The Voting News Daily

The Voting News Daily: NIST: Internet voting not yet feasible, Americans Elect Shows Voters May Be Ready For A Third Party Candidate, But Not A Third Party

National: NIST: Internet voting not yet feasible | FierceGovernmentIT

Internet voting is not yet feasible, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology have concluded. “Malware on voters’ personal computers poses a serious threat that could compromise the secrecy or integrity of voters’ ballots,” said Belinda Collins, senior advisor for voting standards within NIST’s information technology laboratory, in an May 18 statement. “And, the United States currently lacks an infrastructure for secure electronic voter authentication,” she added. Collins released the statement in response to an inquiry from Common Cause, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit active in campaign finance and election reform. Read More

Blogs: Americans Elect Shows Voters May Be Ready For A Third Party Candidate, But Not A Third Party | TPM

“None of the above” will now be the only real option for voters frustrated with the tired choice between two parties now that Americans Elect, the well-funded nonpartisan organization that sought to nominate a legitimate third-party candidate for president in 2012, has folded. (Only Nevada has an actual “none of the above” option on the ballot.) It seems that the inability to create a movement in this vein was less about the sentiment — polls show Americans are aren’t fans of either party specifically or the political process generally — but it was lacking a key ingredient: leadership. “You can’t fill a political vacuum with a concept,” Lee Miringoff, assistant professor of political science and director the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, told TPM. “The context is there, and the climate is right, but you need someone you can look at, a person, a candidate. Politics has become much more about personal qualities of individuals.” Read More

The Voting News Daily: 22 states join campaign finance fight, In Defense of Voting Rights

National: 22 states join campaign finance fight | Associated Press

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are backing Montana in its fight to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision from being used to strike down state laws restricting corporate campaign spending. The states led by New York are asking the high court to preserve Montana’s state-level regulations on corporate political expenditures, according to a copy of a brief written by New York’s attorney general’s office and obtained by The Associated Press. The brief will be publicly released Monday. The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse a state court’s decision to uphold the Montana law. Virginia-based American Tradition Partnership is asking the nation’s high court to rule without a hearing because the group says the state law conflicts directly with the Citizens United decision that removed the federal ban on corporate campaign spending. The Supreme Court has blocked the Montana law until it can look at the case. Read More

Editorials: In Defense of Voting Rights | NYTimes.com

Racial discrimination in voting is “one of the gravest evils that Congress can seek to redress,” Judge David Tatel wrote in a crucial ruling on Friday upholding the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. In extending the law in 2006, Congress did just that, after reviewing racial bias in the nine states and parts of several others that have deep histories of discrimination. These “covered jurisdictions” had long been required by Section 5 of the law to get permission from the Justice Department or a federal court before making any changes to their voting rules. Congress found that discriminatory practices were still persistent and pervasive in those jurisdictions, and that the preclearance requirement remained necessary. In his 2-to-1 majority opinion for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Judge Tatel explained that Congress’s judgment, supported by a legislative record of more than 15,000 pages and 22 hearings, “deserves judicial deference” because of the weight of the evidence. The ruling upheld a forceful decision by a federal district judge that reached the same conclusion in 2011. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Appeals court upholds key voting rights provision, Can Montana brief end Citizens United?

National: Appeals court upholds key voting rights provision | Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, rejecting an Alabama county’s challenge to the landmark civil rights law. The provision requires state, county and local governments with a history of discrimination to obtain advance approval from the Justice Department, or from a federal court in Washington, for any changes to election procedures. It now applies to all or parts of 16 states. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that Congress developed extensive evidence of continuing racial discrimination just six years ago and reached a reasonable conclusion when it reauthorized section 5 of the law at that time. The appellate ruling could clear the way for the case to be appealed to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice John Roberts suggested in a 2009 opinion that the court’s conservative majority might be receptive to a challenge to section 5. Read More

National: Can Montana brief end Citizens United? | Politico.com

Montana’s attorney general is due to file a brief Friday in the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to uphold the state’s Corrupt Practices Act. This 1906 law prohibits corporations from making expenditures on behalf of candidates in Montana elections. The Supreme Court’s response could have repercussions far beyond Montana — the case may well determine how much states can regulate money in politics after Citizens United. The state high court cited Montana’s long history of corruption, when corporations often spent unlimited sums to steal elections, as the reason to narrow Citizens United and uphold the law. The Supreme Court should heed the Montana attorney general’s argument. More important, this case could offer the high court a viable means to revisit its Citizens United decision. This 2010 ruling, extended by lower federal courts, has spawned the super PACs now threatening to bring Wild West corruption to federal elections. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Congressional Democrats Push Voter Empowerment Act, Americans Elect Ends Online Primary After No Candidates Qualify To Run

National: Congressional Democrats Push Voter Empowerment Act | Roll Call

House Democrats on Thursday unveiled new voting rights legislation designed to modernize voter registration while cracking down on practices that could discourage certain populations from voting. The Voter Empowerment Act appears to be a direct counter to a growing movement within the GOP at the state and national level to require voters to present a photo ID when voting. “The ability to vote should be easy, accessible and simple. Yet there are practices and laws in place that make it harder to vote today than it was even one year ago. … We should be moving toward a more inclusive democracy, not one that locks people out,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), one of the bill’s sponsors and a 1960s civil rights icon. Read More

National: Americans Elect Ends Online Primary After No Candidates Qualify To Run | ABC News

Americans Elect, the group that aimed to nominate a third presidential candidate through an online primary, ended its nomination process today after no prospective candidates met their minimum requirements. To run in its online primary a candidate had to get 10,000 “clicks” of support (1,000 in at least 10 states). Buddy Roemer was the closest to reaching that goal, but he got less than 6,300 “supporters. As of this week, no candidate achieved the national support threshold required to enter the Americans Elect Online Convention in June,” the group said in a statement. “The primary process for the Americans Elect nomination has come to an end.” Read More

The Voting News Daily: The Third Party Fantasy, Is Campaign Disclosure Heading Back to the Supreme Court?

Editorials: The Third Party Fantasy | NYTimes.com

“Third parties are like bees,” the intellectual historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1955. “Once they have stung, they die.” It’s an aphorism that aptly describes the anti-slavery and anti-immigrant parties of the mid-nineteenth century, the Populists and Progressives who ushered out the Gilded Age, as well as more recent third-party standard bearers, from George Wallace to Ross Perot. All of these movements and figures influenced American politics dramatically, before fading away and leaving the basic two-party duopoly intact. Of late, though, our potential third parties have been skipping the stinging part and going straight to the dying. This was true of Unity ’08, the much-ballyhooed attempt by former Democratic and Republican politicos to put up an independent alternative to Barack Obama and John McCain. Despite enjoying a wave of free publicity and boasting Sam Waterston of “Law & Order” as their spokesman, the Unityers never even came close to conjuring up a plausible candidate or platform, and their movement fizzled out amid attempts to entice an unwilling Michael Bloomberg into the lists. Read More

Editorials: Is Campaign Disclosure Heading Back to the Supreme Court? – Don’t expect to see Karl Rove’s Rolodex just yet | Rick Hasen/Slate Magazine

The news this week that a federal appeals court has refused to block a lower court ruling requiring the disclosure of more funders of campaign ads has campaign finance reformers tasting their first victory in a long time. “It’s the first major breakthrough in overcoming the massive amounts of secret contributions that are flowing into federal elections,” Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 told the Los Angeles Times. But don’t expect to see Karl Rove’s Rolodex just yet. Crossroads GPS and other groups have found that raising money from donors who don’t want to be disclosed is good for business, and they’ve got a few ways to keep the unlimited money poured into campaigns secret yet. And before you get too excited it’s worth considering that the Supreme Court could well help them keep their secrets in 2012, even though the court has so far been a big supporter of disclosure laws.

