Editorials: A new era: our elections now will be decided by hackers and leaked data | Steven Hill/The Guardian

A new and disturbing factor emerged during this presidential election, and one that may change elections forever: democracies are now at the mercy of hacking and surveillance technology – and those who control it. WikiLeaks and a network of anonymous hackers have become a major influence, turning the rituals of democracy into sleaze-fests for the tabloids and the sensationalist press. And foreign governments have a hand, too – allegedly Russia, in the case of the US election. Technology has advanced rapidly from election to election, becoming more powerful and ubiquitous. Skilled hackers have the ability to access and release private conversations, communications and information, whether from two hours ago or 20 years ago. And now in the US, that technology has played the role of kingmaker: WikiLeaks’ firepower was directed only at one of the presidential candidates, and the topic of missing emails was controversially revived by the FBI nine days before the election. Hillary Clinton blamed that intervention as one reason she lost the election. Both set a troubling precedent, but this emerging “leakocracy” is not just a threat to the US.

Editorials: Pueblo County Election problems | The Pueblo Chieftain

Last week, we were highly critical of Pueblo County Clerk and Recorder Gilbert “Bo” Ortiz and his elections staff, blaming the significant delays in vote counting on poor preparation, specifically a poor decision to purchase software inadequate to the task of counting Pueblo’s numerous ballot styles. It appears we were a bit premature. As it turns out, there were all sorts of factors leading up to the election vote count problems. As reported in Wednesday’s Chieftain, state election officials essentially said Ortiz and his team had no way of knowing that the computer system would bog down on the morning of Election Day. They said they had approved the number of ballots, the way issues were presented on them, and the purchase of the Dominion Express System by the county. Significant tests — more than actually required — were conducted prior to the election, and there were no indications that a disaster lie ahead.

Editorials: I’m Blind And I Voted. Here’s What Went Wrong | Ross Doerr/WBUR

The good news is that voting, as an American tradition, is alive and well. The bad news is that the disenfranchisement of people with disabilities — also a tradition in this country — is, too. I experienced it firsthand last Tuesday in Augusta, Maine, when I attempted to exercise my constitutional right to vote. I am a disability rights attorney who happens to be blind. Neither blindness nor accessible voting systems are new to me: I have been blind since childhood, and I was a driving force in the implementation of the accessible voting system component of the Help America Vote Act in Maine and New Hampshire. On Tuesday, when I went to vote, the problems were immediate: It took two people from the city clerk’s office a half hour to get the accessible voting machine working. Once it was ostensibly functioning, it would not accept my selections on the first try — or the second, third or fourth. In fact, not until my fifth attempt. Did nondisabled voters need to wrestle their paper ballots into compliance like this? Roughly 35 minutes after I had begun voting, my ballot was complete — or so I thought.

Editorials: Did Russia Install Donald Trump As the Next U.S. President? | Caroline Baylon/Newsweek

From Iran to Chile, covert CIA-backed operations were responsible for installing leaders friendly to the U.S. in countries around the world in an attempt to gain supremacy over the then-Soviet Union during the Cold War. Russia seems to have taken a page from the U.S. playbook and one upped it, as it may have significantly contributed to the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. The U.S. intelligence community has publicly accused the Russian government of being behind the hacking and leaking of emails involving Hillary Clinton’s election campaign by cyber espionage groups Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear on WikiLeaks and other sites this summer. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, issued a joint statement with Department of Homeland Security on October 7 declaring that they were “confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of emails” and that “these thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has been vocal in his support of Trump, calling him the “absolute leader in the presidential race” in a December 2015 news conference. Many of Trump’s positions—including his expressions of admiration for Putin and his July 2016 comments that he “would be looking at” recognizing Crimea as Russian territory and lifting sanctions—have curried the favor of the Russian leader.

Editorials: American Elections Will Be Hacked | Bruce Schneier/The New York Times

It’s over. The voting went smoothly. As of the time of writing, there are no serious fraud allegations, nor credible evidence that anyone hacked the voting rolls or voting machines. And most important, the results are not in doubt. While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain. As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens. Electronic voting machines can be hacked, and those machines that do not include a paper ballot that can verify each voter’s choice can be hacked undetectably. Voting rolls are also vulnerable; they are all computerized databases whose entries can be deleted or changed to sow chaos on Election Day.

