National: Unusual level of glitches at US polling stations reported on election day | The Guardian

As the United States went to the polls for the first time in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act on Tuesday, lawyers and voter registration groups around the country reported an unusual level of irregularities and glitches at polling stations. The largest non-partisan voter protection coalition in the US received more than 12,000 calls to its hotline from people struggling to cast their ballot amid a slew of new voter-ID laws. The coalition of 150 groups led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said it has received an unusually high volume of distress calls from would-be voters to its eight call centers across the country. The top three states (in terms of the number of cries for help) were Florida – a state notorious for its long lines and historical voting interference – Georgia, and Texas. In Georgia, almost 1,500 calls had come in over the past two days and long lines were reported in Atlanta and several other urban centers. Many were from people who are among the 40,000 “disappeared” people who were registered to vote but whose details have not been transferred to voting rolls, a problem that was exacerbated on Tuesday by the secretary of state’s own voting website crashing, leaving voters in the dark about the location of their polling stations.

Editorials: Midterm Election Results 2014: Did Voter ID Laws Help Republicans Win The Senate Majority? | Howard Koplowitz /International Business Times

Thousands of voters in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia said they were unable to cast ballots in Tuesday’s midterm elections amid growing efforts by Republicans to stamp out voter fraud. The complaints suggest that a slew of laws passed in recent years by GOP lawmakers and blasted by critics as a modern-day poll tax aimed at suppressing Democratic turnout may have influenced the results in some of the nation’s most contested contents. In states that recently passed election reform laws, voters said they were turned away because they didn’t have photo identification or after they showed up at the wrong precinct. Voters also complained of long lines, faulty voting machines, language hurdles and confusion over voter requirements, according to the nonpartisan coalition Election Protection. In all, the nonprofit fielded 18,000 complaints, a 30 percent increase from 2010, according to the Seattle Post‑Intelligencer. Republicans have led efforts in recent years to require photo identification and reduce or eliminate early voting or same-day voter registration because of alleged incidents of voter fraud. But critics argue that the laws suppress voter turnout of key Democratic demographics, including low-income, black, Hispanic, female and young voters.

Maryland: Elections board gets 56 vote-flipping reports | News Observer

Maryland elections officials got dozens of reports of malfunctioning election machines Tuesday but said the problem did not lead to incorrectly cast ballots. Voters can look at a preview screen of their selections before they actually cast their ballots, a step designed to prevent anyone from voting for the wrong candidates, said Nikki Charlson, a spokeswoman for the Maryland State Board of Elections. There were 56 reports in which the preview screen showed a candidate other than the one that the voter had selected, Charlson said Tuesday afternoon. But no incorrect votes were actually registered, Charlson said, and most of the malfunctioning machines were taken out of service. The malfunctioning machines represent a small fraction of more than 16,000 voting units at 1,800 precincts, and voting overall was going smoothly in Maryland, Charlson said.

Rhode Island: Barrington voters, be prepared: Ballot a long read | Providence Journal

Want to vote in Barrington Tuesday? Don’t expect to do it on your lunch break. First you have to pick a U.S. senator, member of Congress, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, general treasurer, two General Assembly members and five local officials. Then turn over the double-sided ballot sheet, the first of two, for seven statewide questions and the beginning of 40 local questions. Phew. “We are concerned about the number of questions,” state Board of Elections Executive Director Robert Kando said. “We asked the Board of Canvassers to send out the questions with a page that they [voters] can mark, tear out and bring with them so they can quickly go through the questions.” “In the 2012 election,” Kando continued, “Providence had a large number of questions and did not send out any voter information with respect to their questions…. [Voters] ended up reading five sides of ballot sheets and it created a backup at the booths.”

