National

When voting system activists in the U.S. managed to get many paperless electronic voting machines replaced a few years ago with optical-scan machines that use paper ballots, some believed elections would become more transparent and verifiable. But a spate of problems with optical-scan machines used in elections across the country have shown that the systems are just as much at risk of dropping ballots and votes as touchscreen voting machines, either due to intentional manipulation or unintentional human error. A new election system promises to resolve that issue by giving election officials the ability to independently and swiftly audit the performance of their optical-scan machines. Called Clear Ballot, the system is patterned in part after an auditing system that was used in California in 2008. It uses high-speed commercial scanners made by Fujitsu, as well as software developed by the Clear Ballot team, which includes a former developer who worked under Ray Ozzie to create Lotus Notes.

National: Why can’t you vote online? | The Verge

Elections in the United States aren’t perfect. Between rare instances of voter fraud, attempts to make it harder for people to vote, voter intimidation, egregious manipulation of voting districts by major parties, and regularly low voter turnout, there’s plenty of room for improvement — leading governments at all levels in the US federal system to examine alternative voting mechanisms that could alleviate these issues. In the age of the internet, an obvious solution for many is remote internet voting — an option that seems more palatable every year given the adoption of PCs, mobile devices, and broadband internet. And in 2012, more citizens than ever will have access to online voting assistance: more than 30 states and the District of Columbia will offer registration or provide absentee ballots for overseas voters using email or an internet portal. But can internet voting really solve problems in US elections? New voting technologies face a mountain of scrutiny. Elections in the United States require a high level of integrity, across multiple dimensions, either by public expectation or by law. These requirements include secrecy (so people can’t find out how you voted), privacy (so people can’t stand over your shoulder at the ballot box and coerce you), accountability (so votes can be verified as authentic), uniqueness (so people can only vote once), and accuracy (so votes are recorded correctly). Good voting systems should also be reliable, flexible, convenient, and cost-effective. For remote internet voting to be feasible and meaningful, it has to fulfill all of these criteria adequately, and experts are skeptical that an internet voting system could meet all of these needs. Each time an internet voting initiative begins in the US, warnings come from high places. A circle of expert technologists in the United States have been speaking out against the prospect of online voting since various groups began exploring it as early as 2000. And government bodies like the National Institute of Science and Technology have identified serious security vulnerabilities and voter authentication and election auditing weaknesses in pilot systems. According to some critics of internet voting, a secure solution might as well be penciled in on the calendar next to cold fusion; experts say the technical challenges of securing a remote online voting system are insurmountable, at least in the foreseeable future.

National: At polling places, some fear monitors will challenge some legitimate voters, intimidate others | The Washington Post

Kimberly Kelley of Tampa has provided Florida elections officials with thousands of names of people she thinks may be ineligible to vote and should be removed from the rolls. On Election Day, she’ll join thousands more — people of all political stripes — to monitor balloting. “I believe there is fraud both ways. I don’t think it’s a specific group,” said Kelley, a registered Republican whose group is called Tampa Vote Fair. “We’re just there to observe. We’re not going to intimidate anyone.” Poll watchers from unions, immigration groups and other organizations favoring greater voter access will also be on hand. Gihan Perera of the group Florida New Majority said training sessions are being held for observers and communications lines set up to respond to problems. “We’ll be aware and vigilant so that all of the rules and processes are honored and that our people are able to vote with ease,” he said.

National: Voter ID Foes’ Wins in Pennsylvania, Other States Could be Short Lived | Stateline

In recent months, courts have struck down voter identification laws in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas, heartening critics who feared the laws would turn away legitimate voters in November. But because the judges declined to reject the laws as unconstitutional, voter ID opponents may be winning battles but losing the broader war. The recent rulings have done little to alter the legal basis that has allowed comparable laws in Georgia and Indiana to stand for years. In Pennsylvania, for example, the judge ruled that state officials did not have enough time to implement the new voter ID law before Election Day. And a federal court ruled that Texas’s specific law would place a disproportionate burden on minority voters, but it left the door open for a different voter ID measure.

National: Disabled voters face Election Day challenges | CNN

On Nov. 6, there’s a very real possibility that many Americans with disabilities will not be able to vote because their local polling places will be inaccessible. Advocates for the disabled are worried that local governments aren’t doing enough to prepare — as are some of the small businesses that outfit polling sites with ramps. “We’ve gotten quite a few inquiries from major municipalities, but they’re not following through to actual sales,” said Dave Henderson, sales manager at EZ-Access in Algona, Wash.

