Wisconsin: Judge rejects bid to stop election recount | Reuters

A U.S. judge in Wisconsin on Friday rejected a request by President-elect Donald Trump supporters to stop a recount of election votes while the Michigan Supreme Court denied an appeal by Green Party candidate Jill Stein to restart the state’s recount. The results of the Nov. 8 election have been challenged in three states by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who finished fourth in the presidential poll. In Pennsylvania, the third state, a judge said he would rule on Monday on whether to allow a recount to go forward. Even if the recounts were carried out, they would be extremely unlikely to change the outcome of Trump’s win over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The Gambia: Soldiers on the streets in Gambia as unrest grows after president rejects election result | The Independent

Gambia’s president-elect said on Saturday that the outgoing leader who now rejects his defeat has no constitutional authority to call for another election, and he called on President Yahya Jammeh to help with a smooth transition in the interest of the tiny West African country. Jammeh’s surprise reversal late Friday was certain to spark outrage among the tens of thousands who took to the streets after Adama Barrow was announced the president-elect in the 1 December vote, shouting “Freedom!” The United States and others quickly rejected Jammeh’s new stance, and the African Union on Saturday called for security forces to remain neutral. Soldiers were in the streets of the capital, Banjul, as Gambians closed down shops in fear of unrest. Barrow said the Independent Electoral Commission is the only competent authority to declare a winner. “It was already done so, and I am the president-elect,” Barrow said. “President Jammeh is the outgoing president. He is to hand over executive powers to me when his term is expires in January.”

Ghana: Elections Marred by Attempt to Hack Website and Calls for the President to Concede | Foreign Policy

Ghana’s presidential elections Wednesday started off surprisingly well, with voters lining up hours early at some polling places — using stones to save their place in line — and congratulations pouring in from the (real) U.S. Embassy in Ghana. Fears of election-day violence and confusion seemed misplaced. Then it all came apart. First, the electoral commission’s website was victim to a hack attempt. Also, an image circulating on Twitter said that the New Patriotic Party’s Nana Akufo-Addo had won the day, forcing the commission to frantically tweet for voters to ignore the fake news. Though votes were still being counted Thursday, the Akufo-Addo camp announced Thursday that, according to its tabulations, Akufo-Addo did in fact have a strong lead. They called for the incumbent, President John Mahama, who’s been in power since 2012, to concede. That didn’t sit well. Mahama’s camp called the calls for concession “treasonable.”

National: Trump Backers Go to Court to Block Vote Recounts in 3 States | The New York Times

President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies have filed separate legal challenges in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a suddenly robust effort to stop the presidential election recount efforts there. None of the challenges immediately derailed the recounts in those states, but they promised to complicate them with more legal wrangling by Mr. Trump, groups supportive of him, state officials and Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate. Ms. Stein initiated the recounts and a successful fund-raising drive after suggesting that voting machines were susceptible to hacking. On Friday, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Appeals in an attempt to block the recount there, which had not yet begun. “If the Bureau of Elections moves forward with the recount, it will waste the State’s scarce resources, create a logistical nightmare for counties across the State, and assure that Michigan’s Electoral College voters will not be counted,” the filing said. Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general, filed a separate lawsuit in a bid to halt the recount, saying that it put the state’s voters at risk of “paying millions and potentially losing their voice in the Electoral College in the process.”

National: US election recount: how it began – and what effect it could have | The Guardian

Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the presidential election, voter security experts began privately discussing their concerns about whether the results might have been tampered with, according to John Bonifaz, the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute. The election had taken place against a backdrop of warnings from the US government that Russian hackers were “scanning and probing” the election systems of American states, and were behind the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Eight days before the election, the White House had used an emergency hotline to warn Russia against further interference. “I was getting calls from members of the election integrity community, so I joined them and began looking at possible discrepancies myself,” Bonifaz said in an interview. Several concerns emerged. Trump appeared to have performed particularly well in Wisconsin counties only using electronic voting. There seemed to have been a sharp increase in the number of ballots cast in Michigan that left the presidential field blank. Electronic voting systems had briefly faltered in one North Carolina county on election day.

Editorials: Paper trail can thwart voter fraud | Alex Halderman/The Detroit News

How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.

