The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for October 6-12 2014

A new report from the Atlantic Council and Intel Security “Online Voting: Rewards and Risks,” discusses the challenges that must be solved before online voting could be safely implemented and a report issued by the General Accounting Office found that fewer African Americans have the types of identification required to obtain a ballot than whites. A dual-track voting system, in use in Arizona for the first time in the upcoming election, has created problems for some first voters – especially students. With California heading into another election relying predominately on paper ballot voting systems, Doug Chapin, director of Future of California Elections noted “paper based balloting may feel old fashioned, but in many ways it’s the most modern and reliable system that we have.” The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a brief, unsigned order reinstating provisions of a North Carolina voting law that bar same-day registration and counting votes cast in the wrong precinct. The Supreme Court also blocked Wisconsin’s Voter ID law. Meanwhile, a federal judge on Thursday struck down a Texas law requiring voters to show identification at polls, saying it placed an unconstitutional burden on voters and discriminated against minorities and another federal court ruled that Virginia’s congressional map violated the 14th Amendment and instructed the legislature to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries. Two reports in Canada highlighted the security and accessibility challenges facing the creation of an online voting system while Cambridge Professor of security engineering Ross Anderson, speaking about proposed online voting in the UK, observed that with internet voting “you can have subversion of the technical mechanism, subversion of the organisation that does the vote tabulation and announces the result, or you can have coercion of individual voters.”