Tunisia: Votes counted after historic poll -in Tunisia | Al Jazeera

Tunisia has voted in historic elections to choose its first parliament since the overthrow of long-time ruler in 2011 that sparked the ‘Arab Spring’ protests. Votes were being counted across the country on Sunday as Tunisians cast their ballots in parliamentray elections, four years after the ouster of autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Many polling stations reported high turnouts and long lines early in the day, with an estimated 60 percent of the 5.2 million registered voters turning out to vote for the 217-seat parliament. “The spotlight is on us and the success of this [vote] is a guarantee for the future,” Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa said as he cast his ballot. US President, Barack Obama called the election an “important milestone in the country’s historic political transition”. “In casting their ballots today, Tunisians continued to inspire people across their region and around the world,” Obama said.

Maryland: Democrats launch effort on voting rights | Baltimore Sun

The state Democratic Party, mindful of past “shenanigans” at the polls, launched a program Wednesday that they said would protect Marylanders’ right to vote in the Nov. 4 election. Two of the party’s senior leaders, U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin and U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, held a news conference in Baltimore to call attention to the Democrats’ “voter empowerment operation.” Cummings said voters in Maryland face fewer barriers than those in many other states that have adopted voter ID requirements that Democrats believe are designed to suppress the minority vote. But he said Maryland Democrats have to be on guard. “We cannot remain silent when people are trying to lessen the rights of people to vote,” said Cummings, a veteran Baltimore congressman. With eight days of early voting starting Thursday, the Democrats have set up a hotline — 1-888-678-VOTE — where people can receive information on when and where to vote and report any problems at the polls.

Florida: Study: In 2012, Florida voters waited the longest to cast ballots | McClatchy

Voters in Florida waited far longer than those in other states to cast their votes in the 2012 election, hampered by long ballots and cutbacks in early voting options, according to a new report by congressional auditors. Voters in the state stood in line more than 34 minutes on average, significantly longer than ballot-casters did in any other state reviewed by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ watchdog. The shortest waits? Alaska, at just 1.4 minutes. Three others states had wait times about 25 or more minutes: Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina. But most of the others fell somewhere between five minutes and 20 minutes, on average. In Florida, the GAO estimated, 16 percent of voters waited 61 minutes or more to cast their ballots – tops among the states surveyed. “People should not have to stand in line for hours to exercise their constitutional right to vote,” U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said in a statement.

Ohio: Supreme Court grants Ohio’s request to shorten early-voting period | Los Angeles Times

e Supreme Court ordered a halt Monday to early voting in Ohio that was scheduled to begin this week, clearing the way for the state to close polls on the Sunday before election day, when African American turnout has been heaviest. The emergency order, approved 5 to 4, is a victory for Ohio Republicans and a setback for civil rights lawyers who had challenged a law that shortened the early-voting period by about a week. Several other election-year disputes could reach the high court before November. Wisconsin, Texas and North Carolina also face pending court challenges to Republican-sponsored voting restrictions that take effect this year. Ohio had adopted one of the nation’s most generous early-voting policies after what was widely considered to be an election day debacle in 2004, when voters waited hours in long lines to cast ballots and many cities did not have enough voting machines to accommodate the turnout.

Utah: Counties Switch To Mail-in Balloting System | Utah Public Radio

The first Tuesday in November is notorious for long lines to tap a few buttons, cast a vote, and possibly change the future course of our state. Depending on where you live, you may not be waiting in line to cast your vote in November. Several counties across Utah are doing it: mail-in ballots- for everyone, not just the absentee voters. This isn’t new, but several counties are trying it for the first time this year.

Florida: Early-voting sites increase but hours, days drop | Orlando Sentinel

A year after far-reaching election reform, Florida’s election supervisors are deploying more early-voting sites but fewer total hours and days than in the last nonpresidential-year election, an analysis shows. Florida’s massive election-law rewrite happened last year in the wake of the chaos that ensued after the Legislature and Gov. Rick Scott reduced early voting in 2011. After Florida became a national punch line over its hours-long lines at the polls during the 2012 presidential contest, lawmakers scrambled to lengthen the days, hours and locations for early voting. But they also provided more flexibility for counties to reduce early voting if they wanted to do so. Election supervisors were allowed to have eight to 14 days of early voting spread over the final two weeks before an election. They were also authorized to hold 64 to 168 total hours of early voting.