Since 1974, federal campaign finance law has required the disclosure of campaign donors and spenders. Opponents of disclosure have long argued that at least some disclosure is unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and association, because compelling someone to reveal the names of those funding political speech will chill vigorous participation in politics. As I’ve explained, the Supreme Court rejected that constitutional challenge in the 1976 campaign finance case, Buckley v. Valeo. Confronted in that instance with a law that required disclosure of even very small contributions, the court held that the disclosure laws were justified by three important government interests: First, disclosure laws can prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption. Second, disclosure laws provide valuable information to voters. (A busy public relies on disclosure information more than ever.) Third, disclosure laws help enforce other campaign finance laws, like the ban on foreign money in elections.

The Voting News Daily: Election decision may force disclosure of secret donors, 5 Voting Laws That Make People Angry

National: Election decision may force disclosure of secret donors | latimes.com

Advocacy groups spending millions of dollars to influence the 2012 election now face the prospect of having to reveal their secret donors, after a federal appellate court panel refused to block a lower-court order requiring the disclosure. In a 2-to-1 decision issued Monday evening, a U.S. Court of Appeals panel here declined to stay a ruling by a federal judge requiring tax-exempt organizations that run election-related television ads to disclose their donors. The panel’s decision was a significant victory for campaign finance reform advocates who have been fighting against the deluge of money — much of it from undisclosed donors — that has flooded the political landscape in the wake of several Supreme Court decisions, including the 2010 Citizens United case. Read More

Editorials: 5 Voting Laws That Make People Angry | Huffington Post

A wave of Republican-sponsored laws restricting who can and cannot vote may mean that fewer Democrats, especially those who are low-income or minorities, vote in the 2012 presidential election. Since the beginning of 2011, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and West Virginia have passed, or have plans to pass, restrictive voting laws. More than 70 percent of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency will come from these states, the Brennan Center reported in March. Republican lawmakers argue that the laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but fewer than 100 people have been charged with voter fraud in the past five years, according to the Washington Post. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton condemned the laws for disenfranchising Democrats, describing them as “the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time.There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today,” he said. Read More

National: Campaign Finance Disclosure Decision Means Rove, Others Could Suddenly Have To Disclose Donors | Huffington Post

One of the most consequential campaign finance loopholes affecting the 2012 race — the one allowing big-money donors to secretly funnel millions into campaign ads — is now closed, after an appellate court ruling on Monday. In April, a district court judge struck down a Federal Election Commission regulation that allowed donors to certain nonprofit groups — including those created by Karl Rove and the Koch brothers — to evade normal disclosure requirements. And on Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit turned down a request to stay that ruling on a 2 to 1 vote. “This case represents the first major breakthrough in the effort to restore for the public the disclosure of contributors who are secretly providing massive amounts to influence federal elections,” said Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer, one of the lawyers who filed the original lawsuit that led to the April decision, in a statement. 

The Voting News Daily: Protecting your vote, Americans Don’t Elect to Use Americans Elect

Editorials: Protecting your vote | Ron Rivest/Boston.com

Sometimes, a few votes make a huge difference. Just ask Rick Santorum. In January, Rick Santorum won the Iowa caucuses, but, because of vote counting and tabulation errors, Mitt Romney was declared the winner. In the two weeks before the error became clear, Romney’s campaign gained momentum, while Santorum’s withered. Unfortunately, the same problem – or worse – could easily occur in Massachusetts. This year, voters will choose the president, and control of the US Senate may come down to the race shaping up between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. Read More

National: Americans Don’t Elect to Use Americans Elect; 3rd Party Hits Wall? | TechPresident

As David Karpf wrote here ten days ago, the Americans Elect third-party experiment of 2012 looks like it has hit a dead end. No declared candidate is anywhere close to hitting the group’s requirement of earning 10,000 supporters across at least ten states, with at least 1,000 from each state. Former Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer the closest at just 5,840. He has less than 600 from California. As Jonathan Tilove points out in his story in the Times-Picayune, that means Roemer has more followers on Twitter than he has supporters who actually want him on AE’s presidential ballot line. Americans Elect had an ambitious plan to hold several rounds of online voting to winnow down what its leaders had hoped would be a competitive field of national candidates, and spent a reported $35 million circulating ballot petitions and building the organizational and online infrastructure to attract those candidates to its fold. It also attracted a fair amount of media coverage for its efforts, and encomiums from the likes of Thomas Friedman, John Avlon and Lawrence Lessig. But it never caught on, in part for the reasons I outlined almost a year ago: the lack of transparency about its finances made potential supporters distrustful (even spawning a watchdog blog called AETransparency), and the evident lack of public interest in its founders’ evident desire to find a “centrist” candidate. It’s possible that AE could have evolved differently, but that would have required that the vehicle be more genuinely controlled by its supporters, and that was an option that AE’s leaders clearly didn’t want to allow. Read More

The Voting News Daily: 2012 election drowning in secret money, How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United

National: 2012 election drowning in secret money | UPI.com The 2012 elections are awash in secret money, with donors accountable to no one, while the national media sleeps and few voters seem to care. If money has an impact in U.S. elections, the race for the White House and other high offices may be determined by faceless donors pulling the strings from the shadows. Not exactly an image promoted by the Founding Fathers. In January 2010’s Citizens United vs. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling effectively ended the restrictions on political contributions from the general funds of corporations and unions for independent electioneering. The U.S. appeals court in Washington then used Citizens United to rule in SpeechNow.org vs. FEC that limits on individual contributions to groups making independent expenditures are unconstitutional. Read More

Editorials: Money Unlimited: How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United | Jeffrey Toobin/The New Yorker When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections? Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., summoned Theodore B. Olson, the lawyer for Citizens United, to the podium. Roberts’s voice bears a flat-vowelled trace of his origins, in Indiana. Unlike his predecessor, William Rehnquist, Roberts rarely shows irritation or frustration on the bench. A well-mannered Midwesterner, he invariably lets one of his colleagues ask the first questions. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again, After Fiery Speech, Voting Rights Amendment Is Pulled