Verified Voting Blog: Election Security Is a Matter of National Security | David Dill

State-sponsored cyber-attacks seemingly intended to influence the 2016 Presidential election have raised a question: Is the vulnerability of computerized voting systems to hacking a critical threat to our national security? Can an adversary use methods of cyber-warfare to select our commander-in-chief?

A dedicated group of technically sophisticated individuals could steal an election by hacking voting machines 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 presidential 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 power might be tempted to do so. The military expenditures of a medium-size country dwarf the cost of a multi-pronged attack, which could include using the internet, bribing employees of election offices and voting machine vendors, or just buying voting machine companies. It is likely that such an attack would not be detected, given our current election security practices.

What would alert us to such an attack? What should we do about it? If there is reason to suspect an election result (perhaps because it’s an upset victory that defies the vast majority of pre-election polls), common sense says we should double-check the results of the election as best we can. But this is hard to do in America. Recount laws vary with each state. In states where it is possible to get a recount, it often has to be requested by one of the candidates, often at considerable expense.

In the recent election, it is fortunate that Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein, citing potential security breaches, recently requested a recount of the 2016 presidential vote in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and plans to do so in Michigan. Donald Trump unexpectedly won these three states by very narrow margins, and their recount laws are favorably compared with some of the other swing states.

Michigan: Court hearing set for Sunday in Michigan presidential ballot recount | Detroit Free Press

A hearing is expected in U.S. District Court in Detroit Sunday to decide when a recount of Michigan presidential election ballots can begin. Green Party candidate Jill Stein filed suit against state election officials in federal court in Detroit late Friday in the latest in a raft of lawsuits over her request for a recount of Michigan’s presidential election vote. Barring a court injunction, the hand recount of about 4.8 million Michigan ballots is likely to begin Wednesday, though it is possible it could get under way late on Tuesday, state Director of Elections Chris Thomas said Friday. Thomas made that determination after the Board of State Canvassers deadlocked, 2-2, on president-elect Donald Trump’s objections to Stein’s request for a recount — meaning the recount proceeds. Thomas said that under state election law, officials must wait two business days after ruling on Trump’s protest, before starting the recount. But in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit, Stein says that delay is unreasonable and violates equal protection and due process rights guaranteed under the Constitution, “effectively denying the right to vote” if the recount is not completed in time to meet federal deadlines. The court announced late Saturday night that it would hear the case in a rare Sunday hearing. The 10:30 a.m.case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith.

Nevada: Secretary of state has final say in calling statewide recount of Nevada presidential vote | Las Vegas Review-Journal

A recount of ballots in select precincts from five Nevada counties sought by a last-place presidential contender will not automatically trigger a statewide recount, even if the stipulated 1 percent discrepancy is found, a state election official said Wednesday. Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, who came in dead last in Nevada with 2,552 votes in the Nov. 8 general election, filed for a recount Tuesday just minutes before the 5 p.m. deadline to do so. He paid a fee of $14,154.98 to finance the effort to recount ballots in 93 precincts, or 5 percent of the total. Under state law, if a discrepancy of 1 percent or more is found in either the votes received by the person requesting the recount or the person who won — Democrat Hillary Clinton in this case — a new counting of all ballots cast in that race can be ordered. But it is not mandatory or automatic. “State law gives the secretary of state some discretion on when a person who requests a recount is entitled to a full statewide recount,” elections deputy Wayne Thorley said. “The secretary of state will need to review the results of the sample recount of 93 precincts before making any decisions on a full statewide recount.”

North Carolina: Durham elections board denied extension on Monday recount deadline | News & Observer

The Durham County Board of Elections on Friday unsuccessfully requested an extension of the state’s deadline to recount 90,000 votes – arguing the recount can’t be completed by Monday evening. Later Friday, the State Board of Elections denied the extension. “State Board officials have been working with Durham County officials to ensure the recount is conducted as expeditiously as possible,” agency spokesman Patrick Gannon said. “At this point, the State Board office does not believe an extension beyond Monday night is necessary.” The Durham board met Friday morning to discuss the State Board of Elections order that it complete a recount by 7 p.m. Monday. Durham wanted that deadline extended to Wednesday because it expects it will take that long to run 90,000 ballots through its tabulating machines if it begins Sunday morning.

