Voting Blogs: The Maldives: a serial coup in progress? | openDemocracy

In the latest episode of what appears to be a serial coup in the Maldives, the country’s Supreme Court – apparently at the behest of allies of the former dictator,  Islamists, and powerful business figures – threw out the results of the first round of presidential elections just hours before the scheduled date of the second round in which pro-democracy leader Mohamed Nasheed was expected to win handily. On October 10, the Court also invalidated all registered voters (the greatest number of whom had supported Nasheed) and called for the re-registration of everyone who wished to participate in a new presidential election, which they scheduled for October 19, only nine days later. This has raised concerns that the rushed and largely unsupervised re-registration process will allow anti-democratic forces to add the names of non-existent supporters of their candidates to the rolls while purging large numbers of Nasheed supporters. The Economist, noting that the police were getting “suspiciously strong powers of oversight” in the repeat election, observed that the impact of the ruling of the Court, dominated by appointees of a former dictator, is that “the crooked and the powerful are telling voters to go away and try again until they come up with a different result. ”

Voting Blogs: Navigating Debates about Redistricting | The Monkey Cage

People feel passionately about redistricting.  They don’t like how it’s done, or how it’s disadvantaged their party, or both.  So when political scientists come along to say “redistricting might matter less than you think”—for the outcomes of the 2012 House elections, for party polarization, for declining electoral competitiveness—people get cranky.  For example:

 Suck on it Monkey Cage and prove me wrong with maps.

So there’s clearly room for more thinking and discussion about the effects of redistricting.  Here are 4 things I think are important to discuss or at least mention.

Voting Blogs: Mr. McCutcheon—and the Parties—Before the Court | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Justices yesterday pondered and puzzled over various hypotheticals about how large donations can flood into the political system. All advocates were highly able and performed well, but the discussion never came to a clear agreement about what the law would allow, or when its proper enforcement would require the Federal Election Commission to challenge underhanded activity. There was uncertainty about contribution limits and the various uses of the terms “transfers” and “contributions”; disagreement about how far the earmarking rules reached; distinctions blurred between “hard” and “soft” money; and differences over which schemes for evading the limits could be considered “realistic” predictions of political behavior. Justice Breyer offered one hypothetical and a view of the legal implications, then conceded he or his law clerk might have it wrong and would have to review the rules again. Justice Breyer also had views of how easily circumvention could be accomplished and how open to public view it was. It was “pretty easy,” he said, “to have not one person control … 4,000 PACs,” and “if you want to say, is this a reality? Turn on your television set or internet. Because we found instances, without naming names, where it certainly is a reality.” Transcript of Oral Argument at 8, McCutcheon v. FEC, No. 12-536 (Oct. 8, 2013).

Voting Blogs: On the Eve of Argument: The Trouble with the Court’s Contributions Jurisprudence | More Soft Money Hard Law

It is assumed that if the Court in McCutcheon revises the standard of review for contributions, it will do so to overthrow Buckley and to bring the standards for contributions and expenditures into alignment. Certainly this is a possibility, and it is the outcome being urged by Senator McConnell and dreaded by prominent voices in the reform community. Of course, the Court has other choices. Depending how it goes about the task, the Court could improve on the Buckley jurisprudence without destroying altogether the contribution/expenditure distinction. The Court’s treatment of contributions and expenditures does not have to be same in order for the approach to contributions to be better—more rigorous in construction and more convincing in application—than it is today.

Voting Blogs: One Path, Two Forks: Election Overhauls in Colorado and North Carolina | The Canvass

Colorado and North Carolina share some commonalities, politically speaking. Both have had healthy two-party competition over the last dozen years or so; both became battleground states in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections; and, since the 2012 election, both now have unified governments. Democrats control the House, the Senate and the governor’s office in Colorado, and Republicans control the same in North Carolina. Another commonality: this year Colorado and North Carolina both enacted major election overhauls that address same day registration, early voting and pre-registration for teens (along with other issues). The two states took mirror opposite approaches to those issues.

