National: Why don’t Americans vote online? | CNN.com Tuesday is Election Day in the United States, and although the mostly state and local races won’t stir the same passions as next year’s presidential contest, millions of people will cast ballots. They’ll do it in much the same way that Americans have for centuries: by showing up…
National: When Voter Registration is a Crime | TIME.com Dawn Quarles, a high school teacher, is facing a $1,000 fine for doing something Florida has been cracking down on lately: registering students to vote. The state’s leaders want to stop registration drives that add more qualified voters to the rolls – and they are having…
National: Congressional Democrats seek to curb tough state voter-screening laws | MiamiHerald.com Democrats on Thursday ratcheted up efforts to combat new voting laws adopted by 13 states that Democrats contend are deliberate efforts to keep its core voting blocs from casting ballots next year. “Election legislation and administration appear to be increasingly the product of partisan…
National: Civil Rights Leader Rep. John Lewis: Voter ID Laws ‘Are A Poll Tax,’ ‘I Know What I Saw During The 60s’ | ThinkProgress Republican lawmakers across the country have been waging an successful campaign to restrict the right to vote. States are cracking down on non-profit organizations’ registration drives, reducing early voting periods, and…
Alabama: D.C. Circuit To Hear Voting Rights Act Case In January | The Blog of Legal Times Lawyers for an Alabama county that is challenging a controversial section of the Voting Rights Act have asked a federal appeals court in Washington to strike down a judge’s ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the law. Judge John…
From the Verified Voting Blog: David Jefferson: If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online? There is widespread pressure around the country today for the introduction of some form of Internet voting in public elections that would allow people to vote online, all electronically, from their own personal computers or mobile…
National: Congressional hearing sought over voter ID laws sweeping states | McClatchy Does requiring a photo ID to vote return America to the days when poll taxes and literacy tests made it hard for minorities to cast ballots? Are state lawmakers trying to make it harder for people to vote? Two top House Judiciary Committee Democrats…
Florida: Election laws tightening in Republican-run states | latimes.com Reporting from Tallahassee, Fla.— Barack Obama may have won this crucial state three years ago on the Sunday before election day when “souls to the polls” drives brought a surge of blacks and Latinos to cast ballots after church. Florida had opened the polls two weeks early,…
Blogs: ES&S Attempts to Block Pennsylvania County’s Independent Audit of Failed Touch-Screens | BradBlog Despite failing to object for months prior, the nation’s largest electronic voting system vendor, ES&S, is now attempting to stop a landmark independent examination of their e-voting systems in a Pennsylvania county dead in its tracks. An October letter from the…
National: Online Voting: Just A Dream Until Security Issues Can Be Fully Addressed, Experts Say | Courant.com Allowing citizens to cast ballots online would increase participation in elections and make democracy more accessible. But don’t expect to vote on your iPhone in Connecticut anytime soon; the technology just isn’t there to ensure secure elections, said several experts who…
South Korea: Cyber Attacks Hit South Korean Election Commission, Candidate | The Chosun Ilbo The websites of the National Election Commission and the pan-opposition candidate for Seoul mayoral by-election, Park Won-soon, were paralyzed by cyber attacks on Wednesday morning as voters went to the polls. The onslaught was a so-called distributed denial-of-service attack whereby hackers effectively…
National: Emanuel Cleaver, Artur Davis Spar Over Voter ID Laws | Roll Call Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) criticized former Rep. Artur Davis today for his recent support of voter ID laws, saying that his changed stance has led to speculation that the Alabama Democrat is considering becoming a Republican. “I don’t know…
From the Verified Voting Blog: How Voting Equipment Varies in the U.S. The following article was posted at Digital Communities on October 24 2011. Pamela Smith and the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) are on a mission — in her words — “to safeguard elections in the digital age.” In an earlier time, she said, ballot boxes were inspected…
Editorials: Are voter ID laws protective or restrictive? | UPI.com Voter identification — considered a safeguard against fraud by some and an effort to disenfranchise voters by others — was a hot topic in state legislatures this year. Twenty states that didn’t have requirements requiring voter ID at the polls at the beginning of 2011 considered…
Editorials: Colorado county clerks crying wolf | Vincent Carroll/The Denver Post Get ready for a battle royal over the integrity of elections in Colorado — and just in time for this state’s apparently pivotal role in the 2012 presidential race. If the clash shapes up as expected, lawmakers will have to choose sides between a would-be…
