National

The Nov. 6 presidential election is the first in which almost half the states will permit Americans in the military or overseas to cast ballots via e-mail or online, raising concerns that voting may be vulnerable to hacking or cyber attacks. The BGOV Barometer shows that 23 states and the District of Columbia will permit some degree of Internet-enabled voting for armed forces personnel and U.S. citizens living abroad, according to data compiled by the Overseas Vote Foundation. Among contested states in the presidential race, Nevada, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina will allow e-mailed ballots, raising the possibility that the winner of a state’s electoral votes might depend on a few thousand electronic ballots. “From a security point of view, it’s the riskiest form of voting ever invented,” said David Jefferson, a director of the Verified Voting Foundation, a Carlsbad, California-based non- profit that works to improve the security of online and electronic balloting.

National: After Pennsylvania ruling, future of voter ID in other states is unclear | Philadelphia Inquirer

A Commonwealth Court decision Tuesday resolves the question of whether Pennsylvanians must present ID at the polls in November, but it hardly ends the state or national debate on the subject. In recent years, 30 states have put in place laws requiring voters to show some form of identification before casting a ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2012, 33 states introduced legislation to either implement voter ID or strengthen or amend previously passed laws. In many, like Pennsylvania, there has been great division over the need for such laws. And by confining the decision to the upcoming presidential election, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson Jr. ensured that the debate will continue in Pennsylvania.

National: Setbacks For Voter ID Laws in Pennsylvania, Other States Could Be Short-Lived | NPR

Civil rights groups are cheeringthe injunction placed on the Pennsylvania voter identification law, but their recent victories against state photo ID measures very likely won’t last beyond Election Day. The Pennsylvania law is the latest to lose a court ruling that keeps it from being implemented for Nov. 6; before that, a federal court ruled against Texas’ strict photo ID statute. In both cases, the judges ruled that voters who lack the allowed IDs would be disenfranchised. The Pennsylvania ruling, in particular, turned on the judge’s opinion that there wasn’t enough time for voters to obtain new IDs before Election Day.

National: DOD slams report that military absentee ballots are down due to DOD error | Washington Examiner

Defense Department spokesman George Little said he takes “strong issue” with the Military Voter Protection Project report showing a major decline in requests for absentee ballots among service members. “The data in that report, we believe, is quite old,” Little told reporters at the Pentagon today. “It’s important to remember that the number of deployed members in the war-zones has declined significantly.”

National: White House Hacked In Cyber Attack That Used Spear-Phishing To Crack Unclassified Network

October 3, 2012

National: Voter ID Rules Fail Court Tests Across Country | NYTimes.com

October 3, 2012

A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday blocked the key component of a highly contested state law requiring strict photographic identification to vote in next month’s election, saying the authorities had not done enough to ensure that voters had access to the new documents. The result, that Pennsylvanians will not have to present a state-approved ID to vote in November, was the latest and most significant in a series of legal victories for those opposed to laws that they charge would limit access to polls in this presidential election. With only a month left until Election Day, disputes around the country over new voter ID requirements, early voting, provisional ballots and registration drives are looking far less significant. “Every voter restriction that has been challenged this year has been either enjoined, blocked or weakened,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice, which is part of the New York University School of Law and opposes such restrictions. “It has been an extraordinary string of victories for those opposing these laws.”

National: Romney seeks extended deadline for overseas voters | The Detroit News

October 3, 2012

Working to broaden his popularity among military veterans, Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign has sent letters to election officials in Wisconsin, Mississippi and Vermont demanding that the deadline for receiving ballots from military and overseas voters be extended. The letters sent in recent days on Romney’s behalf by former U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi charge that election officials in the states missed the Sept. 22 deadline for mailing some ballots to overseas and military voters. A fourth letter was to be sent Tuesday to Michigan officials, according to Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams. The campaign is actively monitoring state and local election officials across the country, he said. “We want to ensure that our fighting men and women overseas have the right to vote in the time that is given under federal law,” Williams said. “We’re doing it across the country in both red states and blue state and battleground states.”

National: Voter registration fraud claims singe GOP | CBS News

October 2, 2012

National: White House Hacked In Cyber Attack That Used Spear-Phishing To Crack Unclassified Network | Huffington Post

October 2, 2012

Hackers breached an unclassified computer network used by the White House, but did not appear to have stolen any data, a White House official said Monday. The hackers breached the network by using a technique known as spear phishing, in which they target victims who have access to sensitive computer networks by sending personalized emails that appear to come from trusted sources. Once the victims click on the bogus attachment or link, the hackers can install malicious software on the PCs to spy on users and steal data. A White House official declined to comment on what data resided on the network, but emphasized it did not contain any classified information. “These types of attacks are not infrequent and we have mitigation measures in place,” the White House official, who asked not to be identified, told The Huffington Post. “In this instance the attack was identified, the system was isolated, and there is no indication whatsoever that any exfiltration of data took place. Moreover, there was never any impact or attempted breach of any classified system.”

