Tag Archives: tvnw

Early next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will be a test as much of the five conservative justices as of the law they will review. Ever the optimist that principled reasoning will prevail, I’m betting that the conservatives will pass the test (hoping for once to be proven right!). The issue in McCutcheon v. FEC is the limitation on aggregate contributions to federal campaigns. To simplify it radically: under federal law, individuals can give up to $2,600 to any candidate in any election cycle. But the total amount they can give to federal candidates in aggregate is capped at $123,200 per year. So, for example, while I can give $1,000 to any candidate I want, I can’t give that much to more than 123 candidates in one year (poor me!). Critics of the law say it “abridges” their “freedom of speech.” They should be allowed, these critics argue, to give as much as they want in aggregate, so long as the contribution for any candidate is limited to $2,600. Since 1976, the Supreme Court has been pretty clear about the basic question that must be answered in a case like this. The First Amendment limits Congress’s power to regulate political speech—severely, and rightly, in my view. Only if Congress can show a “compelling” interest can it restrict the freedom of individuals to contribute to political campaigns. Even then, the restriction must be “narrowly tailored” to the interest the government seeks to advance. “Good enough for government work” just doesn’t cut it when the issue is political speech.

Iowa: Lawsuit challenging voting rules advances in court | Associated Press

Two civil rights groups will proceed with their lawsuit challenging Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s authority to pass emergency voting rules in the months before an election. It comes after a judge refused to dismiss the lawsuit over the weekend. Polk County Judge Scott Rosenberg said in a ruling Saturday that since there is nothing to stop the secretary of state from attempting to pass voting rules again prior to an election, the court must hear the case and resolve the issues. “If Schultz refiles these emergency rules before a future election, the same issues will arise of whether he abused the emergency rulemaking process, exceeded his statutory authority, and violated the right to vote,” Rosenberg wrote.

Maryland: Absentee ballots downloaded online raise security issues, as does Election Day voter registration | MarylandReporter.com

A new Maryland law allowing voting by mail with a ballot downloaded online has some voter advocacy groups alarmed that adequate security measures will not be in place for the 2014 elections. Election Day voter registration and the future of online voting were also among the hot button issues debated at a forum this week, hosted by the Maryland League of Women Voters in Annapolis. The bill, Election Law – Improving Access to Voting, extends the right to all Maryland absentee voters to download and mark their ballots online. Ballots would then be mailed in to local election boards rather than tallied online. Previously only overseas voters and military personnel were allowed by law to obtain and mark ballots on the Internet. Under Maryland’s no-excuse absentee voting law, any Maryland voter is allowed to receive an absentee ballot without having to provide a reason for being absent on Election Day. Cyber-security hawks like Rebecca Wilson of SAVE our Votes said Maryland has no process for examining voter’s handwritten signatures that are required for all the new potential mailed in absentee ballots. “Maryland is moving increasingly to vote by mail,” Wilson said. “How does the [election official] know the person on the computer is the real voter?” Wilson cited four western states that either vote entirely by mail — Washington and Oregon – or by a large percentage – California and Colorado.

Michigan: Canvassers certify Detroit mayoral recount that changed just 9 votes | The Detroit News

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers voted Thursday to certify a recount of the Aug. 6 primary election — which only changed nine votes in the Detroit mayoral election. The board Thursday decided to dismiss all fraud charges alleged by primary mayoral candidate Tom Barrow. The panel’s action means former Detroit Medical Center CEO Mike Duggan still won the Aug. 6 primary with 52 percent of the vote despite losing nine votes and will face Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, who received 30 percent of the primary vote, in the Nov. 5 general election. Melvin “Butch” Hollowell, attorney for the Duggan campaign, said the board did a thorough job, even going as far as hiring a handwriting expert. .