Voting Blogs: Ohio Early Voting in the Supreme Court | Election Law at Moritz

In reading the Sixth Circuit opinion in Ohio’s early voting case now before the Supreme Court, I get the sense that the Sixth Circuit believes that the exact same set of early voting opportunities would be constitutionally permissible in other states, just not in Ohio. Indeed, the Sixth Circuit went so far as to say “the same law may impose a significant burden in one state and only a minimal burden in another.” (Slip. op. at 25.) This view is perplexing. What is it about Ohio that makes its relatively generous provision of early voting opportunities unconstitutional, even though they would be constitutionally permissible elsewhere? In their Supreme Court brief, the civil rights plaintiffs stress Ohio’s horrible experience on Election Day in 2004. Because of the atrociously long lines at the polls on Election Day in Ohio in 2004, the plaintiffs assert that “the default Election Day-only system was no longer a constitutional option for Ohio.” (Page 32-33.)

Editorials: Long Lines at Minority Polling Places | New York Times

Some of the longest lines on Election Day occur at polling places in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. A new report says that’s not a coincidence. In the three states with the longest lines in 2012, precincts in minority neighborhoods were systematically deprived of the resources they needed to make voting operate smoothly — specifically, voting machines and poll workers, according to the report by the Brennan Center for Justice. The report’s data show the growing need for federal supervision of voting rights, though ensuring supervision is harder than ever since the Supreme Court removed the teeth from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 last year. The report looked at Maryland, South Carolina and Florida, where many voters waited for hours to cast a vote in the 2012 presidential election. In all three, minority precincts were more likely to have had long lines. In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of black registered voters, on average, than the rest of the state.

National: Waiting at the polls: Long lines and voting rights | Facing South

Every big election year, horror stories surface around the South and the rest of the country of voters having to wait for hours to cast their ballots. In 2008, reports came out of Georgia of voters having to stand in line for up to 12 hours to vote. In 2012, the battleground state of Florida garnered national headlines with accounts of voters waiting six hours at the polls. In 2013, President Obama assembled a 10-member bipartisan commission to look into the experiences of voters in the previous year’s elections and to propose solutions to help streamline the voting process. The commission found that the Florida and Georgia experiences weren’t isolated: More than 10 million people had to wait more than half an hour to vote in 2012. Arguing that “no citizen should have to wait in line for more than 30 minutes to vote,” the group outlined a series of ways election officials could make voting easier, saying that “jurisdictions can solve the problem of long lines through a combination of planning … and the efficient allocation of resources.” Yet despite a flurry of election law bills at the state level, many states have failed to act on the commission’s proposals and make improvements to ensure long wait times don’t taint the 2014 mid-term elections.

New Mexico: Judge: Rio Rancho residents lost right to vote | Albuquerque Journal

Calling the 2012 general election in Sandoval County “a debacle,” a federal judge has ruled in favor of three Republicans who claimed actions by the Democratic county clerk and elections director deprived voters of the chance to cast ballots. There were problems administering the election in Rio Rancho, which resulted in voters standing in long lines and waiting in some instances for more than five hours to exercise their right to vote, according to the order by District Judge William P. Johnson. Johnson had granted a preliminary injunction ordering Election Bureau Director Eddie Gutierrez and Sandoval County Clerk Eileen Garbagni to comply with a resolution passed by the County Commission in October 2013 pertaining to the number of voting machines and distribution of polling places in Rio Rancho. The resolution establishes 17 voting convenience centers in Rio Rancho and two in Corrales.

