New York: Comptroller slams city’s ‘broken voting system’ | New York Post

Comptroller Scott Stringer vowed Sunday to “take a sledgehammer” to the city’s voting system following the disappearance of 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats from election rolls that came to light during last Tuesday’s primary. “We have a broken voting system,” Stringer told NY1. “We’ve got to take a sledgehammer to this. We have to stop pretending this is a democracy.” His office is planning to audit the Board of Elections, but Stringer said the agency shouldn’t wait for his report. “The Board of Elections has to get their act together. First, they have to admit they have a problem,” he said.

Editorials: After New York’s Disastrous Primary, It’s Time to Demand Better Voting Laws | The Nation

During this year’s presidential primary, New Yorkers across the state discovered something that voting-rights advocates have been saying for years: Despite the state’s progressive reputation, New York’s elections are a mess. Approximately 120,000 people were inexplicably purged from the voting rolls in Kings County. Others had their party affiliation switched without their knowledge—leaving them unable to vote in New York’s closed primary. Polling places didn’t open on time or closed early. And millions didn’t get to vote because they did not register with the Republican or Democratic Party—a decision they would have had to make by October 9, 2015, 193 days before the primary. All of this led to an embarrassingly low turnout: As Ari Berman pointed out at The Nation, with 19.7 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot, New York had the second-lowest turnout this primary season, second only to Louisiana.

New York: State Attorney Schneiderman’s office receives more than 1,000 primary day complaints | Times Union

State Attorney Eric Schneiderman said Wednesday that his office fielded more than 1,000 complaints from voters statewide during Tuesday’s presidential primaries. “By most accounts, voters cast their ballots smoothly and successfully,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “However, I am deeply troubled by the volume and consistency of voting irregularities, both in public reports and direct complaints to my office’s voter hotline, which received more than one thousand complaints in the course of the day yesterday.” Schneiderman said his office has opened an investigation into “alleged improprieties” in Tuesday’s voting by the New York City Board of Elections, which has been rebuked by officials after some 125,000 Democratic voters were purged from the rolls in Brooklyn.

New York: Brooklyn election official ousted for error that purged Brooklyn voters | New York Daily News

The massive purge of over 100,000 Brooklyn voters from the rolls — which caused huge problems at polling sites this past Tuesday — was the result of an epic screw-up by a long-time official expected to be forced out over the debacle, sources said. Diane Haslett-Rudiano, the Board of Election’s chief clerk, was suspended without pay on Thursday, two days after the city’s botched presidential primary prompted criticism from both the winners and losers on the Democratic side.

National: Why Voters Could Be Removed From The Rolls | NPR

It certainly looks suspicious that more than 125,000 Democrats were dropped from Brooklyn’s voter rolls between last November and Tuesday’s primary. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said that the Board of Elections confirmed the voters were removed and that his office would conduct an audit to see if anything improper was done. In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio called on the New York City Board of Elections to “reverse that purge,” adding that “the perception that numerous voters may have been disenfranchised undermines the integrity of the entire electoral process and must be fixed.” And it was an unusually high number of names to be dropped all at once. But Michael Ryan, executive director of the elections board, denied anyone was disenfranchised. While more than 100,000 voters were taken off the rolls, he told the New York Times,63,000 were added and the decline did not “shock his conscience.” He told WNYC that “people die every day and they come off the list,” and New Yorkers move a lot — another reason they might be taken off the rolls. Indeed, there might very well be a good — and legitimate — explanation for why all those names were removed.

New York: Voting Problems Prompt Comptroller to Vow Audit of City’s Elections Board | The New York Times

Citing concerns about potential voting irregularities during the most consequential presidential primary in years, the New York City comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, said on Tuesday that his office would audit the city’s Board of Elections in part to determine if tens of thousands of Democratic voters were improperly removed from voter rolls. Mr. Stringer said in a statement that the Board of Elections had confirmed that more than 125,000 Democratic voters in Brooklyn were dropped between November 2015 and this month. He said the decline occurred “without any adequate explanation furnished by the Board of Elections.” “There is nothing more sacred in our nation than the right to vote, yet election after election, reports come in of people who were inexplicably purged from the polls, told to vote at the wrong location or unable to get in to their polling site,” Mr. Stringer, a Democrat, said.

