The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly April 2-8 2012

Democracy in Burma

The Australian publication The Age and Reuters provided international perspectives on two key issues affecting the 2012 US elections: spending by SuperPACS and Voter ID requirements. The New York Times considered a recent ruling that will result in more disclosure of campaign spending by nonprofits. A constitutional amendment requiring a photo ID at the polling place will be on the ballot this November in Minnesota. Computerworld looked at the miscounted votes in a recent local election in Palm Beach County. A DHS official warned that Internet voting is not ready for live elections – a reality reinforced by the recent NDP leadership contest in Canada – and Burma celebrated the electoral victory of former political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi.

National: The big money men buy a voice in American politics | The Age
National: Voter ID laws spark heated debate before U.S. election | Reuters
Minnesota: Voter ID amendment is now up to Minnesota’s voters | StarTribune.com
Editorials: A Judge Turns on the Light on Campaign Finance | NYTimes.com
Florida: E-voting system awards election to wrong candidates in Florida village | Computerworld
National: Internet voting not ready for elections, says DHS official | FierceGovernmentIT
Canada: Internet voting carries risk as show by NDP experience | thestar.com
Burma, International: From Prisoner to Parliament in Myanmar: Party Claims Victory for Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar | NYTimes.com

Apr 07, 2012
National: The big money men buy a voice in American politics | The Age

The video begins like this: wispy clouds drift over the great American outdoors. Cranes build an office block. Trucks roar down the highway. “Capitalism made America great,” says a gravelly voice. “The free market. Hard work. The building blocks of the American dream.” A family walks through a wheat field, where the Stars and Stripes waves briskly. “But in the wrong hands, those dreams can turn into nightmares.” And storm clouds gather over the wheat field. The attack ad goes on to paint Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a corporate raider of the worst ilk, making his millions through stripping assets and staff from honest American businesses. It was exquisitely timed to upset Romney, as rival Republican Newt Gingrich accelerated his run towards his South Carolina primary win on January 21. But Gingrich’s name was not mentioned, nor did he endorse the ad (or later accept responsibility for its errors and exaggerations). It was paid for by a group called Winning Our Future.

As the Republican primaries draw to a close, it is becoming clear that this year’s fight for the White House will be an all-guns-blazing naval battle on a heaving sea of cash. But much of that money is neither being given to, nor spent by, the candidates or their campaigns. Instead, America’s richest businessmen and their corporations seem to be engaged in a bidding war to elect the next leader of the free world. And some are laying the blame on America’s fervent dedication to the principle of free speech.

Full Article: The big money men buy a voice in American politics.

Liberal activists on Wednesday criticized new voter registration requirements in dozens of states, saying millions of people could be deterred from voting in the November U.S. presidential election – a claim their opponents disputed. The Center for American Progress issued a report that said new barriers to voting have been enacted by conservative state legislatures with the aim of disenfranchising voters from among certain groups such as low-income voters, minorities and college students. Those constituencies have tended to favor Democrats. ”The right to vote is under attack all across our country,” the group said in a report that launched the latest salvo in the growing war of racially tinged rhetoric over new voter ID requirements.

Conservative groups and Republican-led state legislatures that have proposed the new rules say they will help ensure fair voting and cut back on fraud. They vehemently disagreed with the report. ”This is clearly a campaign by the left to demonize Republicans, to play the race card and to use this as an issue to make believe that Republicans are suppressing minority voters, which is clearly not the case,” said Brian Darling, senior fellow for government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Since 2011, nine states have passed strict new photo identification requirements while two dozen others have introduced legislation that would require voters to show a picture ID card to vote. Other states have passed laws that shorten an early voting period and make it tougher to register. These changes could impact minorities in particular, the Center for American Progress report said, since as many as 25 percent of blacks do not possess a valid form of government-issued ID, compared to 11 percent on average for all races. The new laws have led to a flurry of lawsuits across the country, and it is unclear how many will have gone into effect in time to play a role in the 2012 election.

Full Article: Voter ID laws spark heated debate before U.S. election | Reuters.

Minnesota’s historic battle over photo ID and the future of the state’s voting system moved from the Capitol to the voters themselves on Wednesday. The House and Senate, with Republicans supplying all the “yes” votes, gave final approval to a proposed constitutional amendment that would require voters to show a photo ID, create a new system of “provisional” balloting and end election day “vouching” for voters without proof of residence. It passed the House on a 72-57 vote shortly after midnight and was approved by the Senate Wednesday afternoon on a 35-29 vote. The decision puts Minnesota squarely in the center of a national debate over election security vs. ballot access. Five states have strict photo ID requirements in law. Wisconsin and several other states are battling the issue in court or in their legislatures. Minnesota now joins Mississippi and Missouri as states that have sought to impose the changes via constitutional amendments. Minnesota’s amendment will likely face court challenges of its own before it goes to voters.

