National: Can Edward Snowden vote in the 2016 elections? | The Daily Dot

Edward Snowden is the world’s most wanted man. He faces charges related to espionage and theft of government property for leaking classified NSA documents to journalists. He is actively evading U.S. law enforcement by living under asylum in Russia. So, can he still vote in the 2016 election? Absolutely, yes, according to Ben Wizner, leading U.S. attorney for Snowden and director of the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no legal basis whatsoever for depriving Edward Snowden of the right to vote. The short answer is: He’s eligible,” Wizner told the Daily Dot when asked about Snowden’s voter status. “There’s no legal basis whatsoever for depriving Edward Snowden of the right to vote. He’s been convicted of no crime, much less one that would strip him of his civil rights.”

National: How Polling Station Design Could Influence Elections | Co.Design

Today, an estimated half a million people in New Hampshire will go to the polls to vote in the Republican and Democratic primaries, and in the weeks ahead, many other Americans will vote as well. Depending on where you live, you’re guaranteed to get a totally different voting experience compared to someone in another state, or even another county. That’s because the physical design of polling stations varies wildly across the U.S.: they’re located in libraries, civic centers, grocery stores, and other random places, and there isn’t a universal set of rules that tells officials how to set up polling stations. But new research suggests that the design of polling stations is critical to the voting process—and if we don’t design these places well, some people may decide not to vote. Just like an ATM machine or public transportation, polling stations are systems, and their poor or great design could influence whether voters use them. When people deal with a badly designed system—one that’s inconvenient, confusing, or takes too much time—they might make mistakes or avoid the system altogether. The problem with polling stations is that people can’t just switch to a different location—they have to use the one to which they’re assigned (unless they vote by mail). Rice University researchers Claudia Acemyan and Phil Kortum say this all-or-nothing situation, along with a poorly designed system, could disenfranchise people. Since there currently aren’t general design standards for polling places, they’ve set out to create a set of guidelines, based on science.

National: UCSD researchers: Voter ID laws hurt Democrats, minorities | San Diego Union Tribune

Researchers from the University of California San Diego have created a new statistical model indicating that voter identification laws do what detractors claim — reduce turnout for minorities and those on the political left. Overall, the researchers found, strict ID laws cause a reduction in Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points, compared to a reduction of 3.6 percentage points for Republicans. The study focused on the 11 states with the strictest voter ID laws, generally requiring photo identification to cast a ballot. Researchers used a large voter survey database to compare turnout in those states to those in states with lesser or no ID requirements. Several states have passed less strict ID laws. But in 17 states including California, New York and Illinois, a more traditional honor system still applies at the ballot box.

National: Clinton Allies Forming Group to Protect, Register Voters | The New York Times

Allies of Hillary Clinton are forming a new $25 million political organization aimed at expanding voter protection efforts and driving turnout and registration among Latino and black voters essential to her Democratic presidential campaign. The new group, Every Citizen Counts, is beginning its work as Clinton faces a stronger-than-expected challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose overwhelming victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary has set off new worries among Democrats that Sanders may soon cut into Clinton’s advantage with black and Hispanic voters. The non-partisan organization will focus on legislation, litigation, voter registration and turnout among black and Latino communities in the general election. It was formed in August and has recently begun developing partnerships with other organizations to expand voter education, registration, protection and turnout.

National: U.S. Election Official under Fire for “Secretive” Action Imposing Voter Citizenship Requirement in Three States | Associated Press

A federal elections official has decided — without public notice or review from his agency’s commissioners — that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a federal form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship. The action by the new executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is being roundly criticized by voting rights activists, who say the “secretive move” will create additional barriers for potential voters, and one of the agency’s own commissioners, who says it contradicts policy and precedent. The new instructions were posted on the agency’s website, according to EAC’s executive director Brian Newby, who sent letters dated Jan. 29 to the three states that had requested the change. Under the new rule, any resident in those states who registers to vote using the federal form must show citizenship documentation — such as a birth certificate, naturalization papers or passport. In other states, no such documentation is needed to register; voters need only sign a sworn statement. The changes took effect immediately, Newby said, adding that any interested party could request a review from the commission, which is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

National: Ryan backs voting rights bill — but tells black caucus it's out of his hands | The Hill