South Dakota: Ruling sides with Native group over costs of voting-rights lawsuit | The Argus Leader

September 26, 2013

Twenty-five Native Americans will not have to pay court costs related to their voting-rights lawsuit against the state and Fall River and Shannon counties, a federal judge ruled. The 25 plaintiffs from the Pine Ridge reservation sued in January 2012 to ensure they would get an in-person absentee voting station in Shannon County for the full period allotted by state law. In previous elections, in-person early voting was available only on a limited basis. After the lawsuit was filed, Secretary of State Jason Gant and local officials agreed to provide in-person absentee voting stations in both Shannon and Todd counties. Both counties do not have a courthouse, and the agreement would provide the early absentee voting stations through the 2018 election.

Australia: Electoral chief cautious about online voting | Sydney Morning Herald

September 26, 2013

The replacement of paper-and-pencil voting with an electronic system could see Australians lose confidence in the poll results, the electoral chief has warned. Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn defended the system’s reliability following attacks from election hopeful Clive Palmer, who portrayed himself as a victim of ”rigged” results and the AEC as a military-infiltrated ”national disgrace”. Despite the conspiracy claims, Mr Palmer extended his lead over his Liberal National Party rival to 111 votes on Friday, with the final counting of outstanding votes in the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax expected on Saturday. The Palmer United Party founder and wealthy Queensland businessman reacted angrily to the discovery of 750 votes tallied against the wrong pre-poll location mid-way through the count. In an earlier mistake, officials noticed 1000 votes for Victorian independent Cathy McGowan had not been recorded correctly, pushing the seat of Indi further out of reach of former Coalition frontbencher Sophie Mirabella, who subsequently conceded defeat this week. Mr Killesteyn said computer-based voting would eliminate these kinds of ”human errors” but the benefits would have to be weighed against hacking and manipulation fears.

Estonia: Electoral Committee Launches E-Voting Tests | ERR

September 25, 2013

Officials begin a three-day period of testing Estonia’s e-election system today, and voters can also participate. The testing comes in light of the fact that the upcoming local government elections will be the first in which Internet voters will be able to verify that they have voted – a sort of electronic receipt, reported ETV. Those wishing to vote online, as has been possible in Estonia since 2005, must download the voting software and log in with their national ID card or mobile ID. Despite its reputation as an Estonian success story, e-voting has been a controversial issue that has been challenged by political opposition, claims of security vulnerabilities and an ensuing Supreme Court case.

National: The Recall Is the New Normal: The Rise of the Permanent Campaign | Pacific Standard

September 19, 2013

Last week, in a first for the state of Colorado, two state legislators were recalled by their constituents. Senator Angela Giron (D-Pueblo) and Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) were sent packing in large part due to their votes in favor of new gun laws passed and signed into law earlier this year. As I’ve noted elsewhere (here and here), recall elections are a rarity in the United States, but they’re becoming increasingly common. There have only been 38 state legislative recall elections since states first began adopting the procedure in 1908. Seventeen of those—nearly half—have occurred just since 2010. And some of them, particularly the recent Colorado ones, would have to be labeled as political successes for their backers. A vocal and passionate minority (in this case, gun owners) wanted to punish some lawmakers for their votes and send a message of intimidation to others. They did that. My guess is that the recall will only become more popular in the coming years. Now, I remember quite a few people predicting the same thing after the successful 2003 recall of California Governor Gray Davis. In fact, it would be another five years before anyone would attempt to recall a state legislator, and another three years after that until an attempt to unseat another governor. Why would it not catch on then but catch on now?

Kansas: State won’t require citizenship proof for driver’s license renewals | Topeka Capital-Journal

Kansas no longer plans to require people renewing driver’s licenses to produce proof that they are living in the U.S. legally, Revenue Secretary Nick Jordan said Monday, confirming a policy shift with implications for the state’s administration of a separate proof-of-citizenship requirement for new voters. Jordan said in an interview with The Associated Press that the Department of Revenue, which oversees licensing, will develop a program in coming months in which drivers renewing their licenses can voluntarily present birth certificates, passports or other citizenship documents and have it noted on their licenses. Kansas law already requires people obtaining a new license to provide proof of their lawful residency. State officials previously had planned for such a requirement to be extended to all license renewals under a 2005 federal anti-terrorism law designed to make states’ licenses more secure. But federal officials recently declared that Kansas is among 20 states complying with the federal statute, even without requiring proof of legal residency to renew a driver’s license.