Editorials: The Voters Abandoned by the Court | The New York Times

On Tuesday, for the first time in more than 50 years, Americans went to the polls to elect a president without a fully functioning Voting Rights Act — thanks to an insidious decision by the Supreme Court in 2013. Consider what has been happening in North Carolina, a battleground state with a history of racial discrimination in voting. Republican lawmakers and officials have gone to remarkable lengths to drive down turnout among black voters, who disproportionately favor Democrats. Among other things, they cut early voting hours and Sunday voting, and closed polling places in minority communities, despite significant public opposition. Even after a federal appeals court struck down the state’s outrageous voter-suppression law in July, saying that it targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision,” officials were scheming to work around it. On Monday, the state’s Republican Party issued a news release boasting that cutbacks in early voting hours reduced black turnout by 8.5 percent below 2012 levels, even as the number of white early voters increased by 22.5 percent.

Editorials: Republican war on voting rights may have helped Trump win. | Mark Joseph Stern/Slate

Donald Trump clinched the presidency by securing victories in two critical swing states: Wisconsin and North Carolina. In Wisconsin, Trump won by about 3 percentage points; in North Carolina, 4. It is, of course, impossible to know what factors contributed to Trump’s victories in these states. But it is certainly worth noting that each engaged in extensive and carefully coordinated voter suppression in the years preceding the election. In Wisconsin, the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a series of “reforms” designed to suppress the votes of minorities and college students. The Legislature slashed early voting, especially in minority communities, and passed draconian new voter ID requirements that effectively disenfranchised many underprivileged black voters. One federal judge found that the Legislature had explicitly targeted certain black people on the basis of race and attempted to suppress their votes. But an appeals court pushed back against several district court rulings softening the law, leaving much of it in place for the 2016 election. As a result, many people were unable to obtain necessary identification documents and cast ballots in Wisconsin this year.

Editorials: Donald’s trumped-up Nevada lawsuit is a fitting end to a hateful campaign. | Richard Hasen/Slate

Donald Trump’s campaign filed a complaint on Tuesday alleging that election officials in Nevada broke the law by allowing up to 300 people to vote who were not in line at closing time on Friday at Cardenas market, a Latino-oriented restaurant in Clark County serving as a temporary early polling place. His campaign also made similar charges about a few other locations. Trump was trying to use this complaint to stop ballots cast there from being counted. This seems likely to be a ploy to try to deprive Hillary Clinton of having Nevada declared for her Tuesday night in the event of a close race with her ahead. Judge Gloria Sturman denied the campaign any preliminary relief to sequester ballots or get information on poll workers, but the suit may continue. It will take a while to sort out everything, but my initial impression is that—even if it is true that people were allowed to vote late on the Friday night before Election Day at a handful of locations—Trump’s claim is weak on the law. The suit also misunderstands the point of early voting and the lack of harm done when early voting times are extended.

Editorials: What an election law expert worries about on election day | Richard Hasen/Los Angeles Times

For those of us who follow elections and election law professionally, election day itself is pretty uneventful—unless of course you work for a campaign. There often are reports of “flipped votes” for one candidate or another thanks to a miscalibrated machine, problems of long lines here or there and various little hiccups, but generally nothing major. This time around, though, I am more nervous than usual. Here are the three things I am most worried about, from least to most concerning. Bureaucratic shenanigans. In recent years, Republican legislatures have passed a slew of laws making it harder to register and vote, especially if you’re poor, a person of color or a student (all populations likely to vote Democratic). In response, Democrats and voting rights groups have sued, claiming the laws violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act. Although federal courts in some states, such as Wisconsin and Texas, have imposed interim remedies to assist those who, for example, do not have one of the narrow forms of photographic identification required to cast a ballot, reports from the early voting period suggest that misinformation is widespread. (That’s often because recalcitrant state governments are unwilling to clarify requirements or to fully and fairly implement court orders.)