National: Parties Prepare for Post-Election Legal Battles | Roll Call

Election Day is still weeks away, but both parties are already gearing up for post-election legal battles over the House and Senate race outcomes. Recounts in close races are only one scenario among many that party operatives refer to as “overtime” or “post-
election activities.” Lawyers and campaign committees are trying to be ready for whatever they may face on the morning of Nov. 7. “On a weekly basis, we have been doing training with lawyers in key districts,” a national GOP operative said. “Each state is different; each process is different.” Party committees are also actively fundraising to cover post-election legal fees. Aides say that elections can be lost after the polls have closed and that being caught unprepared for a post-election dispute could be fatal to a campaign. One Democratic operative said he considers preparations for legal challenges as important as get-out-the-vote efforts.

National: The controversy over state photo ID laws for voting continues to heat up | Washington Times Communities

I have a dirty little secret: I am legal to vote in two different states. Neither state requires photo identification. I can vote in either or both this year. How cool is that? What a great country! This came about because I moved from one state to another a few years ago, but the voter registration records in my previous location were apparently never updated to reflect my move. The government makes mistakes? There’s something I never would have guessed. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 7 million people move from state to state each year. If other state agencies are as efficient as the one where I used to live, that means up to 7 million people could be registered to vote in more than one state every year. Mix in some illegal aliens who want to be citizens, the illiterate and the clueless, some political corruption – and there goes the liberal theory that current voter registration laws are fine just as they are.

National: Election administration issues on ballot in several states | electionline

This year, some ballots, like those in Florida, are so long and filled with candidates and issues that elections officials are encouraging voters to vote early to avoid possible lines on Election Day. The issues on the ballot range from gay marriage to gambling to ethics to tax levies. In several states however, the issues on the ballot are the elections themselves. In Minnesota voters will decide whether or not photo ID should be required to cast a ballot in future elections, in Arizona voters will decide whether or not to revamp the state’s entire primary system and in Illinois, residents in East Saint Louis will vote whether or not to eliminate city’s election board.

National: Presidential campaigns target new citizen voters | The Associated Press

October 11, 2012

From Florida to Virginia, Massachusetts to California, candidates and political parties seeking to squeeze every vote from a divided electorate are targeting America’s newest citizens. It’s a relatively small bloc but one that can be substantial enough to make a difference in razor-close presidential swing states and competitive congressional races.In Florida, which President Barack Obama won by less than 5 percentage points four years ago, a new analysis of U.S. Census data shows people who naturalized as Americans since 2000 make up 6 percent of the population of voting-age citizens. For months, the Obama campaign has been sending volunteers to citizenship ceremonies to register people and canvassing Miami-area neighborhoods where immigrant families live. In California, where new citizens comprise nearly 9 percent of potential voters, Republicans hope House candidates Ricky Gill and Abel Maldonado can reach that group by highlighting their families’ journeys from India and Mexico, respectively, in search of the American Dream.

National: Feds should ‘rarely’ need time off to vote | GovExec

October 11, 2012

Federal employees who want to take off a few hours from work to vote in November will be permitted to do so only in a limited number of circumstances. A memo from Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry to chief human capital officers advises agencies on the government’s long-standing policies governing excused absences for voting. Berry told agencies that such absences “should rarely be needed” since most polling places now are open for extended periods of time, with some offering early voting options. Excused absences for voting can be granted in cases where an employee must vote early, has an extended commuting time, or attends a polling place that is not open at least three hours either before or after regular working hours. The policy applies to federal, state, county and municipal elections.

National: Study Says Transgender Voters Could Lose Rights Under ID Laws | ABC News

October 11, 2012

“It just throws people for a loop,” said Yan, 28. “I have trouble at the polling booth with people not believing that it’s me.” A study from the Williams Institute, an LGBT think tank at the University of Los Angeles, estimates that about 25,000 transgender Americans could be disenfranchised in the upcoming election because of a patchwork of voter ID laws. And it’s not just voter ID requirements that are the problem. Poll workers have discretion in giving voters a regular ballot or a provisional ballot, and bias could still affect who gets to vote. Provisional ballots can also be counted differently from regular ones.

National: 4 controversial rule changes to know in the 2012 elections | Alaska Dispatch

October 10, 2012

Voter ID laws have received plenty of attention recently, but they’re not the only controversial changes to election rules this year. Some states have made changes that critics say could impact individuals’ ability to vote. Here are four. Ohio won’t count provisional ballots mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct. Four years ago in Ohio, there were 200,000 provisional ballots cast among a total 5.7 million votes. This was the most among any state other than California. (Federal law requires states to use provisional ballotswhen a voter’s eligibility is in question or if their registration doesn’t reflect a new name or address.) But Ohio requires county election boards to reject provisional ballots if the ballot doesn’t correspond to the voter’s assigned precinct — even if it was the poll worker’s mistake. (A few other states have similar rules, but Ohio is fighting a lawsuit right now to preserve its approach.)

