Voting Blogs: Certification Provides Critical Resources for Election Officials | Matt Masterson/EAC Blog

Last week I attended the Midwestern Election Officials Conference (MEOC) in Kansas City. It was a fantastic gathering of engaged election officials from across the Midwest focused on practical boots on the ground info to prepare for the 2016 election season. Prior to the start of the conference I had the pleasure of meeting with the leadership and staff at the Kansas City Board of Elections. Meetings like this are the best part of my job. I get to share what the EAC is doing while seeing local election offices and hearing from those who deal with the day to day work to prepare for the election. At the MEOC conference Brian Newby of Johnson County Kansas moderated a panel with all three EAC Commissioners. During that conversation Brian asked, “What does certification do for us?” After I answered the question and had a chance to reflect on my conversation with the KC staff I realized that many election officials must be wondering the same thing.

Voting Blogs: A case study on college poll workers – An in-depth look at the Chicago Program | electionlineWeekly

Elections officials looking to improve efficiency on election day should look no further than the nearest college, university or community college according to a recent study of the college poll worker program in Chicago. Among other things, the Student Leaders in Elections: A Case Study in College Poll Worker Recruitment found that recruiting college poll workers helps improve the transmission of election results, makes it easier to staff polling places in need because students aren’t married to a location and students who served as bilingual poll workers are more likely to serve in future elections. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has long supported the practice of college poll workers and one of the recommendations of Presidential Commission on Election Administration was for jurisdictions to recruit more college students as poll workers.

Voting Blogs: Kyrgyzstan’s elections: a gentleman’s agreement | openDemocracy

Voters in Kyrgyzstan go to the polls this Sunday to elect a new parliament, with 14 political parties contesting the 120 seats in the Jogorku Kenesh. The ruling Social Democratic Party (SDRK), under its leader President Almazbek Atambayev, is set to keep its hold on government. But this time, other parties have also been given access to ‘administrative resources’ to help sway the voters, and Atambayev’s political competitors have been happily upholding the tradition of misusing them.

Voting Blogs: Muddying the Waters: Publishing Virginia’s Proposed Redistricting Remedies | State of Elections

The most recent action in Virginia’s ongoing redistricting saga involves a motion to make the proposed remedial plans available on a publicly accessible website. Perhaps ironically, it is the Defendants (Alcorn) suggesting that the proposals be posted online, while the Plaintiffs (Personhuballah) argues that general public input is not necessary or appropriate. Almost one year ago (October 7, 2014), a U.S. District Court (the Court) ordered that Virginia adopt a new redistricting plan before the next election of U.S. Representatives. It ordered the State’s General Assembly to remedy the constitutional violations found by the court. After the United States Supreme Court vacated that judgment and remanded the case in March of this year, the Court again ordered the General Assembly to draw and adopt new districts by September 1, 2015.

Voting Blogs: Catalonia: no fast track to independence | openDemocracy

One year ago, failing to win the independence referendum, Scottish PM Alex Salmond swiftly resigned. This has not been the case of President Artur Mas. At the end of the day, Spain, as the local cliché goes, is different, and Catalonia remains part of Spain. Following a very emotional and tense campaign, the pro-independence parties have won an absolute majority of seats in the Catalan regional parliamentary elections of September 27. Yet, they have lost the plebiscite they had claimed this election would be. They wanted a clear and overwhelming mandate, and a clear and overwhelming mandate there is not. They now backtrack by saying there are many “yes” votes hidden in not pro-independence parties’ vote. But if they count this election to be a plebiscite, as they said they will, then one counts the explicit “yes” on the “yes” camp and all the others on the “no” camp, even if you think you could find many implicit “yeses” here and there. The truth is that they have got 47.78 percent of the votes. The rest is hot air.

