National: Six Republican Secretaries Of State Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Millions Of Voters | Ryan Mac and Craig Silvermann/BuzzFeed

On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major milestone for what he called “the largest voting information campaign in US history.” Launched in August with the goal of registering 4 million Americans to vote, Facebook claimed the effort garnered an estimated 4.4 million registrations across the company’s social media platforms, based on conversion rates the company calculated from “a few states it had partnered with.” “Voting is voice,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to the company’s internal message board, specifically thanking Facebook’s civic engagement and civic integrity teams. What he didn’t mention, however, was the resistance the voting information campaign faced from Republican-led secretaries of state. In September, Facebook received a strongly worded letter signed by the secretaries of state of Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, asking the company to discontinue its Voting Information Center. It argued election officials alone are “legally and morally responsible to our citizens” and said Facebook has “no such accountability.” “While such goals may be laudable on their face, the reality is that the administration of elections is best left to the states,” read the letter, which was addressed to Zuckerberg. “The Voting Information Center is redundant and duplicative of what we, as chief election officials, have been doing for decades.” The six Republican secretaries of state warned that the voting information center could foster “misinformation and confusion.”

Full Article: Republican States Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Voters

 

Louisiana: Emails show how election officials shut down website on National Voter Registration Day | David Hammer/WWL

In mid-August, Louisiana elections officials delayed the scheduled maintenance of the state’s voter registration website from Sept. 8 to Sept. 22, apparently never noticing the move would shut down the site for hours on National Voter Registration Day and cause a political firestorm.Nearly 300 pages of public Secretary of State’s Office emails obtained by WWL-TV through a public records request seem to indicate the scheduling snafu was an honest mistake by election officials who were focused on the Aug. 15 municipal elections and an especially challenging election season. “The 2020 election cycle presented unprecedented challenges to our state, including a global pandemic and two hurricanes,” Secretary of State spokesman Tyler Brey said. “Despite a strained staff, the July and August elections were conducted without incident or error, and the presidential election is being administered with the same level of excellence Louisiana voters have come to expect.” But Democrats expressed suspicion about the motives of the Republican secretary of state, Kyle Ardoin. GOP legislators had pressed Ardoin this summer to make his emergency election plan more restrictive in November than it had been for the primaries and municipal elections.

National: Voter Registrations Are Way, Way Down During The Pandemic | Kaleigh Rogers and Nathaniel Rakich/FiveThirtyEight

Poll after poll showed a high level of enthusiasm for voting in the general election in 2020, and in the beginning of the year, voter registration surged to match that excitement. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. New registrations have fallen off a cliff. The spring of a presidential election year is often a busy time for adding new voters to the rolls, and a recent report from the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve voter turnout and election security, shows registration numbers were even stronger in early 2020 than early 2016. But things changed dramatically in March, at least in the 12 places where FiveThirtyEight or CEIR were able to obtain data on new voters, a category that includes first-time voters, voters who recently moved to the state and, in some states (Texas, for example) even voters who moved between counties in the state. Consider Florida, for example, where 109,859 new voters registered in February of this year, compared to 87,351 registrants in February of 2016. But in April 2020, only 21,031 new voters registered, compared with 52,508 in 2016. The same pattern holds in 10 other states, plus Washington, D.C.: Each one registered fewer new voters in April 2020 than in April 2016, including in states where online voter registration is available.

National: US voter registration plummets during coronavirus pandemic, challenging both parties | Joey Garrison/USA Today

The registration of new voters dropped dramatically in the USA amid the coronavirus pandemic, challenging efforts of both major political parties to enlist supporters in battleground states before the 2020 election. The number of new voters registered across 11 states in April 2020 decreased by 70% compared with April 2016, according to a report from the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research released Thursday. Voter registration was well ahead of the 2016 pace in most states through February. It started to decline in March, when states began enforcing stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements to fight the spread of the COVID-19 virus. By April, registration plummeted as the two most popular methods of signing up voters – third-party at schools and other public venues and “motor voter registration” – virtually halted. The latter refers to a federal law that requires states to give individuals the opportunity to register to vote when they apply for or renew a driver’s license.

National: George Floyd protests created surge in voter registrations, groups say | Brian Schwartz/CNBC

Voter registrations, volunteer activity and donations for groups linked to Democratic causes are surging in the midst of protests following the death of George Floyd, according to voting advocacy groups. This surge in registrations could end up being one of the factors that helps tip the election between apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. The efforts are by groups including Latino voter registration organizations, Rock the Vote and one co-chaired by former first lady Michelle Obama. Latino voter registration groups in recent weeks have noticed an uptick in their communities mobilization to vote, particularly from younger voters. The leaders of these organizations said that many are registering after nationwide outrage directed at police brutality and the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has left over 100,000 dead and tens of millions jobless in the United States. Unemployment rates for Hispanic and black workers remained high at 17.6% and 16.8%, respectively, even after the nation added 2.5 million jobs last month.

