The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly January 9-15 2012

Faux news anchor Stephen Colbert handed over control of his Super PAC to Jon Stewart, in his ongoing campaign to highlight the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Rick Perry and four other other candidates who failed to meet ballot access requirements for the Virginia primary lost their appeal in court. Doug Chapin blogged about risk-limiting audits. Facing South reviewed the impact of challenges to Voter ID laws on the Voting Rights Act. Controversy heated up over the Indian Election Commission’s decision to drape statues of elephants, the symbol for Chief Minister Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. Finance Minister’s off-hand comment in announcing the government’s decision to finally dispose of NEDAP voting machines provoked a spirited reaction in Ireland’s pubs. Americans Elect wants to trust the Internet to choose Presidential candidates. Scientific American compared voting technology in the first two primaries and the Supreme Court upheld the ban on Foreign contributions to Federal candidates and heard arguments in a challenge to Texas redistricting.

National: Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC: Testing the Limits of Citizens United | TIME.com
Virginia: Judge rejects Perry, GOP hopefuls for Virginia ballot | USAToday
Blogs: New Equation for Voting Technology: Auditing > Testing? | Doug Chapin/PEEA
Editorials: Voter ID cases could test Voting Rights Act | Facing South
India: Statue-gate: Mayawati’s party attacks Election Commission | NDTV
Ireland: Pubs ‘could use e-voting machines’ | Belfasttelegraph.co.uk
National: Internet picks presidential candidate if Ackerman gets his way | The News Journal
National: Ballot Secrecy Keeps Voting Technology at Bay | Scientific American
Editorials: Supreme Court Messes With Texas, Voting Rights | Justin Levitt/Miller-McCune
National: SCOTUS upholds foreign money ban | Politico.com

Jan 14, 2012
National: Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC: Testing the Limits of Citizens United | TIME.com

Stephen Colbert is laughing at the U.S. Supreme Court. He started Thursday night, on his show, when Colbert transferred control of his super PAC to his mentor, business partner and friend, Jon Stewart. It’s a great set piece of comedic theater underscored by a serious argument: Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by a majority on the Supreme Court, issued a ruling in 2010 rewriting the nation’s campaign finance rules that is, on its face, pretty absurd. The argument is actually worth exploring in some detail. Since the 1970s, many lawyers and judges have argued quite reasonably that the the First Amendment’s right to free speech should permit anyone–an individual, a corporation or a union–to spend as much money as they want to influence elections. This argument posits that this sacred right to self-expression around elections simply trumps the danger that the large sums of money could corrupt the political process. It is a balancing test–the First Amendment on one side, the public interest in avoiding corruption on the other side–and reasonable people can reach different conclusions about where the fulcrum should be placed.

But that is not what Kennedy and the Supreme Court did in the Citizens United case. In the majority opinion, the court agreed with past court rulings that the threat of corruption trumps the First Amendment rights of a person, corporation or union to give unlimited amounts of money to politicians for use in campaigns. But then Kennedy and the High Court created a huge carve-out based on a factual statement: “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

In other words, Kennedy stated that if a wealthy individual, corporation or union spends its money to support its candidate independently, the First Amendment does not have to be more important than the threat of corruption. Rather, “corruption or the appearance of corruption” is simply no longer a threat. Candidates would no longer feel the need to repay their contributors with favors, and contributors would no longer feel they can influence the candidates with the money. The key word here is “independent.”

Full Article: Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC: Testing the Limits of Citizens United | Swampland | TIME.com….

A federal judge today rejected Rick Perry’s lawsuit challenging Virginia’s ballot requirements, meaning Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will be the only major GOP candidates on the ballot. U.S. District Judge John Gibney said in his ruling that Perry — along with GOP candidates Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum who joined in the Texas governor’s lawsuit — waited too long to file the complaint against the state’s ballot requirements. ”They knew the rules in Virginia many months ago … In essence, they played the game, lost, and then complained that the rules were unfair,” Gibney wrote.

With the primary scheduled for March 6, Gibney said that there isn’t enough time for Perry, Gingrich, Huntsman and Santorum to collect the required 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot. ”To place the plantiffs on the ballot would deprive Virginia of its rights not only to a conduct the primary in an orderly way, but also to insist that the candidates show broad support,” Gibney wrote.

Gibney said if the lawsuit had been filed in a “timely manner” then the four GOP candidates would probably have won their argument that it is unconstitutional to allow only Virginia residents to circulate the petitions to get candidates on the state ballot.

Full Article: Judge rejects Perry, GOP hopefuls for Va. ballot.

Berkeley’s Philip Stark and David Wagner recently shared a paper they have submitted for publication entitled “Evidence-Based Elections“. While subject matter is highly technical, the authors do a nice job of making it accessible to the informed layperson – and tucked into the piece is an observation that could significantly revamp the approach to voting technology at every level of government nationwide. Stark and Wagner start with this assertion: “an election should ﬁnd out who won, but … should also produce convincing evidence that it found the real winners – or report that it cannot.” Working from that premise, the authors describe various recent elections where voting technology failures created controversy about the validity of the results.

