The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly September 17-23 2012

New York’s Fine Print Ballots

USAToday reported on the continuing concern over the accuracy and reliability of America’s aging electronic voting equipment. Early Voting began in several States, while court challenges over controversial voting laws are still pending. Voting rights advocates expressed concern over organized polling place challengers. Secretary of State Scott Gessler is undaunted by the lack of evidence of voter fraud in his quest to purge Colorado’s voter rolls. Similarly Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schulz continues to defend controversial changes in his State’s eligibility rules. New York City voters complained about ballots that are difficult to read. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sent a challenge to the State’s Voter ID law back to a lower court. Opposition parties called for a boycott of Belarus parliamentary elections, while Georgia once again experiences cyber attacks in advance of elections.

National: Electronic voting’s the real threat to elections | USAToday.com
National: Amid court challenges, early voting begins in U.S. election | Reuters
National: The Ballot Cops | The Atlantic
Colorado: Lack of evidence doesn’t stop Colorado from going after voter fraud | Examiner.com
Iowa: Secretary of State’s voter eligibility investigation on hold after judge issues injunction | Des Moines Register
New York: New York City Voters Annoyed by Hard-to-Read Ballots | NYTimes.com
Pennsylvania: State Supreme Court Vacates Lower Court Voter ID Ruling | NYTimes.com
Belarus: Go fishing on election day, Belarus opposition urges people | Reuters
Georgia (Sakartvelo): Cyber attack underscores political rivals in Georgia | OregonLive.com

Sep 21, 2012
National: Electronic voting’s the real threat to elections | USAToday.com

Imagine how easy voting would be if Americans could cast ballots the same way they buy songs from iTunes or punch in a PIN code to check out at the grocery store: You could click on a candidate from a home computer or use a touch screen device at the local polling place. It’s not entirely a fantasy. In many states, some voters can already do both. The process is seductively simple, but it’s also shockingly vulnerable to problems from software failure to malicious hacking. While state lawmakers burn enormous energy in a partisan fight over in-person vote fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, they’re largely ignoring far likelier ways votes can be lost, stolen or changed. How? Sometimes, technology or the humans running it simply fail.

•In March, malfunctioning software sent votes to the wrong candidate and the wrong municipal election in Palm Beach County, Fla. The mistake was corrected only after a court-approved hand count.

•In an election in Pennington County, S.D., in 2009, a software glitch almost doubled the number of votes actually cast.

•In Carteret County, N.C., 4,530 electronic votes simply disappeared in 2004 when the voting machine ran out of storage capacity and no one noticed until too late.

•In 2010, a University of Michigan assistant professor of computer science and three assistants hacked into Washington, D.C.’s online voting system during a test. They manipulated it undetected, even programming it to play the Michigan fight song. While inside, the hackers blocked probes from Iran, India and China. Washington officials canceled plans for online voting.

Experiences like these argue for great caution about expanding electronic voting, but too many states are choosing convenience over reliability. Sixteen states, for example, use electronic voting devices with no paper backup, according to a study by the Verified Voting Foundation, Common Cause and the Rutgers School of Law. This means there’s no way to know whether the machine has recorded a vote accurately or, for that matter, recorded it at all. And there’s no way for elections officials to conduct a verifiable recount if things go wrong.

Full Article: Electronic voting’s the real threat to elections – USATODAY.com….

The November 6 election is still seven weeks away, but early, in-person voting begins in two states on Friday, even as Democrats and Republicans battle in court over controversial plans to limit such voting before Election Day. Idaho and South Dakota are the first states to begin early voting on Friday, although North Carolina has been accepting absentee ballots by mail since September 6. By the end of September, 30 states will have begun either in-person or absentee voting, and eventually all the states will join in. Much of the focus of the early voting period will be on the politically divided states of Ohio and Florida, which could be crucial in deciding the race between Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.