Missouri: Getting Ferguson Majority to Show Its Clout at Polls | New York Times

Down the street from where the body of Michael Brown lay for hours after he was shot three weeks ago, volunteers have appeared beside folding tables under fierce sunshine to sign up new voters. On West Florissant Avenue, the site of sometimes violent nighttime protests for two weeks, voter-registration tents popped up during the day and figures like the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. lectured about the power of the vote. In this small city, which is two-thirds African-American but has mostly white elected leaders, only 12 percent of registered voters took part in the last municipal election, and political experts say black turnout was very likely lower. But now, in the wake of the killing of Mr. Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white Ferguson police officer, there is a new focus on promoting the power of the vote, an attempt to revive one of the keystones of the civil rights movement.

National: Rules of the game: New laws tough for some voters | CNN.com

Edna Griggs keenly remembers the anger and outrage she felt during the 2012 general election when she watched as African-American senior citizens were forced to wait in long lines in the Houston heat as they cued up to vote at the Acres Homes Multi-Service Center. A member of her local NAACP chapter, Griggs says she was told that she couldn’t bring them water to drink or chairs to rest in. “A poll watcher approached me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He told me I couldn’t do that. They thought we were trying to sway their votes by giving them water,” she said. “It was really sad to me because it was like a reflection of the stories I heard from my grandmother and mother when they had to pay to vote. It was a reflection of everything our people have gone through.”

South Dakota: Voters Face Polling Confusion | KDLT

Polling centers have been replaced by precincts for this Primary Election. And that’s caused a lot of confusion throughout the day. Long lines have turned into mix-ups. In April’s city election, voters could go anywhere; Tuesday however, that wasn’t the case. Minnehaha County Auditor Bob Litz said, “We had our usual flurry of calls at 7 o’clock this morning from people wondering where they were supposed to go.”

Editorials: How to advance voting rights through executive action | Lucy Zhou/The Hill

Voters across the country scored significant victories in the past few weeks. A federal judge struck down Wisconsin’s voter ID law, saying it violated the Voting Rights Act. A Pennsylvania ID law is dead after the governor decided not to appeal a decision ruling it unconstitutional. And two states passed laws expanding voter registration access. Still, fights continue in dozens of states, and a bill to strengthen the Voting Rights Act is stalled in Congress. At a time of historic dysfunction and congressional inaction, it is not enough to rely on the courts. It is high time for a greater executive role in safeguarding the right to vote. President Obama has the authority to act, and he must. After long lines marred the 2012 election, the president formed a bipartisan commission to identify best practices and new ideas to improve the voting experience. The commission’s final report, issued in January, contained potent recommendations for reform on the state and local level. Obama also spoke out recently on the grim reality of voting restrictions. “The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” the president told a group of activists in April. These efforts to restrict the right to vote will not go unchallenged, he assured the audience. But if the president’s words are to be more than mere flourishes, he must assert his leadership through executive action. The Brennan Center for Justice recently released a proposal outlining several concrete steps Obama can take to improve elections in America.

Guinea-Bissau: Presidential runoff vote held | Mail Online

Long lines formed outside polling stations in Guinea-Bissau on Sunday for a presidential runoff vote intended to restore constitutional order in a country known for coups and unrest. The vote pits Jose Mario Vaz, whose party won a parliamentary majority in April’s first round, against Nuno Gomes Nabiam, who is known for having close ties to military leaders. More than 80 percent of eligible voters took part in the first round, a statistic observers say indicates the country is eager to move past its instability and begin rebuilding the economy with the help of international donors.  The large crowds on Sunday at polling stations in the capital, Bissau, suggested a similarly healthy turnout for the second round.

Florida: Voters are told to hold everything – yes, everything – at some polling places | Sun Sentinel

Broward and Palm Beach County voters can rest easy. Elections supervisors in the two counties say they won’t implement the restroom ban imposed by Miami-Dade County. In the state’s most populous county, voters who need to go while waiting to vote aren’t allowed to do so. The media office at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department didn’t respond to a request for information about the rule. But it’s detailed by county officials in email exchanges with a disability rights lawyer. “It’s absolutely stunning,” said Marc  Dubin director of advocacy for the Center for Independent Living of South Florida, which serves people with disabilities in Miami-Dade County. He’s a former senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was responsible for ADA enforcement. “It is a current policy of the Department of Elections. It’s in effect right now,” Dubin said.

