Tag Archives: tvnw

The N.C. General Assembly’s attempt to revamp the state elections board and ethics commission weeks before Democrat Roy Cooper was sworn in as the new governor violates the state Constitution, a three-judge panel ruled on Friday. The judges also found unconstitutional the legislature’s shift of managerial and policy-making employees from former Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration to positions where it’s more difficult to replace them. But the Republican-controlled General Assembly’s attempt to have a say in who joins Cooper’s Cabinet was not found to be a violation of the separation of powers clause in the state Constitution. To date, the state Senate has approved three of the appointments Cooper has made with hearings for others set for next week. The rulings from Superior Court Judges Jesse Caldwell, Todd Burke and Jeff Foster come nearly two weeks after a daylong hearing inside a Campbell University law school courtroom.

Virginia: McAuliffe vetoes bills he says could restrict voting rights | CNS

Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Wednesday vetoed a bill that he said could disenfranchise qualified voters but Republican legislators said could reduce voter fraud. HB 2343, sponsored by Del. Robert Bell, R-Charlottesville, would have required the state Department of Elections to provide local registrars with a list of voters who, according to data-matching systems, have been found to be registered in another state. … In a statement explaining his veto, McAuliffe said he believed the bill would have endangered the voting rights of some Virginians and increased the administrative burden on local governments. “This bill would invite confusion and increase the possibility of violating federal law,” McAuliffe said. “Moreover, it would expose eligible and properly registered Virginians to the risk of improper disenfranchisement.”

France: Election under high cyber threat | EUObserver

French authorities are on high alert to head off a cyber-attack that could affect the result of the upcoming presidential election.
Prime targets could be candidates’ websites and government networks. The threat was publicly recognised by president Francois Hollande, who accused Russia of trying to interfere in the campaign, ahead of the first round on 23 April and a run-off on 7 May. “Russia is using all of its means to influence public opinion,” he said in a recent interview to several European newspapers. “It is not the same ideology as in the time of the USSR, [but] it is sometimes the same methods, with more technology,” he said, adding that Russia had “a strategy of influence, of networks, with very conservative moral views”. … In early March, the government decided to ban electronic voting in June’s legislative elections for French voters abroad. Electronic voting was not planned for the presidential election itself.

India: Is banning electronic voting machines the solution? Should India follow The West? | Businessworld

Political leaders who lost the recent state elections – Mayawati and Harish Rawat among them have alleged the electronic voting machines were tampered with. Arvind Kejriwal too questioned the use of the electronic method of gathering votes. Now, Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi also seem to be indulging in the theory. Is there a possibility of rigging electoral outcomes in a general election to the Lok Sabha? This question has arisen not only because of the unexpected number of seats won or lost by some parties in the recent contest. It is accentuated by the recent news from many western nations doubting the integrity of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and bringing back the ‘old-fashioned ballot system’. Let’s look at the situation from a different angle. What is our idea of democracy based on? (1) Free and fair elections (2) Equal voting rights (3) Right to represent ourselves. Well, these and others would only stand straight if the vote gathering process is transparent enough for the citizens to believe in it.

Netherlands: Populists Appear to Fall Short in Dutch Election, Amid High Turnout | The New York Times

European populism faced its first big electoral test since last year’s “Brexit” referendum and Donald J. Trump’s election. Turnout was the highest in decades. The main exit poll indicated that the largest party in Parliament will remain the center-right party of Mark Rutte, the prime minister, with 31 of 150 seats. He has moved rightward in recent months, making tougher pronouncements on immigration but steering clear of the xenophobic and borderline racist statements of other parties. The far-right populist party of Geert Wilders gained seats, but did not perform as strongly as expected. Exit polls suggested that it was tied for second place with the conservative party Christian Democratic Appeal and the center-left pro-European party Democrats 66 — each with 19 seats. Also making a relatively strong showing were the left-leaning Greens, with 16 seats. The leftist, euroskeptic Socialist Party is projected to have 14 seats.