Ohio: ACLU sues Secretary of State Jon Husted over removing voters from the rolls | Cleveland Plain Dealer

A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday is suing Ohio Secretary of State over how state officials remove inactive voters from the rolls. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio on behalf of Ohio A. Phillip Randolph Institute and Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, argues people are removed from Ohio voter rolls in violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also called the “Motor Voter” law. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said the state manages its voter rolls in compliance with both federal and state laws and has been complying a 2012 settlement requiring voter rolls to be scrutinized and maintained. “This lawsuit is politically motivated, election-year politics, is a waste of taxpayer dollars, and opens the door for voter fraud in Ohio,” Husted said in a statement.

Ohio: New Lawsuit Challenges Alleged Voter Purge In Ohio | TPM

Voting rights groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday challenging what they described as a massive voter purge in Ohio. The lawsuit accuses the state of violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — also known as the “Motor Voter” law — by taking tens of thousand of voters off the registration rolls because they did not participate in past elections. “As a result of these violations, numerous Ohioans have been disenfranchised in recent elections, and many more face the threat of disenfranchisement in the 2016 Presidential Election and future elections,” the complaint said. The lawsuit is being brought by the progressive public policy organization Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, who are representing a state chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an African-American labor group, and the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. It was filed in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Ohio.

United Kingdom: Cameron’s purge of young voters from the electoral register could cost him the referendum | openDemocracy

David Cameron has spoken of his “fear” that Britain will vote to break with Brussels because of a low turnout. The Prime Minister’s sleep patterns will not have been helped then by Sunday’s Observer poll that put the Leave campaign ahead by 4 points. The poll also found that the group most supportive of remaining part of the EU are people in the 18-34 age group. Remain campaigns will say they have the future on their side. But as Freddie Sayers, YouGov’s editor-in-chief, says “the single most important driver of turnout is age.” And over 65s are more both more likely to be eurosceptic and more likely to vote. The Observer poll found 52 per cent of younger people were certain to vote, compared to 81 per cent of older voters. So Cameron now depends on the people least likely to have voted for his Conservative government to keep him in Downing Street. But crudely partisan attempts to make it more difficult for Labour and other left-wing parties to mobilise their supporters against the Conservatives may now come back to haunt him.

Georgia: Lawsuit accuses Secretary of State of illegally removing voters from rolls | Atlanta Journal Constitution

A federal lawsuit has accused Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp of illegally bumping Georgia voters off the state’s rolls ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Kemp’s office has denied the claim. The suit filed by the Georgia NAACP and government watchdog group Common Cause said the state is violating the National Voter Registration Act because of its longtime practice of sending “confirmation of address” notices to voters who haven’t cast a ballot in three years — and removing them from active status if they eventually do not respond. “People have a right to vote and they also have a constitutional right not to vote,” said attorney Emmet J. Bondurant, who is representing the groups. Federal law, he said, does not allow state officials to demand confirmation of address if they have no reason to believe a voter has moved other than that they have not cast a ballot.

Editorials: To purge voters, or not, in Ohio | Akron Beacon Journal

In a clash foreshadowing next year’s presidential election, Democrats in the Ohio House and voter activists now want big changes in how voter registration rolls are purged in the state. Experts consider registration the No. 1 factor in determining participation, and a bill unveiled last week by state Rep. Kathleen Clyde, a Kent Democrat, seeks to stop state officials from removing from the rolls voters who move within the state or who have been inactive. Her bill still would allow purging voters who move out of state and would leave intact the removal process for those who die or request to be removed.

Ohio: Democrats call Ohio’s purgings of voter rolls too aggressive | The Columbus Dispatch

Ohio House Democrats and some liberal advocacy groups want to put an end to the state’s purging of people from voter-registration rolls just because they move within the state or have not voted for a few years. But Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office says Ohio is following federal law when it clears inactive voters off the rolls. Rep. Kathleen Clyde, D-Kent, says Ohio is too aggressive in purging people from the voter rolls. It has removed 2 million names over the past five years. Husted’s office said that total includes more than 400,000 deceased voters.