National: RNC Uses $5.3 Million Recount Fund To Bolster Total | Huffington Post

October 2, 2012

The Republican National Committee has counted more than $5 million in contributions it cannot use to help Republican candidates until after the November election as part of the pool of money it has available for the 2012 campaign. The RNC has taken in a whopping $5.29 million in donations for a recount fund that could be accessed if the results in the Nov. 6 election are indecisive. In the committee’s Federal Election Commission filings, the money is being counted among the $282,795,014 in total donations that it has received during the current electoral cycle. After the August fundraising period, the committee claimed to have $76,569,658 in cash on hand. In actuality, that figure is close to $71.2 million.

National: As Election Day looms, voter ID law critics seek out the unregistered | The Sun Herald

As legal challenges to voter identification laws slowly wind their way through the courts, opponents of the controversial measures aren’t just sitting around waiting for judicial relief. They’re hitting the streets in a grassroots effort to make sure affected voters have the documents they’ll need to cast their ballots in November. “When you put Americans’ backs against the wall, we tend to rise and we tend to fight a little harder,” said John Jordan, an NAACP elections consultant in Philadelphia, where a new state law requires voters to have government-issued photo identification documents.

National: Potential voter registration fraud in Florida: GOP’s own ‘ACORN’ scandal? | CSMonitor.com

The Republican Party promptly fired a voter registration contractor this week after the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting, turned in illegible, incorrect, and falsified voter registration forms to Florida election officials. Saying the party has “zero tolerance” for voter fraud, the GOP also filed complaints against the company with the Florida Secretary of State’s office. The company, run by long-time GOP operative Nathan Sproul, says a single employee was responsible for the forged signatures, though the problem, by Friday, had spread to 10 counties. “This is an issue we take extremely seriously,” RNC spokesman Sean Spicer told CBS News. “When allegations were brought to our attention we severed all ties to the firm.” While reasonable, those explanations could have trouble finding traction among the US electorate, which has watched battles erupt in mostly swing states from Florida to Ohio over control of voter rolls, and heated debates about potential disenfranchisement of key Democratic constituencies, poorer, minority, and elderly voters.

National: Republican Voter Laws Face Scrutiny As Obama Wins Mount | Bloomberg

With 39 days left before the U.S. presidential election, time is running out for judges to resolve voter access lawsuits in states including Ohio and Florida where a few thousand votes may be the margin of victory between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. A federal appeals court in Cincinnati is considering Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s bid to overturn rulings blocking Republican-sponsored restrictions on early voting and provisional ballots. In Pennsylvania, voters are waiting to hear whether courts will enforce laws requiring them to show photo identification at the polls. “The sooner these matters can be resolved the better,” Matt McClellan, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said in a telephone interview. “They’re in an expedited process and we hope they will be resolved well in advance of the election.”

National: RNC cuts ties to firm after voter fraud allegations | latimes.com

The Republican National Committee has abruptly cut ties to a consulting firm hired for get-out-the-vote efforts in seven presidential election swing states after Florida prosecutors launched an investigation into possible fraud in voter registration forms. Working through state parties, the RNC has sent more than $3.1 million this year to Strategic Allied Consulting, a company formed in June by Nathan Sproul, an Arizona voting consultant. Sproul has operated other firms that have been accused in past elections of improprieties designed to help Republican candidates, including dumping registration forms filled out by Democrats, but none of those allegations led to any criminal charges.

National: Risk of Disenfranchisement High for Ex-Felons | New America Media

Walter Lomax can still remember the day he cast his first vote in an election. The emotion in his voice changes as he takes a pause, attempting to put into words how it felt to exercise the right after serving 40 years, wrongly convicted, in a Maryland prison. “I felt empowered,” said Lomax, sitting inside the Park Avenue Baltimore office where he now operates the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative (MJRI). “Being someone who spent two-thirds of my life in prison, being free and able to participate was refreshing. I played a part in the process.” Not a hint of bitterness can be detected as the slender, tall, man, now in his early sixties, reflects on the day he entered a Baltimore booth in 2007, just one year after his release, to vote for a slew of offices from mayor to city council members. “Now if we need a speed bump in our neighborhood, a stoplight, or a playground I can have a say because if you look in the records you’ll see that I am a voting constituent.” According to the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization, one in 40 Americans stand to become disenfranchised even after they have served their time. That statistic is significantly higher when it comes to the African American population, where one in every 13 over the age of 18 has lost the right to vote.