National: State Republicans Push For More Restrictive Voting Laws | NPR

Vice President Pence has yet to begin a promised investigation into allegations by President Trump that millions of people voted illegally in November. But that hasn’t stopped state lawmakers from taking action they say would limit voter fraud, even though the president’s claims have been widely discredited. Legislation to tighten voter ID and other requirements has already been introduced in about half the states this year. And in statehouse after statehouse, the debate has had a familiar ring. “We do not have a voter fraud problem in North Dakota,” Democratic Rep. Mary Schneider argued last month during a state House floor debate of a measure that would tighten that state’s voter ID requirements and increase penalties for voter fraud. “To say that there’s not a voter fraud problem in North Dakota, I think that’s another inaccurate statement. Maybe there have been no convicted cases but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have an issue,” countered Republican Christopher Olson, shortly before the measure was approved by a vote of 74-16.

National: Democrats seek special prosecutor in Russia election meddling | Associated Press

Democrats pushed Tuesday for a special prosecutor to examine the Trump administration’s potential ties to Russia, using a confirmation hearing to urge the No. 2 pick at the Justice Department to consider handing over any such investigation to an independent overseer. “We need steel spines, not weak knees when it comes to political independence in the Department of Justice,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. The remarks came during a hearing for Rod Rosenstein, a longtime federal prosecutor tapped for deputy attorney general, which instead became a referendum on Russian meddling in the presidential election.

Arkansas: Senate approves voter ID bill | Times Record

The Senate on Wednesday approved a bill to require Arkansas voters to show photo ID at the polls. House Bill 1047 by Rep. Mark Lowery, R-Maumelle, passed in a 25-8 vote, reaching with one vote to spare the two-thirds majority vote needed for passage in the 35-member Senate. The bill passed in the House in a 74-21 vote in January and now goes back to that chamber for concurrence in Senate amendments. Sen. Larry Teague, D-Nashville, was the only Senate Democrat to join with Republicans in voting for the bill Wednesday. Democrats cast all the votes against it.

Georgia: FBI investigating alleged breach in Georgia at KSU’s elections center | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating an alleged data breach in Georgia at the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned. The situation is still developing, although the Secretary of State’s Office said Friday that the investigation is not related to its own network and is not a breach of its database containing the personal information on Georgia’s 6.6 million registered voters. The office referred all other questions to both university and federal officials.

Iowa: House approves voter ID bill following 12 hours of debate | Des Moines Register

Iowa would become one of 34 states that have enacted laws requesting or requiring some form of identification on Election Day under a bill approved by the Iowa House Thursday. House File 516 was approved on a party-line vote after nearly 12 hours of debate that spanned two days. It now advances to the Senate where a Republican majority also is expected to advance the legislation. Secretary of State Paul Pate, who submitted the bill, immediately praised its passage. … Democrats took to the floor Wednesday and Thursday in an effort to convince Republicans the legislation is unnecessary, expensive and would have a disproportionate and negative effect on minorities, the elderly, the disabled and others.

Texas: Federal panel rules Texas congressional districts illegal | The Texas Tribune

Some of Texas’ 36 congressional districts violate either the U.S. Constitution or the federal Voting Rights Act, a panel of federal judges ruled Friday. In a long-delayed ruling, the judges ruled 2-1 that the Texas Legislature must redraw the political maps it most recently used for the 2016 elections. Specifically, they pointed to Congressional District 23, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, takes in most of the Texas-Mexico border and is represented by Republican Will Hurd of Helotes; Congressional District 27, represented by Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi; and Congressional District 35, a Central Texas district represented by Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin. The 166-page ruling by the San Antonio-based district judges was the latest in a complicated case that dates back to 2011, and comes just two election cycles away from the next U.S. Census — when the state would draw a new map under normal circumstances.

West Virginia: House Judiciary mulls stricter voter ID law | Charleston Gazette-Mail

The House Judiciary Committee worked through a bill Wednesday to require West Virginians to present government-issued photo identification at the polls before casting a ballot. After an hour of discussion, the committee sent the bill (HB 2781) down to a subcommittee for further review. Should it pass, the bill would trump sections of existing legislation (HB 4013), which passed last year and is scheduled to take effect in 2018. That law calls for a lower standard of identification for voters, allowing for bank statements, hunting licenses or having an adult or poll worker vouch for a familiar voter’s identity.