Editorials: The Supreme Court Ruled That Voting Restrictions Were a Bygone Problem. Early Voting Results Suggest Otherwise. | Emily Bazelon/The New York Times

Tomorrow, and the early voting leading up to it, mark the first presidential election since the Supreme Court clipped the protective wings of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, speaking for a conservative majority of five, Chief Justice John Roberts effectively eliminated the safeguards created by a provision of the law called Section 5, saying that Congress could no longer require states and counties with a history of racial discrimination to get the approval of the Department of Justice before changing local voting rules and practices. Roberts said things had “changed dramatically” since the 1960s, and these jurisdictions, which are mostly in the South, didn’t need oversight from the D.O.J. anymore. They could be trusted to treat minority voters fairly on their own. As evidence of change, Roberts pointed to the end of the literacy test and other methods of barring voter registration, which included the poll tax. But his conservative majority didn’t account for the hassle tax — the new price that minority voters disproportionately pay. In North Carolina over the weekend, people stood in line for hours in counties with large black and student populations. In a study of 381 counties covered by Section 5, about half the total number, the Leadership Conference Education Fund found 868 fewer places to vote than existed in 2012.

Editorials: Peace of Mind for a Tumultuous Election: Paper Trails and Risk-Limiting Audits | Arlene Ash and Mary Batcher/Huffington Post

With increasingly heated allegations of “rigged elections,” things have probably not gotten better since a September 29 poll concluded that “more than 15 million voters may stay home on Election Day” over concerns about cyber-security. Equally problematic would be doubts about who won following November 8. A vibrant democracy requires trusted elections. Paper validation of ballots cast and meaningful audits of those ballots are important - and neglected - tools for bolstering trust. As statisticians working in healthcare and business, we frequently help researchers, patients, and business executives think about the probability and severity of potential risks. Based on the news coverage it receives, you might think that the problem of people who are not entitled to vote showing up at polling places is rampant. It is not. A comprehensive study of all American elections between 2000 and 2014 identified only 31 possible cases out of a billion votes cast. That is, only 0.000003 percent of votes might have been due to the kind of fraud that Voter ID laws could possibly prevent! In contrast, electoral malpractice, intentional or not - including confusing ballot designs, computer security breaches and malfunctions, long lines, partisan administration, misleading information about where and how to vote, poorly maintained voting lists, and overly aggressive voter list purges - plague every American election.

Editorials: Maryland voting audit falls short | Philip B. Stark & Poorvi L. Vora/Baltimore Sun

At the Board of Public Works Oct. 19th meeting, members passed without discussion a proposal by the State Board of Elections to pay Clear Ballot Group Inc. $275,000 for an "independent and automated solution to verify [the] accuracy" of the state's election results. Seems reasonable, right? Especially now that the term "rigged" frequently precedes "election" in this year's campaign rhetoric. The only problem is it won't work. We have some experience to back this judgment: Between us, we have helped audit about 20 contests in several states and designed auditable voting systems. Methods developed by one of us are in laws in two states. It's great that Maryland voters get to vote on paper ballots this year; paper ballots that voters can check are the best evidence of "the will of the people." Maryland's ballots will be scanned and then counted electronically. As required by hard-won state legislation passed in 2007, the paper ballots will be stored securely as durable evidence of what voters wanted.

Editorials: Trump campaign promises not to intimidate voters on Election Day. That’s huge. | Richard Hasen/Slate

On Friday morning, a federal district court will hear arguments in a dispute between the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee over whether the RNC, the Trump campaign, and its allies are violating a long-standing consent decree barring the RNC from engaging in intimidation of minority voters at the polls. It’s not the only case being heard on an emergency basis this week: Democrats have filed suit against Donald Trump, Republican state parties, and Trump ally Roger Stone in the battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In the Nevada suit, Stone has been ordered to explain at a separate Friday hearing what his questionable “Stop the Steal” organization is planning for Election Day. But regardless of how these hearings go Friday, the lawsuits have already borne fruit by getting the campaign on the record with its plans and promises not to intimidate voters. In an important development on Thursday afternoon, the Trump campaign in response to the lawsuits sent an email to Nevada campaign workers describing for them what constitutes illegal harassment and what constitutes good behavior. By getting Trump on the record promising not to harass voters with its “ballot security” activities, the Democrats have significantly lessened the chances of Trump-driven voter intimidation on Election Day.