National: Coronavirus-Fueled Freeze on Citizen Oath Ceremonies Threatens Voter Registration for 2020 | Michelle Hackman and Eliza Collins/Wall Street Journal

A swelling backlog and extended wait times to become a U.S. citizen, compounded by a slowdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, threaten to leave hundreds of thousands of potential voters on the sidelines of the November election. The issue has drawn bipartisan concern in recent weeks since U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services closed its offices in March in response to the pandemic and canceled citizenship oath ceremonies, the public events that are the final step in the process, nationwide. Approximately 130,000 people who would have become citizens at these ceremonies are waiting for the events to restart, according to a Wall Street Journal calculation based on USCIS annual data. They are part of a larger backlog of permanent residents waiting to have their citizenship applications processed and unable to complete required in-person interviews. That group totaled about 650,000 people at the end of 2019. USCIS estimated in December, months before the pandemic, that their wait times would average about eight months, compared with less than six months at the end of 2015. Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said that means most of the permanent residents who applied for citizenship at the start of this year likely won’t complete the process in time to register to vote.

National: Voter Registration Plummets Due To Pandemic, Reshaping 2020 Electorate | Pam Fessler/NPR

No door to door canvassing. Public gatherings are canceled. Motor vehicle offices are closed. Naturalization ceremonies are on hiatus. Almost every place where Americans usually register to vote has been out of reach since March and it’s led to a big drop in new registrations right before a presidential election that was expected to see record turnout. The consequences of that decline could reshape the electorate ahead of the November election, although it’s not yet clear how. Four years ago, organizers for the progressive group New Virginia Majority were able to register 120,000 new voters, who contributed to Hillary Clinton’s victory in the state and Democrats’ subsequent takeover of the state legislature. But this year, in the middle of a pandemic? “The rules of engagement have been completely upended,” said Tram Nguyen, New Virginia Majority’s co executive director. “We’re not able to walk the neighborhood streets. We’re not able to set up tables at community centers and places where it’s easy to reach people in community. So organizers have still continued to do the work around engaging folks. It looks a lot different,” she said.

National: The Pandemic Is Crushing Voter-Registration Efforts | Ronald Brownstein/The Atlantic

Gamers playing nintendo’s animal crossing encountered an unusual sight late one afternoon last week. The massively popular online video game allows participants to customize their appearance, and in their onscreen avatar, some of the players were sporting political swag. A few wore T-shirts with the name nextgen or nga, for the liberal organizing group NextGen America. Some wore hats that read vote. And some stood beside virtual booths, like the kind you’d see at a carnival, that advertised the Tom Steyer–backed organization. NextGen, which Steyer, the erstwhile presidential candidate, founded in 2013 to engage young voters, recruited the players by posting notices on Twitter and in Facebook groups devoted to the game. About 60 users agreed to tout the group’s cause as they played; one even built a podium and delivered a short address through the chat function about the importance of registering to vote. The Animal Crossing event took place the day before Earth Day, when NextGen normally would have held an in-person voter-registration rally, likely featuring remarks from a political leader, says Mark Riffenburg, the group’s director in Nevada, who helped organize the event. Instead, with such outreach shelved by the coronavirus outbreak, the group tried to broadcast its message to the many players who spend hours inside the game building digital neighborhoods, buying and selling virtual crops, and interacting with anthropomorphic animals. At political events, Riffenburg says, “you are used to having a senator. But now it is a squirrel.”

National: Coronavirus threatens to hobble voter registration efforts | Sara Swann/The Fulcrum

The coronavirus has already drastically compromised campaigns and voting this year. The next looming casualty looks to be registration drives.  With about 95 percent of the population under states’ orders to stay at home this spring, face-to-face “Get Out the Vote!” crusades so typical in election years have ceased to exist. Civic engagement groups, now forced to operate entirely online, are expressing alarm that a significant share of people who want a say in electing the president this fall won’t be able to get on the voter rolls in time. The country’s digital divide already makes accessing online registration forms and information difficult for many Americans, particularly in low-income and rural areas. And for some 28 million across nine states, it’s not an option at all because they have to complete actual paperwork. Groups focused on creating new voters, and then making them the core of efforts to boost turnout, say they’re determined to rise to the challenge. The Covid-19 crisis has underscored the importance of their mission, they say, and their staff and volunteers are using the unprecedented situation to get more creative in their approaches.