Voting Blogs: EAC Commissioner Masterson on Aging Voting Technology | EAC Blog

Recently a report was released discussing the current state of voting technology across the United States as we head in to the 2016 Election Cycle, which covers elections for many offices, from President to statewide offices to school boards. Pam Fessler of NPR (a reporter who has spent years reporting on election administration issues and talking to state and local election officials) summed up the report, “Voting machines around the United States are coming to the end of their useful lives. Breakdowns are increasingly common. Spare parts are difficult, if not impossible, to find.”

Voting Blogs: The sham of voter registration in the UK | openDemocracy

If it wasn’t bad enough having 8 million people missing from the electoral register, they will soon be joined by as many as 1.85 million more individuals who look set to drop off from 1 December, as a result of the Government’s decision to bring forward changes to how we register to vote. That near-10 million people equates to 19% of all eligible adults not being on the electoral register. How is this happening? Why isn’t there a public outcry? The reason is probably because the bulk of those not registered or about to drop off are already on the margins of society. They are the young, the poor, those who move regularly from one private rented accommodation to another, and the newcomers for whom English isn’t a first language. In fact, these non-voters are the very people who need a voice most.

Voting Blogs: EAC-NIST Form Public Working Groups for New Voting System Guidelines | Matthew Masterson/EAC Blog

This week the EAC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided information to the election community regarding the formation of public working groups to help inform the work of the EAC and its Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) in creating a new version of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG). We are very excited about the creation of these working groups and moving forward with the next VVSG. Public working groups are something that NIST successfully used in a variety of areas to help develop standards and receive broad based buy in from various communities as standards are being worked on as opposed to seeking that buy-in after the fact. The creation of the working groups was done as a direct response to feedback received from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA), EAC Standards Board as well as the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED).

Voting Blogs: Puerto Rico and Electoral College reform | Excess of Democracy

The New York Times recently reported on comments by Hillary Clinton in Puerto Rico about the territory’s status in presidential elections:

But she also has an eye on the general election. Puerto Ricans are increasingly moving to Central Florida, where they are a key voting bloc in the swing state. In the past two elections, they have turned out in large numbers, helping hand President Obama his two victories in Florida. And she hinted at as much as she closed her remarks in Puerto Rico. “It always struck me as so indefensible that you can’t vote for president if you live here,” she said with a slight smile. “But if you move to Florida — which, of course, I’m just naming a state — you can vote for president.”

Voting Blogs: 5th Circuit Decision Could Leave Hundreds of Thousands Without Right to Vote in Texas | Brad Blog

The recent decision by a unanimous three judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal in Veasey v. Abbott was greeted as “very good news.” After all, it marked the first occasion in which a federal appellate court made an express finding that a state-enacted polling place Photo ID law violated the provisions of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The appellate panel affirmed the lower U.S. District Court’s finding late last year that a Texas polling place Photo ID law (SB 14), which threatened to disenfranchise 608,470 already legally registered voters (and many others not already registered), disparately impacted minorities and the poor. “Hispanic registered voters and Black registered voters,” the 5th Circuit appellate panel observed in their recent ruling, “were respectively 195% and 305% more likely than their Anglo peers to lack [the requisite Photo] ID” now required to cast a vote at the polls under the Texas law.

Voting Blogs: OIG report recommends USPS develop Vote by Mail strategy | electionlineWeekly

The U.S. Postal Service is the largest self-funded agency of the U.S. government and is supported entirely by revenue from postage and products. Because of that, unlike most federal agencies that are always looking for ways to cut costs, the Postal Service is also always looking for ways to boost revenue. Therefore, with the increasing popularity of vote-by-mail, the Office of the Inspector General of the USPS (USPSOIG) set out to evaluate voting methods to identify opportunities to increase voting by mail and therefore revenues for an agency that has struggled under budget constraints and the changing mailing habits of Americans.

