District of Columbia: Primary election date change proposal appears to be dead | Washington Post

The city’s top elected officials held high hopes that next year’s primary election might be moved from its current date of April 1, via legislation introduced in April by D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and subsequently endorsed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). But with at least three of five members of the council’s Government Operations Committee currently opposing the change, it looks as though next year’s primary day will remain April Fools’. Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), the panel’s chairman and a co-introducer of the bill, confirmed that the measure has insufficient support on his panel. He said Monday that if he can’t get two additional votes by Friday, he won’t move the bill.

District of Columbia: Homeless residents organize for D.C. special election | Washington Post

It’s unclear just how many D.C. residents will vote in Tuesday’s traditionally low-turnout special election. Will more vote this time than in the last citywide special election, in 2011, when 46,967 voted — a 10.3 percent turnout? What we know is that of the 2,894 residents who cast ballots during early voting this year, scores were homeless. They were organized by Shelter, Housing and Respectful Change and the Washington Interfaith Network, which held a rally April 13 at a downtown homeless shelter, after which about 80 homeless residents voted.

District of Columbia: Elections Board says it lacks funds to improve on questionable track record | Washington Examiner

The District Board of Elections Chairwoman Deborah Nichols accused the mayor's office Tuesday of "nickel-and-diming the electorate" by underfunding next month's special election by more than $200,000 of its requested budget. The city has allocated $832,788 for the April 23 special election, which features a seven-person contest for an at-large D.C. Council seat and referendum that would give the city budget autonomy. The Board of Elections said it requested $1,046,800. Election officials said they needed money to ensure that election facilities and other expenses get paid. Additionally, further funding could be used to publicize the special election to improve voter turnout or to improve pay for election workers.

District of Columbia: Norton Introduces Another D.C. Statehood Bill | NBC4

D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton once again introduced legislation to Congress that would make D.C. the country’s 51st state. This isn’t the first time she has introduced such a bill and likely won’t be her last. The New Columbia Admissions Act would give the State of New Columbia two voting senators and a voting member of the House of Representatives. The bill stipulates that the state would not have jurisdiction over federal buildings and territory within its borders.

District of Columbia: Obama Motorcade Plates to Show Support for DC Voting Rights | ABC News

The motorcade for President Obama’s Inaugural Parade on Monday will feature a shout-out to Washington, D.C., voting rights advocates. D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh’s office confirmed to ABC News that Obama plans to equip his limos with license plates reading “Taxation Without Representation,” a reference to D.C.’s lack of a proxy in the House of Representatives and the Senate. “President Obama has lived in the District now for four years, and has seen first-hand how patently unfair it is for working families in D.C. to work hard, raise children and pay taxes, without having a vote in Congress,” White House spokesman Keith Maley said in a statement.

District of Columbia: Elections board approves budget autonomy referendum | Washington Times

The D.C. Board of Elections on Tuesday rejected arguments from the city’s top lawyer and will let voters decide this spring if they want to divorce the city’s local budget from the spending process on Capitol Hill — a long-sought goal known as “budget autonomy.” The board’s decision came a day after D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan reluctantly implored the board to be “courageous” and to deny a proposed charter referendum from the ballot, even if it would be a politically unpopular stance. He said the measure is legally unsound and could create a backlash from members of Congress.

District of Columbia: D.C.’s online absentee ballot request form was broken | Washington Post

A little more than three weeks remain before the deadline for D.C. residents to request absentee ballots for the Nov. 6 election. But those in need are currently unable to download an absentee application from the Board of Elections Web site. The online absentee function gives users an error when they try to display a personalized application form: “This URL is not valid. Please try again.” A resident who contacted me said the function has been down “for some days.” The alternative is hauling oneself down the board’s offices at One Judiciary Square downtown.

District of Columbia: It’s just the D.C. Board of Elections now | The Washington Post

A name that has graced the city political scene for four decades is on its way to the dustbin of history: The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics is now officially the D.C. Board of Elections. The change follows enactment of the city’s new ethics law; that established the new Board of Ethics and Government Accountability to handle the matters encompassed under the “ethics” portion of the BOEE name, which dates back to the earliest days of home rule. Legally speaking, the BOEE became the BOE in late January, when the ethics bill became law. But only in the past few weeks has the board — busy earlier with a primary and special election — moved to publicly change its name.

District of Columbia: D.C. elections officials condemn O’Keefe voting ploy | The Washington Post

Elections officials in the District are condemning conservative activist James O’Keefe as a “prankster” for his latest hidden-camera ploy, in which he sent an associate inside a D.C. polling place to demonstrate the need for “voter ID” laws by showing he could vote as the U.S. attorney general. In a statement, the Board of Elections and Ethics said the O’Keefe associate was “misrepresenting his identity” by walking into Spring Valley’s Precinct 9 on Tuesday and asking a poll worker if Eric Holder appeared on the rolls. But a representative of O’Keefe’s Project Veritas said no laws were broken in the incident. The attorney general is indeed registered to vote in the precinct, and the poll worker invited the man to sign the poll book and proceed to vote. At that point, the man inquired about providing ID and was told it was not necessary before he left. The board said that the Holder incident is one of “multiple incidents” that took place last Tuesday that it continues to investigate. O’Keefe teased other hidden-camera episodes in the Holder video.

