The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 18-24 2016

Federal courts have reined in strict voter ID laws in Texas and Wisconsin, while a legal battle continues to rage over North Carolina’s rules mandating showing identification at the polls — even after lawmakers there took pre-emptive steps to soften them. PCWorld reports that this November, 15 states will still be using outdated direct recording electronic voting machines that don’t support paper printouts used to audit their internal vote counts. Mark Buchanan wrote about the potential impact of internet bots on the presidential election. An Illinois judge tossed from the fall ballot a constitutional amendment to take away the General Assembly’s power to draw legislative district boundaries, dealing a loss to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and a win to Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to block a Kansas election rule that could throw out thousands of votes in state and local races by people who registered at motor vehicle offices or used a federal form without providing documents proving U.S. citizenship. In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court of Virginia on Friday struck down Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s executive order restoring voting rights to 206,000 felons, dealing a severe blow to what the governor has touted as one of his proudest achievements in office. Joshua Wong, the teenage leader who is the face of the youthful pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, was convicted of participating in an unlawful assembly that snowballed into a massive sit-in known as the Umbrella Movement and a Japanese court has found an election law provision denying prisoners the right to vote in a national poll is constitutional.