Editorials: The Voter Fraud Lie We Can’t Shake | Dale Ho/The New York Times

Early voting is underway, and according to Donald J. Trump, so is voter fraud. Almost daily, he proclaims that “large-scale voter fraud” is happening and that the election is “rigged.” Politicians across the spectrum have criticized this nonsense as divorced from reality, deleterious to our democracy and unprecedented in our elections. It’s good to see such a strong, bipartisan pushback, but the critics are wrong on that last point. Thinly supported allegations of electoral malfeasance have been deployed throughout American history, often by those who want to restrict the vote. In the Jim Crow South, discriminatory devices from poll taxes to all-white primaries were justified as a means of fraud prevention. In 1902, Texas adopted a poll tax. Its champions argued in The Dallas Morning News that the tax would prevent fraud and protect against “corrupt methods at the polls.” Their reasoning? If casting a vote is free, then poor people will sell their votes “for a trifle.” … In itself, there is nothing wrong with poll monitoring. States often allow certified observers to watch polls. Trained poll monitors can help prevent mishaps on Election Day, like ensuring that eligible voters don’t slip through the cracks because of poll-worker error. But undisciplined poll watching can degenerate into voter intimidation.

Editorials: Yes, broken voter ID laws will affect the 2016 election | Herman Schwartz/Reuters

"We have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us," Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said during a recent rally in Pennsylvania, " Everybody knows what I'm talking about." As the poll numbers tighten, both nationally and in key battleground states, Donald Trump has ratcheted up his claims that without voter ID laws, Democrats will flood the polls with people ready to "vote 15 times." These claims are typical of what many Republicans have been asserting for more than a decade to justify severely restrictive voter ID laws now in effect across the nation. As first enacted, these laws restricted the number of acceptable photo IDs to a handful - usually no more than seven or eight - and deliberately excluded IDs most readily available to low-income and young people through public assistance agencies, colleges and public or private employees. Texas and Wisconsin even excluded military veteran IDs, but relented after veterans groups protested.

Editorials: Ballot Measures Need to Be Written in Plain Language | Whitney Quesenbery & Dana Chisnell/New York Times

The biggest complaint we hear in our research with voters is that ballot questions seem written to purposely confuse them. They're not wrong. Weighing in at 75 words, the Florida amendment on solar energy that has so upset voters this year doesn’t look too bad. But it took us almost an hour to work out what the amendment actually says — and we are experts used to reading legal texts. What about voters like the 43 percent of American adults who read at basic or below basic levels? Ballot measures that are written in plain language are much more respectful of voters. But there are other issues at play: First, readers have to find the information in advance to inform their opinion on ballot measures. For many voters, the first time they see a ballot question is when they are faced with it in the voting booth.

Editorials: The world may change; but D.C. voting rights remain the same | Timothy Cooper & John Capozzi/The Hill

The last time D.C. residents went to the polls to cast a vote for or against a D.C. statehood referendum, 52 American diplomats and citizens were being held hostage in Tehran by the Ayatollah Khomeini; the AIDS-causing virus hadn’t yet been discovered, let alone controlled; and Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms had only been launched the previous year. The Cold War between East and West was at full pitch. Now China has become the world’s second largest economy and the Berlin Wall is no more. Even Eastern Europe’s democratic color revolutions have come and gone. South Africa has long since dismantled apartheid. In other words, most everything in the world appears to have changed since 1980; that is, except, of course, the non-voting status of District of Columbia residents. Our sorry political status remains conspicuously the same. We enjoy no right to equal congressional representation; nor, for that matter, are we permitted by Congress full local autonomy to run our daily affairs as only we see fit.

Editorials: Without a modernized Voting Rights Act, there’s no such thing as an honest election | Jim Sensenbrenner/The Washington Post

On Tuesday, Americans will elect a president without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The last time that happened they were deciding between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater — more than a half-century ago. In 2013, the Supreme Court declared that voter discrimination was no longer a problem and effectively struck down the only portion of the act designed to stop discrimination before it affects an election. The court let stand the provisions of the act that allow lawsuits after a discriminatory law takes effect, but unfortunately, the United States has learned the hard way that there is no satisfactory cure for discrimination after an election occurs.