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told black lawmakers Wednesday that he supports new voting rights protections they’ve championed, but said he won’t bypass a committee chairman to move legislation, according to a Democrat who attended the gathering. “He said it right in front of everybody — he said he supports the [Jim] Sensenbrenner bill,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), said after Ryan met with the group on Capitol Hill. “So somebody was saying, ‘Well, why don’t you go tell your committee chair to do it?’ ” Cleaver added. “And he said, … ‘Look, I can’t do that.’ ” Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), a former chairman of the Judiciary panel, has sponsored bipartisan legislation to update the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in response to a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted a central provision of the 1965 law.

National: Federal agency helps red states make voter registration harder | MSNBC

The director of the federal agency that helps states run elections is under fire for abruptly reversing course and siding with three Republican-led states in their efforts to make vote registration much more difficult. The controversy involves questions of federal policymaking authority that may sound arcane. But at stake are the rights of perhaps thousands of would-be voters as the 2016 elections approach — as well as allegations of improper collusion at the federal level. On Friday, Brian Newby, the new executive director of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), wrote in letters to Kansas, Georgia and Alabama officials that the agency had changed the state-specific instructions given to voters in those states to accompany the federal voter registration form that the EAC administers. The new instructions say that would-be voters must present proof of citizenship when they register. Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State, Kris Kobach — an ally of Newby, a former Kansas county election administrator — has for years been pressing the EAC to green-light that change. In 2011, Kobach, a former GOP operative and zealous backer of strict voting and immigration laws, helped pass a state law that required proof of citizenship from those registering to vote. But the EAC had twice rejected Kobach’s request to change the instructions given to Kansas voters on the federal form, saying the change would violate federal voting law, which aims to make registration as easy as possible. In late 2014, a federal court likewise ruled against Kobach.

National: New evidence that voter ID laws ‘skew democracy’ in favor of white Republicans | The Washington Post

Voter fraud is, for all intents and purposes, practically nonexistent. The best available research on the topic, by Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, found only 31 credible incidents of voter impersonation in an investigation of over 1 billion votes cast. But that hasn’t dampened Republican efforts to pass a spate of strict voter ID laws since 2008. And it hasn’t hurt the public’s overall enthusiasm for those laws, either. But the results of a new working paper from political scientists at University of California, San Diego suggest folks may want to consider. The researchers analyzed turnout in recent elections — between 2008 and 2012 — in states that did and did not implement the strictest form of voter ID laws. They found that these laws consistently and significantly decreased turnout not just among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups, like blacks and Hispanics, but among Republican voters too.

National: Could the US election really be hacked? | International Business Times

The United States presidential election is a complex, drawn-out affair. After months of raucous campaigning at the expense of hundreds of millions of dollars, the lengthy voting process to choose Barack Obama’s successor finally got underway with the Iowa caucuses. Once the two main political parties – Democratic and Republican – choose their respective nominees through party-sponsored contests in each of the states and overseas territories, the process of electing the 45th President of the United States in the general elections scheduled for November will begin. But how secure is the all-important process of marking and casting ballots and then collecting and counting them? Could the use of outdated electronic voting systems with dubious safety controls compromise the integrity of the entire electoral process, or is the threat exaggerated?

National: Change At Federal Election Agency Muddles Kansas Voter Registration Laws | NPR

Get ready voters: It’s time to be confused. Even as Americans start heading to the polls for this year’s presidential primaries, laws remain in flux in a number of states — including North Carolina and Texas, where voter ID requirements are being challenged in court. Now the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency charged with helping to improve the running of elections, has added to the confusion. And unlike most voter ID conflicts — which involve showing identification at the polls — this comes earlier in the process, when residents are first registering to vote. The EAC has been in a long legal battle with Kansas regarding the state’s requirement that residents show proof-of-citizenship when they register to vote — even if they use a federal registration form, administered by the EAC. The federal form — which can be used throughout the United States as an alternative to local voter registration forms — requires individuals to swear that they are citizens, not provide a birth certificate or other document as proof.