The states have also been the venues for court battles in which Democrats have accused Republican-led legislatures of trying to limit early voting periods in order to suppress turnout of working-class and minority voters. Such voters make up large percentages of those casting ballots before Election Day, and they tend to back Democrats. Absentee ballots, popular among military voters, tend to favor Republicans.

The restrictions on early voting are among several election laws passed by Republican-led legislatures since 2010. Other new laws, also challenged by Democrats and voting-rights groups, have been aimed at limiting voter registration and requiring voters to show photo IDs. Republicans say the laws are aimed at preventing voter fraud.

Full Article: Amid court challenges, early voting begins in U.S. election | Reuters.

The afternoon before early voting began in the 2010 midterm elections, a crowd of people gathered in the offices of a Houston Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots. They soon formed a line that snaked out the door of the Patriots’ crumbling storefront and down the block, past the neighboring tattoo parlor. The volunteers, all of whom had been trained by the Patriots to work as poll watchers, had come to collect their polling-place assignments. As they waited, the group’s chief trainer, Alan Vera—a mustachioed former Army ranger who likens poll observers to commandos who “jump out of airplanes” and “blow things up”—walked the line, shaking hands. As he would later recall, he then launched into a drill-sergeant routine. “Are you ready?” “We’re ready!” “Strength and honor! Remember your mission! Your mission is the vote!” The next day, King Street Patriots—many of them aging white suburbanites—poured into polling places in heavily black and Hispanic neighborhoods around Houston, looking for signs of voter fraud. Reports of problems at the polls soon began surfacing in the Harris County attorney’s office and on the local news. The focus of these reports was not fraud, however, but alleged voter intimidation. Among other things, poll observers were accused of hovering over voters, blocking lines of people who were trying to cast ballots, and, in the words of Assistant County Attorney Terry O’Rourke, “getting into election workers’ faces.”

The Patriots’ alleged activities touched off a furor. The county attorney’s office, which received some 50 complaints of voter intimidation, launched an investigation. The head of the local chapter of the New Black Panthers went on TV to warn that the group would “not tolerate any intimidation.” The Texas Democratic Party blasted the Patriots for what it called “1960s style” tactics and filed a lawsuit challenging the group’s tax-exempt status. Undaunted, the group’s founder, a suburban soccer mom and small-business owner named Catherine Engelbrecht, addressed a boisterous crowd at the group’s headquarters the next week. “The nation is ready for something like this,” she said. In the months that followed, she began laying out plans to recruit and train 1 million poll watchers around the country by Election Day 2012.

Full Article: The Ballot Cops – Mariah Blake – The Atlantic.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been investigating voter fraud for over a year even though concern over ballots being cast by thousands of voters who aren’t U.S. citizens has been founded on myth, not math. ”It’s created an atmosphere where voters, even ones who are entitled to vote, fear their registration may not be valid or that they’ll be challenged at the polls,” said Elena Nunez, executive director of Common Cause, a liberal group that has tangled with Gessler over election issues. More than a year ago Gessler said there could be in excess of 11,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Colorado. Earlier this month, the Republican Secretary of State announced that his office had found only 141 people who were noncitizens registered to vote out of 1,416 names run through a federal database, and of those 141, only 35 who had cast ballots. That number represents 0.001 percent of Colorado’s 3.5 million registered voters.

“Voter fraud is not tolerable, period,” Gessler said. “If they want to argue that a little bit of vote fraud is OK, that’s their argument. I think no vote fraud is acceptable.” The 35 people listed as noncitizens who voted included 18 registered Democrats, 10 unaffiliated voters and five Republicans. The Denver Post reports today that Gessler has implied there was significant fraud as a result of noncitizen voting.

Full Article: Lack of evidence doesn’t stop Colorado from going after voter fraud – Denver Grassroots Politics | Examiner.com….