Pennsylvania: Green Party Switches Strategy in Pennsylvania Recount Bid | Associated Press

A Green Party-backed campaign changed its strategy to force a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s Nov. 8 presidential election, won by Republican Donald Trump, and said late Saturday night that it will seek help in the federal courts, rather than the state courts. The announcement that it would seek an emergency federal court order on Monday for a recount came hours after it dropped a case in the state courts. “Make no mistake — the Stein campaign will continue to fight for a statewide recount in Pennsylvania,” recount campaign lawyer Jonathan Abady said in a statement issued around 11:30 p.m. “We are committed to this fight to protect the civil and voting rights of all Americans.” In the statement, Abady said barriers to a recount in Pennsylvania are pervasive and the state court system is ill-equipped to address the problem.

Wisconsin: Federal judge denies quick halt to recount | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A federal judge Friday denied an emergency halt to the recount of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, allowing the process to continue until a Dec. 9 court hearing at least. There is no need to halt the recount just yet because it will not do any immediate harm to Republican President-elect Donald Trump or his supporters, U.S. District Judge James Peterson wrote in a three-page order that called for both sides in the case to lay out written arguments before he takes any action. Citing the case that cleared George W. Bush’s path to the presidency, Trump supporters had filed a lawsuit early Friday to stop Wisconsin’s recount and safeguard the president elect’s Nov. 8 victory here.

Austria: Vying for Their Own Election Upset, Austrian Populists Forge Ties to Trump Allies | Wall Street Journal

Senior politicians from Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party celebrated the upset victory of Donald Trump at an election-night party in Trump Tower in New York. This Sunday, when their nation goes to the polls, they will be hoping for an improbable presidency of their own. Mr. Trump’s win has energized populist politicians across Europe who echo his criticism of immigration, free trade and international institutions and calls for improved ties with Russia. But nowhere, perhaps, is the jubilation as great as in Austria, where the Freedom Party now sees years of quiet efforts to establish ties with conservative Republicans in the U.S. paying off just as its own candidate stands on the verge of the Austrian presidency. The party’s Norbert Hofer is running neck-and-neck with center-left candidate Alexander Van der Bellen in the polls ahead of Austria’s runoff presidential election on Sunday. Mr. Hofer’s victory would give the Freedom Party—long ostracized for its xenophobic rhetoric and past links to former Nazis—the Austrian presidency for the first time.

The Gambia: Jammeh in shock election loss after 22-year rule | Reuters

Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh, who once vowed to rule the tiny West African nation for “a billion years”, said he had accepted his shock election defeat on Friday, 22 years after seizing power in a coup. Voting on Thursday against Jammeh was a rare show of defiance against a leader who has ruled by decree and who rights groups say crushes dissent by imprisoning and torturing opponents. In an address broadcast by Gambian state-owned radio on Thursday evening, Jammeh said he would not contest the poll results showing opposition candidate Adama Barrow had won, which had been announced earlier in the day. “If (Barrow) wants to work with us also, I have no problem with that. I will help him work towards the transition,” Jammeh said, before later saying that he planned to move to his farm after leaving office following a handover in January.

Italy: Referendum to Determine Matteo Renzi’s Fate | Wall Street Journal

When Italians vote on a much-awaited popular referendum on Sunday, they will also be deciding the fate of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s government—and expressing the country’s appetite for change. The ballot is ostensibly over Mr. Renzi’s proposal to overhaul Italy’s legislature. But with his popularity waning and the economy stalled, it has become a make-or-break vote on the premier himself and his vision for a nimbler and faster-growing Italy. A loss would likely drive Mr. Renzi from office and usher in a period of instability amid growing support for a large populist party. Italy’s referendum kicks off a momentous electoral year in Europe, where populist parties are expected to do well. On the same day as the Italian vote, Austrians go to the polls to elect a new president, in a race that could install the country’s first right-wing populist head of state since World War II. Support for anti-establishment parties is surging in France and Germany, too, both of which have elections next year.

Verified Voting Blog: Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots | J. Alex Halderman

You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. Thatarticle, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen. 

