The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for April 4-10 2016

The Election Assistance Commission is in federal court this month, its executive director accused of trying to suppress voter turnout in this November’s election. The Supreme Court endorsed the way Texas draws its legislative districts based on total population and not just eligible voters – the same method used by all 50 states – rejecting a conservative challenge in a case focusing on the legal principle of “one person, one vote.” The Justice Department has opened an investigation over the decisions that led to the chaotic presidential primaries in Arizona’s most populous county, where thousands of voters waited up to five hours to cast ballots and thousands more were barred from participating because of mistakes and confusion over party registration. Nebraska Republicans cleared a major hurdle in their efforts to reinstate a winner-take-all system in presidential elections, a move that would wipe out any chance of the state splitting its electoral votes as it did for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. The ACLU is suing Ohio Secretary of State over how state officials remove inactive voters from the rolls. Wisconsin congressional staffer Glenn Grothman pretty much said what everyone already knew: The state’s voter ID law was all about power. It had nothing to do with voter fraud, of which there has been virtually none that a photo ID would stop. Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh, in power since 1999, was expected to win a fourth term in office in an election that began on Friday, although some opposition candidates openly doubted the integrity of the vote and a cyber-attack on the website of the Philippines Commission on Elections has resulted in personally identifiable information of roughly 55 million people being leaked online.