National: Lawsuit highlights difficulty of third-party involvement in debates | latimes.com

The participants if this year’s presidential debates are set – Republican nominee Mitt Romney will face off against President Obama in a matchup that’s been obvious for months. But there are still other presidential candidates, and one in particular is keen on elbowing his way into the debates. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson earlier this month filed a lawsuit against the Commission on Presidential Debates, claiming that the organization’s practices violate antitrust laws and alleging collusion between the commission and the country’s two dominant political parties. In the suit, Johnson and his campaign accuse the commission, along with the Republican and Democratic national committees, of a “conspiracy” to meet in secret and create the rules for the debates, excluding third-party candidates and participating in what the lawsuit contends is a “restraint of trade” violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

National: Students try to navigate voting laws, registration hassles | Houston Chronicle

For young voters busy registering for classes, registering to vote isn’t always their No. 1 priority. Tack on changing registration laws and voting can turn into a struggle. “When students come back to school, they’re either more worried about schools or worried about, let’s be honest, parties,” said David Schultz, an election law expert at Hamline University. “The first thing on their mind is not registering to vote, especially for students who just turned 18. They don’t know much about the process.” California’s new same-day registration law is a blessing for students with planners already crammed with exam dates, Rock the Vote President Heather Smith said. But across the country there are technical issues students face that could complicate the process for them. Students new to voting often don’t know registration deadlines (in Texas, Oct. 9 and Oct. 12 in New York) or even that they need to register to vote, Smith said. “It’s frustrating when a young person navigating the process for the first time is calling our office on Election Day (saying), ‘I’m here and ready to vote and I didn’t realize I needed to register,’” Smith said. Proposed ID requirements to register, like Texas and Pennsylvania laws currently in the courts that don’t accept all student IDs, have been criticized as adding another hurdle for young voters. For example, students in the dorms or on campuses with good public transportation often don’t need a driver’s license, Smith said.

National: 2012 US campaigns have cost more than $4bn, election commission says | guardian.co.uk

More than $4bn was spent on the presidential and congressional candidates and campaigns in the first 18 months of the election cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission. Presidential candidates have received $601.9m of that money, the data released on Wednesday, shows, while $1.21bn has been donated to congressional candidates donated to presidential candidates personally. The Federal Election Commission compiled campaign finance reports filed between 1 January 2011 and 30 June 2012 to produce the report. The time period covers the Republican primaries and the buildup to the presidential race. In total $4.06bn was received by presidential candidates, congressional candidates, party committees and PACs over the 18-month-period. There are no direct figures directly comparing the same period available from 2008 or earlier, but Bill Allison, from the non-profit Sunlight Foundation, said ultimately more money will be spent on the 2012 campaign. “This is 18 months and we’re at $4bn, 2008 the entire election cycle ended up being at $5.2bn, so there’s still a quarter of the money to go,” Allison said. “We’ll definitely top that number. The current projection is about $5.8bn that we’ll see for 2012.”

National: GOP’s ACORN moment | Salon.com

There are still plenty of conservatives who think ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama and will do it again this year. ACORN was everywhere four years ago. Even John McCain, late in his campaign and desperate to land a blow on Obama, ranan ad tying his challenger to the community-organizing group before saying in the final debate that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” How did ACORN steal the election? A number of the group’s paid canvassers had been caught submitting false voter registration forms in a handful of states, using the names of dead people or false addresses, in order to avoid working. Four years later, ACORN is dead, and a Republican firm contracted by the Republican National Committee has adopted its shady tactics. But, so far at least, there’s been hardly a peep from the same conservatives who seized on ACORN about one of their own engaging in almost identical fraudulent tactics. Prosecutors in Florida are looking into alleged voter registration fraud conducted by employees of Strategic Allied Consulting, which the RNC and state parties hired in at least five states. TheRNC has now cut ties with the firm after news broke that its employees had registered dead people and listed the addresses of a Land Rover dealership and other non-residences on registration forms. Paul Lux, the Republican supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, Fla., who first brought the suspect registration forms to the attention of prosecutors, said as many as one in three were questionable. “It’s kind of ironic that the dead people they accused ACORN of registering are now being done by the RPOF [Republican Party of Florida],” Lux said.

National: Military voting threatens caucuses | Politico.com

In an unexpected political twist, a move to include overseas military personnel and wounded warriors in the presidential nominating process could threaten the caucuses in Iowa and other states. At both the Republican and Democratic national conventions over the summer, delegates proposed rules changes to enhance the ability of overseas service members and injured troops to participate in the caucuses. A Republican rules change asserting that states “shall use every means practical to guarantee” the participation of overseas and injured service members in the presidential nominating process was designed to enhance military voting. But in the case of Iowa and other caucus states, where voters must be present to participate, it also has the side effect of forcing changes in traditional procedures — and raising questions about the future viability of the caucuses themselves.

National: Provisional ballots could be hanging chads of 2012 | KNOE

New voting laws in key states could force a lot more voters to cast provisional ballots this election, delaying results in close races for days while election officials scrutinize ballots and campaigns wage legal battles over which ones should get counted. New laws in competitive states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin could leave the outcome of the presidential election in doubt – if the vote is close – while new laws in Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee could delay results in state or local elections. Some new laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are still being challenged in court, adding to the uncertainty as the Nov. 6 election nears. “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: Voter Harassment, Circa 2012 | NYTimes.com