How might a foreign government hack America’s voting machines to change the outcome of a presidential election? Here’s one possible scenario. First, the attackers would probe election offices well in advance in order to find ways to break into their computers. Closer to the election, when it was clear from polling data which states would have close electoral margins, the attackers might spread malware into voting machines in some of these states, rigging the machines to shift a few percent of the vote to favor their desired candidate. This malware would likely be designed to remain inactive during pre-election tests, do its dirty business during the election, then erase itself when the polls close. A skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs — though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.

Could anyone be brazen enough to try such an attack? A few years ago, I might have said that sounds like science fiction, but 2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election. This summer, attackers broke into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and, separately, into the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and leaked private messages. Attackers infiltrated the voter registration systems of two states, Illinois and Arizona, and stole voter data. And there’s evidence that hackers attempted to breach election offices in several other states.

In all these cases, Federal agencies publicly asserted that senior officials in the Russian government commissioned these attacks. Russia has sophisticated cyber-offensive capabilities, and has shown a willingness to use them to hack elections. In 2014, during the presidential election in Ukraine, attackers linked to Russia sabotaged the country’s vote-counting infrastructure and, according to published reports, Ukrainian officials succeeded only at the last minute in defusing vote-stealing malware that was primed to cause the wrong winner to be announced. Russia is not the only country with the ability to pull off such an attack on American systems — most of the world’s military powers now have sophisticated cyberwarfare capabilities.

[caption id="attachment_108182" align="aligncenter" width="800"]The pink counties predominately use optical scan paper ballots, which can be examined to confirm that the computer voting machines produced an accurate count. Blue counties use paperless voting systems, which require forensic analysis. The pink counties predominately use optical scan paper ballots, which can be examined to confirm that the computer voting machines produced an accurate count. Blue counties use paperless voting systems, which require forensic analysis.[/caption]

Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.

National: Jill Stein raises $6 million for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania | CS Monitor

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has raised almost $6 million to petition the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to recount votes in order to determine if hacking skewed the election away from the expected victor, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In all three states, President-elect Donald Trump won an upset victory with a tiny margin. If the trio had gone blue, as was expected, Mrs. Clinton would have earned enough electoral votes to secure the election. Proponents of the recount have compared it to instant replay in a sporting event, but critics say it undermines confidence in the electoral process. While Clinton supporters are holding on to their last hope to see her in the White House, the Obama administration has announced that the election was not hacked, by Russians or anyone else. “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect,” the Obama administration wrote in a statement. “Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.

National: Hillary Clinton’s Team to Join Wisconsin Recount Pushed by Jill Stein | The New York Times

Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results. In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

Voting Blogs: Listening and Responding To Calls for an Audit and Recount | Marc Elias/Medium

Over the last few days, officials in the Clinton campaign have received hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton. The concerns have arisen, in particular, with respect to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three states that together proved decisive in this presidential election and where the combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes. It should go without saying that we take these concerns extremely seriously. We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted. Moreover, this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign: the U.S. government concluded that Russian state actors were behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the personal email accounts of Hillary for America campaign officials, and just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government was behind much of the “fake news” propaganda that circulated online in the closing weeks of the election. For all these reasons, we have quietly taken a number of steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states.

Michigan: State preparing for potential hand recount of 4.8M presidential votes | Detroit Free Press

Just in case, the State of Michigan is preparing for a recount of nearly 4.8 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential race. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, has raised more than $5 million to pay for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. She filed a formal recount request Friday afternoon with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and faces a Monday deadline in Pennsylvania and Wednesday in Michigan. A recount won’t be cheap, and it will be a monumental task for the Secretary of State and 83 county clerks around Michigan. She can’t request a recount in Michigan until the vote is certified, which is scheduled to happen at 2 p.m. Monday, when the Board of Canvassers meets to make the results — which show Republican Donald Trump with a 10,704-vote lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton — official. After the certification, she has until Wednesday afternoon to make the recount request.

North Carolina: Governor requests vote recount in tight race | Reuters

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory announced on Tuesday he has officially requested a recount of votes from the Nov. 8 election with official results showing him trailing his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Roy Cooper, by one-tenth of a point. The gubernatorial race in the ninth largest U.S. state remained undecided two weeks after Election Day. Officials with the State Board of Elections were continually updating results as they arrived from the state’s 100 counties. A recount is mandatory if the margin is less than 10,000 votes once all 100 counties have finished their canvasses, a spokesman for the election board said. As of Tuesday afternoon, Cooper’s lead was 6,187 out of 4.7 million votes cast.

