commission chief Imed al-Sayeh. Sayeh was speaking at a news conference to announce preliminary results for the June 25 election, which was marred by a poor turnout, violence and the murder of a leading women’s rights activist.

Nepal: CPN-UML faction against electronic voting machines | eKantipur

The CPN-UML faction led by Madhav Kumar Nepal has rejected the party’s decision to use Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) for the Central Committee (CC) election. The Nepal faction has expressed a serious reservation over the effort of the organising committee of the ongoing ninth UML National Congress to use the EVMs for election. Organising a separate press meet on Saturday, UML politburo member, Raghuji Pant, said that a large section of the party representatives are skeptical about the use of EVMs, and demanded the use of paper ballot for the election.

New Zealand: The rights and wrongs of MMP | Northern Advocate

MMP has enjoyed more than a two-decade tenure as New Zealand’s voting system. But three months out from the general election, cracks are showing. Cassandra Mason investigates the prides and pitfalls of MMP and whether there’s room for change. New Zealand’s mixed member proportional system (MMP) ousted first past the post (FPP) when it was voted in in 1993. The change answered calls from an increasingly diverse New Zealand that Parliament more closely resemble its population. With September’s election on the horizon, the system’s more controversial characteristics are fuelling debate.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 30 – July 6 2014

voting-technology_260A decade after Congress appropriated billions in funding for voting equipment that equipment is quickly becoming obsolete and cash-strapped states and counties are unable to replace it. An expert testifying in the federal voting rights trial in Anchorage said Monday it’s possible to trace Alaska’s current failure to provide full language assistance to Native language speakers to territorial days when Alaska Natives were denied citizenship unless they renounced their own culture. The right to vote for President for American citizens from U.S. territories is at issue in a Guam lawsuit headed to federal court. The American Civil Liberties Union asked a Kansas judge Friday to prevent Secretary of State Kris Kobach from starting a “dual” voting system to help the conservative Republican enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for new voters that he championed. Though he has yet to present evidence to support his claim that voter fraud pushed Senate incumbent Thad Cochran to victory in Mississippi’s GOP runoff, State Senator Chris McDaniel continues to threaten to contest the election in court. The hackers who breached the Oregon Secretary of State’s website in February probably exploited software that cybersecurity websites had identified as vulnerable but that state IT officials had not patched. After a potential opening last week to ease Afghanistan’s political crisis, the presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah signaled on Sunday that more deadlock was ahead and voters in Indonesia head to the polls to elect a new President.

National: The Looming Crisis in Voting Technology | Governing.com

More and more often these days, Neal Kelley and his staff find themselves rooting through shelves at used computer stores in Orange County, Calif., looking for something they can’t find anywhere else: laptops that run on Windows 2000. Kelley is the registrar of voters in Orange County, and one component of his election equipment still runs on the Microsoft operating system from 14 years ago. As in most places around the country, Orange County’s voting technology is based on federal standards set after Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. The razor-thin presidential election in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush revealed that outdated technology had left thousands of votes uncounted. With HAVA, Congress encouraged local governments to install electronic voting equipment, resulting in a wave of upgrades across the country. Between 2002 and 2004, Congress allocated more than $3 billion for some 8,000 local jurisdictions to replace the punch card devices and lever machines they had been using for more than 30 years. But today, a decade later, that upgraded election infrastructure is quickly becoming obsolete. In a worst-case scenario, current equipment will start to fail in the next couple years, forcing fewer voting booths to process more ballots, a recipe for longer lines and voter frustration. “What you don’t want is disenfranchised voters who are deciding not to cast a ballot because of these issues,” says Kelley. “We can’t let ourselves get to that point. We need to be ahead of this curve.”

National: Rules of the game: New laws tough for some voters | CNN.com

Edna Griggs keenly remembers the anger and outrage she felt during the 2012 general election when she watched as African-American senior citizens were forced to wait in long lines in the Houston heat as they cued up to vote at the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center. A member of her local NAACP chapter, Griggs says she was told that she couldn’t bring them water to drink or chairs to rest in. “A poll watcher approached me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He told me I couldn’t do that. They thought we were trying to sway their votes by giving them water,” she said. “It was really sad to me because it was like a reflection of the stories I heard from my grandmother and mother when they had to pay to vote. It was a reflection of everything our people have gone through.”

Alaska: Official testifies in voting rights trial | Associated Press

A top Alaska elections official testifying in a federal Native voting rights trial disputed claims that villages with sizable populations of limited English speakers vote in lower proportions than elsewhere in the state. Division of Elections Director Gail Fenumiai took the stand Wednesday as the state’s last witness in the Voting Rights Act lawsuit filed by village tribal organizations and elders against her and other election officials. Fenumiai testified that most of the village precincts beat the state’s average turnout in the 2012 presidential election if only precinct-level turnout numbers were examined, the Anchorage Daily News (http://is.gd/5OYggI ) reported. Fenumiai’s office, however, provides more voter services in urban areas, such as easy access to early voting and absentee balloting. She said voters who cast absentee or early ballots aren’t counted in the turnout numbers of their home precincts.

Guam: Equality: No matter where they live, all citizens should have vote for president | Pacific Daily News

Today is Independence Day, when we mark the decision of the Founding Fathers to break away from a tyrannical monarchy and establish our representative democracy. The hallmark of our form of government is that it is of, for and by the people. We, the people, decide who will lead us in government, including who will serve us as president — unless you are a U.S. citizen who’s a resident of Guam or one of the other territories. Then you have no vote, and thus no voice, in who will lead the country. A new federal lawsuit being developed by the We the People Project, a nonprofit that fights for the day residents of Guam and other U.S. territories, aims to change that.

Illinois: Madigan won’t defend Lake County election commission | Daily Herald

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office will drop its defense of a controversial plan to take election-running powers from the Lake County clerk and create a new government commission instead. A lower court had previously struck down part of a law that would create the new government, and Madigan’s office appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court because the attorney general is responsible for defending state laws. Madigan spokeswoman Natalie Bauer said Thursday the office would drop that appeal.