National: Partisan Rifts Hinder Efforts to Improve U.S. Voting System | NYTimes.com Twelve years after a too-close-to-call presidential contest imploded in a hail of Florida punch card ballots and a bitter 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling for George W. Bush, the country’s voting systems remain as deeply flawed as ever with any prospect of fixing them…
National: Voting Tech Errors Could Be a Deal Breaker in Swing States, Report Says | GovTech As with any technology, electronic voting machines run the risk of malfunctioning. However, with the upcoming November presidential election, states may want a plan B if a worst-case scenario occurs on Election Day, like if a machine fails to…
National: Is your vote secure? Many digital systems lack paper backups, study says | CSMonitor.com In elections this March in Palm Beach County, Fla., an election management software glitch gave votes to the wrong candidate and the wrong contest. But paper ballots were available, and a recount was done. The mistake was corrected. Such failures are…
National: Voting Machine Report: States Ranked Based On Use Of Paper Ballots | Huffington Post Six states received the lowest grades for their abilities to accurately count election results based on their lack of access to paper ballots, according to a report released Wednesday by Common Cause, Rutgers Law School and the Verified Voting Foundation. The report…
National: Overseas voting in 24 states vulnerable to hackers | Fox News Few could forget the weekslong hubbub over vote-counting in Florida in 2000 that led to a recount, a Supreme Court ruling and a national debate about the veracity of the system by which voters cast their ballots. But 12 years later, the voting system…
National: State systems for overseas voters vulnerable | USAToday.com States trying to make it easier for troops overseas to vote have set up voting systems that are vulnerable to hacking when they allow voters to return ballots online, via e-mail, or Internet fax, says a state-by-state report to be released today. The report, Counting Votes 2012,…
National: How a great-great-granny could settle the voter ID issue | Yahoo! News State laws requiring identification cards for voters have raised big issues that will carry into fall election season, as three key rulings are expected at the same time the presidential election heats up. And in one case that has Supreme Court ramifications, it…
National: Tech Startups Making Millions Off the Presidential Race | Bloomberg Four years ago, Michael Beach was toiling inside the Republican National Committee, overseeing a voter-turnout operation that was overrun by President Barack Obama’s technology-driven grassroots army. After the election, he and another former RNC aide, then both 28 years old, set out to start a…
National: Voting Rights Act Section 5 challenges reach Supreme Court | SCOTUSblog Attorneys for challengers to the constitutionality of the 1965 voting rights law’s key provision for federal regulation of state and local election laws urged the Supreme Court on Friday to settle the issue in the next Term, starting October 1. One new case…
National: Super PAC donors may keep opening wallets, but public may not see it | CNN When the super PAC backing Mitt Romney, Restore Our Future, files its June donation report on Friday with the Federal Election Commission, it is expected to show a six-figure contribution from Wyoming businessman Foster Friess, his first to the…
National: States praised, others faulted, for policies toward military voters | KansasCity.com With both a tradition of helping service members get their votes counted as well as a tight turnaround between its primary and general elections this year, Washington state officials decided to move up its primary date a few weeks, from late August to…
Editorials: How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game? | Matt Bai/ NYTimes.com “A hundred million dollars is nothing,” the venture capitalist Andy Rappaport told me back in the summer of 2004. This was at a moment when wealthy liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis were looking to influence national politics by financing…
National: Senate Republicans block Democratic bill to require disclosure of large political donors | The Washington Post Senate Republicans blocked Democratic-backed legislation requiring organizations pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign ads to disclose their top donors and the amounts they spend. GOP opposition prevented Democrats from getting the 60 votes needed to bring what…
National: States Constrict Voting Rights In Advance of November Elections | The International A nationwide discourse over numerous proposed and enacted changes to state voting laws has reached a new level of fervor in the United States. State legislative sessions in 2011 and 2012 have resulted in 180 different bills that restrict some aspect of…
National: Texas Voter ID trial: closing arguments | Dallas Morning News A 3-judge panel will now decide whether to let Texas implement its controversial voter ID law. In closing arguments at federal court, a lawyer for the state, John Hughes, insisted that even if non-white Texans lack an acceptable photo ID under the law, the “ultimate…