National: Winning the fight against gerrymandering in the South | Facing South

After the wave of Tea Party victories across the nation turned more state legislatures red in 2010, Republican lawmakers redistricted their states to the party’s benefit. In some cases, Democratic voters — often African-American — were packed into a small number of districts, diluting their political power. Not long ago, Shelby County, Alabama successfully challenged the section of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states and counties with a history of racial voting discrimination to submit any proposed election law changes — including new voting district maps — to the federal government for approval. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder enabled states, most of them in the South, to change voting districts without federal consent.

National: Why You (Still) Can’t Vote Online | National Journal

When Hur­ricane Sandy hit in 2012, it threw New Jer­sey in­to an ad hoc ex­per­i­ment in on­line vot­ing. … Had New Jer­sey’s ex­per­i­ment gone well, it would have been a ma­jor vic­tory for ad­voc­ates of on­line vot­ing, who’ve long ar­gued that the in­ter­net could be a valu­able tool to pro­tect the right to vote and in­crease dis­mal U.S. vot­ing rates. It did not, however, go well at all: Email serv­ers were over­whelmed, leav­ing voters un­able to re­quest or re­turn their bal­lots. In an at­tempt to fix the situ­ation, one elec­tions of­fi­cial gave out his per­son­al email ad­dress to voters to sub­mit their bal­lot re­quests—and a se­cur­ity re­search­er dis­covered that his pass­word re­cov­ery ques­tion was ap­par­ently his moth­er’s maid­en name after look­ing at Hot­mail’s pass­word-re­set form. The of­fi­cial says he was nev­er hacked. … Se­cur­ity ex­perts cried foul at the elec­tion, which saw an es­tim­ated 50,000 bal­lots cast elec­tron­ic­ally. They were con­cerned that voters’ per­son­al data was po­ten­tially ex­posed, and were wor­ried that there was an op­por­tun­ity for bal­lots to go un­coun­ted. “We don’t know how many of these votes were ac­tu­ally coun­ted or shouldn’t have been coun­ted versus lost, or how many people tried to use this sys­tem but were un­able to get bal­lots,” Ed Fel­ten, who was then the dir­ect­or of Prin­ceton Uni­versity’s Cen­ter for In­form­a­tion Tech­no­logy Policy, told Al Jaz­eera in 2014. “We can’t meas­ure it, but cer­tainly there are in­dic­a­tions of over­flow­ing mail­boxes, big back­logs and prob­lems pro­cessing re­quests. So I don’t think you could con­clude at all that this was a suc­cess­ful ex­per­i­ment.”

National: New state voting laws face first presidential election test | USA Today

Battles are being waged across the country over new voter ID laws and other election changes that have never before been tested in a presidential election. National and local civil rights groups also have launched grass-roots efforts to fight state laws that they say could suppress voting by minorities and the elderly. President Obama joined the cause in pledging during his Jan. 12 State of the Union Address to travel the country lobbying for steps to make voting easier. “You’re going to see some ramping up of activism,’’ said the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP. “The president is right, but everybody should be joining in that (effort).’’ Barber’s group will lead a voting rights rally Feb. 13 in Raleigh. … Myrna Pérez, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Election Project, said voters in some of those states, “are going to be voting in a presidential election with fewer federal protections than they’ve had in the last 50 years.”

National: Internet voting is just too hackable, say security experts | USA Today

Three ballot initiatives have been proposed in California to require the state to allow online voting, but security experts and some voting officials say the technology is nowhere near secure enough for something so crucial as the democratic process. “When people stop me in the supermarket and ask, ‘When am I going to be able to vote on my cell phone?’ I say ‘Pretty soon—in about 20 years,’” said Dana DeBeauvoir, the county clerk for Travis County, Texas. She was one of three speakers Wednesday in a session on online voting and security issues at Enigma 2016, a computer security conference held in San Francisco. So much of daily life now happens online, including shopping, banking, communication, that voters naturally wonder why voting can’t too, said J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich. who researches voting and security. However, the ongoing litany of breaches, hacks and crashes in those realms are an object lesson in why voting shouldn’t happen there. It’s just too important, he said. “Imagine the incentives of a rival country to come in and change the outcome of a vote for national leadership. Elections require correct outcomes and true ballot secrecy,” Halderman said.