Voting Blogs: A Hacked Case For Election Technology | OSET Foundation

Catching up on piles of reading, I noticed a respectable digital journal—Springer Link recently (in June) published an article by Antonio Mugica of Smartmatic in London, UK, titled “The Case for Election Technology.” I am going be bold here: IMHO, it is unfortunate to see a respectable journal publish this paper, or any that claims to describe a system that is “un-hackable”, completely secure, impenetrable, and/or impossible to compromise. It’s the computer systems equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.Impossible. Bear in mind, I think Smartmatic has some fine technology. I know folks there, and I am confident that if they had been aware of this article going to press before it did, they would have done everything they could to put the brakes on it, until some revisions were made for basic credibility. But that cat is out of the bag, so to speak. And the article is being widely circulated. I also disagree with most of Mugica’s comparisons between eVoting and paper voting because from a U.S. perspective (and I admit this review is all from a U.S.-centric viewpoint) it’s comparing the wrong two things: paperless eVoting verses hand-marked hand-counted paper ballots. It ignores the actual systems that are the most widely used for election integrity in the U.S.

Voting Blogs: Campaign Finance and Issue Advocacy: The Fight About Wisconsin | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was badly divided on the “coordination” question that it resolved in favor ending an ongoing criminal investigation. The majority and dissents expressed their disagreement in harsh terms, and there was a similar outbreak of ill-will or impatience among experts and seasoned observers trading views on the election law list serv. Dividing the camps for the sake of convenience into progressives and conservatives: the former were appalled by the case and the latter overjoyed, and neither could believe how the other was reacting. The case was either a nightmare for desperately needed reform, or a vindication of the rule of law in a struggle with political persecution and police state tactics. But are the issues being fairly brought out amid all this vitriol, and is it necessarily true that the opinions on the coordination issues in Wisconsin must always and inevitably fall out along ideological and party lines?

Voting Blogs: Voting Information Project makes official data available wherever voters look for it – online | electionlineWeekly

In 2008, The Pew Charitable Trusts and Google realized voters were having trouble finding accurate voting information. Millions of people were looking for answers to three main questions: “Where do I vote?”, “What’s on my ballot?”, and “How do I navigate the election process?” but no standardized, reliable, and official source for this information existed. Pew partnered with Google and the states to address the issue by creating the Voting Information Project (VIP). Pew works on VIP with state election officials to develop cutting-edge solutions to standardize and publish the data, and Google and other partners have ensured that voters find data where they’re looking for it most — online. The results of this partnership have been dramatic. During the 2014 general election, official information provided by VIP was accessed an estimated 31 million times from a variety of sources, including: Google products, such as Search; customized tools on the websites of national organizations such as the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rock the Vote, and the League of Women Voters; or, on one of over 1,500 websites that housed VIP’s white-label voting information tool.

Voting Blogs: The D.C. Circuit in Wagner: Aspects of Appearances in the Defense of The Embattled Law | Moe Soft Money Hard Law

It is understandable that the D.C. Circuit’s Wagner decision upholding the federal contractor ban would attract a good bit of attention. The federal courts are suspected of harboring animus toward the campaign finance laws and here is a major decision going the other way and on fairly broad grounds. So it has been described as having the potential to be highly significant. The decision was notable for the clarity and thoroughness of its presentation. The Court also deftly reinforces the available authority by use of case law stressing the particular dangers presented by political pressure on, or from, government employees. A strength, perhaps also a surprise, was the unanimity of the opinion.

Voting Blogs: California considers taking plunge to almost all vote-by-mail | electionlineWeekly

The Adams’ house in Northern California is a house divided. Marcia prefers to cast her ballot by mail and is on a permanent vote-by-mail list. Ted prefers to make his way to his local polling place on Election Day. “I enjoy seeing how many people in my local precinct have voted, getting an “I Voted” sticker, Ted Adams said. “When my children were of an appropriate age, I took them along a number of times, which I felt was beneficial. It is a positive experience.” However, if Senate Bill 450 is approved, Ted may soon be joining Marcia at the kitchen table to fill out his ballot before dropping it in the mail.