Editorials: The Voting Poor | State of Elections Initiatives aimed at registering poor Americans to vote is un-American, or at least that is the conjecture Matthew Vadum made early last month in acontroversial article published by American Thinker. Vadum, the author of Subversion, Inc.and Senior Editor for the non-profit watchdog group Capital Research Center, argues that…
California: State Won’t Fund Vote-by-Mail | Central Coast News The state’s budget problems have reached your mailbox and it could hamper your right to vote by mail in years to come. Central Coast counties are making sure you still get your ballot, but it will cost you. “It’s very frustrating because voters are caught up in…
National: Military voting jumped last year, report says | The Washington Post Buoyed by a new law requiring states to make absentee ballots more accessible to military troops serving overseas, troops voted at a higher rate than the general population in last year’s midterm elections, according to a new report. Overall, 46 percent of the…
Blogs: Mike Huckabee Makes Hilarious Voter Disenfranchisement Joke | Comedy Central Former speculated-possible-savior of the Republican Party Mike Huckabee was in Ohio over the weekend, drumming up support for referendum that seeks to strip the collective bargaining rights of public workers while also making them pay at least 15 percent of their health care costs. However,…
Editorials: Rick Scott’s misdirection on voting rights | St. Petersburg Times Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has a novel strategy to preserve state election changes that would disproportionately hurt minority voters: Get the courts to end the federal process in Florida that could prevent the changes from taking effect in Hillsborough and four other counties. A…
National: House Dems denounce GOP’s proposed dissolution of Election Assistance Commission | TheHill.com Democrats on the Committee on House Administration have unanimously denounced a Republican recommendation to reduce spending within the legislative branch. This week lawmakers proposed cost-saving initiatives to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. In a letter Thursday to the joint committee co-chairmen,…
National: New census data trigger federal requirements for bilingual voting ballots in 25 states | The Washington Post In the run-up to the 2012 elections, the federal government is ordering that 248 counties and other political jurisdictions provide bilingual ballots to Hispanics and other minorities who speak little or no English. That number is down from…
Indiana: Bayh calls White’s vote fraud allegations ‘baseless’ | The Indianapolis Star Former U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh is calling voter-fraud allegations against him and his wife, Susan, “baseless.” But whether the allegations, made in a criminal complaint filed by Secretary of State Charlie White on Tuesday, will lead to charges is difficult to say.…
Colorado: Fairness questioned as 9 mostly Democratic Colorado counties to mail inactive voters ballots | The Denver Post Officials in at least nine counties plan to mail ballots to inactive voters for the Nov. 1 election — a decision some believe could give a boost to a statewide ballot measure to raise taxes for education. The…
National: What it takes to make every vote count | MIT News Eleven years after the disputed 2000 presidential election thrust the subject of electoral integrity into the spotlight, many of the challenges that jeopardized that election remain unresolved, voting experts said at an MIT-hosted conference held Saturday. The conference, “Election Integrity: Past, Present, and…
Blogs: Shocked, shocked to find “non-cyber” attacks on voting systems | Educated Guesswork Argonne Labs’s demonstration attack on a Diebold voting machine is getting a lot of press. The article above has the details, but briefly, what the Argonne team did was to insert some malicious “alien” electronics between the CPU and the touch screen. Unsurprisingly, that…
National: Republicans Eye Electoral Vote Changes | Time Magazine Republicans in Pennsylvania and Nebraska want to change the way their states award Electoral College votes, moves that could hinder President Barack Obama’s re-election chances. Lawmakers in the Democratic-leaning battleground of Pennsylvania are weighing whether to give the presidential nominees one electoral vote for each congressional…
Blogs: How We Got Into The Primary Calendar Mess — And Why We Can’t Get Out | TPM Amidst the ongoing controversies surrounding the Republican primary calendar — with Florida moving its contest to late January, and triggering a move up by the officially sanctioned early states — some people have probably wondered if it…
California: Los Angeles County Voting System Overhaul To Include Options | AM 1220 The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RR/CC) has embarked on the most significant overhaul of the voting system since 1968. Although the system has been upgraded and adapted to keep up with changes in technology and in the regulatory environment, this project has…
National: Voter ID Law Proponent Spakovsky Acknowledges There’s No “Massive Fraud In American Elections” | Media Matters for America Among his other specialties, right-wing commentator Hans von Spakovsky is a strong proponent of laws requiring citizens to present photo identification in order to vote. Conservatives often justify their call for photo ID laws by raising the specter of voter fraud even…