Georgia: NAACP Sues Hancock County For Purging African-American Voters | WABE

About 50 voters were permanently removed from Hancock County’s registration list in recent months, according court filings. Most were African-American, and the Georgia NAACP is now suing the county Board of Elections for what it says are racially biased voter purges. Hancock County is about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta. At issue is how the Board of Elections conducted a series of voter challenge hearings. Julie Houk, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, represents the plaintiffs. She said since August, at least 201 voter registrations were challenged, according to the lawsuit.

Florida: Proposed bills put greater scrutiny on Florida’s voter purges | News13

Seeking to hold Gov. Rick Scott to a higher level of scrutiny should his administration call for a purge of Florida’s voting rolls in 2016, Democratic lawmakers have filed measures to mandate the listing of purged voters according to party affiliation. Under SB 736 and HB 523, election supervisors would be required to give the Florida Department of State bi-annual lists of purged Democrats, Republicans and those who belonged to other party affiliations in each of the state’s 67 counties. The Scott administration has been roundly criticized by election supervisors and voting rights groups for ordering a problem-riddled voter purge in 2012. From a list of roughly 180,000 voters the administration believed to be non-citizens and therefore illegally registered, just 85 were identified as such and removed from the voting rolls.

United Kingdom: ‘Outrageous’ Tory changes to electoral roll will face challenge in Lords | The Guardian

The government’s attempt to rush through changes to the electoral registration system, which could result in up to 1.9 million people disappearing from the roll, is to be challenged in the House of Lords. In a rerun of the battles in the last parliament to redraw the constituency boundaries, the Liberal Democrats are opposing the changes, calling them “an outrageous gerrymander”. The voters likely to fall off the register are mainly in inner-city areas and less likely to vote Conservative. The Electoral Commission had advised the government in June to spend another year transferring voters on the old household-based register to the new individual register, but ministers want to short-circuit the process so that it is completed by December 2015, and not the end of 2016. The commission says there are 1.9 million names on the household register that are not on the individual register.

Kansas: Culling voter records to take weeks in some Kansas counties | Lawrence Journal World

Some Kansas counties expect to take at least several weeks to cancel incomplete voter registrations from residents who haven’t documented their U.S. citizenship, local election officials said Monday. Local officials also said even when they’re done culling the more than 31,000 records as required under a new rule from Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the canceled registrations still will be accessible in their voter registration databases. Kobach has directed counties to cancel incomplete registrations older than 90 days, with most from prospective voters who haven’t met the proof-of-citizenship requirement. A 2013 state law requires new voters to produce a birth certificate, passport or other citizenship papers when registering. Kansas is only one of four states with such a law, and its incomplete registrations ballooned to nearly 37,700 last week.

Montana: Purging Voters | Flathead Beacon

As the presidential primary race hits full gallop, the country’s constituents are paying a little more attention to politics and, perhaps, thinking about whether they are registered to vote, the process of which varies widely by state. Montana’s election rules made headlines in recent weeks, including when former Republican state lawmaker Corey Stapleton announced his bid for secretary of state and accused the current officeholder, Democrat Linda McCulloch, of “purging” thousands of voter files. “When both the elected officials and the media don’t talk about these things, bad things can happen,” Stapleton told the Associated Press.

National: Bloated U.S. voter rolls could lead to lawsuits | Washington Times

America’s voter rolls are so bloated that dozens of counties have more people registered than there are adults living there, according to two new studies released Thursday that the authors said could lead to lawsuits forcing states to clean things up. True the Vote, a Texas group that works for clean elections, counted 136 counties with voter registration rates of more than 100 percent of their adult population. Meanwhile the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm based in Alexandria, used a slightly different methodology and counted 141 counties. And an increasing number are mid- and large-sized ones — the kind that should have enough resources to police their voter rolls, but just aren’t getting to it, said Logan Churchwell, research director for True the Vote.