National: All Mail in Elections Beneficial in Some States | WREG

October 10, 2012

In The last Presidential election, 61% of eligible voters in Shelby County cast a ballot. In this past summer’s primary election saw a measly 17% voter turnout. Some states, like Oregon and Washington, have started mailing people ballots. Those two states have some of the highest turnout every election. The voter fills out the ballot and and puts it back in the mailbox, casting their ballot. “I am voting and I think it would be a lot more convenient for everybody if we could do that,” said Stephanie Helay. While Shelby County saw that seventeen percent turnout in August Washington state saw an average of thirty-eight percent voter turnout.

National: Straight-Party voters face a tangled ticket | Rock Hill Herald Online

In 2008 nearly 43 percent of York County voters pushed a single button, voting for all the candidates in their party of choice. That strategy has some petition candidates on the ballot this year encouraging people to vote for the candidates of their choice. About 250 candidates across the state were disqualified from the June primary elections after the S.C. Supreme Court ruled they didn’t file paperwork properly. Among those disqualified were Republican Gary Williams, running for the York County Council District 6; Democrat Roy Blake, running for York County Council District 4; and Republican John Rinehart, running for York County Council District 2. (Joe Thompson, running as a petition candidate against Republican Wes Hayes in S.C. Senate District 15, joined the race after the primary.) Instead Williams, and others, had to get enough voters to sign a petition to put his name on the ballot. Williams is spreading the word while canvassing neighborhoods and has mailed information telling voters how to vote for petition candidates. Those details “will be in anything I mail out or hand out” until the campaign is over, he said.

National: Campaigns Use Social Media to Lure Younger Voters | NYTimes

In 2012, it is not enough for candidates to shake some hands, kiss a baby or two and run some TV ads. They also need to be posting funny little animations on the blogging site Tumblr. If the presidential campaigns of 2008 were dipping a toe into social media like Facebook and Twitter, their 2012 versions are well into the deep end. They are taking to fields of online battle that might seem obscure to the non-Internet-obsessed — sharing song playlists on Spotify, adding frosted pumpkin bread recipes to Pinterest and posting the candidates’ moments at home with the children on Instagram. At stake, the campaigns say they believe, are votes from citizens, particularly younger ones, who may not watch television or read the paper but spend plenty of time on the social Web. The campaigns want to inject themselves into the conversation on services like Tumblr, where political dialogue often takes the form of remixed photos and quirky videos. To remind Tumblr users about the first presidential debate on Wednesday, Mr. Obama’s team used an obscure clip of Lindsay Lohan saying “It’s October 3” in the comedy “Mean Girls.” And on Twitter, Mitt Romney’s bodyguard posted a picture of the candidate’s family playing Jenga before the debate.

National: Courts block Republicans’ voter ID laws – for now | latimes.com

Earlier this year, voting rights advocates foresaw a cloud over this year’s election because new voting laws in Republican-led states tightened the rules for casting ballots and reduced the time for early voting. But with the election less than a month away, it’s now clear those laws will have little impact. A series of rulings has blocked or weakened the laws as judges — both Republicans and Democrats — stopped measures that threatened to bar legally registered voters from polling places in the November election. “Courts see their role as the protectors of the core right to vote,” said Ned Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University. The laws were the product of a Republican sweep in the 2010 election. The GOP took full control in such states as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, and soon adopted changes in their election laws. Some states told registered voters they must show a current photo identification, such as a driver’s license, even if they did not drive. Others, including Florida and Ohio, reduced the time for early voting or made it harder for college students to switch their registrations.

National: States Deny Millions Of Ex-Felons Voting Rights | Huffington Post

Eric Bates was caught twice in the late 1990s driving with a suspended license, and then again in 2006. That third time, under then-Virginia law, Bates was considered a habitual offender and was prosecuted as a felon. He served 14 months in prison and was released in 2008. He returned home hoping to put his legal issues behind him and move on with his life. But like many of the nearly 1 million people who are released from correctional facilities each year, Bates said he has had difficulty finding steady work and making ends meet. His rather pedestrian criminal record has also come with one other lingering consequence: Bates has found himself among the approximately 5.8 million whose voting rights have been taken away because of a felony conviction. “I owned up to my crime. I served my time and I just want my rights back,” Bates, 53, an unemployed electrical engineer, told The Huffington Post. “I want to participate. But it’s just as well as if I murdered somebody. It’s a life sentence.”

National: As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections | NYTimes.com

October 8, 2012

On the morning of the primary here in August, the local elections board met to decide which absentee ballots to count. It was not an easy job. The board tossed out some ballots because they arrived without the signature required on the outside of the return envelope. It rejected one that said “see inside” where the signature should have been. And it debated what to do with ballots in which the signature on the envelope did not quite match the one in the county’s files. “This ‘r’ is not like that ‘r,’ ” Judge Augustus D. Aikens Jr. said, suggesting that a ballot should be rejected. Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor here, disagreed. “This ‘k’ is like that ‘k,’ ” he replied, and he persuaded his colleagues to count the vote. Scenes like this will play out in many elections next month, because Florida and other states are swiftly moving from voting at a polling place toward voting by mail. In the last general election in Florida, in 2010, 23 percent of voters cast absentee ballots, up from 15 percent in the midterm election four years before. Nationwide, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of voting by mail has more than tripled since 1980 and now accounts for almost 20 percent of all votes.