National: Electronic voting 2012: Here we go again | Marketplace

Elections come and go and many issues change, but one seems to remain: electronic voting. Two years ago, four years ago, eight years ago — the story’s been about the same: the machines don’t seem ready for primetime, but we’re using them anyway. This week, the official verdict came back on some electronic vote-reading machines in the South Bronx that seemed a little fishy in the last congressional election, 2010. Larry Norden is with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and says sometimes the voting machine “was essentially overheating and because it was overheating, it was reading a lot of phantom votes — a vote that the voter didn’t actually cast, but that the machine saw.” The upshot is that in some districts in the Bronx, it turns out more than a third of votes weren’t counted. Things could get really scary in a state that’s gone all electronic, like South Carolina. University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell is worried for 2012: “I’m not sure there’s any real change from four years ago to now.” Seriously? What’s taking so long? Read More

National: After Fiery Speech, Voting Rights Amendment Is Pulled | NYTimes.com

Sometimes during lengthy floor debates on bills, interesting things happen in the witching hours. Such was the case late Wednesday, when Representative John Lewis of Georgia pushed back with a fiery speech directed at an amendment offered by Representative Paul C. Broun of Georgia that would have barred the Justice Department from using money to enforce a part of the Voting Rights Act. At around 10 p.m., Mr. Lewis, a former civil rights leader, took to the podium to denounce the amendment, which sought to end financing for enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, designed to protect minority voters from being disenfranchised. Read More

The Voting News Daily: John Lewis objects, and Paul Broun backs away from attempt to gut Voting Rights Act, Americans Elect Near the End?

National: John Lewis objects, and Paul Broun backs away from attempt to gut Voting Rights Act | ajc.com

My AJC colleague Daniel Malloy in Washington sends this report of a confrontation between two Georgia members of Congress that you may not have heard about: Around 10 p.m. last night, as House debate over a contentious spending bill stretched on, Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens, approached with an amendment to end all funding for U.S. Department of Justice enforcement of Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. This is the provision that requires states like Georgia to submit new election laws – last year’s statewide redistricting, for instance — for federal approval to ensure against disenfranchisement of minorities. Broun argued that this is a hammer held over only a few select states, and noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has suggested that the law has outlived its usefulness. Read More

Editorials: Indie Block – Americans Elect Near the End? | TIME

When Americans elect announced last July that it was pouring millions into placing a third-party presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states, the political world snapped to attention. Barack Obama’s longtime political adviser David Axelrod revealed his concern by publicly criticizing the group, while pundits gushed. “Watch out,” declared New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote that Americans Elect might change politics the way the iPod changed music. So far, Americans Elect is looking more like the Zune than the iPod. The group canceled a May 8 online caucus after no candidate met the necessary criterion of 1,000 backers in each of 10 states. More voting scheduled for later this month may also be scratched; it’s possible that Americans Elect won’t nominate a single candidate. That might say more about this well-intentioned effort’s shortcomings than it does about the durability of our two-party system. Founded by a group of political centrists, including former investment banker Peter Ackerman, Americans Elect had a promising plan: “break gridlock” and challenge “special interests” by helping elect a President beholden to no party. It invited people to join online, nominate candidates and ultimately select one through Internet voting. (To be eligible, candidates needed credentials meeting the group’s somewhat subjective criteria.) Read More

Blogs: A/B Testing: Could, Would It Work in Elections? | Election Academy

Every now and then, a really interesting piece rolls through my Twitter feed; earlier this week, it was a Wired piece about the growing use of “A/B testing” on the web:

Welcome, guinea pigs. Because if you’ve spent any time using the web today — and if you’re reading this, that’s a safe bet — you’ve most likely already been an unwitting subject in what’s called an A/B test. It’s the practice of performing real-time experiments on a site’s live traffic, showing different content and formatting to different users and observing which performs better.

The article notes that A/B testing (explained in further detail here) has been around for a little more than a decade, most notably by giants like Google and Amazon, who use the procedure to test and tweak virtually every aspect of their online experience.

The Voting News Daily: Simple steps could catch technical failures in vote counting, Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box

National: Simple steps could catch technical failures in vote counting | Palm Beach Post

Carolyn Crnich likes to be second-guessed: The registrar of voters in Humboldt County, Calif., scans every ballot and makes the election results available, online or on disk, so that anyone, anywhere, can count them. Community activists do just that. The result: 100 percent audits of the supervisor’s results, a sharp contrast to Florida, which limits vote counts to a small number of ballots in a single race. “I don’t like saying to my constituents, ‘Hey, just trust me,’ ” Crnich said. “Now, I don’t have to. Count them yourself, and if you find anything out of the ordinary, I want to know.” In 2008, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project did find something out of the ordinary: 197 ballots dropped by machines. That led to an examination of the elections software used in Humboldt, about 200 miles north of San Francisco. So many problems were found, the system was decertified for use in California. It continues counting ballots in two Florida counties without incident, although a state Division of Elections advisory urged counties to get an upgrade. But elections supervisors shouldn’t get too comfortable with any system, experts say. Read More

Blogs: Overvotes: Phantoms of the Ballot Box | ReformNY

The New York State Board of Elections, New York City Boards of Elections, and voting machine manufacturer ES&S each released reports yesterday detailing the results of an investigation into the abnormally high numbers of lost votes attributed to “overvoting” in the South Bronx in 2010. The upshot is that a machine defect led to “phantom votes” on at least one machine used in the 2010 election, resulting in some candidates receiving more votes than they should have, and the choices of many more voters being voided when the machines detected both actual and phantom votes in the same contest. Now that the reports on how this happened are out, election officials must make sure that what happened in the Bronx in 2010 does not happen again in the future. Voting machines record overvotes when they detect more than one candidate selected for a contest. In such cases, no vote is recorded for any candidate in the overvoted contest, regardless of the voter’s actual intent. The Brennan Center first uncovered a high number of overvotes in the South Bronx while reviewing documents produced for discovery in a litigation it brought against the State and City. It published its findings in Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes; the report notes that in some election districts up to 40% of the votes cast did not count. Read More

The Voting News Daily: The FEC: A Toothless Watchdog for a $6 Billion Election, Election Regulations and Voter Disengagement

National: The FEC: A Toothless Watchdog for a $6 Billion Election | Businessweek

Worried about election fraud in 2012? Consider this: The Federal Election Commission has six members, and five of them are serving on borrowed time. Cynthia Bauerly’s and Matthew Petersen’s terms expired in 2011, Steven Walther’s and Donald McGahn’s in 2009. Then there’s Ellen Weintraub: She was supposed to be replaced five years ago. The FEC, which enforces the nation’s campaign finance laws, has one of the most important jobs in the federal government. This year the watchdog will oversee an election season in which political parties and a collection of outside groups are expected to lay out $6 billion. Yet, the lack of fresh blood on the commission has rendered it nearly powerless. President George W. Bush nominated five of the panel’s members in 2008; since then, the commissioners have deadlocked 34 times along party lines over whether to investigate campaigns for violating election laws. On 25 of those occasions, its own lawyer recommended they do so. Read More

