National: Trump’s term limits promise faces its own limits on Capitol Hill | The Washington Post

Of all the promises made on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to pass a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress might be the most daunting. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dismissed the idea out of hand the day after Trump’s stunning victory. A few days later, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) gave the proposal a tepid endorsement as he indicated it would be up to a House committee to consider Trump’s proposal. The reticence of both Republican leaders on the issue is not surprising, given their long tenures in Congress.

National: Jill Stein raises $6 million for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania | CS Monitor

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has raised almost $6 million to petition the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to recount votes in order to determine if hacking skewed the election away from the expected victor, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In all three states, President-elect Donald Trump won an upset victory with a tiny margin. If the trio had gone blue, as was expected, Mrs. Clinton would have earned enough electoral votes to secure the election. Proponents of the recount have compared it to instant replay in a sporting event, but critics say it undermines confidence in the electoral process. While Clinton supporters are holding on to their last hope to see her in the White House, the Obama administration has announced that the election was not hacked, by Russians or anyone else. “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect,” the Obama administration wrote in a statement. “Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.

National: Hillary Clinton’s Team to Join Wisconsin Recount Pushed by Jill Stein | The New York Times

Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results. In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

National: Jill Stein raises over $4.5m to request US election recounts in battleground states | The Guardian

Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is preparing to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states. Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a multimillion-dollar fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The drive has already raised more than $4.5m, which the campaign said would enable it to file for recounts in Wisconsin on Friday and Pennsylvania on Monday. The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states. Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified,” she said in a statement. “We deserve elections we can trust.” Stein’s move came amid growing calls for recounts or audits of the election results by groups of academics and activists concerned that foreign hackers may have interfered with election systems. The concerned groups have been urging Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee, to join their cause.

National: Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones) | WIRED

After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states. Dig into their argument, however, and it’s less alarmist than it might appear. If anything, it’s practical. There’s no evidence that the outcome of the presidential election was shifted by compromised voting machines. But a statistical audit of electronic voting results in key states as a routine safeguard—not just an emergency measure—would be a surprisingly simple way to ease serious, lingering doubts about America’s much-maligned electoral security. “Auditing ought to be a standard part of the election process,” says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT. “It ought to be a routine thing as much as a doctor washing his hands.” … While there’s no indication that polling places in the three states Halderman calls out were hacked, it’s well established that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to malware that could corrupt votes. Many US voting machines today scan a paper ballot that the voter fills out by hand, and many electronic systems produce a paper record as well. In fact, Halderman notes, about 70 percent of Americans live in voting districts that leave a paper trail. record exists that can be used to check its digital results. But all too often, no one ever does, he writes. “No state is planning to actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the computer-based outcome was wrong,” Halderman says.

National: Clinton Being Pushed to Seek Vote Recount in 3 States | Associated Press

A group of election lawyers and data experts has asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to call for a recount of the vote totals in three battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to ensure that a cyberattack was not committed to manipulate the totals. There is no evidence that the results were hacked or that electronic voting machines were compromised. The Clinton campaign on Wednesday did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it would petition for a recount before the three states’ fast-approaching deadlines to ask for one. President-elect Donald Trump won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by razor-thin margins and has a small lead in Michigan. All three states had been reliably Democratic in recent presidential elections. … Many election experts have called for routine post-election audits designed to boost public confidence in vote outcomes, by guarding against both tampering and natural vote-counting mistakes. These could involve spot-checks of the voting records and ballots, typically in randomly selected precincts, to make sure that votes were accurately recorded.

National: Clinton camp remains mum as 3-state recount urged over hacking questions | The New York Times

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, a combined gap that is narrowing. Some of her impassioned supporters are urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College. In recent days, the supporters have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked. “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer-science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on the online-publishing platform Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.” More likely, he wrote, pre-election polls were “systematically wrong.” But the only way to resolve the lingering questions would be to examine “paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states,” he wrote.