Editorials: How to restore faith in American elections | Justin Talbot-Zorn/The Hill

There's good news: most Americans still have at least some confidence in our elections. But there's also troubling news: Americans' faith appears to be falling, and only four in ten now have “strong confidence” that their votes will be counted as cast. Among Republicans, the proportion has fallen to around a third. While Donald Trump has been working hard to propagate perceptions of voter fraud, there’s still scant evidence of such threats. A recent academic study found just 31 credible allegations of in-person voter fraud out of more than a one billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014. According to polling, more Americans are concerned about the susceptibility of our voting system to hacking than to other kinds of manipulation. Regardless of where you stand on questions of election integrity, we all need to reckon with a simple fact: Even just perceptions of rigging are corrosive to our democracy. We have a serious obligation to restore faith in our electoral system. The question is how to do so. … For now, there's one option that's both cheap and effective: returning to paper ballots.

Editorials: Better hope the election’s not close | Michael McDonald/USA Today

The revival of Hillary Clinton’s email woes and a trend toward tightening polls are giving Donald Trump new hope of winning the White House. Could this election go into overtime? If the race is exceptionally close, we can’t rule out an overtime period that, in this environment, could rip the country apart. It is absolutely fair for any candidate to exercise his rights to ask for a recount if the election is particularly close. We should have all confidence that the election results are accurate. When the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount he had requested in 2000, Al Gore graciously accepted the results. “For the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession,” he said. However, Gore’s conciliatory tone is not Trump’s rhetoric of “rigged” elections, which he regularly uses to whip up his supporters. He talks of people casting fraudulent votes and stationing observers to “watch” the election. Trump questions the process itself, describing how election officials count ballots: “Oh here’s a ballot. Here’s another ballot, throw it away. Oh, here’s one I like. We’ll keep that one.” This is where a real nightmare for America’s democracy could unfold. What if the initial tally on election night favors Trump but as more votes are counted in the following days, the results shift in Clinton’s favor? It does not take too much imagination to predict Trump would be outraged, with an emphasis on rage.

Editorials: Trump rhetoric fosters Iowa voter fraud | Des Moines Register

Iowans can vote early in this year’s general election, but they cannot vote often. Unless they want to spend some time in jail and perhaps lose the right to vote entirely. Terri Lynn Rote of Des Moines was arrested last week on suspicion of casting two ballots for the upcoming election: one at the Polk County Election Office and one at a satellite voting location. The 55-year-old woman was booked Thursday on a first-degree charge of election misconduct and released Friday after posting bond. Iowa Code Chapter 39A rightly contains unforgiving language about offenses with the potential to affect the election process, including voting or attempting to vote more than once in the same election. Such wrongdoing should “be vigorously prosecuted and strong punishment meted out through the imposition of felony sanctions which, as a consequence, remove the voting rights of the offender.” Iowans will be watching to see if Rote, a registered Republican who supports Donald Trump for president, is vigorously prosecuted. Because she certainly should be. Rote is not an elderly person with dementia who forgot she had already voted. It appears she knew exactly what she was doing. She told Iowa Public Radio she feared her first ballot for Trump would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton. So she went and cast another one. “The polls are rigged,” she said.

Editorials: Why Trump’s rhetoric about immigrant voters is dangerous | Chris Kromm/Facing South

On Oct. 17, at a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Donald Trump made one of his many provocative claims about the integrity of U.S. elections, especially in battleground states crucial to his election chances. "It's possible that non-citizen voters were responsible for Obama's 2008 victory in North Carolina," Trump told the crowd in the packed convention center. "It could have provided his margin of victory." The charge was, in some ways, quintessential Trump, melding two central themes of his candidacy: the supposed danger posed by undocumented immigrants, and alleged "large scale voter fraud" that could tip the election against him. Trump's claim was quickly dismissed as a "pants on fire" distortion by Will Doran of PolitiFact North Carolina. But while it may have been easy for some to dismiss the allegation as Trump's latest truth-challenged exaggeration, the reality is that, at the state and federal level, such rhetoric has resulted in discriminatory policy that threatens immigrant citizens' voting rights. The study Trump was alluding to came from a guest editorial published in the Washington Post shortly before the November 2014 elections by two researchers from Old Dominion University. Drawing on self-reported data, the authors claimed that up to 6 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. voted in 2008, nearly 18,000 in North Carolina alone.