Editorials: Election Regulations and Voter Disengagement | Sundeep Iyer/Huffington Post

The super PACs and nonprofit groups dominating the 2012 election filed their latest financial disclosures with the Federal Election Commission. The reports showed that these outside groups — some of which do not disclose any information about their donors — are poised to continue playing an outsize role in this year’s elections. Karl Rove’s Crossroads groups, for instance, raised about as much in the first quarter of 2012 ($49 million) as they did during all of 2011. This breakneck fundraising pace will only accelerate as November approaches. But this fundraising is not just affecting the ads we see on TV. It may also be having a troubling influence on voter attitudes toward our electoral process. According to a national survey conducted on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, 41 percent of Americans already say their vote does not matter because big donors to super PACs have so much more influence than they do. Alarmingly, nearly one in four Americans say they are less likely to vote because of the influence big donors have over elected officials. This is nothing less than a crisis of confidence in the power of average citizens to effect change through the electoral process. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Jury is out on states’ voter ID laws, Americans Elect scraps virtual caucus for lack of early candidate support

National: Jury is out on states’ voter ID laws | The Post & Courier/Politico

Some see South Carolina’s voter ID law and other states’ efforts to tighten early voting as less of an attempt to curb voter fraud than some of the earliest volleys in the 2012 presidential race. At least that is how the laws were painted by Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), as well as NAACP members and union leaders who spoke before more than 100 people at a Tuesday evening rally in Charleston, S.C. Clyburn said he has visited Florida four times in the past six weeks to work on anti-voter-suppression efforts with the Democratic National Congressional Committee. He noted that national GOP strategist Karl Rove has forecast that President Barack Obama could win South Carolina this fall, and Republicans are fighting to keep this state — and other swing states — in the GOP column. “They have put in these draconian rules and regulations and laws because they have calculated that if they can suppress the vote by 1 percent in nine different states, we lose the national election in November,” Clyburn said. “That’s their calculation.” Most experts put the Palmetto State solidly in the Republican column. Read More

National: Americans Elect scraps virtual caucus for lack of early candidate support | The Post and Courier

A group clearing the path for an independent White House bid canceled the first phase of its search for a bipartisan ticket Tuesday because declared and draft candidates aren’t mustering enough preliminary support. Americans Elect scrapped a virtual caucus that had been planned for next week. Another round of voting set for May 15 also is in jeopardy; a third is to be held on May 22. Candidates must meet a certain threshold of support to be eligible for the caucuses. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Conservative group seeks FEC approval to keep donors secret, Caucus System Cracks Revealed During 2012 GOP Primary Season

National: Conservative group seeks FEC approval to keep donors secret | chicagotribune.com

A conservative group that plans to run a barrage of television ads attacking President Obama has asked the Federal Election Commission if it can avoid disclosing its donors by not naming him explicitly in its commercials. American Future Fund, a tax-exempt free-market advocacy group based in Iowa, wants to air a series of spots hammering Obama’s energy and healthcare policies within 30 days of upcoming primary elections and 60 days of the November election, the group’s lawyers wrote to the FEC last month. Read More

Blogs: Caucus System Cracks Revealed During 2012 GOP Primary Season | governing.com

When it comes to running elections and counting votes, states and counties have come a long way over the past dozen years. Nothing demonstrates their progress better than watching other people try to do the same job. During the Republican presidential primary campaign this year, several states were embarrassed by snafus with their caucuses, which are run by political parties rather than by public officials. In Iowa, an eight-vote election-night win for Mitt Romney was later converted into a 34-vote victory for Rick Santorum, with party officials admitting that they didn’t, in fact, know the actual number. (The state party chair resigned.) Counting was slow enough in Nevada to raise doubts during the delay, while in Maine, the GOP decided to declare Romney the statewide winner before some counties had even held their caucuses. “It’s been stunning to watch,” says Cathy Cox, a former Georgia secretary of state. “Caucus voting looks like the Wild West of voting.” Read More

Arizona: Bill limiting local election dates goes to Governor | Arizona Daily Star

Insisting they know better, state lawmakers voted Monday to limit local elections to just two days every two years. HB 2826 says, with only a few exceptions, cities, counties, school districts and other government entities could have their elections only at the same time as the state. That means the same days as the statewide primary, which usually occurs in late August, and the general election in November. The 32-28 House vote came over the objections of lawmakers from both parties who questioned why the state should overrule what local communities have decided. “Local rule is still the best rule,” complained Rep. Cecil Ash, R-Mesa. It also presages a legal fight. Read More

Connecticut: House Debates Controversial Same-Day Voter Registration | Hartford Courant

After more than five hours of debate, the state House of Representatives voted Monday night for the controversial Election Day voter registration bill that has a long history in the state legislature. By a vote of 83-59, the House voted allow the same-day registration, despite complaints by opponents about potential fraud. Nine conservative Democrats broke with their party and voted against the bill. Only one Republican, Livvy Floren of Greenwich, voted in favor. Lawmakers have been clashing for more than a decade as the issue has been blocked by a veto by then-Gov. John G. Rowland in 2003 and a federal court ruling in 2005 in Connecticut that rejected same-day registration.

The Voting News Daily: Between Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs, Voter ID Costs Considered

Editorials: Between Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs | NYTimes.com

Since the beginning of 2011, lawmakers around the country abruptly enacted laws to curb voting rights and tighten registration rules. These measures are fiercely controversial. But lately the debate has taken a surprising turn. Suppressive voting laws have met resistance at the polls and in the courts. This surprisingly emphatic twist is good for our democracy. If the restriction of voting rights can be blocked or blunted, it will give us an opportunity to move forward with bipartisan reforms to our ramshackle registration system. Consider the recent backlash.

In Maine, voters reversed a new law, passed in June 2011, that ended same-day registration. Now voters will be able to register on Election Day in 2012. In Ohio, more than 300,000 citizens signed petitions, enough to temporarily suspend the state’s new law that curbed early voting and force a statewide referendum in November. Now nervous Republicans are close to a deal with Democrats that would repeal the law and restore early voting for the three days before the election. Florida, meanwhile, imposed onerous penalties and paperwork burdens on volunteers who sign up voters. Helping your neighbors participate in our democracy is not something we should restrict, which is why the Brennan Center is leading the fight to challenge this law. We represent the League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote, and other civic groups that have shut down registration drives. The league has won similar lawsuits twice before and now awaits a judge’s ruling, which is expected soon. Even on the contentious issue of requiring government-issued photo identification to vote, the strictest new laws have slammed into legal barriers. Read More

Blogs: Voter ID Costs, Considered | The Thicket

What does it cost to implement a strict voter ID requirement?  Many legislators would like to know. So would NCSL. Because we get this question frequently, we looked into it last month. First, we created a webpage with links to many legislative fiscal notes that were attached to this year’s voter ID bills. We then called state and local election officials in states that are implementing new laws this year.  Last, we summed up what we had learned about voter ID costs in a short essay in Electionline Weekly. Here’s an excerpt from that document:

