The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for June 16-22 2014

With the midterm elections only months away, efforts to carry out some of the country’s strictest photo ID requirements and shorten early voting in several politically pivotal states have been thrown into limbo by a series of court decisions concluding that the measures infringe on the right to vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee will examine the Voting Rights Amendment Act, a bill aimed at updating those sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last summer. Legislation in Massachiusetts requires military and overseas voters to waive their right to a secret ballot when voting online. As part of a settlement in a federal voting-rights lawsuit, Montana will open satellite voting offices on four Native  American reservations. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that an anti-abortion group can challenge the constitutionality of an Ohio law that bars lies about politicians during an election. Afghanistan’s presidential election was cast into crisis on Wednesday as the candidate Abdullah Abdullah announced a boycott of the electoral process, accusing his opponent and President Hamid Karzai of engineering huge fraud in a runoff vote. A major anti-Beijing news site and an online voting platform have been hit by major DDoS attacks rendering them unusable, just days before an unofficial referendum in Hong Kong on universal suffrage, while a three-pronged wave of cyber-attacks aimed at wrecking Ukraine’s presidential vote – including an attempt to fake computer vote totals – was narrowly defeated by government cyber experts.