Some of the blame, they suggest, can be laid at the continued reliance of the field on a testing and certification process aimed at identifying and screening for problems before a given technology can be used. Indeed, they note that “the trend over the past decade or two has been towards more sophisticated, complex technology and much greater reliance upon complex software–trends [to which] that the voting standards and the testing process have been slow to react.” Moreover, the continued consolidation of the voting equipment market and slow development of the federal testing process has resulted in a high cost of testing that serves as a barrier to entry and innovation in the field.

Full Article: New Equation for Voting Technology: Auditing > Testing? – Program for Excellence in Election Administration.

Since 1965, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Acthas been a key tool used by civil rights and election reform advocates to protect the franchise in the South. By requiring states and counties to “pre-clear” major election changes with the Department of Justice, the measure has allowed groups to challenge a variety of state laws that threatened to disproportionately hurt African-American and other historically disadvantaged voters. But Section 5 has come under increasing scrutiny from conservative lawmakers and the Supreme Court itself. Three years ago, in alawsuit brought by a Texas sewer district, the court came close to striking down Section 5 on the grounds that it represented an unconstitutional over-reach by Congress over states’ rights.

While the Supreme Court didn’t end up striking down Section 5 in the Texas case, their opinions signaled a displeasure with the provision. That fueled more challenges, from a small-town Kinston, North Carolina lawsuit over non-partisan elections (still pending) to the more epic issue of Texas redistricting (which just this week the court suggested would not be used to challenge Section 5).

Now election law expert Rick Hasen sees another, more immediate threat on the horizon: Legal battles over the Department of Justice’s increasing role in challenging voter ID bills that passed in several states last year.

Full Article: Voter ID cases could test Voting Rights Act | The Institute for Southern Studies.

A day after the Uttar Pradesh government complied with the Election Commission’s deadline to cover all statues of Chief Minister Mayawati and her party’s election symbol, the elephant, the Bahujan Samaj Party has hit out at the poll panel saying the decision was one-sided and had hurt the sentiments of the downtrodden. In a letter to Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi, senior party leader Satish Chandra Mishra questioned the commission’s intention to conduct free and fair elections in the state, which will see voting over seven phases in February. He claimed that the decision was unjustified and was a violation of Article 14 of the Constitution.

The commission had not taken into account the statues and election symbols of other parties, Mr Mishra pointed out and claimed that the order was not in conformity with the law. He said that the Dalits and backwards were feeling cheated due to the decision which was based on representations from the Samajwadi Party, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The EC had on Saturday issued an order to cover all statues of Mayawati and the BSP poll symbol at parks and memorials in Lucknow and Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida) to ensure a level playing field. Fixing January 11 as the deadline, the EC had asked the District Electoral Officers-cum-district magistrates of the two places to send a compliance report. But Mr Mishra said, “The statues installed in parks and memorials are in welcome position with upside trunk and the BSP symbol elephant has down trunk, which did not violate model code of conduct.

Full Article: Statue-gate: Mayawati’s party attacks Election Commission.

Finance Minister Michael Noonan has said Irish pubs around the world could offer new homes for defunct and costly e-voting machines. The idea would give punters and emigrants the chance to vent their electoral anger on 7,500 electronic units rather than turning to jukeboxes and gaming machines. ”Fianna Fail thought it would not be fashionable as Bertie (Ahern) said to be ‘using the peann luaidhe’ any more and that you needed to have a hi-tech machine,” he said. ”But when the hi-tech machine was checked out it didn’t do the job that it was supposed to do so the system was flawed. They are valueless now. ”There may be a market for them in Irish-themed pubs across the world.”

It is understood the Government is aiming to get rid of the machines over the next six months and is discussing whether to try to sell-off or recycle. The idea was the brainchild of Mr Ahern’s Fianna Fail government at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom and promoted by former ministers Noel Dempsey and Martin Cullen.

Full Article: Pubs ‘could use e-voting machines’ – Republic of Ireland, Local & National – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk.

It’s just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 11, and Peter Ackerman is staring at red numbers flashing on an electronic board. He sees 2,008,069. ”That’s 2 million Americans who have signed on to having another candidate on the presidential ballot,” he says, beaming, in the Manhattan offices of the marketing agency for Americans Elect, the group he’s backing with more than $5 million. Ackerman, 65, who made more than $300 million working alongside Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc.’s Beverly Hills, California, offices in the 1980s, is Americans Elect’s chairman and top donor. He wants to circumvent U.S. politics-as-usual by letting voters choose a presidential candidate via the Internet who, with a running mate from a different political party, will appear on every state ballot for the 2012 election, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.