Florida: Senate approves bill to create an online voter registration | Tampa Bay Times

The Florida Senate on Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that requires the state to create an online voter registration application by 2017. The 34 to 3 vote sends the bill to the House, where passage is also expected, despite strong opposition from Gov. Rick Scott’s chief elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner. To underscore bipartisan support for online voter registration, the Senate’s Republican leadership left a Democratic senator as the bill’s sponsor. The bill (SB 228) is sponsored by Sen. Jeff Clemens, D-Lake Worth. Three Republican senators voted no.

Iowa: Controversial Iowa voter rules will not take effect | Des Moines Register

Voter registration rules enacted by former Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz that critics said threatened to disenfranchise eligible voters will not take effect, after a long-running lawsuit was resolved on Friday. The Secretary of State’s Office — now held by Paul Pate — voluntarily dismissed an appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court that was initiated by Schultz last year following a loss at the district-court level. “This is an important victory for the protection of voters’ rights in Iowa,” American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis said in a statement. “It means that Iowans will not have to worry about the voter purges we’ve seen take effect in other states with a disastrous impact, especially for new U.S. citizens and Latinos.” By declining to continue the appeal, the state has effectively concluded the lawsuit and allowed the lower-court ruling to stand. That means the rules will never take effect.

Missouri: Since 2004, St. Louis Has Purged 25 Percent Of Its Voters | St. Louis Public Radio

Over the past 10 years since it faced two federal lawsuits, the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners has quietly cut 75,000 people off of its voter rolls. That represents more than a quarter of the 281, 316 voters on the city’s rolls in 2004. St. Louis’ voter list now totals 206,349, according to state election records. The city’s Republican elections director, Gary Stoff, says none of the excised voters appears to have been an active voter. He suspects most were people who had moved or died and whose names had simply been languishing on the city’s voter rolls for years. But the reduction in St. Louis’ voter rolls appears to be by far the most dramatic action taken by the 29 Missouri counties – the city of St. Louis is its own county – that were sued 10 years ago by the federal government because they had more people on their voter rolls than their entire voting-age population.

Idaho: Ada County wrongly strips more than 750 voter registrations | KBOI

Hundreds of people in Ada County have been stripped of their voter registration when they shouldn’t have been. It all came to light when KBOI’s Truth Squad received a call from a woman in Eagle, saying her husband received a letter that said his voter registration was taken away. When the Truth Squad began making calls, Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa, said it alerted him to the magnitude of the problem countywide. Charmaine Miller, the Eagle resident, read the letter her husband received in the mail. “Dear David…you are currently registered in Arizona. Based on this information, we have canceled your registration in Ada County, Idaho,” she said. “We’ve never been in Arizona,” Miller told KBOI.

Indiana: Nearly 700,000 voters on state ‘inactive’ polling list | Courier-Journal

More than 696,400 registered voters in Indiana are now considered inactive, due to the state’s voter list update. But those voters will still be able to vote in elections through the federal election in 2016 before being removed from the voter poll lists, according to Secretary of State Connie Lawson. If they do not vote in any election prior to January 2016, county voter registration offices will remove their records from poll lists. Two federal election cycles, or up to four years, must pass before a county may remove an inactive voter from a list. August 6th was the federal deadline for counties to process data from the voter list refresh before the November 2014 election.

Iowa: Secretary of state candidates play down voter ID | Des Moines Register

The loud cry for voter identification and vote fraud investigation is fading to a whimper as Iowa’s top election official prepares to leave and those running to replace him downplay the politically charged issues. Matt Schultz, who recently was defeated in his bid for the Republican Party’s 3rd Congressional District nomination, was elected secretary of state in 2010 after a campaign largely focused on promoting voter ID and fighting what he argued was problematic voter fraud. Once in office, Schultz unsuccessfully lobbied lawmakers for a voter ID law, spent about $250,000 in a two-year investigation of election fraud and tried to pass a voter purge rule for those lacking citizenship proof, which led to a lawsuit.

Indiana: State moves to update voter registration rolls | Lafayette Journal & Courier

Registered voters will begin receiving a postcard from the Indiana Secretary of State’s office this week as part of an effort to update voter rolls. “The Secretary of State is sending out a postcard to every registered voter,” Tippecanoe County Clerk Christa Coffey said Monday. “It is the first step in the process of identifying voters who have moved and not updated their registration.” When registered voters receive a postcard, they should look over the information and then decide how to respond, she said. “If the information is correct on it, you don’t have to do anything,” Coffey said.