Voting Blogs: The Corporation and the Little Guy in the 11th Circuit | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Campaign Legal Center has alerted its readers to a “flood” of challenges to campaign finance laws, and its message is that the reform advocates must remain at their battle stations. It is certainly true that interests hostile to any campaign finance regulation are hard at work; they might well believe that in this time, with this Supreme Court, their moment has come and no time should be wasted. But not all of these challenges are fairly lumped together and described as one indiscriminate assault against any and all reasonable regulation. A few raise questions that even those favoring reasonable limits on campaign finance should take—and address—seriously. The case of Worley v. Fla. Sec’y of State, 717 F.3d 1238 (11th Cir. 2013), is one such case, a challenge to an application of a state requirement that individuals supporting or opposing a ballot initiative must register and report through a political action committee (PAC). The Eleventh Circuit rejected the claim, which is now before the Supreme Court on a petition for certiorari. The four petitioners in Worley argue that PAC requirements, if a burden on corporations in the manner described by the Supreme Court in Citizens United, must fall even more heavily and just as permissibly on individuals banded together in limited, inexpensive “grassroots” political enterprises.

Voting Blogs: Political Contributions, Conflicts of Interest, and the Role of Ethical Standards | More Soft Money Hard Law

In the fight over contribution limits, litigants argue over how much money, given by whom and in which ways, can push normal politics into corruption or the certainty of its appearance. McCutcheon tests the proposition that corruption can be a byproduct of the total volume of giving, not just how much a donor hands over to a specific candidate or political committee. McCutcheon v. Fed. Election Comm’n, No. 12-536 (S. Ct. docketed Nov. 1, 2012). Other cases bring the courts into the dispute over the relationship between corrupt potential and the size of the contribution, the tipping point at which the sum given exceeds what it is safe to allow. Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377 (2000). Threading its way through these arguments is the question of whether and how the identity of donors, such as political parties, should be weighed in the bargain. See e.g. Illinois Liberty PAC v. Madigan, Case:1:12-cv-05811 (N.D. Ill.). These arguments are waged energetically but without much precision or consistency.

Voting Blogs: A. Lawyers, Guns and Money — Q. What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Recall | The Recall Elections Blog

On September 10th, Colorado will be holding its first ever state-level recalls against two Democratic state Senators, Senate President John Morse and Angela Giron, for their support for gun control legislation. Petitioners actually went after two other legislators and discussed recalling the Governor, but they failed to turn in petitions for those officials. In many ways, these recalls are different than most famous recalls of recent years against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and California Governor Gray Davis in that the primary goal here is symbolic. These recalls will not result in Republicans gaining control of the Senate (absent a Democratic Senator flipping parties). Morse is term-limited and out of office in 2014. Democrats are not actively looking to draft new gun control laws, and since the Democrats control the House and the Governor’s office, the laws will likely not be revoked until a new full election.

Voting Blogs: The Impact of the Electronic Transmission of Blank Ballots in 2012 | Overseas Vote Foundation

Approximately 10 years ago, states began to explore using electronic transmission methods, such as fax and email, to transmit blank ballots to military and overseas voters. At that time, 24 states allowed a blank ballot to be sent to voters via fax only and three states, Florida, Wisconsin, and Virginia, also permitted email transmission in limited cases. Gradually, additional states continued to implement electronic transmission methods in 2006 and in 2008. In 2009, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act formalized the use of electronic technology in the military and overseas voting process by mandating the use of electronic transmission of election materials to UOCAVA voters with options for the electronic delivery of blank ballots. As states became compliant with MOVE, the use of electronic transmission methods for the delivery of blank ballots increased sharply. For example, in 2010, 47 states and the District of Columbia provided for the transmission of a blank ballot via email or Internet download, up from 20 states in 2008. Only two states, Alaska and Rhode Island, offered blank ballots via fax as their method of electronic delivery in 2010. Several states, however, placed restrictions on the use of email for delivery of blank ballots. For example, Colorado only allowed military voters to receive ballots via email and not overseas civilians.

Voting Blogs: New Mexico Secretary of State Revives 21-Year Old Discredited Attorney General Opinion to Remove Green and Constitution Parties from Ballot | Ballot Access News

New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna J. Duran, a Republican, recently removed the Green Party and the Constitution Party from the ballot, even though both parties successfully petitioned in 2012 and even though, for the last seventeen years, New Mexico law has been interpreted to mean that when a party successfully petitions for party status, it gets the next two elections, not just one election. The Secretary of State found a discredited 1992 Attorney General’s Opinion that says a party should be removed, after just one election, if it runs for either Governor or President and fails to get one-half of 1%. Yet, the Opinion says if a party qualifies by petition and then doesn’t run for either Governor or President, it remains on the ballot for the next election.