Americans Elect is the latest manifestation of Ackerman’s passion for grass-roots democracy Ñ an interest that has divided his attention during his career as a financier. At Drexel, he raised billions of dollars for junk-bond-fueled takeovers in the 1980s. He helped secure $5 billion for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.’s $31.3 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco Inc., the deal immortalized in “Barbarians at the Gate.”

Today, he’s the majority shareholder of FreshDirect Holdings Inc., a Web-based grocer operating around New York. Former FreshDirect Chief Executive Officer Rick Braddock says he saw another side of Ackerman in 2011 when Ackerman promoted a nephew as CEO after summarily ousting Braddock and three directors.

Full Article: Internet picks presidential candidate if Ackerman gets his way | The News Journal | delawareonline.com….

Voters in the recent Iowa caucuses and Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary will rely on paper ballots as they have for generations. In the very next primary on January 21, South Carolinians will vote with backlit touch-screen computers. In an age of electronic banking and online college degrees, why hasn’t the rest of the nation gone the way of the Palmetto State? The reason is simple and resonates with the contentious debate that has yet to be resolved after at least 15 years of wrangling over the issue of electronic voting. No one has yet figured out a straightforward method of ensuring that one of the most revered democratic institutions—in this case, electing a U.S. president—can be double checked for fraud, particularly when paperless e-voting systems are used.

Electronic balloting has yet to reconcile two conflicting needs in the polling place. Any election must proceed under a cloak of anonymity. But if a recount is required, election officials must go back and reproduce a verifiable audit trail. No account number ties the transaction to an individual, as it does when you transfer cash from checking to saving. What tangible proof then is there that those 5,734 votes really registered at the elementary school on Main Street? “If you have a machine collecting and recording votes with an electronic ballot box there’s no way to go back after the fact and see if the machine made a mistake, whether through malice or simple software error,” says Stanford University computer science professor David Dill and founder of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election watchdog.

Electronic voting has its share snafus to prove the case of the doubters. In 2006 voters in Florida’s 13th Congressional District election learned firsthand that there is little recourse when e-voting election results are in dispute. That year Democratic nominee Christine Jennings, who lost the election by 369 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan, claimed that 18,000 votes went uncounted in the district. Without a ballot paper trail to follow, the matter was left to the courts and Buchanan held onto the seat.

“They couldn’t audit the election because there was no way to evaluate the machine’s accuracy,” Dill says. “It’s like you have a worker who’s doing your accounts who is very smart but not very trustworthy. If you have some independent way of checking the numbers he started with against the numbers he finished with then you don’t have to trust him, you can double check his work and catch any major errors. That’s what we need for voting machines.”

Full Article: Ballot Secrecy Keeps Voting Technology at Bay: Scientific American.

There is a way the U.S. Supreme Court can extract some sense out of a wildly politicized Voting Rights Act it heard Monday, argues a prominent redistricting specialist. “Don’t mess with Texas” — this time, the U.S. Supreme Court should have listened. The court has injected itself into a 10-gallon disaster that grows messier with every passing day. Today, the court hears arguments. If only it could slowly back out of the room.

The problem arises (again) from a Texas redistricting plan. Last cycle, Texas re-redrew a federal court’s lines, causing Democrats to twice flee the state to gut a legislative quorum. This caused then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to set federal law enforcement on their tail, which in turn earned Mr. DeLay a formal admonishment. The resulting districts were struck down under the Voting Rights Act; the Supreme Court found that they “took away the Latinos’ opportunity because Latinos were about to exercise it.”

This time around, the Texas Legislature drew lines without calling in air support. Because of past discrimination, Texas is subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which means the state must “preclear” election-related changes to ensure that they don’t reduce minority citizens’ practical ability to elect candidates of choice. No changes legally can be implemented until they are precleared. Most other jurisdictions that must preclear redistricting submit Section 5 changes to the U.S. Department of Justice, which has a relatively speedy procedure for assessing preclearance — and which has precleared every statewide map that it’s considered this cycle. Texas chose, instead, to go to a federal court in the District of Columbia — a permissible route, but a slower one, with the same substantive standards but a judicial decision-maker rather than the attorney general.

Full Article: Supreme Court Messes With Texas, Voting Rights – Miller-McCune.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld a federal law that bars foreign nationals from spending to influence U.S. elections. In the latest of a series of high-profile cases challenging limits to political contributions, the high court affirmed a lower court ruling that foreign citizens can be excluded from certain civic and political activities. The Supreme Court summarily upheld the lower court’s decision in the Bluman v. Federal Election Commission case without comment. Campaign finance reform advocates painted the court’s decision as a victory for keeping corporate foreign cash from improperly influencing the U.S. political system.

“It was a way to get more foreign corporate money into elections,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California Irvine. “The thinking is this would just be a general tool to further deregulate the system.” Two foreign nationals had challenged the law in federal court, arguing that it violated the First Amendment rights of foreign nationals who legally live and work in the United States.

Full Article: SCOTUS upholds foreign money ban – Robin Bravender – POLITICO.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly January 9-15 2012

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