Virginia: Lawmakers propose stricter rules for third-party voter registration drives | Richmond Times-Dispatch

The Republican chairman of the House of Delegates elections committee has introduced a bill to tighten rules governing voter registration drives after multiple cases of potential fraud leading up to the presidential election. Del. Mark L. Cole, R-Spotsylvania, pre-filed a bill that would add stricter paperwork and reporting requirements for non-governmental groups that canvass neighborhoods and events to register Virginians to vote. Cole’s legislation, which will be considered when the legislature reconvenes in January, would require every individual employee or volunteer working with outside groups to register with the state and submit logs of their activity. The state would assign each worker a unique identifying number and keep a record of each person’s name and contact information. The bill would prevent voter registration groups from paying employees on a per-application basis, which some have speculated could create a financial incentive for phony applications. Del. Hyland F. “Buddy” Fowler Jr., R-Hanover, pre-filed the same bill.

Wisconsin: Election recount will take place in Wisconsin, after Stein files petition | The Washington Post

An election recount will take place soon in Wisconsin, after former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Friday with the state’s Election Commission, the first of three states where she has promised to contest the election result. The move from Stein, who raised millions since her Wednesday announcement that she would seek recounts of Donald Trump’s apparent election victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, came just 90 minutes before Wisconsin’s 5 p.m. Friday deadline to file a petition. Now it will keep some hope alive for many Hillary Clinton supporters for another few weeks while Wisconsin recounts ballots before a Dec. 13 deadline. Trump scored upset victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and seems on the path to declare a victory in Michigan as well, though the result of the election in that state will not be certified officially until Monday. Had Clinton won those three states, previously seen as part of the Democrats’ “firewall,” she would have secured enough electoral votes to win the election.

Haiti: Tensions mount as Haiti waits on re-run election results | Reuters

Election tensions spilled onto Haiti’s streets on Monday with shots fired outside the presidential palace as various candidates claimed victory in a re-run vote in the impoverished Caribbean country. Haitians are counting on their next president to lift the country out of political limbo and repair damage from Hurricane Matthew, which devastated the country last month, killing up to 1,000 people and leaving 1.4 million needing aid. With paper ballots counted laboriously by hand, election results typically take a week to be announced in Haiti. But less than 24 hours after polling centers had closed, some candidates and their supporters claimed they had won, leading to chaotic scenes in the capital where guards were forced to shoot into the air to clear a celebrating crowd. The provisional electoral council (CEP) released a statement urging the public to disregard any premature victory announcements. “We call on the population not to believe or transmit any pseudo-result, even partial, that has reached them,” it said. “Any result circulating on the internet or social media is not attributable to the CEP.”

Mali: Local elections marred by boycotts, kidnapping | Reuters

Malians burned ballot boxes and one candidate was kidnapped during local elections meant to fill posts left vacant in the north since Islamist militants hijacked a 2012 Tuareg rebellion and ousted the government. The jihadists were driven out a year later by a French-led military operation, but have continued to launch strikes on army and U.N. targets from their desert bases and have intensified their insurgency in recent months and spread further south. Polls were canceled in at least seven districts for security reasons in elections widely criticized by opposition parties as well as armed groups participating in a U.N.-led peace process, pointing to the ongoing fragility of the former French colony three years after the war. While locals formed orderly lines outside polling booths in the southern capital Bamako, ballot boxes were burned by armed men in Timbuktu and the PRVM-FASAKO party said its candidate for a commune near the central town of Mopti had been kidnapped.