Voting Blogs: Another legal challenge? Colorado law mandates a vote on the recall question for a successor vote to count | Recall Elections Blog

The Citizen Center’s Marilyn Marks has pointed out that the Colorado Recall requires that voters must cast a ballot on the yes-or-no recall question if they want to vote for a successor candidate. Just to be clear: Colorado, like California, has what I call a two-step/same-day recall vote — voters cast one ballot which has two parts: step one is the question of “Should this official be recalled?” and step two is “Who should be named as a replacement?” Colorado’s Constitution very clearly states that if you don’t vote on the recall question, any second vote is tossed out and doesn’t count. This is a ripe avenue for litigation, as California had the same provision in 2003. A US District Court tossed it out as unconstitutional (the case was not appealed). San Diego is facing the same question (which may very well be tossed out there as well). This one could be another minefield for the Secretary of State and the local Clerks.

Voting Blogs: The Interest in Speech about Politics v. the Interest in Political Speech | More Soft Money Hard Law

The SCOTUSblog symposium on the McCutcheon case continued with postings on various aspects of the speech and government interests involved in the contribution/expenditure distinction. Justin Levitt argues that overall, in granting more protection to expenditures, the distinction correctly ranks the speech values. The independent expenditure is pure self-expression, the spender’s “unique” view; the contribution helps the candidate’s speech, and as he may speak as he pleases, the message he communicates and the “unique” view of the contributor may well diverge. Tamara Piety affirms the Court’s view that “the expressive interests of contributions are minimal” and that restrictions on them may be necessary to protect against loss of public confidence in government, to enhance the competitiveness of elections, and to focus governmental energies on voters and not contributors. What this analysis misses in following Buckley is the difference between an interest in speaking about politics, and an interest in effective political speech. The contribution and expenditure distinction is rooted in the first of these interests, and it is for this reason that the expenditure is the constitutionally privileged form of speech. In theBuckley view, the spender speaking just for herself may well treasure volume; the more said, the better, in order to drive the points home. By contrast, because the contributor supposedly speaks through another, “by proxy,” a strictly limited amount given still completes the expressive act of association and fully vindicates this more limited First Amendment interest. The contributor, however, in funding candidate speech is motivated by a deeper interest than Buckley accounts for—an interest in effective political speech.

Voting Blogs: What Did VRA Preclearance Actually Do?: The Gap Between Perception and Reality | Election Law Blog

A widespread perception exists that, in the years before the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Section 5 preclearance regime was a powerful tool in protecting access to the ballot box for minority voters.  Indeed, Section 5 is widely thought to have been overwhelmingly about protecting access in the covered areas:  that is part of it symbolic meaning.  On this view, Section 5 was a bulwark against laws like the one just signed by North Carolina’s governor – which makes voting more difficult for eligible voters by cutting the early voting period, eliminating same-day registration, and other measures. But the reality is that Section 5 was rarely used in this way, at least in its last three decades.  Section 5 did not, primarily, function to protect access to the ballot box.  Instead, the overwhelming uses of Section 5 were to ensure more majority-majority election districts or to stop at-large election systems and other practices believed to weaken minority voting strength.  Some of these uses, especially the compelled creation of majority-minority election districts, are more controversial (even among conventional “liberals”) than are robust protections for access to the ballot box.  Yet in practice, Section 5 was used primarily for redistricting and other matters of vote dilution rather than protecting the right of eligible citizens to cast a vote.

Voting Blogs: Thoughts on the Road Ahead in North Carolina | Election Law Blog

Today North Carolina’s governor signed one of the most restrictive voting laws in the Nation. I have been trying to think of another state law passed since the 1965 Voting Rights Act to rival this law but I cannot. It is a combination of cutbacks in early voting, restrictions on voter registration, imposition of new requirements on voters such as photo identification in voting, limitations on poll worker activity to help voters, and other actions which as a whole cannot be interpreted as anything other than an effort to make it harder for some people—and likely poor people, people of color, old people and others likely to “skew Democratic”—to vote. And yet I don’t expect that the entirety of this law will fall through one of the lawsuits filed or to be filed against it.

Voting Blogs: Greg Abbott’s curious brief | Texas Redistricting

Last week, the State of Texas filed a brief responding to arguments that Texas should be ‘bailed in’ to preclearance coverage under section 3 of the Voting Rights Act. The brief makes any number of technical and procedural arguments, and the courts will have to sort through those in due course. But it’s worth pausing to consider two of the more far-reaching claims in the brief. The first of these is the claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby Co. means that ‘bail in’ under section 3 is now limited to situations like those that existed in the Deep South in the 1960s and that:

To suggest that Texas has engaged in or will engage in 1960s style ‘common practice of staying one step ahead of the federal courts by passing new discriminatory voting laws’ is absurd on its face.

