The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for March 9-15 2015

Contrary to popular belief, the fundamental security risks and privacy problems of Internet voting are too great to allow it to be used for public elections, and those problems will not be resolved any time soon, according to David Jefferson, who has studied the issue for more than 15 years. Jefferson, a computer scientist in the Lawrence Livermore’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing, discussed his findings in a recent Computation Seminar Series presentation, entitled “Intractable Security Risks of Internet Voting.” Florida election officials have warned that “Habitual” technology failures in an “obsolete” and glitch-prone state voter registration system could have devastating effects in 2016 if not addressed quickly. 50 years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, U.S. citizens in Guam and the other territories still can’t vote for president. 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. The North Dakota House defeated a bill that would have required the state’s colleges and universities to provide student identification cards that could be used to vote. Despite numerous attempts to overturn it, Utah lawmakers stood by last year’s deal to reform how political parties choose their nominees. Up to 250,000 votes are expected to be cast using the iVote electronic voting system between March 16 and the close of polls on March 28 in an election in New South Wales Australia and on March 17th, citizens resident in Israel will vote for the 20th Knesset since the country’s founding.