Editorials: Internet Voting: Not Ready for Prime Time | Association for Computing Machinery/Huffington Post

Yahoo, the DNC, Federal Reserve, Ashley Madison, US Office of Personnel Management, Google, Sony, Jeep, Charles Schwab, JP Morgan, Target, Symantec, Northrop-Grumman, the US State Department...

The above is a partial list of corporations and agencies that have been hacked in the past few years. Given the incredible computer security resources available to each of them, it is reasonable to expect that it is not a matter of “if” but of “when” any widely used Internet voting system will be hacked. This year 30 states plus Washington, DC are allowing overseas military and civilians to return their voted ballots over the Internet; Alaska allows any Alaskan to vote over the Internet. States typically implement Internet voting with the hope of increasing voter access, especially of military voters, or reducing electoral costs. But it is critical to consider the prospective impact of hacks on election outcomes before allowing voted ballots to be delivered over the Internet. A safer option for military voters with access to postal mail is provided by the 2009 MOVE Act, which requires the posting of blank ballots online at least 45 days in advance of an election. Overseas voters can download the blank ballot, print it, mark it, and then return the marked ballot via postal mail.

Editorials: Protecting your right to vote in Ohio this year | Cleveland Plain Dealer

This presidential election year, millions of Ohioans will be exercising -- and already are exercising, in the early-voting period -- their precious right to vote. But because of recent federal court decisions, it's more important than ever that Ohioans protect their franchise by taking extra steps to make sure their right to vote is not being illegally abridged and that their votes will be counted. One recent federal court ruling, for instance, determined that thousands of Ohioans were purged illegally from state voting rolls going back to 2011. How to protect these voters' rights to vote in the Nov. 8 election was not resolved until last week, when a federal judge ruled that certain voters absent from the voting rolls must be allowed to cast a provisional ballot. It's important that all Ohio voters now take affirmative steps first to find out if they fall in this category by checking their registration status online or at their county board of elections, and then, if they have been wrongly purged, to understand how they can cast a provisional ballot to make sure their voting rights aren't unlawfully denied.

Editorials: The Real Voting Problem in the 2016 Election | Zachary Roth/Politico

Donald Trump’s claims that the election will be “rigged” through voter fraud have become a centerpiece of his faltering campaign. There’s no evidence to support this incendiary charge, but the GOP candidate has been energetically spreading the notion that if Hillary Clinton wins, it will only be because thousands of illegal votes will be cast on Nov. 8. Polls now suggest that most Trump supporters fear the election could be stolen from their man. Trump is right that fairness is going to be a problem this year. He’s wrong about where the problem really lies. In fact, the real voting problem we face in 2016 is almost exactly the opposite of what Trump is complaining about: Officials in at least five states, including several key presidential battlegrounds, have been dragging their feet on obeying court orders to open up access to the polls. As a result, rather than an epidemic of illegal, fraudulent votes, the election is likely to see tens or even hundreds of thousands of people across the country deprived of their constitutional right to cast a ballot. The election wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. Over the summer and early fall, 2016 was shaping up as a landmark year for voting rights, as a string of federal court rulings struck down, blocked or loosened restrictive voting laws in key states across the country. In the three most significant decisions, North Carolina’s sweeping voting law was struck down, Texas’ voter ID law was significantly loosened, and a court required that Wisconsin promise to make voter IDs available on demand, seemingly blunting the impact of that state’s ID law. Voting rights supporters, who had fought for years against restrictions on who can register and when, breathed a cautious sigh of relief. But as Election Day approaches, what’s actually happening on the ground in those states reveals a troubling reality: Important as they are, court rulings can’t adequately protect voting rights if election officials simply don’t want to make things easy for voters.

