The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for September 1-7 2014

The New York Times surveyed changes in state election laws and the impact they may have on the mid-term elections. Counties in California and Texas are developing open-source voting systems that use software running on inexpensive computer terminals to design, print and tabulate paper ballots. A federal judge in Anchorage ruled Wednesday morning that the state elections division violated the U.S. Voting Rights Act by failing to provide ballot and candidate information in Native languages to Yup’ik and Gwich’in speakers in three rural regions of Alaska. Two election law statutes have raised questions about whether Kansas Democratic Senate candidate Chad Taylor gave sufficient cause to remove himself from the ballot, and, if so, whether Democrats must ultimately choose a candidate to replace him. In Baltimore a federal judge ordered Maryland election officials to adopt an online absentee voting tool in time for this year’s general election, despite warnings from computer security experts that it could lead to voter fraud or privacy breaches. A federal judge also blocked Ohio’s cuts to early voting and ordered the state to establish additional polling days before November’s elections, saying the reductions would disproportionately harm the poor and members of minority groups. The U.S. Department of Justice and other plaintiff’s attorneys began their challenge Tuesday in federal court to Texas’ stringent voter ID law, the first national test of such laws that have surfaced following a Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for such measures and Chinese plans to allow, for the first time, every Hong Kong citizen to vote for the territory’s leader have met with anger and indifference since it is widely assumed that the result of the next election for Hong Kong’s chief executive will be rigged.