National: Gerrymandering Is Even More Infuriating When You Can Actually See It | WIRED

President Barack Obama spent the last chunk of his 2016 State of the Union Address talking about how to “fix our politics.” His first solution? Stop gerrymandering, the shaping of congressional districts to guarantee electoral outcomes. “We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around,” he said. At least one geographer has heeded Obama’s call to action. Using data from the US Census Bureau, Alasdair Rae, a geographer and urban planner at Sheffield University, built maps of every congressional district—all 435 of them—to show just how screwed up they really are. When Rae maps them individually, removed from the context of their surrounding districts, you can really see the extent of the problem. “There are some shapes that are quite egregious,” Rae says.

National: How Facebook tracks and profits from voters in a $10bn US election | The Guardian

If you lived in north-east Iowa, the evangelical stronghold where the battle for the soul of conservative American politics will play out in person on Monday, and happened to have given Senator Ted Cruz’s campaign your email address sometime in the last few months, you might find something especially appealing this weekend in your Facebook feed. You might see, amid the family photos, a menacing video of Donald Trump talking about how “my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa”. LIKE ON ABORTION, blares the sponsored ad from Cruz’s deep-pocketed, social media-savvy digital team. And you might wonder how this campaign managed, by paying Facebook, to differentiate between Trump’s “New York values” and “OURS”. Facebook, which told investors on Wednesday it was “excited about the targeting”, does not let candidates track individual users. But it does now allow presidential campaigns to upload their massive email lists and voter files – which contain political habits, real names, home addresses and phone numbers – to the company’s advertising network. The company will then match real-life voters with their Facebook accounts, which follow individuals as they move across congressional districts and are filled with insightful data.

National: Voting Rights Act: After Supreme Court Ruling, 2016 Election Could Endanger Black, Latino Rights | International Business Times

Decades after many Americans fought, bled and died for the right to vote, millions of voters could be once again be turned away from the polls this year because of a regime of voting laws that disproportionately burden minorities, the elderly, immigrants and the poor. With both presidential and congressional elections in November, advocates warn that the stakes are high. “Basically, all hell is breaking loose,” said Katherine Culliton-González, director of the voter protection program at the Washington, D.C.-based Advancement Project, who spent five years working on voter issues at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Unless you are in the elite — and that doesn’t even mean in the middle class — voter restrictions are going to impact you, one way or another.” This year’s presidential election will be the first one held after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the historic Voting Rights Act in 2013, which required federal pre-clearance of voting law changes for states with a history of voter discrimination. Without those protections in place, pending legal battles over the fairness and constitutionality of recently enacted voting laws will get unprecedented scrutiny this year, advocates on both sides have said. If the courts uphold, for example, a voter ID requirement in North Carolina or allow Texas to redraw districts and reduce political power in heavily immigrant communities, they’d potentially be denying millions the right to vote and be equally represented by their state lawmakers. “Voting laws seem to be changing every day, and that in and of itself is disenfranchising to so many Americans,” González said.

National: As Voter ID Laws Expand, Fewer People Are Getting Drivers Licenses | CityLab

A North Carolina law requiring people to have certain kinds of photo identification in order to vote is on trial this week, in a federal courthouse in Winston-Salem. The state passed a voting law in 2013 that even some conservatives have called one of the most restrictive in the nation in terms of the potential burdening effect it could have on women and people of color. The voter ID provision is one part of a broader set of measures included in that law that, among other things, shortens the early voting period and eliminates Election Day voter registration. Those other measures were taken up in a separate federal trial last summer, with a decision currently pending. This week, the voter ID provision is on trial, with the North Carolina state chapter of the NAACP arguing that it will make it harder for African Americans and Latinos to vote, especially when combined with the law’s other restrictions. African-American registered voters are far less likely to have driver’s licenses than white voters.