In 2012, cost estimates for voter ID laws range from “no fiscal impact” in Nebraska and Virginia to “unknown greater than $7,027,921” in Missouri for the first year of implementation. The variation can be explained in part by differences in the legislation—what IDs are accepted, and whether there is another mechanism, such as absentee voting, that won’t require an ID. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Citizens Dis-United: Justices May Take Another Look at Campaign Finance Case, Felon Voting Rights Fight – The Forgotten Front In The War On Voting

National: Citizens Dis-United: Justices May Take Another Look at Campaign Finance Case | ABA Journal

After Newt Gingrich became the victim of attack ads paid for by Mitt Romney’s $30 million “super PAC,” Gingrich struck back with his own. His Winning Our Future political action committee hauled in at least $10 million from a loyal casino multimillionaire. And, while observing the damage done by Republican super PACs, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign decided to use administration and campaign aides to raise his campaign’s own funds. These multimillion-dollar PACs were made possible byCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the controversial 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down parts of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, aka the McCain-Feingold Act, which placed limits on corporate campaign spending. Super PACs can accept unlimited corporate contributions and make unlimited expenditures for—or against—federal candidates like Gingrich and Obama. But while super PACs are enlivening the 2012 campaign, the Supreme Court may not yet be done with Citizens United. In late February it stayed a surprising Montana Supreme Court ruling that stunned election experts by ignoring Citizens United altogether and upholding the state’s ban on independent corporate spending in state elections. Read More

National: Felon Voting Rights Fight – The Forgotten Front In The War On Voting | TPM

State restrictions on early voting, voter ID laws and regulations on voter registration groups have been getting a lot of attention this year because of the impact they could have on the 2012 election. But there’s at least one voting issue that advocates say deserves more focus: the disenfranchisement of former felons. Nationwide, the approximately 5.3 million Americans with felonies (and, in several states, those with misdemeanor convictions) are kept away from the polls, according to the American Civil Liberties Unions (ACLU). The organization is sponsoring the Democracy Restoration Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), which would create a federal standard for restoring the voting rights of felons. The ACLU doesn’t have any pipe dreams about passing the law this year, but they’re holding out hope it will have a chance with a more favorable Congress. Read More

The Voting News Daily: FEC Disclosure Loophole Closes On Secret Donors As Court Won’t Stay Ruling, Ninth Circuit Rejects Effort to Apply HAVA to Local Recount

National: FEC Disclosure Loophole Closes On Secret Donors As Court Won’t Stay Ruling | Huffington Post

A court rulingrequiring non-disclosing political groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity — to disclose their donors is one step closer to going into effect after a district court refused to stay its ruling in the face of an appeal. On March 30, a district court ruled in Van Hollen v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) that a loophole in FEC rules that allowed certain independent group campaign efforts to keep private the names of donors was invalid and needed to be rewritten or reset to the original language. On Friday, the court not only refused to stay the ruling, as requested by two intervening groups that are appealing the case, the Center for Individual Freedom and the Hispanic Leadership Fund, but the court also found that its ruling invalidated the FEC loophole, which required it to be immediately closed, resetting to the original language in the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law, known officially as the Bi-Partisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). Read More

National: Ninth Circuit Rejects Effort to Apply Help America Vote Act to Local Recount | metnews.com

Federal law does not require states and localities to use a particular method of recounting ballots in elections for non-federal offices, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. The court affirmed a district judge’s ruling dismissing a suit by Martin Crowley against the state of Nevada and the Churchill County clerk. Crowley sought declaratory relief and damages after a recount of a 2006 election for justice of the peace, which he lost by 26 votes, failed to change the results. Crowley brought suit under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983 and Sec. 301 of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. HAVA was enacted in response to problems in Florida and elsewhere during the 2002 elections, and established standards for the conduct of federal elections and authorized payments to state and local governments to replace antiquated voting systems. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Voter ID’s new champion, Democracy Restoration Act Would Restore Voting Rights to Millions

National: Voter ID’s new champion | Salon.com

After a month of bitter protests and a wave of defections by its corporate members, last week the special-interest-sponsored legislation mill known as ALEC disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force. That’s the unit that crafted the controversial “stand your ground” laws and voter ID measures that ignited the national conversation about Trayvon Martin and minority voters’ access to polls. Liberal groups, like ThinkProgress, hailed the development as a “progressive victory.” But now, another scandal-plagued right-wing group is stepping in to fill the gap. The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative Washington think tank, has announced plans to launch a task force to take over ALEC’s work on election issues. “Part of the mission of the National Center is to find out where the conservative movement is weak and to insert ourselves in the process,” the group’s executive director, David Almasi, told Salon. “Our aim is to make sure ALEC’s excellent work continues.” Read More

Editorials: Democracy Restoration Act Would Restore Voting Rights to Millions | Huffington Post

Despite two centuries of a national history extending the right to vote to ever more Americans, state legislatures have recently passed a flurry of laws that make voting more difficult. Some require government-issued photo identification cards; others are obstructing early voting or restricting voter registration drives. It’s time for Congress to protect the rights citizens of a democracy hold most dear and create the opportunity for greater citizen participation. Members can begin by opening up the voter rolls to the four million Americans covered by the Democracy Restoration Act. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Americans hate super PACs. But will they vote against them?, NVRA vs. Voter ID

National: Americans hate super PACs. But will they vote against them? | The Washington Post

Look no further than the Utah Republican Party convention over the weekend. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) took a strong majority of the vote and nearly avoided having to go to a June primary with his opponent — a good showing considering the position Hatch was in last year — and he did it in large part by running against outsiders who had come to Utah to unseat him. By the end of the campaign, polling showed that 62 percent of convention delegates had an unfavorable opinion of FreedomWorks, the main conservative group seeking to unseat Hatch, and 39 percent said their feelings were “very unfavorable” toward the group. The group, which played a major role in unseating Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) at the 2010 convention, had become a pariah and, undoubtedly, something of a boon to Hatch. One local columnist even suggested the group’s name was a “dirty word” in the Beehive State. Read More

Blogs: National Voter Registration Act vs. Voter ID and Other Voter Access Challenges | Concurring Opinions

In the ongoing battle to improve access to elections and expand the electorate, civil rights groups have often used the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (and its amendments) as the preeminent weapon.  The most transformative legislation to come out of the civil rights movement, the VRA changed the complexion of this country’s elected bodies and increased access to political power for minorities through muscular remedies.  However, it is the NVRA (National Voter Registration Act), the VRA’s lesser known, younger cousin of sorts, that has been stealing headlines this week Sandwiched between the VRA and the more recent Help American Vote Act (HAVA)d passed in 2002, the 1993 NVRA is sometimes overlooked as a significant linchpin of voter access.  Indeed, the NVRA has played an important role in securing expanded registration opportunities for marginalized populations.  And, in the face of stringent voter ID laws that suppress voter turnout and shrink the electorate, both offensive strategies and defensive tools are needed.  The NVRA continues to prove that it can be effective on both fronts. Read More