Now, set aside, for the moment, Texas’ recent history of doing things like trying to re-draw CD-23 – in not one but two successive redistricting cycles – to take away the ability of Hispanic voters to elect their candidate of choice. Or its long record of other Voting Rights Act violations. Instead, stop and ponder this: Texas wasn’t originally subject to preclearance under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That’s right. Although it’s sometimes forgotten today, Texas didn’t become covered under section 5 until the 1975 amendments to the Act.

Voting Blogs: Texas Ups the Ante in Fight Over Voting Rights Act, Betting on An Emboldened Conservative Supreme Court | Election Law Blog

I recently wrote in NLJ about AG Holder’s Texas-sized gambit: to get Texas covered again under a preclearance regime using section 3 of the Voting Rights Act. It’s a move that is risky both legally and politically, for reasons I explain in the earlier piece and do not repeat here. Still, I was struck by the boldness of the State of Texas filing opposing bail in. Texas made the arguments I expected it to make: about the burden on those seeking preclearance to prove intentional discrimination being high, the inappropriateness of relying upon findings of intentional discrimination in a different court opinion—especially one that has been vacated, etc. (See Lyle Denniston’s summary of Texas’s filing.) But Texas made a bigger argument too, and it one that may make it back to the Supreme Court where, for reasons I will explain, the Court may accept it.

Voting Blogs: The Futilities of the Contribution and Expenditure Distinction | More Soft Money Hard Law

Replying to a posting here, David Gans has responded with a confident defense of the brief he co-authored on behalf of Larry Lessig in the McCutcheon case. On the question of whether the aggregate limit is a contribution or expenditure limit, he has no doubt: it is an “easy” one, he writes. But how easy is it? The application has been uncertain from the beginning. A prime example is the limit on a candidate’s personal spending, struck down by the Buckley Court, which shows how a limit, like the aggregate limit, can straddle the contribution-expenditure line. The Court in Buckley described the candidate spending limit as an “expenditure limit,” after the Court of Appeals had reached a different conclusion. Buckley v. Valeo, 519 F.2d 821, 854 (1975). One could say that the Supreme Court then cleared things up.Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 53 (1976) (“The Court of Appeals evidently considered the personal funds expenditure … as a contribution rather than expenditure.”) But it didn’t.

Voting Blogs: Arguing about section 3 in the Texas redistricting case | Texas Redistricting

On Monday, the parties in the Texas redistricting case in San Antonio had their first opportunity to flesh out positions on the issues courts will have to confront in deciding whether to use the “pocket trigger” in section 3 of the Voting Rights Act to impose preclearance coverage on jurisdictions, like Texas, that are no longer subject to preclearance under section 5. A look at what they said in their briefs. The threshold question, of course, is what exactly does section 3 mean? The statutory text of section 3(c) of the Voting Rights Act says a court can order bail-in in a “proceeding instituted by the [United States] Attorney General or an aggrieved person” if it finds “that violations of the fourteenth or fifteenth amendment justifying equitable relief have occurred within the territory of such State or political subdivision.” (emphasis added) The statute, however, is silent as what standards courts should use to decide when such equitable circumstances might exist.

Verified Voting in the News: California College Vote Hack | David Jefferson/Election Law Blog

I just read Doug Chapin’s article on the vote rigging at Cal State San Marcos, and I would add several observations.  Had this been a public election conducted via Internet voting, it would have been much more difficult to identify any problem or to capture the perpetrator, Mr. Weaver. Mr. Weaver was captured because he was voting from school-owned computers. This was networked voting but not really Internet voting. The IT staff was able to notice “unusual activity” on those computers, and via remote access they were able to “watch the user cast vote after vote”. But in a public online election people would vote from their own private PCs, and through the Internet, not on a network controlled by the IT staff of election officials. There will likely be no “unusual activity” to notice in real time, and no possibility of “remote access” to allow them to monitor activity on a voter’s computer.  Note also that university IT staff were able to monitor him while he was voting, showing that they were able to completely violate voting privacy, something we cannot tolerate in a public election.