Florida: For Miami-Dade County, a dispute over potty breaks for voters | Miami Herald

For Miami-Dade County voters who have had to wait up to seven hours on Election Day to cast their ballots, there’s an argument over what should take priority: the call to citizenship or the call of nature. Emails from a deputy elections supervisor and an assistant county attorney say Miami-Dade voters are banned from using restrooms at polling places. But the chief deputy elections supervisor pooh-poohed the notion. Number One and Number Two are fine in publicly owned voting sites, such as libraries and city halls, where bathrooms are open for anyone to use. The problem might arise when precincts are located in private buildings, which don’t have to allow public bathroom access, or in churches and other religious facilities, which are exempt from federal law requiring accessible restrooms for people with disabilities. Elections administrators have long relied on those locations to set up Miami-Dade’s more than 500 polling places.

South Dakota: Sioux Falls City Clerk Talks Election Night Challenges | Keloland

From long lines, to near ballot shortages – Tuesday’s election left behind some questions. The last minute rush, absentee voting, and the ballot size itself are just a few of the challenges city officials faced.  About 32,000 votes were cast. “We still seem to have a bit of energy,” Lorie Hogstad, Sioux Falls City Clerk, said. Hogstad’s office is a bit quieter the day after the big city vote.  While she and her team work on post-election details, she touched on the previous night. Election night started like a sprint, but slowed to marathon pace down later in the evening.  The polls were set to close at 7 pm, but the first voting center did not submit ballots until 8 pm.

National: Study: States Did Better Job Running Elections In 2012 | NPR

For all the criticism about long lines and other Election Day snafus, most states actually improved the way they handled elections between 2008 and 2012, according to a new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The report found that, overall, wait times at polling stations decreased by about three minutes over 2008, and 40 states and the District of Columbia improved their “election performance index” scores, which Pew calculated from 17 indicators that make up the index. Pew analyzed state election administration by looking at factors such as the availability of voting tools online, voter turnout, wait times at polling stations and problems with registration or absentee ballots.

Editorials: Afghan elections: The morning after | Al Jazeera

“I am voting today to secure my grandchildren’s future,” said an octogenarian woman waiting in line at a polling station in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif. Throughout the day, Afghan media continuously showed live footage of voters standing in long lines: Old men leaning on their canes, women of all ages, first-time young voters, people from all walks of life and hailing from all of Afghanistan’s ethnic groups. The 2014 presidential and provincial council elections opened at 7am on a cold and drizzling morning in Kabul, amid heavy security measures prompted by three deadly attacks the previous week and a Taliban threat to voters. Thousands of people had queued at polling stations at dawn, right after morning prayer. The air was filled with enthusiasm, hope and a kind of energy that I had only felt on Nowruz 2002, the first Afghan New Year’s Day after the fall of the Taliban. Twelve years later, however, there was an added aura of determination and defiance. My parents’ generation experienced this kind of euphoria in October 1964, when at the behest of the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, a new Afghan Constitution had changed absolute monarchy to a constitutional one and had started what is known in contemporary Afghan history as the “decade of democracy”.

Florida: Pinellas County now ground zero in Florida’s fight over voting | Tampa Bay Times

Florida’s new battleground over voting is the unlikeliest of places: a cozy branch library in Pinellas Park. It’s one of five remote locations where Pinellas voters put absentee ballots in locked boxes under the watchful eyes of poll workers. Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark has used libraries and tax collectors’ offices as dropoff sites in the past three election cycles as a way to encourage people to vote absentee and avoid the possibility of long lines at early voting locations. Clark’s dropoff sites have become symbols of her emphasis on voting by mail or absentee over all other forms of voting. Her three early voting sites in the 2012 election were by far the fewest of any large county in Florida.