New Jersey: Appeals court orders more review of voting machines | Associated Press

A state appeals court on Monday upheld New Jersey’s use of electronic voting machines, but the judges expressed serious concerns about possible human error and ordered further review of the state’s safeguards. Monday’s ruling, which upheld a lower court decision, is the latest in a legal battle dating back to 2004 when state Assemblyman Reed Gusciora and others sued over the state’s use of the machines. The lawsuit claimed the touch-screen systems, called direct recording electronic voting machines, were unreliable because they didn’t produce a paper backup and were susceptible to hacking. Then-Gov. Jon Corzine signed legislation in 2005 that would have required all machines to be retrofitted with a paper backup system by January 2008, but that deadline wasn’t met and in 2009 lawmakers suspended it indefinitely over a lack of funding.

Michigan: Canvassers in Detroit mayoral recount send some ballots to prosecutor, judge | Detroit Free Press

Six weeks after Detroiters cast their votes for mayor, City Council and clerk, ballots are still being examined, counted and analyzed as the Wayne County Board of Canvassers looks into allegations of fraud. The board spent Tuesday poring through ballots at Cobo Center and made some interesting discoveries. Among them: Some absentee ballots in which Mike Duggan’s name had been typed onto the ballot, some absentee ballots were cast using pencil, and some absentee ballots in which corrective fluid was used. The board voted to send the ballots that had Duggan’s name typed in to the Wayne County prosecutor and the chief judge at the Wayne County Circuit Court for investigation.

South Dakota: Gant forming task force on federal voting money; rights group calls it delay tactic | Associated Press

South Dakota Secretary of State Jason Gant said he’s forming a task force to address whether federal Help America Vote Act funds can be used to open satellite registration and early voting offices on three Native American reservations. But the head of a Mission-based voting rights group is calling Gant’s move a delay tactic. “They don’t need a committee,” O.J. Semans, executive director of Four Directions Inc., said Tuesday. “He has the authority to do it.” The 2002 Help America Vote Act was passed by Congress to address voter access issues identified during the 2000 election. Poverty on South Dakota’s reservations and the long distances to polling places hamper Native Americans’ ability to vote, Semans said. Semans has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the matter, and the American Civil Liberties Union and the Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association support the request.

Texas: Lawsuits pile up over Texas voter ID law | Facing South

This week the NAACP Texas State Conference and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of Texas state lawmakers filed a legal challenge to the state’s photo voter ID law. NAACP and MALC join the U.S. Department of Justice, the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund, the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, and U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democrat representing the Fort Worth area, who’ve collectively filed three other suits challenging the Texas law. As with the other challenges, NAACP and MALC claim the law violates Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids denying voting rights to people of color. All of the challenges want Texas “bailed in” under the VRA’s Section Three preclearance provision, which requires states or counties found to have engaged in intentional discrimination to get federal permission for new election laws before they take effect. The NAACP/MALC suit differs from most of the other cases in that it also argues that the photo voter ID law violates the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment equal protection clause banning racial discrimination. In addition, it claims the Texas law violates the 15th Amendment, which prohibits governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race.

International: Where is it compulsory to vote? | The Economist

September 17, 2013

Voter turnout has declined over the past few decades in many western countries. In America it has been below 60% in every presidential election since 1968. In Britain turnout reached 65% in the 2010 general election, down from 84% in 1950. But there are no such worries in Australia, where Tony Abbott was sworn in as prime minister on September 18th. According to Australia’s electoral commission, turnout in the election on September 7th was 91%. This was no one-off: nine out of ten Australian voters have trudged to the polls (or voted by post) in every federal election since 1925. The reason Australians vote so faithfully is simple: they have to, because failing to vote is illegal. Where else is democracy an obligation rather than a right? Plenty of countries have flirted with compulsory voting. IDEA, an international organisation that promotes democracy, lists 38 countries that have mandatory voting in place or have done so in the past. They include America: the state of Georgia made voting compulsory in its 1777 constitution, subject to a fine, unless the person could provide a “reasonable excuse” (see Article 12). In many countries voting is compulsory in theory, but seldom or never enforced. Voting is obligatory in most of Latin America, for instance. But in Mexico, which is among the countries where abstaining is illegal, turnout in last year’s presidential election was only 63%.