Editorials: Texas’s Road To Victory in Its Decades-Long Fight Against Voting Rights | The Nation Earlier this week, Attorney General Eric Holder declared in his address to the NAACP national convention in Houston what many voting rights advocates had been saying for months: that the photo voter ID law passed in Texas is a poll…
National: Debate intensifies over state election laws | USAToday.com Four months away from a presidential election still considered a tossup, new battles are brewing over state election laws. A federal court in Washington began hearing arguments this week on whether a voter ID law in Texas discriminates against Hispanic voters. Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a…
Editorials: Has SCOTUS OK’d campaign dirty tricks? | Richard L. Hasen/Politico.com An obscure procedural order issued the day after the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care law got lost in the saturated media coverage of the health ruling and the palace intrigue over whether Chief Justice John Roberts switched his vote…
National: Texas case puts voter ID laws to test | The Washington Post Voter ID laws face a high-profile test this week as the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC hears arguments about Texas’ controversial new regulations. The case pits Texas against Attorney General Eric Holder, who has earned the ire of Republicans across the country…
National: Texas to test 1965 voting rights law in U.S. court | Reuters The Voting Rights Act – a cherished safeguard for minority voters since 1965 – has been under siege for two years and this week faces one of its toughest test on an apparent path to the U.S. Supreme Court. Twenty-five hours of argument,…
National: Book review: Broken Ballots | ZDNet UK Few people — the security expert Rebecca Mercuri being the notable exception — thought much about the mechanics of voting before the Bush-versus-Gore presidential election in 2000. A few weeks of watching diligent poll workers holding up ballots to look for hanging chads changed all that. The…
Editorials: A Crack in the GOP’s Support for Voter-ID Laws | The American Prospect There’s little question what the political calculus behind voter-ID laws is. Advocates argue that the laws, which require government photo identification to vote, are necessary to prevent voter fraud—despite there being virtually no evidence that such fraud is a problem. In practice,…
National: Will ID laws lower college student vote? | KansasCity.com It’s a group that can score respectably on the SAT, find its way to classes most days and survive most midterms. But, the young campus crowd is often new to independence and to record-keeping. So how will college students do at democracy? Tougher voter identification laws, some…
Blogs: Stealthy Super PACs Influenced Primaries Without Disclosing Donors | OpenSecrets The Spirit of Democracy America super PAC, which registered with the Federal Election Commission on May 14, has no website. Money, however, was not a problem. The super PAC reported spending more than $160,000 supporting Republican Rep. Paul Cook with a series of media buys during…
National: Pentagon Reverses Course on American Voters Living Abroad | NYTimes.com Responding to the vocal concerns of American expatriates, the Pentagon agency responsible for overseas voting has agreed not to enforce a requirement for voters requesting absentee ballots to state categorically that they either intend to stay abroad indefinitely or not. In a separate development, the…
Colorado: Officials answer election suit | Pueblo Chieftain Election officials in Chaffee County and five other counties contend a citizen group suing the officials is trying to create a nonexistent illusion of harm about access to public records. County Clerk and Recorder Joyce Reno and her counterparts in the other counties contend Citizen Center overstated the…
Blogs: Arizona Proof of Citizenship Requirement Struck Down | Brennan Center for Justice Yesterday was a big news day. We learned of the long-awaited health care decision and the historic contempt finding of Attorney General Eric Holder by the House of Representatives. But less attention was paid to the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate Justice Kennedy’s temporary…
National: U.S. Vote Foundation web tool makes absentee voting easier | electionlineWeekly With more and more people choosing alternative methods to casting their ballot than at a polling place on election day — the U.S. Election Assistance Commission estimated that 23.7 million voted absentee in 2008 — making sure voters have access to what they need to do so…
National: Tens of thousands of service members’ votes not counted | TheState.com Tens of thousands of military service members attempting to vote by absentee ballot in recent years haven’t had their votes counted because of various problems with the system, according to authorities that track voter participation. The Military Voter Protection Project, an organization founded by…
National: Montana Ruling Could Fuel Campaign to Amend Constitution | Roll Call The Supreme Court’s Monday ruling to strike Montana’s ban on corporate campaign spending opens a new chapter in the political money wars, fueling an improbable but increasingly vocal movement to amend the Constitution. “This Supreme Court ruling could be a watershed in terms of…