National: North Carolina voter-ID case could have ramifications across U.S. | The Washington Post

The requirement to present photo identification to cast a ballot went on trial Monday in a closely watched case that will have legal ramifications for voting across the country this presidential election year. Inside a federal courthouse here, attorneys for the Justice Department and the NAACP argued that the law passed by the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly intentionally discriminates against African Americans and Latinos, who disproportionately lack one of the required forms of photo identification. “The state should be making it easier for people to engage in the fundamental right to vote, not harder,” Michael Glick, a Washington lawyer representing the NAACP, said in his opening statement. Because the voter-ID requirement will make it harder for African Americans and Latinos to vote, Glick said, it is unconstitutional and violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

National: Voting rights advocates observe somber King holiday | USA Today

While most of the country will spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday remembering the peaceful nature and civil rights successes lodged by the late leader, voting rights advocates say this is a dark time for them. Many might spend Monday reflecting on King’s 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march to push for voting equality for black Americans, but voting rights advocates note that there has been a major setback in their world. In 2013, a Supreme Court ruling struck down the part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that indicates which parts of the country must have changes to voting rights laws cleared by the federal government or by a federal court. Preclearance was a requirement for states and communities that had a history of discrimination against black voters. Advocates viewed it as a necessary safeguard against discrimination at the ballot. Also, 33 states now have Voter ID laws in place with increased identification requirements for people seeking to cast ballots. The issue has been a controversial one for civil rights advocates, who maintain that some groups of Americans, including older people and minorities, are less likely to have the sort of identification that would be required.

National: When Will We Be Able to Vote Online? | Scientific American

Sooner or later everything seems to go online. Newspapers. TV. Radio. Shopping. Banking. Dating. But it’s much harder to drag voting out of the paper era. In the 2012 presidential election, more than half of Americans who voted cast paper ballots—0 percent voted with their smartphones. Why isn’t Internet voting here yet? Imagine the advantages! … It’s all about security, of course. Currently Internet voting is “a nonstarter,” according to Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of Johns Hopkins University’s Information Security Institute and author of the 2006 book Brave New Ballot. “You can’t control the security of the platform,” he told me. The app you’re using, the operating system on your phone, the servers your data will cross en route to their destination—there are just too many openings for hacker interference. “But wait,” you’re entitled to object, “banks, online stores and stock markets operate electronically. Why should something as simple as recording votes be so much more difficult?” Voting is much trickier for a couple of reasons. Whereas monetary transactions are based on a firm understanding of your identity, a vote is supposed to be anonymous. In case of bank trouble, investigators can trace a credit-card purchase back to you, but how can they track an anonymous vote? And credit-card and bank fraud goes on constantly. It’s just a cost of doing business. But the outcome of an election is too important; we can’t simply ignore a bunch of lost or altered votes.

National: Appeals court upholds FEC rule on disclosure requirements | Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Thursday dealt a setback to campaign finance reform advocates in a ruling about who pays for political ads. The ruling upheld a Federal Election Commission regulation that narrows disclosure requirements for corporations and labor groups paying for ads that run close to Election Day. The regulation says groups running the ads only have to reveal donors who contribute for the express purpose of paying for the ads. That means donors who choose not to say how they want their money used can remain anonymous. Opponents say the rule undermines Congress’ goal of letting voters know which donors are trying to influence elections. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed a lower court decision that threw out the regulation last year. The ruling comes on the six-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which lifted limits on political spending by corporations and labor unions.

National: Partisanship Barges In on John Lewis’s Dream | The New York Times

In 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that, to the joy of millions of African-Americans, Barack Obama redeemed by winning the presidency. As the youngest speaker at that March on Washington gathering, John Lewis identified another dream. It, too, has been redeemed by the American political system. But the blessing has been decidedly mixed. On that sweltering August day, Mr. Lewis, the 23-year-old champion of voting rights, lamented the absence of an unequivocal “party of principles” from the political scene. “The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland,” Mr. Lewis said. “The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater.”

National: Hackers Are Sharing Reams of US Voter Data on the Dark Web | Motherboard

Alleged voting records of millions of American citizens have been uploaded to the dark web on a site affiliated with a well-known cybercrime forum. Although the information is not particularly sensitive in its own right, its presence on the site shows that even easily obtainable personal data can be of interest to hackers. The datasets appear to include voters’ full names, dates of birth, the date they registered to vote, addresses, local school districts, and several other pieces of information. The dumps also include voting records from previous elections and political affiliations. The two largest files are 1.2 GB and 1 GB, respectively, and each contain at least a million entries. The folder containing the files is called “US_Voter_DB,” though Motherboard could not independently verify the contents’ legitimacy. It’s not entirely clear where the data was sourced from. On December 28 last year, news site CSO Online reported that a database configuration issue had left 191 million voter records exposed to the open internet. That data was discovered by security researcher Christopher Vickery, who found his own personal information within the dump.