National: Coronavirus cripples voter registration efforts. Millions could be denied. | Alex Seitz-Wald/NBC

Presidential elections are typically prime time for bringing new people into the political process, but the coronavirus pandemic is making voter registration more difficult than ever, prompting concerns that many young Americans and other nonvoters might miss their chance to get onto the rolls before November. “This is the moment when we historically see people take action to register to vote,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The public health crisis has brought all of that activity virtually to a grinding halt.” Voter registration happens year-round, but the months leading up to a presidential election are crucial as interest in politics spikes and funding for registration efforts flows in. In the runup to the 2016 presidential election, Americans filed more than 77.5 million voter registration applications, according to the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that helps states administer elections, and total registration topped 200 million.

California: State probing whether DMV’s delay of voter registration applications affected election | San Francisco Chronicle

Hundreds of voter registration applications were delayed last fall at California’s trouble-plagued Department of Motor Vehicles, and the state is trying to determine whether any election results were affected, officials said Tuesday. The DMV acknowledged that it had received 589 registration applications that it failed to forward to Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s office before the deadline for the Nov. 6 election. Of that number, 329 were from people who had not previously registered to vote, and the other 260 had moved to a different county and were trying to re-register. It’s not known yet how many of those voters tried to cast ballots and were either turned away or failed to have their votes counted. But in papers filed in a San Francisco federal court, which is overseeing the settlement of a suit by voting-rights advocates against the DMV, Padilla agreed to make sure every vote was counted if the application was properly submitted by the Oct. 22 registration deadline, and to determine whether any election outcomes would be affected.

Turkey: Questions over ‘voter aged 165’ and other irregularities | BBC

Political parties in Turkey are crying foul after thousands of unlikely voters appeared on the electoral roll. Among the oddities are many first-time voters over 100 years old – and one aged 165. Opposition parties also said they had discovered more than 1,000 voters registered at a single apartment. The discovery comes ahead of local elections in March, in which President Erdogan’s AK Party may face its toughest political challenge in years. Turkey has faced economic stagnation in recent months, and the value of its currency is significantly lower than it was a year ago. That has led to speculation that the dominant AKP could lose several key cities, including the capital, Ankara. Opposition parties now say that voter lists are being manipulated.

Oklahoma: Voter registration spike follows state Election Board deal | Associated Press

The number of people registering to vote at Oklahoma’s public service agencies has spiked in recent years, and voting rights advocates are crediting a settlement with the state Election Board. The Oklahoman reports that the 2015 settlement was reached after state and national organization threatened to sue unless the board did more to help register potential voters at public offices, as required under federal law. Those offices included the Department of Human Services, the Department of Health and the Oklahoma Health Care Authority. Since then, the average number of monthly voter registrations from the agencies has tripled, from less than 500 per month to almost 1,500 per month, according to state election data.

Oklahoma: Voting rights advocate praises Oklahoma in expanding registration access | Tulsa World

Voting rights activists on Tuesday praised Oklahoma’s efforts to make registration more accessible under the National Voting Rights Act. “Oklahoma has tripled the numbers of people registering through public assistance agencies since 2015,” said Brenda Wright, senior advisor for legal strategies at Demos, a New York-based non-profit that advocates for ballot access and other causes. “The state should be commended for its impressive commitment to our shared American value that every eligible voter should be able to vote come Election Day,” Wright in a news release. “By implementing a comprehensive plan for voter registration services at these agencies across the state, Oklahoma has exemplified the NVRA’s principle and promise: States must do their part to bring all Americans into our democracy.”

US Virgin Islands: Court Blocks New Voter Registrations Before Nov. 20 Runoff Election | St. John Source

V.I. Superior Court Judge Denise Francois has granted a temporary restraining order “enjoining, restraining and prohibiting Defendant Arturo Watlington, in his capacity as chairman of the Board of Elections and the Virgin Islands Board of Elections” from allowing voter registration in the St. Thomas-St. John district ahead of next week’s runoff election for governor and lieutenant governor, the V.I. Department of Justice announced Wednesday. Meanwhile, the fact that one district planned to register voters while the other did not appears to fly in the face of the intent, if not the explicit wording, of a 2016 V.I. law unifying former district elections boards into a single board.

Georgia: Thousands of voter registrations await processing in Georgia | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

More than 7,000 voter registration applications in metro Atlanta still hadn’t been processed as of Monday, nearly two weeks after the deadline to register to vote and one week since in-person early voting began.
County election officials said they expect the backlog to be cleared this week, but it takes time to review each voter registration form. New voters whose registrations haven’t been processed can cast provisional ballots that will be counted if their information is verified, or they can wait at early-voting sites for election officials to complete their registrations. Registration forms were awaiting processing Monday in Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties, according to ProGeorgia, a nonprofit organization focused on voter engagement and civic participation. Clayton and Gwinnett counties had processed all their voter registration forms.