New Mexico: 2012 elections still contentious | Albuquerque Journal

Even as a new primary and general election season gets underway, a lawsuit stemming from disgruntlement over voting conditions in 2012 was until recently calling for voters to have another chance to decide those contests. Pat Rogers, the attorney representing Republicans who lost to Democrats in Sandoval County, now intends to drop his clients’ request for new elections to decide the outcome of the State Senate District 9 and Sandoval County Clerk’s races in the 2012 general election. However, he said he intends to proceed with other aspects of the case to ensure that the type of voting debacle that occurred in Rio Rancho in November 2012 can’t happen again.

National: Long lines, disputed counts: Why U.S. elections stumble | Detroit Free Press

In the 2012 election, Robert Bauer was President Obama’s campaign counsel and Benjamin Ginsberg was the top lawyer for Republican opponent Mitt Romney. Now they have joined forces to co-chair the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, studying the problems elections face. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity. Q: Long lines, unreliable voting machines, disputed ballots: Why don’t elections in the United States work better?

Ginsberg:There are 8,000 different jurisdictions that are responsible for putting on some part of our elections. It is a process largely fueled by volunteers. They don’t have adequate training in most cases. So uniformity among our elections because of the way our system has been for 200 years is proving pretty difficult.

Bauer:We don’t commit nearly the resources that we need to, to the election administration process. Our administrators, who are generally overlooked when things go well and harshly criticized when they don’t, by and large have to deal with very tight budgets in which the priority is never very high for the work they have to do.

Editorials: Bills should fix problems, not elections | Tom Barrett/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin has, for decades, achieved one of the highest rates of voter participation in the country during presidential elections. That’s something we should celebrate. Unfortunately, since 2011, Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature have rewritten election laws with the primary purpose of ensuring that they remain in power. These actions do not represent democracy. And they certainly don’t reflect the spirit of the first three words of our Constitution, “We the People.” The most recent change restricts the hours for early voting for every municipality in the state, regardless of size. For the city of Milwaukee, city of Madison and other large municipalities, this removes their ability to offer the evening and weekend hours that have existed to accommodate large populations. This legislation further exacerbates a longstanding problem for Milwaukee: the state Legislature’s previous decisions to limit municipalities to one early voting site, regardless of population.

South Carolina: Embattled Richland County elections director fired | The State

Howard Jackson has been fired after eight months as director of the Richland County Elections & Voter Registration Office. Jackson, 43, was dismissed Monday on a 4-1 vote by the election board, with member Adell Adams the only “no” vote. His last day in the office will be Feb. 28. “Things were not going right,” board member Samuel Selph said in confirming the board’s decision. Jackson, who was hired at an annual salary of $78,000, said he would be holding a news conference Tuesday to discuss the turn of events as well as recent elections. He was brought in by the board after the election disaster of November 2012, when too few machines were deployed and voters waited in long lines, some for as long as seven hours, to cast ballots. Then-director Lillian McBride, who oversaw that election, was demoted to another position.

National: Election Panel: Long Lines Were Management Problem | NPR

The commission President Obama appointed last year to figure out how to fix long lines at the polls and other election problems has sought to steer clear of the many partisan land mines surrounding how Americans vote. The two co-chairmen of the panel continued to that navigation Wednesday as they presented their unanimous recommendations to the Senate Rules Committee. When asked by Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota whether some states were doing things intentionally to disenfranchise voters — like limiting early-voting days — commission co-chairman and Democratic election lawyer Bob Bauer responded diplomatically. First, he said the commission was struck by how much it had heard from both Democrats and Republicans, “once the lights were off and the doors were closed,” about their desire to improve the way elections are run. And then he told senators that any partisan plots to disenfranchise voters would be far less likely to succeed if states adopted some of the changes proposed by the bipartisan panel, like improving the accuracy of voter registration lists.