“We will now turn this over to the people of Minnesota, and they will ultimately decide this issue,” the Senate sponsor, Sen. Scott Newman, R-Hutchinson, said as the three-hour Senate debate wrapped up. The photo ID amendment will join another emotional topic, the proposed amendment to ban gay marriage, on the general election ballot Nov. 6.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a DFLer who opposes the measure but who would have to oversee its implementation, predicted the amendment would “turn our state’s entire election system upside down.” His predecessor as secretary of state, the House sponsor, Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, told House members, “If you have no system that deters and detects fraud, and you don’t determine the identity of voters, the electoral system cannot inspire public confidence.”

Full Article: Voter ID amendment is now up to Minnesota’s voters | StarTribune.com….

A federal judge took an important step toward ending secret donations to big-spending political groups, striking down regulations that permitted some groups to hide their donors. Unfortunately, the ruling probably came too late to flush this corrupting practice from this year’s elections — though there is still time for Congress to do so. The secret-donor problem began in 2007 when the Supreme Court, in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, ended restrictions on corporate and union political spending by advocacy groups in the weeks prior to an election. A few weeks later, the Federal Election Commission, naïvely suggesting that some corporate donors to those groups might not have intended to give for political purposes, said that only those donations explicitly earmarked for political purposes had to be disclosed. The loophole was obvious: Just don’t declare any donation to be political, and they can all be secret.

The rule does not apply to modern “super PACs,” which exist for political purposes and must disclose their donors. But it allowed groups that accept money for other purposes, like the United States Chamber of Commerce, to collect millions of undisclosed dollars to buy ads that criticize candidates who differ with their pro-business agenda.

During the 2010 Congressional elections, political operatives like Karl Rove helped set up a variety of purported charities or educational groups to provide a shield to anonymous political donors. Along with the chamber, these groups took in more than $138 million in undisclosed money that year, 80 percent of which was spent supporting Republican candidates. Many of the same secretive groups have already begun running ads in this year’s campaign, and the flood will shortly begin in earnest.

Full Article: A Judge Turns on the Light on Campaign Finance – NYTimes.com….

An optical scan vote tallying system, now used by some 300 U.S. municipalities, misreported the results of a Palm Beach County, Florida, municipal election last month. Dominion Voting Inc.’s Sequoia Voting Systems device mistakenly awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to candidates who were found in a post-election audit to have lost their races. The results were officially changed last weekend after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes. According to a story in the Palm Beach Sun Sentinel , the Sequoia vote counting software was set up in a way that didn’t correspond to the Wellington County ballot distributed to voters. As a result, votes meant for one candidate were credited to a different candidate. In a product advisory notice issued last Friday, Dominion warned customers that problems could arise if the contest order on a paper ballot does not match the ballot order programmed into Sequoia machine. ”The contest order on the ballots in the database can become out of sync with the contest order shown on the corresponding paper ballots,” the company noted. If the issue is not identified during pre-election tests, “election results will show the correct number of votes, but assigns them to the wrong candidate” the company said in the advisory.

In a statement posted on the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor’s site, Bucher blamed Dominion for not alerting election officials about the potential problem. ”We were not made aware of the software shortcoming,” Bucher said. She cited a statement issued after the election by a Waldeep Singh, vice president of customer relations at Dominion, which blamed the problem on “a mismatch between the software which generates the paper ballots and the central tally system.

“This synchronization difficulty is a shortcoming of the version of software currently being used in Palm Beach County and that shortcoming has been addressed in a subsequent version of the software,” the statement said. In a later letter sent to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, Dominion president John Poulos appeared to backpedal from Singh’s statement. Poulos maintained that the company’s software had functioned precisely as designed and contended that the precise reason for the mismatch remains unknown.

Full Article: E-voting system awards election to wrong candidates in Florida village – Regulation, Palm, Industries, hardware systems, hardware, Gov’t Legislation/Regulation, Government/Industries, government – Computerworld.

Unresolved technological problems means Internet voting should not yet be deployed to U.S. elections, a Homeland Security Department cybersecurity official told a conference of election officials and watchdogs. “It’s definitely premature to deploy Internet voting in real elections,” said Bruce McConnell, a senior cybersecurity counselor, speaking before the Election Verification Network conference in Santa Fe, N.M. on March 29. “The security infrastructure around Internet voting is both immature and under-resourced,” McConnell told the audience, citing National Institute of Standards and Technology internal reports that summarize technical research on particular subjects. NISTIR 7770 (.pdf), which addresses security considerations of remote electronic voting, states that “achieving a very strict notion of ballot secrecy remains a challenging issue in remote electronic voting systems,’” McConnell noted.