National: Closer Look Punches Holes in Swing-State Election Hacking Report | Scientific American

This year’s election faced an unprecedented kink: hacking. Wikileaks published hacked emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, for example, and Russian hackers were accused of compromising state election systems. Now some wonder whether hackers targeted the actual Nov. 8 vote results, shifting them in favor of Donald Trump in swing states where the vote was expected to be close. New York Magazine reported Tuesday that experts were urging the Clinton campaign to challenge the results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The report, which cited an unnamed source, said a group including a computer scientist and a voting rights attorney had raised questions as to whether the election results in these states could have been hacked. Group members reportedly discussed their findings in a conference call with Clinton campaign staff last Thursday. Clinton’s camp has until this Friday to call for a Wisconsin recount, until Monday in Pennsylvania, and until next Wednesday in Michigan, the report notes. It also says that Clinton would only be able to claim a victory should all three of these states overturn their results, which would take Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes and Wisconsin’s 10 away from Donald Trump’s 290. Clinton would also have to tack on Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, which have unofficially been assigned to Trump but have yet to be finalized, to clinch the victory. After the Nov. 8 tallies, Clinton lags Trump by 58 electoral votes. But a number of experts contend that the New York Magazine piece contains some incorrect numbers.

National: Hillary Clinton urged to call for election vote recount in battleground states | The Guardian

A growing number of academics and activists are calling for US authorities to fully audit or recount the 2016 presidential election vote in key battleground states, in case the results could have been skewed by foreign hackers. The loose coalition, which is urging Hillary Clinton’s campaign to join its fight, is preparing to deliver a report detailing its concerns to congressional committee chairs and federal authorities early next week, according to two people involved. The document, which is currently 18 pages long, focuses on concerns about the results in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. “I’m interested in verifying the vote,” said Dr Barbara Simons, an adviser to the US election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting. “We need to have post-election ballot audits.” Simons is understood to have contributed analysis to the effort but declined to characterise the precise nature of her involvement.

National: Cybersecurity experts write open letter calling U.S. hacking investigation | Mashable

A huge group of scholars is refusing to let the sophisticated hacks that marred the U.S. election be forgotten. Dozens of experts in cybersecurity, defense, elections and authoritarian regimes have signed an open letter calling on members of Congress to investigate reports of hacking by foreign powers in an effort to influence the outcome of the U.S. election. The letter called for a particular focus on Russia’s involvement. “In this case, what is right is simple: our country needs a thorough, public Congressional investigation into the role that foreign powers played in the months leading up to November,” the experts wrote. “As representatives of the American people, Congress is best positioned to conduct an objective investigation.”

National: Harassment or Hail Mary? Electors feel besieged | USA Today

To supporters of Hillary Clinton, the number looks intoxicating: 155 electors in states where the popular vote went for Donald Trump — some by slim margins — who apparently aren’t legally bound to vote for the GOP presidential nominee when the Electoral College meets Dec. 19. Solicit them like lobbyists schmooze members of Congress, right? Persuade just a portion, and you’ve got the first woman president, winner of the popular vote, certified by a constitutional authority. She’s got 232 in the bag. She would need 38 “faithless electors” to win this game. That’s the problem with this particular political fantasy. Though electors in several states report that they’re getting thousands of emails, letters and even telephone calls to ask them to switch their votes, they’re among the Republican Party’s most loyal members.

National: Hundreds of thousands of Americans cast a ballot without voting for a presidential candidate | The Washington Post

Nevada makes it simple. Voters in Nevada are given a choice for each race on the ballot: Candidate A, Candidate B or “none of the above,” a formal protest vote that is more or less popular depending on who candidates A and B are. In 2012, 5,770 Nevadans chose “none of the above” over Mitt Romney or President Obama, a total equaling 0.57 percent of all presidential votes cast. Obama won the state easily. In 2016, however, the results were more stark. More than 2.5 percent of the ballots cast for president in the state were “none of the above” — 28,863 in total in a race that Hillary Clinton won by 27,207. Enough protest votes to have swung the results of the election. There are protest votes in other states, too, of course; they just aren’t given space on the ballot. In most places these are called “undervotes,” ballots that are cast without a vote for the person at the top of the ticket.