Germany: Strategic voting to decide deadlocked German election | The Irish Times

September 17, 2013

With four days to go, Germany’s federal election is going down to the wire. Latest polls put Dr Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) three points short of re-election with its unpopular coalition partner, the Free Democrats (FDP). The opposition alternative – the Greens, Social Democrats (SPD) and Left Party – are also three points short of a majority. The election will be decided, not by personalities or policies, but by a modified voting system. So how do Germans vote? Every citizen over 18 has two votes: the first for a direct constituency candidate and the second for a party. This second vote decides the allocation of Bundestag party seats, with MPs drawn by parties from state lists. The two-vote system – combining constituency and list systems – is a post-war compromise between the Allies but it is the second vote, the Zweitstimme that counts. The CDU has dubbed it the “Merkel vote”, the guarantee that its leader stays chancellor. Their FDP coalition partners claim the same.

National: Electronic voting machines becoming obsolete | The Salt Lake Tribune

How will voters cast ballots in the future? “That is the million-dollar question when I meet with other election officers and directors,” said Utah Elections Director Mark Thomas. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), making available billions of dollars in funding for states to purchase electronic voting machines — then new and controversial technology aimed at eliminating a repeat of the hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election. “The manufacturer is no longer building them,” Thomas said of the 7,500 electronic machines the state purchased with its $28 million. “The parts will get scarce, and the technology will become obsolete. We’ll work through that as best and as long as we can, but at some point we’ll have to do something different.” That “something different” has yet to be clearly defined — but as current machines age out of use, counties and states will be on the hook to devise and fund their own changes. “Money is a big driver,” Thomas said. “We had HAVA money a decade ago, but that has since dried up. “We wish we had a crystal ball,” he added.

National: GOP State Officials Blame Republican Obstructionism For Blocking Voting Restrictions | TPM

There’s a deep irony about a joint lawsuit Republican state officials in Arizona and Kansas have filed against the Obama administration in order to require voters to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote: Republicans’ own national obstructionism on voting rights is a key blockade for the state-level restrictions to go through. The lawsuit, filed by Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and following Scalia’s guidance issued in the Supreme Court case this July, claims that the Obama administration is illegally blocking Arizona and Kansas’ efforts to require proof of citizenship for registering to vote. The suit argues that failing to staff the vacant Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which is charged with overseeing voter registration guidelines related to the national voter registration form, is blocking these states’ ability to change their voter registration processes. “The lack of quorum unconstitutionally prevents Plaintiffs, in violation of the Tenth Amendment, from exercising their constitutional right, power, and privilege of establishing and enforcing voting qualifications, including voter registration requirements,” the states said in their complaint.

Florida: Supervisors wary of a new voter purge | Florida Today

Secretary of State Ken Detzner will take his pitch for a revived voter scrub on the road next month, but supervisors of elections and voting-rights advocates remain skeptical. Detzner’s office announced this week that he would meet with supervisors in five cities to get their input into another attempt to identify and remove non-citizens from the voting rolls. “Through transparency and the statutory due-process protection afforded to every voter, we can ensure the continued integrity of our voter rolls while protecting the voting rights of eligible voters from those who may cast an illegal vote,” Detzner said in a press release announcing the “Project Integrity Roundtable Tour” of five cities beginning Oct. 3. But despite the spin put on “Project Integrity” by Detzner’s office, his announcement immediately drew fire from Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley, who tweeted: “There is no greater ‘voter advocate’ or ‘voter roll integrity advocate’ than a Supervisor of Elections!”