The Voting News Daily: States Shouldn’t Tamper with Voting Rights Act, Romney super PAC’s $400K gift among mysterious donations this election cycle

Editorials: States Shouldn’t Tamper with Voting Rights Act | New America Media

Since the beginning of 2011, states across the country have passed new laws restricting the right to vote. From voter ID to curbs on early voting and registration drives, these controversial measures could make it harder for millions of Americans to vote this year, including a disproportionate number of minority, young, and elderly voters. The photo ID law passed by Texas, for example, could prevent hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from casting a ballot, including a disproportionate number of minorities, as the data shows. Voting rights advocates are fighting these laws in the courts, but in addition to these direct attacks on the franchise, opponents are now threatening a cornerstone of American civil rights law — the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Decades ago, our nation passed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to combat discrimination in voting. It has successfully protected voters against decades of discriminatory measures that had disenfranchised African Americans, Latinos, and many other Americans. The VRA was even reauthorized in 2006 with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress, and it was signed by President George W. Bush. Elected officials in both parties recognized the VRA is still needed because discrimination against minority voters continues to this day. For example, in recent years, the Justice Department forced Texas to stop discriminatory actions against voters at historically black colleges and universities. Read More

National: Romney super PAC’s $400K gift among mysterious donations this election cycle | The Washington Post

A once-mysterious $400,000 check written to a “super” political action committee supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign rekindled a nagging question this election season: Just how much disclosure is enough to satisfy transparency? The Florida husband and wife behind the contribution were identified Monday as the beneficiaries of an investment fund and are among Romney’s top Florida fundraisers. But up until then, the donation to the Restore Our Future super PAC — which reported the contribution from an unknown Florida firm called SeaSpray Partners LLC — left more questions than answers. Inquiries about the donation intensified over the weekend after a Florida man who owned a similarly named company in Palm Beach told news organizations he never donated to the pro-Romney group. It turned out that Restore Our Future listed the wrong address for the actual SeaSpray donor. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Why Online Voting Isn’t So Safe, A vote for universal registration

National: Why Online Voting Isn’t So Safe – FBI investigating student who hacked college election | Mobiledia

A California student tried to win a college government election by hacking into classmates’ accounts, which may lead to federal charges and increased privacy for not only colleges, but national and state elections as well. Matt Weaver, a junior, ran for student government president at California State San Marcos, located near San Diego, when school officials said he hacked into a computer and stole 700 voters’ passwords and identifications to alter the polling results. School police detained and released Weaver, but have yet charge him for the accusations, which include unlawful access to a computer, election fraud and identity theft. The FBI, which usually isn’t interested in the college student government results, is investigating Weaver’s hacking skills. School officials said they caught Weaver working on a school computer, and in possession of a device, used to steal passwords. … Federal authorities are also examining Weaver’s activities to decide if such hacking may interfere with state or national elections. Read More

Editorials: A vote for universal registration | The Washington Post

I recently visited Russia, where a mild-mannered historian from the city of Astrakhan, Oleg Shein, is on a hunger strike protesting a stolen mayoral election he believes he won. But as Russia starves for free and fair elections, Republicans across the United States are starving our democracy — and too few have noticed. And their furious assault on voting rights is no less destructive to democracy than the vote-rigging we deplore in Russia. Over the past year, Republican legislators in 34 states have proposed legislation that would drastically restrict voting for an estimated 5 million eligible voters. Seven states have passed laws requiring voters to show photo ID — which more than one in 10 Americans lacks — and dozens of others have eliminated early voting, disenfranchised ex-felons or limited the ability of civic organizations to register voters. The consequences are clear in Texas, for example, where you can now register to vote with a handgun license but not a college ID. Read More

Editorials: Overcoming Obstacles to Photo ID Laws | Robert M. Brandon/Huffington Post

This past week, the decision by the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) to shut down its Public Safety and Elections Task Force, the task force that refined and promoted strict photo ID legislation that has been popping up in state legislatures over the past two years, was a significant victory for voting rights advocates. However, the damage is already done. Strict voter photo ID laws will be in place in several states this election, potentially disenfranchising millions if they don’t get the ID they need to vote. While several voting rights groups are fighting to get these laws overturned in the courts, organizers and community groups on the ground are stepping up to make sure that voters will have the IDs they need to be able to vote. Already, in Tennessee and Wisconsin, community groups and statewide organizations have developed programs to identify voters that lack a photo ID and to help them get the ID they need to vote.

The Voting News Daily: Reports show hard-to-track donors dominate outside giving, New curbs on voter registration could hurt Obama

National: Reports show hard-to-track donors dominate outside giving | USAToday.com

Millions of dollars flowing to independent political groups dominating this year’s presidential and congressional contests have come from mystery and hard-to-find donors, newly filed campaign reports show. More than $8 out of every $10 collected during the first three months of this year by two conservative groups associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, for instance, went to a non-profit branch that does not have to reveal its donors. The two groups have surpassed the fundraising of the candidate their spending will help the most — Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney. FreedomWorks for America, a super PAC that has spent more than $700,000 working to oust veteran Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, relied on undisclosed money from its non-profit arm for nearly a third of its receipts this year, federal records show. Hatch, a six-term senator, now faces a June 26 primary after failing to win the support of at least 60% of delegates Saturday at Utah’s GOP convention. Read More

Editorials: New curbs on voter registration could hurt Obama | Reuters

New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year’s presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama’s re-election bid. Voting laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in a dozen states during the past year have sharply restricted voter-registration drives that typically target young, low-income, African-American and Hispanic voters – groups that have backed the Democratic president by wide margins. A further 16 states are considering bills that would end voter registration on election days, impose a range of limits on groups that register voters and make it more difficult for people to sign up, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. The new laws – many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls – could carve into Obama’s potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say. Read More

The Voting News Daily: R.N.C. Rejects Changes to Nominating Contests for 2016, Conservative Group Picks Up Voter ID Issue Where ALEC Left Off

National: R.N.C. Rejects Changes to Nominating Contests for 2016 | NYTimes.com

Members of the Republican National Committee considered — and rejected — changes to their presidential nominating process for 2016 after a contest this year that some members say was too long and drawn out. At a meeting here of the R.N.C.’s rules committee, members debated whether to abandon the proportional voting that gave Mitt Romney’s rivals the ability to try and accumulate delegates even as they failed to win the nominating contests. Sue Everhart, a committee member from Georgia, proposed the change, citing concerns about the length of the competition. She suggested changes that would have allowed states to hold winner-take-all contests in 2016, potentially bringing the contest to a close more quickly. Read More

National: Conservative Group Picks Up Voter ID Issue Where ALEC Left Off | TPM

Shortly after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) announced it was dropping voter identification laws from its agenda, another conservative group is stepping in to fill the void. The National Center for Public Policy Research announced this week it had formed a “Voter Identification Task Force” to continue ALEC’s “excellent work” in “promoting measures to enhance integrity in voting.” Describing itself as a “conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank,” the group was established in 1982. “The fact that ALEC is no longer going to be offering the services it did got us interested in doing something,” National Center for Public Policy Research executive director David Almasi told TPM. “We obviously can’t do everything ALEC did, but we can do something to make sure the issue doesn’t go away.” Read More