“In Washington, one learns to read sentences like this,” he added, stating that in the nuance-heavy speak of the nation’s capital, “this is actually a strong statement.” The same document also states that “unlike some of the other topic areas described in this document, many of the security challenges associated with identification and authentication of users and voters have commercially-available technical solutions.”

The phrase “unlike some of the other topic areas” implies that challenges in Internet voting other than identification and authentication lack commercially-available solutions, McConnell said. When it comes to end-to-end cryptographic voting techniques, the NISTIR states that they are “are largely still an academic effort.” Again, in a typical Washington fashion, “they’re not drawing the conclusion, but they’re laying the predicate,” McConnell said.

listen to McConnell’s conference speech (posted online at Common Cause)

Full Source: Internet voting not ready for elections, says DHS official – FierceGovernmentIT.

The recent New Democratic Party convention in Toronto may have done more than just select Thomas Mulcair as the party’s new leader. It may have also buried the prospect of online voting in Canada for the foreseeable future. While Internet-based voting supporters have consistently maintained that the technology is safe and secure, the NDP’s experience — in which a denial of service attack resulted in long delays and inaccessible websites — demonstrates that turning to Internet voting in an election involving millions of voters would be irresponsible and risky. As voter turnout has steadily declined in recent years, Elections Canada has focused on increasing participation by studying Internet-based voting alternatives. The appeal of online voting is obvious. Canadians bank online, take education courses online, watch movies online, share their life experiences through social networks online, and access government information and services online. Given the integral role the Internet plays in our daily lives, why not vote online as well? The NDP experience provides a compelling answer.

Democracy depends upon a fair, accurate, and transparent electoral process with independent verification of the results. Conventional voting may typically require heading down to the polling station, but doing so accomplishes many of these goals. Private polling stations enable citizens to cast their votes anonymously, election day scrutineers provide oversight, and paper-based ballots can be recounted if needed. There are ways to build anonymity and oversight into an online election process, but as the NDP experienced, there is no way to guarantee it will be disruption-free. In the NDP’s case, 10,000 computers were used in a distributed denial-of-service attack designed to overwhelm the online voting system and effectively render it unusable for authorized voters.

The only real surprise about the attack is that it took anyone by surprise. Not only is a denial-of-service attack typically cited as the most likely security disruption, the NDP experienced much the same thing at its last leadership convention in 2003. Reports from that convention — which only involved a single ballot to elect Jack Layton as the new party leader — indicate that there was a denial-of-service attack that similarly delayed the voting process. Online voting threats are not limited to denial-of-service attacks. Security experts point to the danger of counterfeit websites, phishing attacks, hacks into the election system, or the insertion of computer viruses that tamper with election results as real world threats to an Internet-based voting system.

Full Article: Internet voting carries risk as show by NDP experience – thestar.com….

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy advocate silenced for two decades by Myanmar’s generals with house arrests and overturned elections, assumed a new role in her country’s political transition on Sunday, apparently winning a seat in Parliament to make the remarkable shift from dissident to lawmaker. The main opposition party announced her victory on Sunday; if the result is confirmed, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a 1991 Nobel Peace laureate and the face of Myanmar’s democracy movement, will hold a public office for the first time. But despite her global prominence, she will be joining a Parliament that is still overwhelmingly controlled by the military-backed ruling party. A nominally civilian government took power one year ago after years of oppressive military rule and introduced political changes it hoped would persuade Western nations to end economic sanctions. Sunday’s elections were seen as a barometer for the government’s commitment to change. To many here they represented a sea change; for the first time in two decades people in 44 districts across Myanmar had the chance to vote for Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy.

Outside Myanmar, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 66, who spent 15 years under house arrest, is a symbol of moral fortitude in the face of oppression. Inside Myanmar, she is also a repository for the wide-ranging hopes of a long-suffering population. With her entry into electoral politics, that role may change. Her party, which has been vague in its prescriptions for the country, will be forced to take specific stands in the country’s two houses of Parliament, where the debates have been increasingly lively in recent months.

But on Sunday, hundreds of frenzied supporters reveled in Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory as tallies from polling places, displayed on a large screen outside her party’s headquarters in Yangon, showed her with an overwhelming lead in her race.

Full Article: Party Claims Victory for Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar – NYTimes.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly April 2-8 2012

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