Editorials: The good news on voting and democracy | Joshua A. Douglas/USA Today

All politics is local, as the saying goes, and the same is true of election law. Although the U.S. Constitution protects the right to vote, local laws can expand its scope and influence democratic representation. Voters across the country are making choices this fall that will not only affect state and local elections, they will also serve as the catalysts for nationwide reforms. Maine voters, for instance, will decide whether to adopt ranked choice voting, a system in which people select their first, second, and third choices for each office. This reform would make it easier for third parties to gain support and would provide a better sense of the electorate’s overall preferences. In Missouri, voters are considering whether to amend the state constitution to allow a photo ID requirement for voting. In 2006, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the prior voter ID law violated the state constitution, so to enact voter ID law in Missouri the voters must change the state constitution.

Editorials: It’s time to automate voter registration | The Washington Post

Judges in Virginia and Florida ordered officials to extend the time for people to register to vote because of unforeseen events. In Florida, it was a major hurricane that for days upended people’s lives; in Virginia, it was a crash of the state elections website. The decisions were eminently sensible and must be commended. But they also should raise the question of why in this day and age, this country largely remains wedded to an archaic system of voter registration that discourages — even prevents — people from voting. “No right is more precious than having a voice in our democracy,” wrote Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida in ordering a six-day extension of voter registration in the wake of the massive disruption caused by Hurricane Matthew. “Hopefully, it is not lost on anyone that the right to have a voice is why this great country exists in the first place,” he said in a ruling that should shame Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R).

Editorials: Five reasons why you can count on Minnesota’s voting system | Mark Halvorson/Minneapolis Star Tribune

Rigged? Fraudulent? Excuse me, but as Donald Trump might interject: “Wrong!” In Minnesota, we can have confidence in our election outcomes. For the past 12 years, Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota (CEIMN), a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, has worked to ensure accurate, transparent and verifiable elections in Minnesota. As the founder of CEIMN, I helped organize seven statewide observations of Minnesota’s postelection audits and recounts. Here are five reasons you can be confident that the results of next month’s election will be accurate and verifiable.

1) Routine audits of voting machines: After each general election, audits are conducted in about 200 randomly selected precincts statewide. Ballots are counted by hand to check the accuracy of voting machines. These audits are public events, and anyone can attend. Malicious attempts to influence the election through voting equipment would be difficult because we use paper ballots and we audit them.

Editorials: We should all be voting on paper | Avi Green/Daily Record

Here is a frightening prospect: with four weeks to go before Election Day, some of America’s voting machines are not as secure as they could be. For years, the idea that hackers might mess with a U.S. election seemed more like the plot of a novel than a real possibility. As a result, election administrators have tried to save taxpayer money by using the same machines year after year, even after vulnerabilities with some voting machines were exposed. This year is different. Cyber attackers in Russia have targeted U.S. election systems, taking aim at the Democratic National Committee and voter registration databases of more than 20 states. The risk is small, but real. Let’s start with good news: you can trust the national outcome. Most Americans vote on paper ballots. Those ballots are mainly counted by efficient, accurate optical scan voting machines, and, in most states, they are also audited — hand-counted in public in a small number of randomly selected precincts — to make sure that the optical scan machines are working right. If the election is close enough to merit a recount, or if a random audit shows an anomaly, more precincts can be counted by hand.

Editorials: Why ‘rigging’ resonates | Nathaniel Persily/New York Daily News

Choosing to release us from the three weeks of “suspense” he promoted in the previous night’s debate, Donald Trump on Thursday promised, with characteristic graciousness, to accept the results of the election… if he wins. Rarely has an ellipsis been more consequential. Even at a time when all the constraining norms of American politics appear to be disintegrating before us, the assumption of a peaceful transfer of power — in which the election’s loser concedes to the winner — would have seemed a foregone conclusion. No longer. Of course, if Trump were merely suggesting that he reserves the right to litigate if the election results are uncertain or too close to call, then he was merely stating the obvious. But never before has a candidate sought to keep the nation in “suspense” as to whether he would concede. To do so, by its very nature, casts doubt on the democracy. The reality TV show that this campaign has become could do without yet another dangerous cliffhanger.