National: After a Fraught Election, Questions Over the Impact of a Balky Voting Process | The New York Times

So few Americans cast ballots that a new president was elected by barely a quarter of Americans eligible to vote. Some of those who did vote waited in line for hours. Others were told they needed an ID to vote under a law the courts had nullified months ago — and sometimes, under laws that never existed to begin with. Amid the ruins of the ugliest presidential campaign in modern history, Democrats are bemoaning an election apparatus so balky and politically malleable that throngs of would-be voters either gave up trying to cast ballots or cast ones that were never counted. This was the first presidential election in a half century that was held without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting rights advocates spent the year in court battling, with incomplete success, to roll back restrictions on the franchise enacted by Republican legislatures in state after state. Some scholars and election analysts questioned this week whether a better run and less politically influenced voting process might have changed the outcome in some close races and made the presidential contest even closer. The headline example is Wisconsin, where a Republican-backed law requiring voters to produce one of a limited number of acceptable photo IDs was in effect for the first time. Studies show — and some Republicans admit — that such laws disproportionately reduce Democratic turnout because many of the laws require IDs that low-income and immigrant voters, who are often Democrats, frequently lack. In Milwaukee, where turnout dropped 41,000 votes from the 2012 total, the chief elections official said on Friday that declines in voting were greatest in areas where lack of IDs was most common. Donald J. Trump won Wisconsin by about 27,000 votes.

National: About 100 million people couldn’t be bothered to vote this year | The Washington Post

Roughly 43 percent of eligible voters didn’t bother filling out a ballot this year, according to turnout estimates from the U.S. Elections Project. To look at it another way, the people who could have voted but chose not to vastly outnumbered those who cast a vote for Clinton, Trump or a third-party candidate. The U.S. Elections Project, run by a political scientist at the University of Florida, estimates that there are about 251 million voting-age people in the U.S. But not all of them are eligible to vote: some are non-citizens living in the U.S., while several million more can’t legally vote because they’re in prison, on parole, or have a past felony conviction in states where that’s a barrier to voting. Subtract all those people and you’ve got about 232 million people potentially eligible to cast a vote this fall. But only about 132 million of them did, give or take the one or two million votes that have yet to be officially certified. That means that 100 million people who have the legal right to vote simply decided it wasn’t worth the hassle this year.

National: Civil rights leaders say voter suppression laws influenced 2016 presidential election | McClatchy DC

Civil rights groups say a tangle of Republican-backed “voter suppression” laws enacted since 2010 probably helped tip the scale for Republican nominee Donald Trump in some closely contested states on election night. “When we look back, we will find that voter suppression figured prominently in the story surrounding the 2016 presidential election,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Fourteen states had restrictive new voting laws on the books for the first time in a presidential election this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law: Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. The laws included a mix of photo ID requirements for voters, cuts to early voting opportunities and curbs on voter registration activity. The laws, which were presumably enacted as a safeguard against voter fraud, began to spread nationally after the 2010 midterm elections, when large numbers of Republicans were swept into state offices.

Illinois: Senate overrides governor’s automatic-voter veto | The Web Times

The Illinois Senate has rejected the governor’s veto of automatic voter registration legislation, however, Sen. Sue Rezin, R-Morris, has proposed an alternative bill. The Senate’s 38-18 vote sends the initial measure to the House to consider when it returns Nov. 29 to Springfield. The bill is SB250. The Legislature adopted the plan in the spring with strong bipartisan support. It would allow visitors to a handful of state agencies to be automatically registered to vote unless they opt out. Rauner vetoed it in August, fearing fraud. He said the plan doesn’t meet federal requirements about a person’s participation in the registration process and puts too much of a burden on the State Board of Elections to verify eligibility. Democratic Sen. Any Manar of Bunker Hill says record-keeping and state automation are advanced enough to prevent mischief.

Maine: Recounts requested for legalized marijuana, school surcharge votes | The Portland Press Herald

Opponents of ballot initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana and tax the state’s highest earners to help fund public schools have submitted requests for recounts. Petitions seeking recounts were turned in Wednesday afternoon to the Secretary of State’s Office, hours before the 5 p.m. deadline. State officials must verify that at least 100 signatures on each petition came from registered voters who cast ballots in the Nov. 8 election before a recount is scheduled. Both Question 1, which would legalize marijuana, and Question 2, which would add a 3 percent tax surcharge on individual income over $200,000, were narrowly approved. The two statewide recounts combined will cost taxpayers more than $500,000, the Secretary of State’s Office said. The marijuana question passed by 4,073 votes, 381,692-377,619, less than 1 percent, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s Office.