The Voting News Daily: Corporations Donate to Groups on Both Sides of Voter-ID Debate, Money Rules in Washington Politics

National: Corporations Donate to Groups on Both Sides of Voter-ID Debate | Businessweek

Companies giving at least $2 million to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation — nearly half of its reported 2010 donations — also backed an organization championing voter identification laws that caucus members say “suppress” minorities’ right to vote. The group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, lists 22 corporate and trade association members on its private enterprise board. Thirteen of those firms also contributed to the black caucus foundation in 2010, according to Internal Revenue Service records and the latest available data on the websites of both organizations. The dual support puts companies, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) (WMT), AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, in the position of financing both sides in a political dispute over state laws that the U.S. Justice Department said in some cases are biased against minority voters. “Corporations should be conscious of how their advocacy money is being spent by organizations that they contribute to,” said U.S. Representative Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat and a member of the black caucus. “This is a wakeup call for corporate interests to be more responsible for how they spend their money.” A spokeswoman for the black caucus foundation, Traci Hughes, didn’t respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment. Read More

Editorials: Money Rules in Washington Politics | NYTimes.com

There’s one key that always fits Washington’s locks: a big campaign check. President Obama boasts about the many small donors who propelled him to office, but it’s the biggest givers who find the White House doors smoothly swinging open. Mitt Romney has tried to appeal to those in the middle class, but they’re not invited to the retreats with those who give him $50,000. And, despite decades of money abuses and scandal, neither presidential candidate has shown any interest in reforming the system. As Mike McIntire and Michael Luo reported in The Times on Sunday, big donors to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party are far more likely to be welcomed at the White House than those who gave smaller gifts. Two-thirds of the president’s biggest fund-raisers in 2008 visited the White House at least once, as did three-fourths of those who gave $100,000 or more. Reinforcing the appearance that money is being traded for access, many donors made their contributions in close proximity to their visits. Joe Kiani, the chairman and chief executive of the Masimo Corporation, a medical device company, gave the maximum of $35,800 to the Obama Victory Fund, which benefits the president’s campaign and the Democratic Party, just as he was attending a series of meetings with White House officials. At the time, his industry was lobbying to repeal a tax on medical devices. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Voter ID Laws Take Center Stage at House Judiciary Hearing, ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID

National: Voter ID Laws Take Center Stage at House Judiciary Hearing | Main Justice

The controversial video showing a man almost fraudulently accepting a ballot as Attorney General Eric Holder got more airtime Wednesday at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the Justice Department’s voting rights enforcement track record. The video, made by conservative activist James O’Keefe, prompted some committee members to question the attorney general’s handling of voting cases. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he is “shocked the attorney general hasn’t offered a meaningful response to this.” On hand for the Republican-led House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution hearing was former Voting Section lawyerJ. Christian Adams, who has been a vocal critic of Holder since his dramatic departure from theJustice Department in 2010. Adams was critical of Holder’s decision to partially dismiss a voter intimidation civil lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and members — a racially charged case Adams helped initiate. But many veterans of the Civil Rights Division said the George W. Bush administration’s Voting Section took on a highly politicized agenda in choosing cases. Read More

National: ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID, ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws | The Nation

Pressured by watchdog groups, civil rights organizations and a growing national movement for accountable lawmaking, the American Legislative Exchange Council announced Tuesday that it was disbanding the task force that has been responsible for advancing controversial Voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” laws. ALEC, the shadowy corporate-funded proponent of so-called “model legislation” for passage by pliant state legislatures, announced that it would disband its “Public Safety and Elections” task force. The task force has been the prime vehicle for proposing and advancing what critics describe as voter-suppression and anti-democratic initiatives—not just restrictive Voter ID laws but also plans to limit the ability of citizens to petition for referendums and constitutional changes that favor workers and communities. The task force has also been the source of so-called “Castle Doctrine” and “Stand Your Ground” laws that limit the ability of police and prosecutors to pursue inquiries into shootings of unarmed individuals such as Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. The decision to disband the task force appears to get ALEC out of the business of promoting Voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” laws. That’s a dramatic turn of events, with significant implications for state-based struggles over voting rights an elections, as well as criminal justice policy. But it does not mean that ALEC will stop promoting one-size-fits-all “model legislation” at the state level. Read More

The Voting News Daily: “Corporate Personhood” Is Not the Problem, Billionaires fall in line behind Romney

Editorials: “Corporate Personhood” Is Not the Problem | Garret Epps/American Prospect

American politics is in trouble. A tsunami of unaccountable, untraceable political money is overwhelming the Republican race for the presidential nomination and threatens to do the same to the fall election. For many people, especially progressives, the culprit is easy to name: the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which swept away any limits on election-advocacy ads by corporations, unions, and “independent” political-action committees (PACs) and issue groups. Many progressives believe that Citizens United “made corporations people” and that a constitutional amendment restricting “corporate personhood” will cure this political ill. Citizens United is a bad decision. This obvious fact may even be dawning on the Court’s conservative majority, which is taking a surprisingly leisurely look at American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock, in which the Montana Supreme Court directly challenged Citizens United, in essence telling the justices that they didn’t understand the first thing about politics. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, dissenters in Citizens United, have publicly stated that American Tradition may offer an opening to limit or even overturn the malign precedent. Read More

National: Billionaires fall in line behind Romney | Kenneth P. Vogel/Politico.com

The super PAC mega-donors who dragged out the GOP primary are getting behind the establishment, rather than continuing to back rogue candidates and causes — as some in the Republican Party feared. Donors like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess, who gave millions to anti-establishment presidential primary campaigns, are starting to fall in line — promising to support Mitt Romney and cutting checks to groups fighting for congressional Republicans. Casino mogul Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who donated more than $15 million to a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, gave $5 million to a super PAC linked to House Speaker John Boehner in February — according to newly released filings. And Adelson is hosting a fundraiser next Friday at one of his Las Vegas hotels for a Boehner umbrella group that works closely with the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, POLITICO has learned. Read More

The Voting News Daily: The People vs. the “Corporate People”, DISCLOSE Act Will Make Mandatory Disclosure Mandatory

Editorials: The People vs. the “Corporate People” | The Motley Fool

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, which helped further open the floodgates for corporate political spending in America, is about an ongoing and extremely contentious issue. Even before the ruling, there was plenty of reason to believe the deep-pocketed “corporate people” had far more influence on politics than regular people, and it was a bit amazing to think that corporate interests were given the go-ahead to exert even more power over political outcomes. In California, lawmakers recently put forth a resolution to overturn the unpopular decision, further asking Congress for a constitutional amendment to that end. Obviously, many regular people simply can’t accept the “corporate personhood” argument. The fact that corporate money is equated with “free speech” for these inhuman entities is pretty hard to swallow, too. Read More