National: Electoral Organizations Call For Nationwide Audit | Vocativ

Voting experts are pushing for a nationwide election audit stemming from citizen concerns as well as possible security risks that may have compromised the November 8 presidential election. Verified Voting, a nonprofit that promotes transparent elections, along with other like-minded groups, are leading the charge to check that this month’s election results are accurate and representative of the voting public. Verified Voting cited “unprecedented warnings” regarding the security of the election system and claims of a “rigged” election as reasons for the audit. More than 20 states’ voter registration systems, as well as a Florida voting system vendor, were targeted by foreign cyber attacks, while state election and law enforcement officials in Arizona and Illinois confirmed that voter registration systems were hacked. The Department of Homeland Security even stepped in to bolster voting system security after the attacks. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a “significant minority” of Hillary Clinton supporters believe Trump’s victory was illegitimate. In all, 18 percent of voters reject the election results, with 33 percent of Clinton supporters and 1 percent of Trump supporters saying that Trump did not win the presidential election.

National: What does voter turnout tell us about the 2016 election? | PBS

The vast majority of ballots have been counted nearly two weeks after one of the biggest political upsets in modern U.S. history catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency. Estimates show more than 58 percent of eligible voters went to the polls during the 2016 election, nearly breaking even with the turnout rate set during the last presidential election in 2012, even as the final tallies in states like California continue to be calculated, according to statistics collected by the U.S. Elections Project. But among those figures were stark contrasts in key states that helped swing the election to Trump — in Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan and elsewhere — indicating the President-elect’s leap from long-shot candidate to the most powerful political position in the world may have happened in part because of apathy toward Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, especially among the Democratic base, several political scientists and organizations monitoring voter turnout told the PBS NewsHour.

National: After a Fraught Election, Questions Over the Impact of a Balky Voting Process | The New York Times

So few Americans cast ballots that a new president was elected by barely a quarter of Americans eligible to vote. Some of those who did vote waited in line for hours. Others were told they needed an ID to vote under a law the courts had nullified months ago — and sometimes, under laws that never existed to begin with. Amid the ruins of the ugliest presidential campaign in modern history, Democrats are bemoaning an election apparatus so balky and politically malleable that throngs of would-be voters either gave up trying to cast ballots or cast ones that were never counted. This was the first presidential election in a half century that was held without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting rights advocates spent the year in court battling, with incomplete success, to roll back restrictions on the franchise enacted by Republican legislatures in state after state. Some scholars and election analysts questioned this week whether a better run and less politically influenced voting process might have changed the outcome in some close races and made the presidential contest even closer. The headline example is Wisconsin, where a Republican-backed law requiring voters to produce one of a limited number of acceptable photo IDs was in effect for the first time. Studies show — and some Republicans admit — that such laws disproportionately reduce Democratic turnout because many of the laws require IDs that low-income and immigrant voters, who are often Democrats, frequently lack. In Milwaukee, where turnout dropped 41,000 votes from the 2012 total, the chief elections official said on Friday that declines in voting were greatest in areas where lack of IDs was most common. Donald J. Trump won Wisconsin by about 27,000 votes.