Michigan: Detroit mayoral ballot recount meets challenges right off the bat | Detroit Free Press

Moments after the recount of Detroit’s mayoral race ballots began Tuesday, the first hand went up from a challenger citing an issue. Other hands were soon to follow. So went the first day of recounting ballots after former mayoral candidate Tom Barrow and others alleged fraud in the elections process in several city races. “This is an investigation,” Barrow said Tuesday at Cobo Center, where the recount was being conducted. “We’re seeing thousands of ballots in the same handwriting. All for the write-in. All for (mayoral candidate) Mike Duggan. These are clearly fraudulent ballots — and we’re just getting started.” Tuesday morning, Wayne County Director of Elections Delphine Oden told observers and poll workers that once ballots were taken from ballot boxes, county workers assembled for the recount would begin by holding some ballots faceup, giving challengers from the various campaigns time to examine them, before putting them facedown and moving through the votes.

New York: Mayoral primary plagued by voting machine problems | Associated Press

As New York City’s contentious primary campaign drew to a close Tuesday, some voters – including one leading mayoral candidate – encountered problems with the city’s decades-old voting machines. Turnout appeared light, but the city’s complaint line received several thousand voting-related calls. Many reported jams and breakdowns in the antiquated lever machines, which were hauled out of retirement to replace much-maligned electronic devices. In some sites, the broken machines forced voters to use pen and paper to cast their ballot. Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota presumably wrote his own name when his machine broke at his Brooklyn polling place.

Texas: Voting Rights Dispute Enters Another Round | The Texas Tribune

Texas and the Obama administration are at odds over the Voting Rights Act, but all that’s really changed is the venue. In 2011, the Legislature drew new political maps, adjusting congressional and legislative districts to accommodate growth in the population and — since it was a Republican Legislature at the time — to try to ensure a Republican majority for the next decade. Democrats would have done the same thing, if they’d had a majority. We know that because that’s what happened in 1991. Lawmakers adopted a tough law in 2011 requiring Texans to produce state-approved photo IDs before their votes can be counted. Both the maps and the voter ID law got stuck in the federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court unstuck things earlier this summer with a ruling that effectively removed federal oversight over Texas election laws.

Norway: Vote early, vote often: Inside Norway’s pioneering open source e-voting trials | ZDNet

With Norway holding parliamentary elections this week, the country has taken the opportunity to hold its second e-voting pilot. The pilot follows an earlier trial which took place during the local government elections in 2011. According to statistics released by the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the ministry responsible for running elections in Norway, the e-voting participation increased significantly compared to 2011. The trial was carried out in 12 municipalities, chosen for geographical and demographical diversity, which play home to 250,000 of Norway’s 3.6 million voters. … Even though the e-voting system with security front and centre, it still has attracted some criticism from security professionals. The first and most discussed issue were concerns raised over the encryption used in the pilot. The encryption software on the voters’ computers was thought to not have a good enough random number seed for the algorithm and, according to the security company Computas which was engaged by the government to control the system, the seed value was “very predictable”.

Russia: Opposition Leader Asserts Broad Problems in Moscow Race | New York Times

The Russian opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, on Thursday submitted to a court more than 50,000 pages of documents illustrating what he said were irregularities in Sunday’s voting in the Moscow mayor’s race in an attempt to prove that he won enough votes to force a runoff against the incumbent, Sergei S. Sobyanin. But the court refused to block the inauguration of Mr. Sobyanin, who barely cleared the threshold for an outright victory with 51.4 percent. He was sworn in on Thursday evening during a ceremony in the city’s World War II museum. According to the official returns, Mr. Navalny placed second with 27.2 percent. Yet, even as Mr. Navalny and his aides lugged 21 boxes of documents to the courthouse, they acknowledged not only that there was little hope of overturning the results, but also that the voting had been relatively fair. So they have adopted a new message: while the vote was generally free of blatant fraud like ballot stuffing, the election itself was rigged from the beginning.