Rules governing an effort to verify the eligibility of thousands of Iowa voters cannot be enforced while a lawsuit challenging their validity goes forward, a Polk County judge has ruled. Judge Mary Pat Gunderson issued a temporary injunction to stay the implementation of the rules late Friday afternoon. The ruling casts no judgment on the merits of the case, but means Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s effort to check the citizenship status of more than 3,500 voters is on hold for the time being. Schultz has identified the potentially ineligible voters by comparing the state’s voter rolls to a Department of Transportation list of legal aliens who have obtained driver’s licenses. He’s now seeking to verify those voters’ citizenship status by cross referencing the list against a federal immigration database. The rules enjoined on Friday were passed earlier this summer through an emergency rulemaking process as part of Schultz’s effort to gain access to the federal database.

In her order, Gunderson said the harm posed to Schultz’s effort by an injunction was less than the potential harm to qualified voters if the rules remained in place. The rules “have in fact created confusion and mistrust in the voter registration process,” the judge found, and “have created fear that new citizens will lose their right to vote and/or be charged with a felony and caused some qualified voters to feel deterred from even registering to vote.” “The granting of the temporary injunction will simply maintain the status quo of the parties and the protections of qualified voters as they currently exist until final judgment on the merits of Petitioners’ claims can be determined,” she wrote.

Full Article: Secretary of state’s voter eligibility investigation on hold after judge issues injunction | Des Moines Register Staff Blogs.

Some states want their voters to take ID cards to the polls. In New York City, you may want to bring a magnifying glass. Voters who trekked to the polls for Thursday’s primary races were handed ballots with candidates’ names printed in an eye-straining 7-point type, akin to the ingredient list on the side of a cereal box. Now the city Board of Elections is facing outsize criticism over the mite-size font. Civic groups and lawmakers are calling for reform. And some voters are wondering why the instructions on the ballot were displayed in larger and clearer typefaces than the names of the candidates and the offices they were running for. “I just stood and squinted,” recalled Elinore Kaplan, a semiretired teacher in Manhattan, who said she was upset and disappointed to have so much trouble ensuring she voted for the person she wanted to vote for. “It shouldn’t be a challenge,” she said of the ballot’s design. “It should be an invitation.”

City Council members said they had received numerous complaints, particularly from the elderly and those with visual impairments. “It disenfranchises people needlessly,” said Jessica Lappin, chairwoman of the Council’s Committee on Aging who plans on questioning the Board of Elections about the problem at a hearing next month. Particularly galling to some voters was that the tiny names often appeared beside a vast, unused white space on the ballot, raising questions as to why the designers simply did not enlarge the fonts.

Of course, New Yorkers are known for being a bit cranky, particularly when it comes to politics. An expert opinion was sought. “Wow, that’s tiny!” said James Montalbano, the founder of Terminal Design in Brooklyn, upon seeing a sample ballot. “Those names could be 40 percent larger and still fit.”

Full Article: New York City Voters Annoyed by Hard-to-Read Ballots – NYTimes.com….

In August, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court judge upheld the state’s new voter ID law—despite the fact that state officials presented no evidence of in-person voter fraud, and didn’t even try to claim that voter fraud would likely occur this November in the absence of an ID requirement. Contrary to expectations, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday vacated that lower court ruling. The Supreme Court did not strike down the law, but it returned the case to the Commonwealth Court for review because “the Law is not being implemented according to its own terms.” Briefly, while the law requires “liberal access” to non-driver photo IDs, it’s still difficult to obtain one. “Generally, the process requires the applicant to present a birth certificate with a raised seal…a social security card, and two forms of documentation showing current residency.”

By October 2—mere weeks before the election—the original trial judge must give both sides a chance to make new arguments and deliver a new opinion. If he finds that voters can indeed obtain IDs, and won’t be disenfranchised, he can let the law stand. There’s just one line in the order that strikes me as incorrect: “Given this state of affairs, we are not satisfied with a mere predictive judgment based primarily on the assurances of government officials, even though we have no doubt they are proceeding in good faith.”

Full Article: Penn Supreme Court Vacates Lower Court Voter ID Ruling – NYTimes.com….