National: About 100 million people couldn’t be bothered to vote this year | The Washington Post

Roughly 43 percent of eligible voters didn’t bother filling out a ballot this year, according to turnout estimates from the U.S. Elections Project. To look at it another way, the people who could have voted but chose not to vastly outnumbered those who cast a vote for Clinton, Trump or a third-party candidate. The U.S. Elections Project, run by a political scientist at the University of Florida, estimates that there are about 251 million voting-age people in the U.S. But not all of them are eligible to vote: some are non-citizens living in the U.S., while several million more can’t legally vote because they’re in prison, on parole, or have a past felony conviction in states where that’s a barrier to voting. Subtract all those people and you’ve got about 232 million people potentially eligible to cast a vote this fall. But only about 132 million of them did, give or take the one or two million votes that have yet to be officially certified. That means that 100 million people who have the legal right to vote simply decided it wasn’t worth the hassle this year.

National: Civil rights leaders say voter suppression laws influenced 2016 presidential election | McClatchy DC

Civil rights groups say a tangle of Republican-backed “voter suppression” laws enacted since 2010 probably helped tip the scale for Republican nominee Donald Trump in some closely contested states on election night. “When we look back, we will find that voter suppression figured prominently in the story surrounding the 2016 presidential election,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Fourteen states had restrictive new voting laws on the books for the first time in a presidential election this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. The laws included a mix of photo ID requirements for voters, cuts to early voting opportunities and curbs on voter registration activity. The laws, which were presumably enacted as a safeguard against voter fraud, began to spread nationally after the 2010 midterm elections, when large numbers of Republicans were swept into state offices.

National: Audit the Vote Petition: Did Russia Hack Presidential Election? | Heavy

Thousands of people have signed a petition on Change.org demanding an audit of the 2016 presidential election to rule out any possibility that Russian hackers helped give Donald Trump his Electoral College victory. There’s no evidence of this, although some cyber security and intelligence experts have blamed Russia for hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Those acts benefited Trump, who has said he has never even met Vladimir Putin. The hashtag #AudittheVote was also trending on Twitter on November 17 as Clinton supporters passed around supposed election anomalies. Driving some of the suspicion: The fact that so many polls (pre-election polling but also exit polls) had the election completely wrong.

National: The electoral college badly distorts the vote. And it’s going to get worse. | The Washington Post

Donald Trump won the United States presidency with 290 votes in the electoral college. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 62,568,373 votes, as of Nov. 16, to President-elect Trump’s 61,336,159. The electoral college has overruled the popular vote for the second time in the last five presidential elections. If all votes were weighed evenly, Clinton would have received 259 votes in the electoral college. Trump would have 256. Candidates from other parties would also have received electoral college votes. The United States has faced this conflict between the electoral college and the popular vote only four times in the nation’s history (five, if you include John Quincy Adams’s election). But it’s happening more and more often. The electoral college is designed to favor sparsely populated areas. It was created to strengthen the agrarian elite, offer more federal power to slaveholding states, and counterbalance factionalism and polarization. But it’s not doing any of this today. Rather, the electoral college values some votes above others, while entirely disenfranchising the 4 million Americans who live in overseas territories.

National: Russian hacking of election infrastructure ‘curtailed’ after US statement | The Hill

Russian scanning of state election infrastructure was “curtailed” after the U.S. publicly blamed Moscow for hacking several U.S. political organizations, the nation’s top intelligence official says. “The issuance of the statement and communication between our government and the Russian government seemed to have curtailed the cyber activity the Russians were previously engaged in,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday. “I was referring to cyber reconnaissance many states had observed prior to the statement,” Clapper clarified. Russia is believed to have been behind pre-election attempts to penetrate voter information databases in Arizona and Illinois. Clapper, together with the Department of Homeland Security, in October publicly blamed Russia for the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other political organizations this year, calling the thefts an intentional effort to interfere with the U.S. election process. But intelligence leaders at the time said they were not ready to confirm that the probing of state election systems was the work on Russian hackers.