Voting Blogs: SCOTUS ruling has broader impact than just redistricting | electionlineWeekly

What does this week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Arizona redistricting case mean for the world of election administration? We know it gives a green light to the use of ballot referenda and initiatives to create the kind of nonpartisan redistricting commission that Arizona and California have, and that is potentially a huge development in the world of redistricting itself. We know, too, that the jurisprudential debate between Justice Ruth Ginsburg opinion for the Court’s five-member majority (including the all-important swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy) and Chief Justice John Roberts for the four dissenters has the potential for overarching theoretical significance concerning the nature of appropriate judicial interpretation of the U.S. Constitution—as I’ve already touched on elsewhere. But in terms of the rules and institutions for administering the voting process itself, is this week’s decision of particular significance? Yes. For two reasons.

Voting Blogs: The Arizona Decision: Constitutional Reasoning Within the Reform Model | More Soft Money Hard Law

The next few days of commentary on the Arizona redistricting decision will include the usual debate about which side had the better of the “legal argument.” And, in truth, both the majority opinion and the chief (Roberts) dissent can be defended. Each is effectively drawn, making the most of the materials available to it. Each also takes the usual liberties with the construction of precedent and the standards by which particular points—an example being the majority’s reliance on 2 U.S.C. §2(a)(c)—are deemed relevant. More interesting is the way that the majority weighs the reform objective. The majority in the Arizona case adheres to a model familiar in political reform arguments more generally, within and outside the Court. For this majority, the constitutional question cannot be considered apart from the reform objective served by the initiative creating the Independent Redistricting Commission. The “people” are seen to be taking urgent steps to protect against officeholder self-interestedness. So, as Justice Thomas points out in dissent, the Court here lauds the exercise of direct democracy, which at other times is given the back of its hand. The reason for the difference is simple: the objective that the tools of direct democracy have been in this case wielded to bring about.

Voting Blogs: Writing Campaign Finance Rules: Between “Thorough” Regulation or None at All | More Soft Money Hard Law

George Will looks at Super PACs and sees the consequences of “reform”: it’s a mess, he writes, the result of pressures for a “thoroughly regulated politics” that drives political actors to evade foolish rules. The Constitution requires “unregulated politics”: recent reform experience shows that any other course is sure to end in a bad place. The choice he sees is between thoroughly regulated campaign finance, which is untenable, or none at all. An alternative account of unsatisfactory reform experience would focus on the type of regulatory program that has dominated the policy debate. The FEC is somehow expected to regulate campaign finance as other agencies regulate food or drugs, or fair commercial practice, and the FEC best equipped for the job would be re-structured to take the politics out of its composition and operation. Underlying all of this is a belief that the right rules enforced by the right people, and repeatedly revised in the light of experience, will bring errant political behavior under control and end cheating. By this definition the “right” rule is one that attacks a questionable practice at its source, however complicated the rule and however challenging it will be to enforce it.

Voting Blogs: Alphabetically ordered ballots make elections less fair and distort the composition of legislatures : Democratic Audit UK

Conventional political wisdom suggests the candidate listed first on a ballot enjoys a slight windfall of votes cast by those who don’t know or care enough to consider all their options. By focusing on particular elections, researchers have neglected to consider the broad consequences of arbitrary ballot ordering rules on legislative representation. To evaluate the substantive significance of ballot order rules, I compare the legislators of states that alphabetically order ballots to legislators elected by states that randomize or rotate ballot order. My research suggests that the seemingly innocuous choice of some states to alphabetize ballots has significantly altered the composition of state legislatures and even Congress. Scholarly interest in how ballots are designed and organized predates the explosion of interest in the subject generated by the 2000 Presidential Election. Most studies suggest the first candidate listed on a ballot enjoys an above average number of votes in certain elections. The less that voters know or care about the election, the greater the windfall of votes to the first listed candidate. Think how often you click the first link in Google search results and don’t bother to consider all your options. However, when the stakes are relatively high, as in partisan legislative elections, scholars suggest ballot order has little or no influence on voters. Accordingly, some have concluded that the distortions induced by ballot order are confined to low-level elections and do not affect the general political landscape. I was sceptical of this sanguine assessment of ballot order effects and looked at the impact of alphabetically ordering ballots on high-level legislative offices. I found that the practice of alphabetically ordering ballots, used in a number of states, significantly distorts the composition of their state legislatures and congressional delegations in favour of representatives with early-alphabet names.