District of Columbia: James O’Keefe tries to defend voter ID laws by filming D.C. election workers | The Washington Post

Conservative activist James O’Keefe’s latest project aims to lampoon the mostly Democratic opposition to “voter ID” laws, and does so by focusing hidden cameras on last week’s D.C. primary elections. In the first of several promised clips, an O’Keefe associate tries to see if he can vote as Eric H. Holder, attorney general of the United States and longtime Spring Valley resident. Why Holder? Under his leadership, the Justice Department has objected to laws requiring voters to present identification in states subject to preclearance under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. People like O’Keefe think voter ID laws are a common sense way to prevent voter fraud; people like Holder say they address a problem that doesn’t exist, and the laws would give officials new pretext to keep legitimate voters from casting ballots.

District of Columbia: Hackers Elect Futurama’s Bender to the Washington DC School Board | PCWorld

Electronic voting has earned a pretty bad reputation for being insecure and completely unreliable. Well, get ready to add another entry to e-voting's list of woes. One Bender Bending Rodríguez was elected to the 2010 school board in Washington DC. A team of hackers from the University of Michigan got Bender elected as a write-in candidate who stole every vote from the real candidates. Bender, of course, is a cartoon character from the TV series Futurama. This was not some nefarious attack from a group of rogue hackers: The DC school board actually dared hackers to crack its new Web-based absentee voting system four days ahead of the real election. University of Michigan professor Alexander Halderman, along with two graduate students, did the deed within a few hours.

District of Columbia: House Backs D.C. Special Elections Bill | Roll Call

The House backed legislation this evening that would shorten the window between a vacancy in a local office and when a special election may be held to fill it. The bill passed on a voice vote. “Today [is a] small change to everyone except to the people of the District of Columbia, who consistently have to live under a rule that costs the voters and the residents of the District of Columbia ... enormous additional dollars,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which oversees D.C. affairs. This is the second time Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) has pursued such legislation, which would apply to unexpected D.C. Council, mayoral and attorney general vacancies.

District of Columbia: D.C. Voting Rights: Should Local Corruption Be Used To Justify City’s Disenfranchisement? | Huffington Post

It's a common argument used in the case against greater voting rights or statehood for the District of Columbia: Why should the residents of the nation's capital be given full and equal voting representation in Congress when its local officials have been shown to be corrupt? The situation involving D.C. Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5), who resigned last week before pleading guilty to federal charges that he stole more than $350,000 from the city and filed false tax returns, certainly doesn't help the D.C. voting rights cause.

The most recent corruption spectacle is particularly ill-timed. A delegation of D.C. officials will soon be heading to New Hampshire to press the cause of the "Last Colony" before state legislators in Concord, who could pass a resolution calling for greater voting rights for the residents of the nation's capital.

As the Examiner reported this weekend, Councilmember David Catania (I-At-Large) is particularly angry with the current state of affairs in the D.C. government, which, beyond the Thomas drama, involves ongoing federal inquires into allegations of campaign corruption by Mayor Vincent Gray (D) and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown (D).

District of Columbia: Occupy DC Hunger Strike: Adrian Parsons Plans To Starve For D.C. Voting Rights | HuffungtonPost

Adrian Parsons, still wearing the blue bracelet from his arrest Sunday for defending Occupy DC's barn from Park Police, is sitting at Saxby's coffee shop just north of McPherson Square on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. He's eating an almond cheese danish. For now, Parsons, who has been living in Occupy DC's downtown D.C. encampment for more than two months, is eating as many cheese danish as he wants -- and pasta and anything else he's in the mood for. But on Thursday at noon -- "That's a tentative time," he says -- the tall and already quite skinny performance artist begins a hunger strike for D.C. voting rights that could go on for a long time. "I'm eating a lot of ice cream," he says.

Parsons and three others -- the hunger strike is not an Occupy DC action, but the would-be strikers are all occupiers -- will be asking for three things as a condition of ending their strike: D.C. budget autonomy, legislative autonomy and voting rights. Currently, the city's budget must be approved by Congress and the president, and its legislation must be reviewed by Congress. The District has no representation in the Senate and only nonvoting representation in the House.

District of Columbia: Cheh battling to open all precincts for special election | Freeman Klopott | DC | Washington Examiner

Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh wants to keep all 143 of the District’s voting precincts open for the special election to elect an at-large council member scheduled for April, and she’s asked the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics to dig deep on cost-saving opportunities.

Like the rest of city government, the elections board is under pressure to find way to cut costs as the District scrambles to reduce spending in the face of declining revenue. Earlier this month, the board of elections raised the possibility of opening just 16 voting centers as a way of saving about $200,000 for the special election to fill the seat vacated by Kwame Brown when he was sworn in as council chairman. Residents could cast ballots at any of the 16 centers regardless of where they live, and some studies have shown that voter participation goes up as a result.

via Cheh battling to open all precincts for special election | Freeman Klopott | DC | Washington Examiner.