National: Voting Problems Present in 2016, But Further Study Needed to Determine Impact | Brennan Center for Justice

The 2016 election is over, and while much has been written about who voted and for whom, and what the media missed, there has been frustratingly little post-election coverage on the problem of Americans being disenfranchised by predictable and avoidable shortcomings in the ways we administer elections. Election administrators had to fend off a lot in 2016 before the election even started — claims that elections were rigged, hacks into voter registration databases, out-of-date technology, calls for private citizens to appoint themselves watchers of polling places, and politicians passing laws restricting access to the ballot. Each of those issues contributed to problems at the polls. They were compounded by a persistent problem of insufficient resources. Aging voting machines are a known risk to the functioning of the voting system and public confidence. In 2015, the Brennan Center warned that 42 states use machines that are at least a decade old and approaching the end of their projected lifespans.

National: White House Confirms Pre-Election Warning to Russia Over Hacking | The New York Times

Over the past month, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has received two starkly different messages about hacking into American computer networks from the current and future presidents of the United States: Don’t you dare, and don’t worry, we’re not even sure it was you. The White House confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that eight days before the presidential election, the United States “contacted the Russian government directly regarding malicious cyberactivity” that was “targeting U.S. state election-related systems.” It sent the message over a rarely used system: a hotline connecting the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers in both countries, which they had agreed three years ago could also be employed to deal with major cyber incidents. The pre-election warning — only the latest after verbal cautions by President Obama, his defense secretary and the director of national intelligence — was reported by The Washington Post. The warnings to Russia against further hacking into polling or registration systems, or any further effort to affect the outcome of the election, are being hailed by the Obama administration as a success in deterrence. After all, they argue, a year and a half of Russian hacking activity seemed to slow, or halt, and there is no evidence that voting or counting of ballots was disrupted on Election Day.

National: NSA: WikiLeaks election leaks were ‘conscious effort by a nation-state’ | International Business Times

The leaks and disclosures published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the US presidential election this year were a “conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect”, according to the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). US intelligence chief Michael Rogers, who has managed the secretive agency since 2014, said during a Wall Street Journal conference on 15 November that Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid was hampered by state-sponsored hackers who worked to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind – this was not something that was done casually,” he said when asked about WikiLeaks’ publications. “This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily.”

National: Don’t expect Electoral College drama on December 19 | Constitution Daily

Despite a popular petition on the Change.org website about how the nation’s 538 electors should vote on December 19, there seems to be little chance of the tactic changing the recent presidential election’s outcome. As of Monday afternoon, more than 4.3 million people signed an online petition “to make Hillary Clinton President on December 19” by calling on electors in the Electoral College to ignore their commitments to vote for Donald Trump. For now, Trump has 290 votes in the Electoral College, compared with 228 for Clinton. The vote counting continues in two states: Michigan and New Hampshire. But Trump only needed 270 votes to clinch the election, which he received early on November 9. Regardless of what happens on December 19, Republican candidate Trump will become the elected President on January 6, 2017, unless some vastly unforeseen event prevents Congress from counting the Electoral College votes during a joint meeting of Congress, or the President-elect is unable to take his oath on Friday, January 20, 2017.

National: Are Absentee Ballots Counted Last? Votes Still Being Tallied In Some States | International Business Times

More than 42 million Americans voted before Election Day, but their ballots may still be getting counted a week later. Republican Donald Trump was declared the president-elect early Wednesday morning, beating out Democrat Hillary Clinton in Electoral College votes. However, as states have continued to tally their results, she’s pulled ahead in popular votes. According to data compiled by David Wasserman, the United States House editor of the Cook Political Report, Clinton was up by nearly 963,000 votes as of Tuesday morning. That total included 129.4 million votes — and there were “still millions left to go,” Wasserman added on Twitter. The numbers keep changing because states like California and Washington are still working on their provisional and absentee ballots, which were considered valid if they were postmarked by Election Day, the Atlantic reported. Don’t freak out: These votes, mostly cast in areas that already supported Clinton, won’t reverse Trump’s victory.