National: It May Be Time to Resolve the Meaning of ‘Natural Born’ | The New York Times

After he left Wall Street to enter politics eight years ago, Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, began fielding the occasional question of when he intended to run for president. “It has come up in jest any number of times,” said Mr. Himes, who always has his answer ready. “There could be constitutional questions.” Mr. Himes, you see, was born in Peru in 1966 while his father worked for the Ford Foundation. That makes him one of at least 17 current members of Congress who, because of their birth outside the United States, could run afoul of the Constitution’s “natural born citizen” presidential requirement should they try to relocate down Pennsylvania Avenue.

National: Unlikely Advocates Push To Give 16-Year-Olds A Vote | NPR

Turning 16 is considered a milestone. In many states, it means being able to drive, pay taxes and work like an adult. In Washington, D.C., 16-year-olds could soon take on another responsibility: the right to vote in a presidential election. Michelle Blackwell is helping lead the effort to enfranchise teenagers in the nation’s capital. But she’s not your typical Washington politico. In D.C., the 44-year-old is better known as one of the top go-go singers around. “Go-go is one of the indigenous genres of music — born right in this city,” says Blackwell of the percussive brand of funk music that originated in Washington in the late 1960s. But off stage, she’s now helping lead the effort to make D.C. the first jurisdiction to let 16-year-olds vote in federal elections.

National: Democrats stand as Obama calls for redistricting reform | The Hill

President Obama called Tuesday for an end to partisan redistricting, creating one of the biggest applause lines from fellow Democrats in his State of the Union address. “We have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters, and not the other way around. Let a bipartisan group do it,” Obama said. Democrats in the chamber stood in response, while Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Republicans remained in their seats.
Obama’s party lost control of the House in his first midterm election, and the Democratic Party’s chances of getting it back are dim in large part because of redistricting. More votes were cast for Democratic House candidates in the 2012 election, for example, but it didn’t help put Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) back into the Speakership.

National: Could Pop-up Social Spaces at Polls Increase Voter Turnout? | Smithsonian

If you make voting fun, will it encourage people to cast their ballots? And once people are at the polls, can you keep them there, and get them talking about what they want from their local and national politicians? Those were some of the questions that designers at the Long Beach, California-based studio City Fabrick were pondering when they came up with the idea for Placemaking the Vote—their very own “kit for creating temporary pop-up social spaces at voting polls in historically low voter turnout areas.” While the designers are still figuring out exactly what would go into the kit, they’d likely include lights, shelter, chalk and other supplies for building a gathering place and drawing attention to it. City Fabrick would set up the brightly-colored booths outside of the polling places and provide snacks and comfortable places to sit to encourage voters to stick around and talk.

National: For government’s top lawyer on voting rights, presidential election has begun | The Washington Post

The Justice Department has brought on a well-respected election law professor to oversee its voting section and lead the department’s battles over voting rights during this presidential election year. Justin Levitt of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles has begun serving as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at a critical time, with Justice Department lawyers litigating several voting-rights cases across the country. Levitt will hold the position, which does not require Senate confirmation, until next January. Levitt, 41, takes charge as the Justice Department awaits high-profile court decisions on voting rights in North Carolina and Texas. The presidential election this year will be the first since a divided Supreme Court invalidated a critical component of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also, more restrictive voting laws will be in effect in 15 states for the first time in a race for the White House. “The biggest change since the last presidential election is unquestionably the Supreme Court’s decision [on voting rights],” Levitt said in an interview in his fifth-floor office at Justice Department headquarters.

National: Obama’s State of the Union pledge to push for bipartisan redistricting reform was a late add | Los Angeles Times

President Obama used his last State of the Union address to push for national voting reforms and went off script to specifically call for bipartisan groups to draw new congressional districts instead of lawmakers. “I think we’ve got to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters and not the other way around,” he said before veering from his prepared remarks to add: “Let a bipartisan group do it.” In recent days, aides to the president had said he was concerned about gerrymandering, the flood of money in politics and other barriers to voter participation.