National: Congressman opens voting rights probe of tea party group | latimes.com

October 8, 2012

A Maryland congressman has opened an investigation of a group that has tried to remove thousands of voters from registration rolls across the nation in advance of the presidential election. The inquiry by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings , a Democrat, is being started a week after Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) urged the Justice Department to enforce voting rights laws, citing a Los Angeles Times article detailing attempts by an Ohio offshoot of the group, True the Vote, to strike hundreds of students and others from voting rolls. “At some point, an effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression,” Cummings told True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht in a letter on Thursday. “If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.” Cummings is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

National: In Face of Voter ID Laws, Democrats Push to Expand Ballot Access | NYTimes.com

October 8, 2012

At a time when Republicans have moved to enact tougher qualifications for voting in states around the country, Democrats have begun to push voter registration laws in the opposite direction in states they control, especially here. In the last few weeks, potential voters in California have been able to register online for the first time, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will allow residents to register and vote on Election Day. Connecticut passed similar legislation this year, and voting rights advocacy groups hope as many as five states might join them next year. Democratic lawmakers here described the legislation as a potential counterweight to Republican-backed laws in other parts of the country requiring photo identification to vote and making it more difficult to register. “It’s extremely important that as some states in the nation are moving to suppress voter turnout, California is moving forward to expand voter participation,” said Mike Feuer, a Democratic state assemblyman who sponsored the Election Day registration law. “I hope California is the catalyst for other states to encourage civic engagement and participation.”

National: How Close Are We to Internet Voting? | Mashable

You can do basically anything online. From booking a flight to securely transmitting medical records to your doctor, from buying groceries to managing your bank account, the web supports all sorts of complex transactions. But one common task has firmly resisted the lure of online convenience: voting. At least mostly. There is actually some online voting already happening in very limited ways. At least 32 states and the District of Columbia will allow military or overseas voters to return absentee ballots via email, fax or an Internet portal, in effect offering a form of remote electronic voting to some segment of the population. But for the majority of voters, a trip to a polling place will be necessary to cast a vote in this year’s election. Why is that? Surely, if engineers can figure out how to safeguard your medical records or transfer large sums of money over the Internet, beaming a vote from your living room should be a piece of cake. That’s a popular refrain among proponents of Internet voting systems, and on the surface, it makes sense. If security-obsessed industries like banking and medicine have embraced the Internet, why is voting still stuck in the relative dark ages? As with most things, the reality is a bit more complicated. According to VerifiedVoting.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the “accuracy, integrity and verifiability” of elections in a digital age, all voting systems should have a few key components. First, there needs to be a fully auditable, preferably voter-verifiable paper trail that maintains the integrity of the secret ballot. Second, voting systems need to have in place strong mechanisms to prevent any undetected changes to votes. Third, systems should not be easily subject to wide-scale service disruptions. Indeed, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002 as a response to the Florida recount debacle of 2000, requires some of these provisions under the law.

National: Nathan Sproul, A Republican Operative, Long Trailed by Voter Fraud Claims | NYTimes.com

For a year, the Republican National Committee has portrayed Democrats as the villains when it comes to voter fraud. In a provocative article on CNN’s Web site, the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, said, “Democrats know they benefit from election fraud.” The tables have turned, however, and Republicans are now playing defense over the role of a well-paid operative, Nathan Sproul, in a voter registration scandal that emerged in Florida and has spread to other states. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said it was reviewing “numerous” claims involving a company that Mr. Sproul runs to determine if a criminal investigation is warranted. Complaints have surfaced in 10 Florida counties, among them allegations that registrations had similar signatures or false addresses, or were filed under the names of dead people. In other cases, party affiliations appeared to have been changed.

National: New ID laws could delay outcome of close election | KATC.com

The presidential election is Nov. 6, but it could take days to figure out the winner if the vote is close. New voting laws are likely to increase the number of people who have to cast provisional ballots in key states. Tight races for Congress, governor and local offices also could be stuck in limbo while election officials scrutinize ballots, a scenario that would surely attract legions of campaign lawyers from both parties. “It’s a possibility of a complete meltdown for the election,” said Daniel Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida. Voters cast provisional ballots for a variety of reasons: They don’t bring proper ID to the polls; they fail to update their voter registration after moving; they try to vote at the wrong precinct; or their right to vote is challenged by someone.

National: Absentee ballots gain popularity despite warnings of potential voter fraud | Fox News