Australia: Western Australia’s Web votes have security worries, say ‘white hat’ security experts | The Register

The Western Australian government is pushing back against concerns about the security of its implementation of the iVote electoral system. iVote is an electronic system already used in another Australian State, New South Wales, primarily as an accessibility tool because it lets the vision-impaired and others with disabilities vote without assistance. Perhaps in response to last year’s Census debacle, Western Australia has decided to put in place denial-of-service (DoS) protection, and that’s attracted the attention of a group of veteran electronic vote-watchers. Writing at the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit publication, the group notes that the DoS proxy is not in Australia: it’s provided by Imperva’s Incapsula DoS protection service. That raises several issues, the academics (Dr Chris Culnane and Dr Vanessa Teague of the University of Melbourne, Dr Yuval Yarom and Mark Eldridge of the University of Adelaide, and Dr Aleksander Essex of Western University in Canada) note. First: the TLS certificate iVote uses to secure its communications is signed not by the WA government, but by Incapsula; and second, that means Incapsula is decrypting votes on their way from a voter to the State’s Electoral Commission.

Europe: Western Democracies Facing Cyberattack Threats Return to Election Basics | Bloomberg

Elections in western democracies are going back to pad and paper, abandoning the conveniences of modern technology as they hope to reduce the risk of cyberattacks by outside actors such as Russian-backed hackers. In a year where the European Union possibly hangs in the balance there are three national elections in three EU countries. The Netherlands and France have concluded that the easiest and most reliable solution is to go back to the basics. French citizens living overseas will have to travel back to France to cast a ballot June’s parliamentary election as a precaution against an “extremely high-level threat of cyber attacks,” according to the government ministry that oversees voting, Bloomberg News reported. French voters will also be required to cast a paper ballot for the April and May presidential election.

South Korea: Court upholds Park’s impeachment, triggering election | Bloomberg & AP

In a historic, unanimous ruling Friday, South Korea’s constitutional Court formally removed impeached President Park Geun-hye from office over a corruption scandal that has plunged the country into political turmoil, worsened an already-serious national divide and prompted calls for sweeping reforms. It was a stunning fall for Park, the country’s first female leader and the daughter of a dictator who rode a lingering conservative nostalgia for her father to victory in 2012, only to see her presidency descend into scandal. The ruling by the eight-member panel opens her up to possible criminal proceedings, and makes her South Korea’s first democratically elected leader to be removed from office since democracy came in the country in the late 1980s.

National: Attorney General Jeff Sessions will recuse himself from any probe related to 2016 presidential campaign | The Washington Post

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that he will recuse himself from investigations related to the 2016 presidential campaign, which would include any Russian interference in the electoral process. Speaking at a hastily called news conference at the Justice Department, Sessions said he was following the recommendation of department ethics officials after an evaluation of the rules and cases in which he might have a conflict. “They said that since I had involvement with the campaign, I should not be involved in any campaign investigation,” Sessions said. He added that he concurred with their assessment and would thus recuse himself from any existing or future investigation involving President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

National: Obama Administration Rushed to Preserve Intelligence of Russian Election Hacking | The New York Times

In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators. American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates.

Iowa: Contentious voter ID bill advances in Iowa Senate | Des Moines Register

A contentious voter identification bill cleared an Iowa Senate subcommittee Wednesday, although critics said there is no evidence it’s needed and a Democratic lawmaker scolded a state elections official for suggesting there is a lack of confidence in Iowa’s election system. Senate Study Bill 1163, which is proposed by Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, was approved on a 2-1 vote, advancing the bill to the Senate State Government Committee. Republican Sens. Roby Smith of Davenport and Jake Chapman of Adel supported the bill, while Democratic Sen. Tony Bisignano opposed it. The Iowa House is considering its own version of Pate’s bill, which is House Study Bill 93. Deputy Secretary of State Carol Olson told the panel the legislation will modernize Iowa’s elections technology by establishing electronic poll books in every Iowa precinct. In addition, the bill calls for establishing a voter ID system with signature verification, absentee ballot verification and post-election audits.