National: Commission To Improve Elections Meets in Philadelphia | Lawyers.com

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration met in Philadelphia yesterday to hear testimony given by experts from up and down the east coast and beyond on how to improve voting in America. The commission was created by President Obama this year to “promote the efficient administration of elections” in response to long lines and other glitches that have threatened the integrity of voting days in years past. The commission solicited input from election officials and academics on how to overcome technical and logistical obstacles that impede voting. Among the topics addressed were analytical methods to better distribute polling resources, the use of electronic signature databases for more streamlined registration, language access issues particularly for Asian and Latino voters, access for people with disabilities and emergency preparedness to salvage elections that are disrupted by major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

Editorials: Creating barriers to voting | San Francisco Chronicle

A recent panel discussion on the Latino vote at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, moderated by actress Eva Longoria, took a couple of unexpected turns. One was the claim of a Republican strategist who said he was blacklisted on the orders of panelist John Pérez, the state Assembly speaker, a flap that drew the most media attention. The other, and more consequential, takeaway was the content of the session itself. The focus was not on immigration reform, education, high unemployment rates or even the Republican Party’s inability to connect with an emerging demographic force in American politics. The main topic of the day? Vote suppression. “This is the No. 1 issue that Latinos and other communities should be worried about,” Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Santa Ana, told the gathered journalists. Sanchez knows a little something about vote-chilling tactics. In 2006, a mailer was sent to 14,000 registered voters with Latino surnames and foreign birthplaces telling them it was a crime for immigrants to vote in a federal election. Her Republican opponent was convicted of obstruction of justice in connection with the scheme.

Editorials: Plan B for Voting Rights | New York Times

Voting-rights advocates generally don’t look to Justice Antonin Scalia for comfort. During oral arguments earlier this year in Shelby County v. Holder, the case in which the Supreme Court struck down a central part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Justice Scalia called the act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” But a growing circle of legal scholars is focusing on a lower-profile ruling — issued one week before the Shelby County decision and written by Justice Scalia — that may point the way to a new approach to protecting voting rights. The 7-to-2 decision, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, struck down an Arizona law requiring anyone who wanted to vote to provide proof of citizenship. It said the state could not impose a rule that was more restrictive than the federal “motor voter” law, which requires only a sworn statement of citizenship by the voter.

Kansas: Push to end proof-of-citizenship rule falters | Associated Press

Critics of a Kansas law requiring new voters to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship when registering urged legislators Tuesday to repeal the policy during their special session, but such an effort immediately stalled. About 100 people gathered at the Statehouse for a rally sponsored by KanVote, a Wichita-based group that opposed the law, which took effect in January. The NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and Equality Kansas, the state’s leading gay-rights organization, also called publicly for the law’s repeal. The law took effect in January, backed by Secretary of State Kris Kobach and fellow Republicans, who view it as a way to prevent non-citizens from voting improperly. But more than 15,000 legal Kansas residents’ voter registrations are on hold because they have yet to provide proper documents, meaning they can’t legally vote.

Michigan: State elections director: Re-tabulation prevented disenfranchisement of over 24,000 Detroit voters | MLive.com

The state Board of Canvassers voted Tuesday to certify election results from Detroit’s Aug. 6 primary election after staffers reviewed write-in ballots and calculated totals that differed vastly from Wayne County numbers. Michigan Bureau of Elections workers spent days re-tabulating write-in ballots from 385 of Detroit’s 614 precincts after Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers declined to certify results because of questions surrounding the way mayoral write-in votes were initially counted. In some precincts, poll workers did not use hash marks to count write-in votes, leading the County Clerk’s office to seek to disqualify thousands of votes and calling mayoral candidate Mike Duggan’s overwhelming write-in victory into question. The state unsealed ballot containers and reviewed votes from precincts where there were discrepancies between the county’s vote summary and statements of votes prepared by elections inspectors.

Editorials: North Carolina’s Student Voting Battle Is Not Over | Penda D. Hair/Huffington Post