National: GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham wants Congress to investigate Russian cyberattack on DNC, election | Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump may seek improved relations with Russia, but top Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham wants Vladimir Putin held responsible if the Russian government was involved in cyber-hacks to disrupt the U.S. elections. Graham, who has sparred openly with Trump, his former rival in the presidential primary, is proposing that Congress hold a series of hearings on “Russia’s misadventures throughout the world” – including whether they were involved in “hacking into the DNC.” “Were they involved in cyberattacks that had a political component to it in our elections?” Graham said. If so, Graham said, “Putin should be punished.”

National: DHS Secretary: No election day cyberattacks | CyberScoop

Despite warnings during the that there might be attempts by Russian hackers to disrupt or even influence the outcome of U.S. elections, authorities on high alert across the country last week detected no major cyber attacks or untoward online activity directed at election infrastructure, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday. “In connection with the election, we did not see anything that I would characterize as significant,” he told the Bloomberg Next forum in D.C., “There were minor incidents of the type that people might expect, but nothing of significance.”

National: The first step to fixing long lines at the polls? Knowing where they happen. | The Washington Post

Horror stories about people standing in long lines to vote started even before Election Day this year, with reports of massive waits at early-voting locations. But new technology and research could help give officials the information they need to figure out how to make elections run better next time and one day help them respond to problems at polling places as they happen. There’s remarkably little detailed data about how long Americans wait to vote, according to electoral experts. They say that’s a big problem because fixing long lines at the polls is practically impossible without knowing where they actually happen. Previous research has generally shown longer waits in urban areas and for minority voters. But much of that data comes from media reports or surveys, according to John Fortier, the director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Project. “Even administrators that run large counties often don’t have a handle on what’s going on at all at their polling places,” he said. In fact, many precincts do not have systems to track long lines, let alone prevent them, Fortier and other election watchers said. But that’s starting to change.

National: This year, laws with roots to the Civil War prevented 6.1 million from voting | PBS

Donald Trump won the presidential election on Tuesday as millions of people were prevented from voting this year by rules that root back to the Civil War and were made to maintain white male political dominance. About 6.1 million people who were convicted of breaking laws could not cast ballots because of policies that keep felons off voter rolls, according to justice reform organization The Sentencing Project. And according to the most recent numbers from Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan, which is still counting, Hillary Clinton lost by a margin smaller than those banned from voting — many of whom are poor or black or both, which are groups that tend to vote Democrat. At the same time, Clinton garnered at least half a million more votes than Trump, but lost the Electoral College. This system gives each state a number of votes roughly proportioned to population — 538 in total — and the candidate who wins the majority of them, which will be officially counted in January, wins the election. The last time such an anomaly happened was during the hotly-contested 2000 presidential election, when Republican George W. Bush won the Electoral College, defeating Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote.

National: Voters encounter some malfunctioning machines, other headaches on Election Day | The Washington Post

As voters flooded polling places across the country on Election Day, some reported problems such as broken machines, long lines and voter intimidation in states ranging from Texas to Pennsylvania. While voting appeared to proceed without headaches in many locations, election observers said they expect a significant increase in the number of issues reported nationwide compared to earlier presidential elections. In particular, voters in a handful of jurisdictions across the country encountered problems with malfunctioning voting machines, highlighting issues with the aging infrastructure expected to support tens of millions of voters turning out on Election Day. One major with some technological problems was Durham County, N.C., which has more than a quarter-million residents outside Raleigh. Officials there had technical issues with electronic poll books used to check in voters. As a result, state authorities told Durham officials to use paper poll books, rather than electronic ones, eventually leading to some delays. (Durham was already using paper ballots.) Local officials asked the North Carolina State Board of Elections to extend voting hours in some precincts, a request that was echoed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. On Tuesday evening, state officials agreed to extend voting in eight precincts, pushing back the closing of polls by as much as an hour in some Durham locations and by 30 minutes in Columbus County. A group had also filed a lawsuit Tuesday afternoon seeking to keep the Durham polls open until 9 p.m.