Voting Blogs: The Chances of a Deal to Fix the VRA After Shelby County? Observations about the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing | Election Law Blog

I had a chance to watch a good part of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today. It makes me more pessimistic about the chances of a deal to improve the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court effectively gutted section 5 in the Shelby County case. Back in February I organized a Reuters Opinion symposium on what Congress could do if the Supreme Court struck down section 5. My thinking was that such a decision would be controversial and Republicans might jump at the chance to fix the Act to improve their position with minority voters. (It’s a point I reaffirmed in this NY Times oped.) Symposium participants offered good ideas for improvements, and after the decision Rick Pildes had an important post on increasing the use of “bail in” as another alternative. I noted in the Reuters piece that I did not expect a new coverage formula to emerge, and one question would be whether a VRA fix would look more like a race-based remedy or more like an election administration (“We’ve got to fix that”) remedy. Today’s hearing showed how far apart Democrats and Republicans are.  The Democrats seemed to be grandstanding (as when Sen. Durbin attacked ALEC) or living in a different universe (as when Sen. Klobuchar asked questions about same day voter registration). Sen. Whitehouse talked about voter fraud as a non-existent problem.  These are not the ways to get at a bipartisan compromise on new VRA legislation.

Voting Blogs: An Effects-Test Pocket Trigger? | Travis Crum/Election Law Blog

Following Shelby County v. Holder, civil rights advocates are searching for new strategies to protect voting rights. As I argued in my 2010 Yale Law Journal Note, section 3 of the Voting Rights Act provides a roadmap for the future. Commonly called the bail-in mechanism or the pocket trigger, section 3 authorizes federal courts to place States and political subdivisions that have violated the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments under preclearance. Designed to trigger coverage in “pockets of discrimination” missed by the coverage formula, section 3 has been used to bail-in over a dozen jurisdictions, including Arkansas, New Mexico, and Los Angeles County. Although the pocket trigger has been historically overshadowed by section 5, it has garnered recent attention as a potential replacement for the coverage formula (see here, here, here, and here). So what does section 3 have to offer? First and foremost, it’s already the law of the land. With no need for lengthy hearings and legislative maneuvering, civil rights groups and the Justice Department can move expeditiously to reconstruct the preclearance regime.

Voting Blogs: Ninth Circuit Upholds Denial of “Independent” Label on California Ballots, Leaves Option for Another Lawsuit Issue of Labels for Members of Unqualified Parties | Ballot Access News

On July 3, the Ninth Circuit upheld California law that requires independent candidates for Congress and partisan state office to have “No party preference” on the ballot instead of the label “independent.” However, the ruling leaves open for a future lawsuit the related issue of whether the law is unconstitutional as applied to members of unqualified parties; the law requires “no party preference” for them as well. The case is Chamness v Bowen, 11-56303. The 26-page opinion says there is no evidence that “no party preference”, instead of “independent”, injures independent candidates. The decision does not mention the point that California still permits independent presidential candidates to use the word “independent” on the ballot.

Voting Blogs: One Easy, But Powerful, Way to Amend the VRA | Richard Pildes/Election Law Blog

There have always been two ways that areas could be put under the obligation to pre-clear their voting changes.  The major way was through the formula set by statute, Section 4, that the Court has now struck down.  The second route was through Section 3 (known as “the pocket trigger” or the “bail-in” provision).  In response to a court finding of a specific constitutional violation of voting rights, Section 3 gives courts the power to order a jurisdiction to start pre-clearing its voting changes for a period of time.  I have mentioned this before, along with others, but I want to elaborate on the details. The structure of Section 3 has certain innately attractive features.  First, Section 3 contains a lot of flexibility that can be tailored to the specific issues in specific places.  Courts can — and have — ordered jurisdictions to pre-clear their changes for a defined, limited period of time, rather than indefinitely.  For example, after New Mexico’s 1980 redistricting was found to be unconstitutional, the federal courts ordered New Mexico to pre-clear its redistricting plan for the next decade.  After a decade, the courts then decided that New Mexico no longer needed to remain in the pre-clearance regime.

Voting Blogs: The SCOTUS Majority Is Missing Exactly What the VRA Sought to Remedy | The Monkey Cage

On Wednesday the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that determined which jurisdictions received increased federal oversight of their election procedures. Prior to the ruling in Shelby County v. Holder (summary here), states and counties with low voter turnout or registration during the 1960s, and a history of discriminatory election practices, needed to receive “preclearance” prior to changing any laws or regulations dealing with the electoral process. As the court warned in Northwest Austin Municipal Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder (2009), use of a coverage formula based on election results from 40 years ago “raise[s] serious constitutional questions,” culminating in the present ruling’s call for Congress to “fashion a coverage formula grounded in current conditions” rather than “40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.”