Voting Blogs: Arkansas Chooses New Statewide Voting System | Election Academy

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how county clerks in Arkansas were looking forward to a new voting system but worried about plans to upgrade the system before the state’s March 2016 presidential primary.

While much of that uncertainty remains, at least they now know what machines they’re going to get after an announcement by the Secretary of State yesterday – though even that decision is raising some question about costs. … Of course, just identifying the vendor and a potential cost still leaves some very key variables – namely, delivery schedule and cost – though the Secretary’s spokesman suggested that fast-tracking the implementation is no longer on the table as the state continues to work on funding the purchase.

Voting Blogs: Candidates & Super PACs: The New Model in 2016 | Brennan Center for Justice

As voters begin to assess presidential candidates ahead of the 2016 election, they’ll face a new world in which ostensibly outside groups — which often have extremely close ties to the candidates, but are theoretically separate from them because they aren’t “controlled” by the candidate and don’t give their money directly to her campaign — could dominate political spending. That’s because super PACs and other groups conceived after the 2010 Citizens United decision may raise money without limits, while candidates cannot. While many have understood that super PACs would make a significant impact on American elections, few could have predicted the speed with which they have evolved and moved to the center of our political system. Download the Report

Voting Blogs: “Desperate” at the FEC, Part II: The Risks of Unintended Consequences | More Soft Money Hard Law

A few questions and comments have passed back and forth on the election law listserv about a procedural question raised by the Ravel-Weintraub petition to the FEC for a rulemaking: would the two Commissioners apparently filing this petition in a private capacity have to recuse themselves from voting on it? But there is also a question, not so far discussed, of other consequences that could attach to their decision to raise certain issues in this form. Potential recusal is part, not all, of the problematic course that this initiative could take. The Commissioners wish to have the Commission “clarify” two issues they claim to have been thrown into some doubt by Citizens United. They are concerned that there is some uncertainty about “whether and to what extent” foreign nationals and foreign owned or controlled US subsidiaries can be involved in making corporate independent expenditures. A second clarification is intended to leave no doubt that employers, now prohibited from coercing their employees into making PAC contributions or facilitating candidate fundraising, may also not direct or pressure them into supporting independent expenditures.

Voting Blogs: “Desperate” at the FEC | More Soft Money Hard Law

By petitioning their own agency for a rulemaking, Commissioners Weintraub and Ravel have found a novel way to charge their colleagues with fecklessness. Call it a populist gesture: they are stepping out of their roles as administrators and issuing their appeal from the outside, as members of the general public. They may have done all they could or intended to do with this Petition, which was to publicize their grievances. Or they may have sought to add to public understanding of the grounds of this grievance-to enlighten and inform, and not only turn up the volume of their complaint. A first point—minor but worth considering– is whether this agency needs another quirky procedural controversy. What does it mean for two Commissioners, one of whom is agency Chair, to dispense with their formal roles and petition as citizens, filing a petition on plain paper without their titles and just the Commission’s street address? Will they recuse themselves from voting on the petition as Commissioners? Will they testify before themselves?

Voting Blogs: The Supreme Court and the “Constituent” | More Soft Money Hard Law

The Supreme Court has effectively decided to consider the question of who qualifies as the constituent of a legislator, and, as Joey Fishkin has pointed out, it got into this question from a different perspective in its most recent campaign finance decision, McCutcheon. There the Court included in that category donors, including out-of-jurisdiction donors. Is it possible that this Court would conclude that a donor is a constituent but that for purposes of the constitutional question presented in Evenwel , a resident under the age of 18 or a noncitizen is not? Fishkin writes: “[W]ho counts as a constituent? That’s the question, long latent, that the Court has decided to decide in Evenwel.”