New Hampshire: Judge blocks SB 3 voting law, saying it imposes ‘unreasonable, discriminatory’ burdens | WBUR

The state has been blocked from using new voter registration forms and affidavits set out in the controversial 2017 law known as Senate Bill 3 in the upcoming election by a court ruling that called the law burdensome, confusing and likely to create long lines at voting places. Superior Court Judge Kenneth Brown on Monday issued a preliminary injunction halting the state from moving forward with the provisions of the law, which was challenged shortly after it was signed last year by Gov. Chris Sununu. Brown ruled that “the burdens imposed by SB 3 are unreasonable and discriminatory.” The ruling, which was issued 15 days before the midterm election, was in favor of the plaintiffs: the League of Women Voters, the New Hampshire Democratic Party and several voters. The court said the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits after a full-blown trial, which is expected to be held next year.

Indiana: Glitches with voter registration system raise worries about absentee applications | South Bend Tribune

Problems with a state computer server have left two Michiana county clerks frustrated and concerned about their ability to process mail-in absentee ballot application requests in time for the Nov. 6 elections. Ann Tito, a 71-year-old South Bend woman who is typically homebound because of her cancer, said a St. Joseph County clerk’s office employee told her over the phone that she would soon receive an application in the mail to absentee vote from home. When she still hadn’t received the application two weeks later, Tito, beginning to worry that she wouldn’t be able to vote in time, said she had her caregiver drive her downtown Wednesday to vote in person at the County-City Building. “I took my walker and my cane and got there at 8 o’clock when they opened so I would have the best chance of finding a parking place,” Tito said. “It was difficult physically for me to do it, but it was a lot better than waiting in line on Nov. 6 for unknown amount of time. This election is critical. We need to stand up for what we believe in and vote.”

Florida: Judge rules against Florida Democrats on extending voter registration | Tampa Bay Times

A federal judge has rejected a request from the Florida Democratic Party to force the state to extend a voter-registration deadline because of Hurricane Michael. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle turned down the party’s request for a temporary restraining order to extend the registration deadline to Oct. 16, a week later than the original Tuesday deadline. The party contended an extension was needed because the hurricane, which devastated parts of the Panhandle on Wednesday, could prevent people from registering to vote in the Nov. 6 election. Secretary of State Ken Detzner this week issued a directive authorizing county elections supervisors whose offices were closed Tuesday to accept paper registration applications on the day that their offices reopen. Detzner did not extend a Tuesday night deadline for voters to register online.

California: Secretary Of State Rips DMV For Voter Enrollment Error | Associated Press

Calling it unacceptable, Secretary of State Alex Padilla angrily criticized Department of Motor Vehicles officials Tuesday after they improperly registered about 1,500 people to vote in November’s election. Padilla did not mince words when it came to the error. “These mistakes from the DMV are totally unacceptable,” he told reporters. “It risks jeopardizing confidence in the electoral process which is why yesterday I called for an independent audit of the DMV’s technology and their practices…The DMV needs to get it together here real quick.” The focus is on the national Motor Voter Law that allows voters to register at DMV offices. Padilla said reports that all 1,500 people registered in error were non-citizens was not correct.

Florida: Democrats Sue to Extend Voter Registration Deadline | Associated Press

A partisan brushfire blew up Tuesday over voter registration deadlines in the battleground state of Florida after Hurricane Michael’s approach disrupted registration in the state’s Panhandle region. The Florida Democratic Party sued in federal court, asking a judge to extend the state’s registration deadline by at least a week. Florida’s deadline to register to vote is Tuesday, 29 days ahead of the Nov. 6 election. Democrats including Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who is running for governor against Republican Ron DeSantis, called for an extension as Michael’s imminent arrival prompted evacuations and the closing of government offices across the Panhandle.

Georgia: Some voters report registration delays ahead of deadline | Atlanta Journal Constitution

Scattered online problems on the last day of voter registration in Georgia have some voters complaining of long delays and slow-loading websites. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution received reports from a half-dozen voters who reported problems registering to vote, and officials with the Democratic party and Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign said they’ve heard from dozens more. Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office said its staffers have received four “easily resolved” election-related calls from voters who experienced problems. A spokeswoman for the office said there have been no system outages and no systemwide issues. The voter registration process is under scrutiny ahead of Tuesday’s deadline to vote for the Nov. 6 election, which features a matchup between Abrams and Kemp.