Indiana: State beginning process to purge voter registration list | Brazil Times

With the 2014 Primary Election now in the rear-view mirror, the Indiana Election Division (IED) is driving ahead in its Statewide Voter Registration List maintenance efforts. Beginning next week, the IED will conduct a residency confirmation and outreach procedure, known as a Statewide Mailing, to all active registered voters in Indiana, which has not been done since 2006. This will begin a process to legally remove voters from the voter registration list. Similar to the postcards mailed by the Clay County Election Office earlier this year, the Statewide Mailing should be considered purely informational for those who receive one. The cards will be sent through non-forwardable mail, and the ones returned to the IED as undeliverable due to an unknown, insufficient or incorrect address will initiate the next steps in the procedure. A second mailing will then be sent to those whose cards were returned as undeliverable, known as a National Change of Address mailing.

Florida: Time to purge the voter purge lists | Daytona Beach News-Journal

Florida’s flawed 2012 purge of the voter rolls was struck down by a federal appeals court Wednesday. This came only days after Secretary of State Ken Detzner delayed yet another planned purge of the voter lists. With any luck, Florida elections officials will respond by quietly giving up on the whole, flawed exercise. The rationale behind the past purge lists and the planned purge for this year was that there are a large number of ineligible noncitizens out there somehow registering and voting. Something still unproven. Just look at how the 2012 search for illegal voters proceeded here. That first purge list included 15 possible noncitizens out of 319,207 Volusia registered voters. Except that one voter identified as an noncitizen was a 76-year-old Ormond Beach woman who was born in Pennsylvania and had voted in every presidential election since 1956. Another was a soldier serving in Afghanistan.

Florida: Court rules Florida voter purge illegal, but will it stop GOP voting tweaks? | Christian Science Monitor

A panel for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Tuesday deemed illegal a 2012 attempt by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) to purge the state’s voter rolls of noncitizens and other ineligible voters. The ruling, which the justices said was intended to thwart future questionable roll purges, comes amid a new wave of pitched battles between Republicans who say they want to make voting fairer by curbing voting-booth shenanigans and Democrats who say adding restrictions to voting is a blatant attempt to keep poor people and blacks – many of whom are Democrats – from casting ballots. Since the US Supreme Court unshackled most Southern states from the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act last year, Republican-led legislatures have launched efforts to create what they say are more uniform election systems to ensure that each vote is equal. Republicans in Ohio and Wisconsin have curbed weekend voting, which critics say would most affect blacks who often carpooled to polling places from church on Sunday. In North Carolina, Republicans have stiffened early-voting and registration rules.

National: Will other states delay use of SAVE for voter checks? | Miami Herald

Florida is one of a handful of states that signed agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to use SAVE to search for non-citizens on voter rolls. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner announced Thursday that he was delaying his plan to start a new round of looking for non-citizen voters due to DHS revamping the SAVE website. DHS started changes to the website in February but may not finish the project until after the 2014 election however SAVE remains operational by agencies nationwide. So we wondered if any other agencies that use SAVE for voter registration purposes have also halted efforts as a result of the website changes.

Florida: State halts purge of noncitizens from voter rolls | Tampa Bay Times

Gov. Rick Scott’s chief elections official is suspending a politically charged election-year plan to purge noncitizens from Florida’s voter rolls, citing changes to a federal database used to verify citizenship. The about-face Thursday by Secretary of State Ken Detzner resolves a standoff with county elections supervisors, who resisted the purge and were suspicious of its timing. It also had given rise to Democratic charges of voter suppression aimed at minorities, including Hispanics crucial to Scott’s re-election hopes. Detzner told supervisors in a memo that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is redesigning its SAVE database, and it won’t be finished until 2015, so purging efforts, known as Project Integrity, should not proceed. “I have decided to postpone implementing Project Integrity until the federal SAVE program Phase Two is completed,” Detzner wrote.