Voting Blogs: More Conflict at the FEC: The Question of Partisanship and the Problem of Finger-Pointing | More Soft Money Hard Law

A dispute over whether the FEC is tilting its investigations against conservatives or Republicans is mostly a waste of energy. Commissioner Goodman got this started at a Commission hearing and has been rebuked by Commissioner Ravel. The Republicans profess to be outraged; the Democrats announce that this outrage has rendered them speechless. Once again there is here, in the midst of this clamor, an important question– the uses and misuses of the agency’s enforcement process—that is being misdirected into another round of finger-pointing about bad faith and improper motive.

Voting Blogs: The FEC, the Big Issues, and Getting Right a Few Basics-Like Disclosure | More Soft Money Hard Law

Public Citizen has concluded that the Federal Election Commission is failing. Its shortcomings are “dramatic and uncharacteristic”, because they range across the entire field of their responsibilities in conducting audits; enforcing the law through investigations, settlements and lawsuits; and issuing regulations and advisory opinions. The Public Citizen analysis is statistical and focuses on vote deadlocks. The FEC is indeed disagreeing a great deal—about that, there is no doubt. But is the agency failing or is the old regulatory model collapsing under the pressure of changing law and political practice? Public Citizen cannot answer this question because it is looking at agency performance in the aggregate. It is unable, for example, to explain what might be happening in particular cases, or why deadlocks are occurring across various agency functions. There are certainly instances where the vote for enforcement is as suspect as a vote against it. The result is still deadlock but the reasons for it are not quite what Public Citizen implies. Nonetheless, it being assumed that matters could not have gotten this bad without dereliction of duty somewhere, the FEC takes the blame. It is expected to take up the big issues, such as those involving “coordination” or “dark money”, which are precisely the issues over which disagreement is certain to arise. And so around and around it goes.

Voting Blogs: One county at a time, vote centers coming to Texas | electionlineWeekly

Some revolutions start with a shot and others take time to build. In Texas, a slow-building revolution is moving one county at a time to switch the largest state in the lower 48 to a vote center system instead of the traditional precinct-based polling places. Since beginning a pilot program of vote centers nearly a decade ago just over 10 percent of the state’s 200+ counties used vote centers in the most recent statewide election and more are petitioning to make the move. While not willing to call the pilot an outright success because of the still small sample of counties using the system, the secretary of state’s report to the 84th Legislature on the program said anecdotally, vote centers do make easier for voters and elections officials alike.

Voting Blogs: Sign of the Times: Florida Governor’s U-Turn on OVR | Election Academy

After months of debate in the state capitol and weeks of worrying in county election offices, Florida Governor Rick Scott has now signed legislation that will make the Sunshine State the latest to move toward online voter registration. … Florida’s experience on OVR is just the latest example of how the policy debate has shifted on election issues in recent years. At this time four years ago, the hot topic was voter ID and all the divisive partisan heat that brings. While ID legislation lives on in some legislatures – and clearly in many legislators’ hearts – OVR’s emergence as the new trend in legislatures is quite remarkable.

Voting Blogs: Meet the new elections commissioners: US EAC has quorum for first time in several years |electionlineWeekly

Late in 2014, the U.S. Congress finally — and unanimously — approved the appointment of three new commissioners to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The commission had been without a quorum for four years with new appointments getting hung up on things the way most things on Capitol Hill get hung up — partisanship. And even with a quorum finally in place, some on Capitol Hill aren’t all that happy. Mississippi Rep. Gregg Harper has introduced legislation to eliminate the EAC. H.R. 195 calls for the termination of the commission and assigns remaining duties to the Office of Personnel Management and the Federal Elections Commission. The legislation has been referred to the House Administration Committee.