North Carolina: Voter registration deadline extended for Hurricane Florence victims | WNCT

The voter registration deadline is extended for those impacted by Hurricane Florence. The extension is part of the Hurricane Florence Emergency Response Act. The deadline is now extended to 5 P.M. on October 15th. The change is for the 28 counties heavily impacted by the storm. In the East that includes: Lenoir, Pitt, Beaufort, Carteret, Craven, Duplin, Greene, Hyde, Jones, Onslow and Pamlico counties. In the remaining 72 counties, the deadlines remains Friday October 12th.

Georgia: Outage halts voter registration at driver’s license offices | Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Just days before Tuesday’s deadline to register to vote in Georgia, all voter registration shut down for nearly the entire day Friday at every Department of Driver Services location in the state. The department said its software operator, the global corporation IDEMIA, had taken full responsibility for the failure. David Connell, the chairman of the DDS’ oversight board, said he was confident in the vendor’s statement that the problem resulted from a database overload, not a cyber intrusion. “It’s an issue we all wish wouldn’t have happened,” Connell said. IDEMIA did not respond to a phone message left by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at its Virginia representative office.

Georgia: Civil rights lawsuit filed against Secretary of State Brian Kemp | WJBF

A new lawsuit set to be filed against Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and the plaintiffs say every Georgia voter needs to know about it right now. Have you received something like this in your mailbox? A simple postcard that might look kind of like junk mail.  But if you didn’t return it and you missed voting in a few elections you, and tens of thousands more Georgians, might not be registered to vote anymore, and you’ll have received no further notice. Some say that’s an urgent problem because October 9th is the last day to re-register before the November election.

National: A Record 800,000 People Registered to Vote on National Voter Registration Day | Time

A record number of people registered to vote in the midterm elections on National Voter Registration Day last week, surpassing the previous record set during the 2016 presidential campaign. More than 800,000 people registered to vote this year as part of National Voter Registration Day, which fell on Sept. 25. The corresponding campaign had aimed to register 300,000 people. “Some us were saying, ‘Hey, maybe we’ll hit 400 or 500,000,” says Brian Miller, who coordinates National Voter Registration Day in his role as executive director of Nonprofit VOTE. “No one that I know of thought we would surpass 800,000 voter registrations. That surprised all of us. But I think it’s a sign of the interest in the midterms and the interest in having this unified day of action.”

South Carolina: Public officials, advocacy groups push for extension of voter registration deadline | WCSC

The ACLU of South Carolina and Attorney General Alan Wilson are pushing for an extension on the deadline for South Carolinians to register to vote. The requests for extending the deadline come after several counties were impacted by the threat and damages from Hurricane Florence in September. “In these extraordinary circumstances, we strongly recommend that measures be taken to ensure that all voting-eligible South Carolinians who need additional time to register to vote as a result of the impact of Hurricane Florence be given that time so that they are not disenfranchised by this natural disaster,” the ACLU said in a letter sent to the Election Commission.

California: Los Angeles County Supervisors Approve Investigation For Voter Registration ‘Errors’ | KHTS

The board unanimously approved a motion by Supervisor Kathryn Barger calling for an investigation into voter registration errors as a result of the new “motor voter” program managed by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Created by the Motor Voter Act of 2015 and implemented in April 2018, the program automatically registers any eligible voters who apply for a driver’s license or identification card and transmits this data to the county where that person lives unless the individual specifically declines to participate. The state reported that 23,000 instances of voter registration errors occurred between mid-April and early August. The “motor voter” program has experienced other implementation issues as well, with 77,000 voter records allegedly being misreported in May by the DMV, according to officials.

National: It’s National Voter Registration Day: How to make your voice heard | ABC

At a time when our nation seems so polarized by politics, National Voter Registration Day is something we can all get behind, no matter who we’re voting for. Ahead of the midterm elections, “Good Morning America” is highlighting some ways you can make sure your voice is heard, and how some organizations are stepping up to show there is no excuse to not hit the polls this November. …  Stephanie Young, a spokesperson for the nonpartisan organization When We All Vote, which is co-chaired by former first lady Michelle Obama, told “GMA” that it is important to make voting a “collective” activity.

Fiji: Roll will close same day Fiji election announced | Radio New Zealand

The Fiji Elections Office says the registration of voters will close on the day the writ of election is announced. The FBC reported more than 600,000 Fijians have registered for the 2018 General Election as of the first of August this year. The date the 2018 General Election will be held has still not yet been announced. The Elections office Communications Director, Edwin Nand said the writ could be announced at any time and it’s important for eligible Fijians to take the opportunity to register now.