Voting Blogs: My Initial Thoughts on the Shelby County Voting Rights Act Case | SpencerOverton.com

The preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act required that all or part of 15 states submit their election changes to federal officials for approval.  Today, five members of the Court ruled that the Section 4 coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional and can no longer be used to require that areas preclear their election rules with federal officials.  The Court invalidated the coverage formula because the Justices believed the formula was based on outdated election data from the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s Supreme Court decision is a setback for democracy. Unfortunately, today’s decision gives politicians even more power to unfairly manipulate election rules and target Americans based on how they look or talk.  There is overwhelming evidence that unfair voting rules remain a very real threat—too many political operatives currently manipulate rules to diminish the voices of growing minority communities.

Voting Blogs: Reflections of a Prodigal Election Administrator | Election Administration Theories and Praxis

After nearly two months back in California and back in the society of Election Officials, I have made many observations about the art and profession of administering elections.  Most of these observations are not new but I am seeing them anew and from a slightly different perspective of a scholar and a returning “prodigal”.  I know that after a few more months, I will probably re-assimilate and will lose the perspectives I presently enjoy. I am always struck and am somewhat in awe of the dedication and hard work of election staffs which are repeatedly demonstrated and which have become central features of a powerful professional culture.  The ability, and even the willingness, to do more of the impossible with even less is the hallmark of dedicated election officials.  Hard work, long hours and working weekends never discourage election officials; in fact, they are a badge of honor of sorts.  As a result of the enormity of the work, the intense public scrutiny and the under-appreciation of their efforts, election officials celebrate their underdog status.  It is understandable if, during this celebration of their resilience and ability to perform the impossible, a sense of fatalism, victimhood and martyrdom creep into the way the business of elections is conceived, planned and conducted.

Voting Blogs: Presidential Commission’s Task: Focus on the Little Things | Election Academy

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration convened for the first time last Friday in preparation for its first public hearing this week in Miami. Much of the coverage of the Commission has focused on the unlikelihood that its deliberations will yield any kind of federal legislative activity, leading some to wonder what the body will be able to accomplish. But in many ways, that lack of legislative urgency should be an asset to the Commission, especially since the topics the group has been tasked with covering lie outside the “hot button” issues that have consumed the debate over the last several years.

Voting Blogs: Illusions and realities surrounding Iran’s presidential elections | openDemocracy

A salient message from among numerous satirical dispatches from Iran resonated   well with last week’s presidential elections. It said, “in other countries people go to the poll booths to elect their favourite candidate, in Iran we line up to vote in order to prevent a particular candidate from winning.” This indeed reflects Iranians’ attitude and reaction to an ‘engineered’ electoral process. Reflecting on the people’s past voting strategies where people have to elect from the list of hand-picked candidates of the establishment, I wrote earlier that,  “The key questions on the minds of the Iranians who want to vote strategically are: which candidate will be in a better position to possibly weaken the Supreme Leader? Which will be less detrimental in terms of economic mismanagement? And more importantly, which candidate will be less dangerous than the others in terms of brazen violations of human rights and civil liberties?”

Voting Blogs: Democracy on ice: a post-mortem of the Icelandic constitution | openDemocracy

Iceland earned the respect of many observers of democracy around the world when, after the financial crash of 2008, its parliament decided to go back to basics and revise the country‘s constitution. A constitutional overhaul was long overdue. For nearly 70 years, Iceland’s political class had repeatedly promised and failed to revise the provisional constitution of 1944, which was drawn up in haste with minimal adjustment of the 1874 constitution as part of Iceland’s declaration of independence from Nazi-occupied Denmark. Clearly, the 1944 constitution had not prevented the executive overreach and cronyism that paved the way for the corrupt privatization of the Icelandic banks from 1998 to 2003 – and their subsequent crash a few years later. Faced by pots- and pans-banging crowds in Parliament Square in Reykjavík in late 2008 and early 2009, the politicians admitted failure, accepting the protesters’ demands for, among other things, a new constitution.

Voting Blogs: Arizona: Voter Registration and the Road Ahead | Justin Levitt/Election Law@Moritz

June arrived with two election law cases at the Supreme Court. One is still pending: a highly anticipated decision on section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The other, more frequently overlooked, was decided yesterday. And there are some quirks of the opinion that seem to depart from the swiftly congealing conventional wisdom that the states might actually have “won,” and now need only run out the clock. The case is called Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., but it has bounced through the courts under various names for seven years. In 2004, Arizona voters passed Prop 200, increasing identification requirements at the polls (one valid photo ID or two non-photo documents with name and current address) and requiring new voters to submit documentary proof of citizenship with a voter registration form.