Belarus’s two main opposition parties said they would boycott a parliamentary election next Sunday, denouncing it as a fake exercise and are calling on people to “go fishing or visit your parents” instead. The poll for the 110-seat chamber takes place two years after police cracked down on street protests after a presidential election which installed hardline President Alexander Lukashenko for a fourth term in power. Scores of opposition activists were arrested in the December 2010 unrest and many people, including several candidates who stood against Lukashenko, were handed prison terms. ”Honest people cannot take part in pseudo-elections to a fake parliament,” Anatoly Lebedko, leader of the United Civic Party, said at a weekend rally at which the party announced it was withdrawing its 38 candidates from the election. ”I know I shall not be elected. And that is in no way because people will not vote for me,” said Grigoriy Kostusev, deputy head of the Belarussian People’s Front, which also opted to pull its 31 candidates out of the poll.

The two parties appealed to voters to boycott the ballot which they said could not be considered democratic because opposition activists remained in jail. Human rights agencies say there are about 15 political prisoners in the former Soviet republic. ”Go fishing. Visit your parents. Have some coffee with your friends. Don’t take part in a farce,” Lebedko said.

Authorities reacted sharply to the boycott call. “Those who do not want to take part in the elections and want to disrupt them have shown (by their action) that we need to perfect the law here. We need to make it much stricter. It seems that democracy is not to everybody’s liking,” Lidiya Yermoshina, head of the central election commission, told Belarus 1 television.

Full Article: Go fishing on election day, Belarus opposition urges people | Reuters.

The Georgian government of President Mikheil Saakashvili, long a favorite of U.S. conservatives for championing pro-democratic “color revolutions,” is under fire for its own alleged suppression of a domestic opposition movement headed by a billionaire tycoon. Saakashvili was lauded as a reformer after he became president in 2004, following the Rose Revolution, and he has bravely challenged Russian hegemony in the region. But he has also shown a tendency to overreach, as in the imprudent military moves that offered Russia a pretext for invading Georgia in 2008. Now, critics charge, his government has been overly zealous in combating political challengers at home. Saakashvili’s rival is a wealthy businessman named Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made a fortune in Russia before returning home to form a political party called Georgian Dream. Ivanishvili’s supporters allege a series of repressive moves by the government, including a cyber attack that has caught up not just Georgian activists but U.S. lawyers, lobbyists and security advisers for Georgian Dream.

Allegations about the cyber attack were made to State Department officials in a Sept. 7 briefing by Tedo Japaridze, a former Georgian ambassador to Washington, and other members of a team representing the opposition group. Japaridze charged that “the government has turned the campaign into a war between the ‘state’ and the ‘enemies of the state.’” The Georgian political battle has seen allegations of dirty tricks by both sides, but the cyber attack appears to be an escalation. According to Ivanishvili’s supporters, investigators found 66 malware infections on five computers operated by Ivanishvili, his family and close advisers. The viruses had spread to about 50 other machines.

The malware was cleverly designed: It could turn on the computers’ cameras and microphones, capture screen shots every 10 seconds, and record keystrokes and passwords, the State Department was told. One “screen grab” I saw was a June 7, 2012, bill to Ivanishvili from National Strategies LLC, a Washington-based security advisory firm. Another was a June 4 message to Ivanishvili from an attorney with Patton Boggs in Washington, which is heading his lobbying effort. The cyber campaign evidently went beyond infecting individual computers: Japaridze’s team said that investigators discovered that devices had been installed at several Georgian Internet service providers (ISPs) that could intercept data and insert malware into Internet traffic. The Georgian opposition group alleged that the use of these sophisticated ISP tools “is clear proof of state security and intelligence activity in surveillance of the political opposition,” according to notes from the meeting.

Full Article: Cyber attack underscores political rivals in Georgia | OregonLive.com….

See Also:

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly September 17-23 2012

Author: admin

Related Posts