Michigan: State finalizes $82M contract for new voting machines | The Detroit News

The Secretary of State’s office finalized its contract to replace the state’s ailing voting machines with new equipment in time for the August 2018 primaries. The Board of State Canvassers on Tuesday approved a plan the State Administrative Board previously authorized. It could grant vendors up to $82.1 million over the next 10 years to replace the state’s voting machines with new optical scanners expected to be up and running by August 2018. The new machines still use paper ballots, so not much changes for voters in the polling booth, said state Elections Director Chris Thomas. But the new technology will make things easier for election workers by setting up a statewide repository showing results all in one place. “The voters themselves are not gonna notice a whole lot,” Thomas said. “Just to have a statewide repository for all elections – it just doesn’t exist right now. It’s a big step forward. No question.”

Nebraska: Voter photo ID heads toward showdown | Lincoln Journal Star

The latest effort to require voters to present a photo ID in order to participate in Nebraska elections attracted strong opposition Thursday at a legislative hearing on its first step toward a filibuster showdown. The new proposal (LR1CA) offered by Sen. John Murante of Gretna was crafted in the form of a constitutional amendment that would be submitted to Nebraska voters in 2018. If voters approved the amendment, the Legislature would determine the voter ID requirements. … Opponents argued that requirements for voter photo IDs tend to suppress the votes of students and other mobile young people, the elderly and disabled, African-Americans, Latino-Americans and the poor, most of which are traditional Democratic constituencies. And that, some testifiers said, is what photo ID requirements are designed to do.

North Carolina: Court rulings mean North Carolina is without an elections board and ethics commission | News & Observer

A N.C. Court of Appeals order means that the state doesn’t have a board that oversees elections and ethics laws, Senate leader Phil Berger said Thursday afternoon. Berger made a rare visit to the room in the Legislative Building reserved for reporters to announce the latest news in an ongoing lawsuit over a December law combining the ethics and elections boards into a new State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. “You still have all of the laws that folks are required to comply with, but we don’t have an Ethics Commission and we don’t have a Board of Elections based on this order,” Berger said.

Texas: Was Texas Voter ID Law Biased? Justice Deparment Stays Out of Argument | The New York Times

For several days in 2014 at the federal courthouse here, lawyers argued over whether the Texas Legislature had passed its voter identification law motivated, at least in part, by a desire to deter minorities from voting. Lawyers for the Justice Department said it had, as did lawyers for minority voters and civil rights groups. Lawyers for Texas denied the allegation. More than two years later, in the very same courtroom, the same judge listened to what were largely the same arguments made by many of the same lawyers on Tuesday. But there was one significant exception: The Justice Department stayed out of the fight. On Monday, the Trump administration’s Justice Department withdrew its claim that Texas had enacted the law with a discriminatory intent, reversing a position that had been part of the agency’s yearslong legal battle.

Virginia: U.S. Supreme Court orders reexamination of Virginia General Assembly racial gerrymandering case | Richmond Times-Dispatch

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday instructed a lower court to re-examine whether the Virginia General Assembly unconstitutionally stuffed African-American voters into certain districts, opening the door to a new political map that could reshape the Republican-controlled state legislature. Anti-gerrymandering advocates hailed the court’s opinion as a victory in the pursuit of more competitive elections, though the final outcome of the case remains unclear. With two justices partially dissenting, the Supreme Court told the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to reconsider the matter using a different legal standard that could make it easier to prove lawmakers improperly prioritized race above other redistricting criteria when redrawing House of Delegates districts in 2011.

India: Software glitch responsible for missing names in voters’ list? | Daily News & Analysis

While the Election Commission of India (ECI), State Election Commission (SEC) and Maharashtra’s civic bodies continue to make excuses with regard to the large scale chaos and lakhs of names missing from voters’ list, it appears that a software malfunction may have caused the fiasco. The SEC used the software (developed by Mahaonline) for the first time to divide the list of 92 lakh voters according to wards and booths. The original voters’ list is prepared by the ECI and is based on Assembly constituencies. For the civic elections held this year, about 227 wards and over 7,000 polling booths were set up in Mumbai. While the move aimed to curb errors in the process, it proved to complicate the process. Sources claim that the software glitch led to a faulty separation of voters’ names according to wards and booths. The software was used by 10 civic corporations under the guidance of the SEC.