Blogs: DISCLOSE Act Will Make Mandatory Disclosure Mandatory | Brennan Center for Justice

For decades, the one piece of campaign finance reform that Democrats and Republicans agreedabout was the importance of disclosure. For example, in 2000, House Republican Amo Houghton explained that “[w]e need disclosure by section 527 organizations, but when 501(c) groups intervene in the political process, they should disclose what they are doing and who is paying for it as well.” Lately, though, the GOP has changed its mind about political transparency, and the current debate over increased disclosure requirements for independent election spending has sharply divided on partisan lines. Given the huge volumes of money being spent to swing the 2012 election — with millions being spent by non-profit 501(c) groups with secret donors — it’s long past time for a new bipartisan consensus in favor of transparency. Democrats like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who recently introduced the DISCLOSE Act of 2012 in the Senate, are leading the way, but they need a new generation of Republican leaders to join them. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Voting News Daily 4/16: Public Access to Election Databases, Scytl vote count controversy

Blogs: Outside Looking In? Public Access to Election Databases | Election Academy The Indianapolis Star recently ran an editorial calling on the Marion County Election Board to give access to five “unslated” (i.e., non party endorsed) candidates running in the Hoosier State’s May 8 primary. Here’s the crux of the issue, from the editorial:

The unslated candidates point out that the database is a public record compiled at taxpayer expense. The state Public Access Counselor has informally sided with them, but has advised that the Marion County Election Board adopt a policy ordering the registration board to act.In a special meeting last week, County Clerk Beth White moved to do so. Neither of her fellow election board members offered a second. Patrick Dietrick and Mark Sullivan both are party appointees; but each said he needed to know more about the cost and complexity of releasing the data, as well as the privacy implications. Read More

Editorials: Digging deeper into the 2012 Scytl vote count controversy | Examiner.com

The news story being circulated around the alternative media concerning the Spanish company SCYTL and its contracts with 900 U.S. voter jurisdictions is a complicated one. And it is one that has tended to lend itself to broad generalizations and, in some cases, misinformation. Digging deeper into the vote tabulation controversy should help separate fact from fiction.  First, it is important to consider what has been discovered to be either fiction or at the very least unconfirmed speculation. Rumors, innuendo, and opinions that cannot be verified by the paper trail cannot be considered fact, although there may be some kernel of truth within them. A perfect example is the oft repeated claim that George Soros owns SCYTL. There is no evidence that the Leftwing billionaire has any financial stake in the company. SCYTL is funded by three sources, venture capital corporations that specialize in investing in privately owned companies. Those three sources are Balderton Capital, Nauta Capital, and Spinnaker SCR. SCYTL’s board of directors and information concerning its founder can be found at the corporate website. Information on the company’s management team can be found here. However, all attempts to discover who exactly owns SCYTL have come up empty. The company is listed in all official profiles as a “privately owned corporation,” but no information is given as to the identities of the private owners. Read More

The Voting News Daily: Five myths about super PACs, Has Super PAC Cash Corrupted TV Stations?

Editorials: Five myths about super PACs | Trevor Potter/The Washington Post

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United allowed them. Political candidates rely on them. And Stephen Colbert parodies them. But as a former chair of the Federal Election Commission and the lawyer behind Colbert’s super PAC — Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow — I find that most people don’t understand the role that these largely unaccountable organizations play in American politics. As the GOP primary race draws to a close, let’s take a look at some common misconceptions about groups powerful enough to evade traditional limits with a single bound.

1. Super PACs are transparent because they are required to report the names of donors.
Under federal law, political action committees must report the names of their donors. And under the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, corporations are permitted to spend money on political speech. So super PACs — allegedly independent political action committees that can collect unlimited cash — regularly disclose corporate contributors. But transparency can be a bit blurry at times. In 2011, the Mitt Romney-linked Restore our Future super PAC reported a $1 million contribution from “W Spann LLC.” Never heard of it? Neither had several enterprising reporters, who learned that its address in New York was the same as that of Bain Capital — Romney’s former firm. After the press demanded to know what Romney was hiding, a former Bain executive came forward to say that the donation was his. He had given it through a shell corporation that his lawyer had created for that purpose. How often does this happen? What if W Spann had been funded by another corporation or a foreign national — one whose lawyers had been a little less obvious when picking an address? Disclosure isn’t the same as transparency. Read More

Editorials: Has Super PAC Cash Corrupted TV Stations? | Jeffrey Rosen/The New Republic

When writing for the 5-4 majority that decided Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that caps on corporate campaign contributions were unnecessary because corporations would inevitably be held accountable for the money they spent on advertising. Disclosure requirements, Kennedy suggested, would provide the electorate with full “information about the sources of election-related spending.” But the type of full disclosure that Kennedy envisioned has been harder to achieve than he imagined. As expected, super PACs have been spending vast sums of money on political ads—with the share for television ads expected to rise to some $3 billion this year. But efforts by the government to regulate the transparency of those ads have met bitter resistance—resistance coming not only from corporate donors, but also from the local broadcast networks receiving the bulk of their money. This kind of intransigence from the super PACs is hardly a surprise. What is surprising is the intransigence from public broadcasters. The arguments against transparency offered by the networks show that, having experienced the windfall of advertising dollars that Citizens United unleashed, they have little interest in meeting their legal and ethical responsibility to serve the public interest.

The Voting News Daily: Ban on political ads on public TV struck down, No Election Assistance Commissioners? No problem

National: Ban on political ads on public TV struck down | Reuters

A divided U.S. appeals court struck down a federal ban on political advertising on public TV and radio stations, a decision that could open the public airwaves to a heavy dose of campaign ads leading up to the November elections. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the Federal Communications Commission violated the First Amendment’s free speech clause by blocking public broadcasters from running political and public issue ads. The court said the ban was too broad, and that lifting it would not threaten to undermine the educational nature of public broadcast stations. It upheld a ban on ads for goods and services on behalf of for-profit companies. “Public issue and political speech in particular is at the very core of the First Amendment’s protection,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote in the main opinion. “Public issue and political advertisements pose no threat of ‘commercialization’,” he continued. “Such advertisements do not encourage viewers to buy commercial goods and services. A ban on such advertising therefore cannot be narrowly tailored to serve the interest of preventing the ‘commercialization’ of broadcasting.” Read More

Editorials: No Election Assistance Commissioners? No problem. | The Washington Post

Wait, isn’t this an election year? The kind that will see voters stepping into booths and casting ballots, pulling levers and punching buttons? Bad timing then for the Election Assistance Commission to be completely leaderless. It’s the body that was created in the wake of the 2000 presidential election’s hanging-chad debacle and tasked with overseeing federal election standards. Not one of the body’s four commissioner seats is filled, and it looks like they’ll remain vacant for the foreseeable future. Adding to the leadership vacuum, the commission’s executive director left in November. Filling in has been general counsel Mark Robbins — although he has been nominated to another post and could leave the agency if confirmed. Read More