United Kingdom: Northern Ireland election: DUP finish just one seat ahead of Sinn Féin | The Irish Times

Sinn Féin has emerged as the biggest winner in the North’s Assembly election after the party came to within one seat of matching the Democratic Unionist return of 28 seats. In a dramatic shake-up, unionists lost their long-enduring and highly symbolic overall majority in Stormont as the republican party came very close to securing more first preference votes than the DUP. Former first minister Arlene Foster is now likely to come under intense scrutiny after her party fell below the threshold of 30 MLAs required to trigger a contentious Stormont veto mechanism called the “petition of concern”. The mechanism effectively handed the DUP a veto on issues including moves to lift the ban on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland.

National: The Election Assistance Commission – The Federal Voting Agency Republicans Want to Kill | The Atlantic

Every odd-numbered year since 2011, Republicans in the House have tried to kill the Election Assistance Commission—the tiny federal agency responsible for helping states improve their voting systems. None of their previous efforts made it very far, and with Barack Obama in the White House, the 15-year-old commission had little to fear. This year, the same fight has taken on much greater urgency. Congressional committees are investigating whether a foreign power tried to hack the U.S. election. The new president is convinced that widespread fraud cost him millions of votes. And with an ally in the Oval Office, House Republicans have begun moving faster than ever before to eliminate an agency they say is unnecessary and wastes taxpayer money. “I’m more worried this time,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a belief that this has more legs than it did in the past.” The House Administration Committee has a new chairman, Representative Gregg Harper of Mississippi, who has led the opposition to the EAC, and last week the panel made his bill ending the agency the first piece of legislation it approved in the new Congress. “It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose,” Harper said shortly before the committee’s six Republicans voted down objections from its three Democrats to approve the legislation.

Verified Voting Blog: Our Voting System Is Hackable by Foreign Powers | David Dill

The FBI, NSA and CIA all agree that the Russian government tried to influence the 2016 presidential election by hacking candidates and political parties and leaking the documents they gathered. That’s disturbing. But they could have done even worse. It is entirely possible for an adversary to hack American computerized voting systems directly and select the next commander in chief.

A dedicated group of technically sophisticated individuals could steal an election by hacking voting machines in key counties in just a few states. Indeed, University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman says that he and his students could have changed the result of the November election. Halderman et al. have hacked a lot of voting machines, and there are videos to prove it. I believe him.

Halderman isn’t going to steal an election, but a foreign nation might be tempted to do so. It needn’t be a superpower like Russia or China. Even a medium-size country would have the resources to accomplish this, with techniques that could include hacking directly into voting systems over the Internet; bribing employees of election offices and voting-machine vendors; or just buying the companies that make the voting machines outright. It is likely that such an attack would not be detected, given our current election security practices.

Kansas: Kris Kobach’s “voter fraud” meltdown: Someday he’ll have evidence of a problem that doesn’t exist | Salon

As he blatantly lied on a series of Sunday talk shows about the extent to which illegal voting occurs in American elections, White House aide Stephen Miller told George Stephanopoulos to “invite Kris Kobach onto your show, and he can walk you through some of the evidence of voter fraud in greater detail.” On Monday, three separate networks gave Kobach the chance to do just that. It did not go well for him. A Kansas secretary of state who is a longtime crusader against immigration, Kobach is often credited with having inspired Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. Kobach has also promoted the ludicrous theory that undocumented immigrants are voting in numbers sufficient to swing elections toward the Democrats. You would think the number of elections that Democrats keep losing might dissuade him from this theory. You would be wrong.

Maine: Bills to tighten voter identification rules in Maine strongly opposed at hearings | The Portland Press Herald

A pair of bills aimed at tightening Maine’s voter identification requirements were broadly panned as unconstitutional and unneeded Wednesday during daylong public hearings before the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee. The bills, “An Act to Require Photo Identification to Vote” and “An Act to Protect Voting Integrity by Establishing Residency Verification Requirement for Purposes of Voting,” drew criticism from civil rights groups, top election officials, the state’s attorney general and everyday citizens. Also testifying against the bills were at least a dozen students from Bates College. The Lewiston school has been the target of ongoing criticism from conservatives in Maine, including Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who has suggested that college students have been improperly or illegally voting in Maine elections.

Massachusetts: Auditor says state should pay cities and towns for early voting costs | The Sun Chronicle