The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly November 7-13 20011

CNN featured an editorial considering voting rights controversy and security challenges of the 2012 elections. Rick Hasen raised concerns about lack of transparency and security vulnerability of Americans Elect. Voters in Maine restored election day registration while voters in Mississippi approved a proposal to require photo ID for voting. Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf prevailed in a run-off election marred by violence and claims of vote fraud. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and CNN considered the security risks of internet voting and Time Magazine reflected on changes in Florida’s election laws aimed at making voter registration drives more burdensome.

Editorials: Controversy over voting rules and security | CNN
Editorials: A democracy deficit at Americans Elect? | Richard Hasen/Politico
Maine: Mainers vote to continue Election Day registration | Bangor Daily News
Mississippi: Debate heats up over voter ID laws | usatoday.com
Liberia: Incumbent president wins run-off: preliminary results | news.xinhuanet.com
Canada: Can internet voting boost turnout without risk? | CBC News
National: Why don’t Americans vote online? | CNN.com
National: When Voter Registration is a Crime | TIME.com

Nov 12, 2011
Editorials: Controversy over voting rules and security | CNN

About a year from now, Americans will cast votes for the candidates of their choice. Or at least they will think that’s what they’ve done, having little awareness of concerns about the security of electronic voting machines, a “national security issue” in the view of scientists who easily hacked a widely-used device.

Others, even before they get the chance to vote, will discover that the rules for registering and voting itself have changed in their state; changes so controversial that the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School recently proclaimed that a “War on Voting Rages Nationwide.”

There is debate over the extent of voter fraud, arguments about whether there is a greater problem with accurately registering people than in people actually voting who should not. Nonetheless, 13 states last year amended their voting rules and another two dozen are at various stages of doing likewise. Chief among the changes are photo identification requirements, reduced opportunities to vote early and restrictions on how and when voter registration is conducted.

The Brennan Center report issued in October contended: “State governments across the country enacted an array of new laws making it harder to register or to vote. Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as one in ten voters do not have. Other states have cut back on early voting, a hugely popular innovation used by millions of Americans. Two states reversed earlier reforms and once again disenfranchised millions who have past criminal convictions but who are now taxpaying members of the community. Still others made it much more difficult for citizens to register to vote, a prerequisite for voting. These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election.”

Full Article: Controversy over voting rules and security – CNN Newsroom — CNN.com… Blogs.

The new group Americans Elect is trying to ease the path for an independent presidential candidate chosen by voters in a national Internet primary to appear on the election ballot in all 50 states. This is a tall order — achieving national ballot access for a third-party candidate to run against President Barack Obama and the Republican nominee is complicated and expensive.

Enthusiasm for this group is growing. But it could be misplaced. Tom Friedman said in The New York Times that Americans Elect will do to the two-party duopoly “whatAmazon.com… did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music [and] what drugstore.com… did to pharmacies.” Perhaps.

Rather than gush about this group, I fear many aspects of it: its secrecy; the uncertain security for its Internet election and, most important, the lack of democracy in its system for electing a presidential nominee.

While it is providing voters a path to choose a presidential ticket through the democratizing force of the Internet, the process can, in fact, be overruled by a small board of directors, who organized the group. This board is to have unfettered discretion in picking a committee that can boot the presidential ticket chosen by voters if it is not sufficiently “centrist” and even dump the committee if it doesn’t like the direction it’s heading.

Campaign finance reformers have already condemned Americans Elect for switching its organizational status under the Tax Code from political organization to 501©(4) social welfare organization. This change allows an organization to shield its donors. The group, which says it has raised $22 million of its $30 million goal, insists that it doesn’t have to be registered as a political organization, with publicly disclosed donors, because it is not a political party. Americans Elect cites a court opinion, which ruled that a similar group in the last election, Unity08, did not have to register with the Federal Election Commission as a political organization because it was set up to achieve ballot access, not to pick a particular candidate.

Full Article: Opinion: A democracy deficit at Americans Elect? — Richard Hasen — POLITICO.com….

By a relatively wide margin, Mainers on Tuesday overturned a recently passed law that would have ended a 38-year-old practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day. Question 1 asked: “Do you want to reject the section of Chapter 399 of the Public Laws of 2011 that requires new voters to register to vote at least two business days prior to an election?”

With more than three-quarters of the state’s precincts reporting early Wednesday morning, the yes side was leading 60 percent to 40 percent and had declared victory. The yes side was prevailing in every county, with especially lopsided results in Portland and Bangor. Dozens of Yes on 1 volunteers gathered at Bayside Bowl in Portland and watched the results trickle in on laptops. The mood was festive, even shortly after the polls closed, and only got better as the night went on.

Among those gathered, including Democratic party officials, labor leaders and progressive activists, everyone agreed that it was nice to get a win. “We felt good coming in and we knew we had run a better campaign,” Maine Democratic Party Chairman Ben Grant said. “It feels good to get a win but this isn’t the last vote of 2011, it’s the first of 2012. We need to take this momentum into next year.”

“Maine voters sent a clear message: No one will be denied a right to vote,” said Shenna Bellows, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. “Voters in small towns and big cities voted to protect our constitutional right.”

Full Article: Mainers vote to continue Election Day registration — Maine Politics — Bangor Daily News.

Mississippi has joined the growing number of states adopting tougher voter ID laws, a trend that promises to fuel an intense battle over how such laws may affect voter turnout in the 2012 elections.

“It’s boiling over,” said Jennie Bowser, a senior election policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “People on both sides of the aisle are very protective of elections. They regard it as the cornerstone of American democracy. ” Nearly 200 mostly Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Bennie Thompson of Bolton, recently wrote state election officials urging them to not to let the new laws jeopardize voters’ rights.

Democrats and civil rights groups warn that millions of voters, mostly minorities, may be turned away at the polls next year if they don’t have the required ID. “Voting rights are under attack in America,” said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. The new laws are “slowly robbing Americans of a basic constitutional right,” he said.

Supporters of the laws, mostly Republicans, say they help prevent fraudulent practices such as casting ballots under the names of dead people.

Full Article: Debate heats up over voter ID laws – USATODAY.com….

Liberian incumbent President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf had won the run-off election, according to the preliminary results announced by the National Election Commission on Thursday afternoon. According to the results, Johnson-Sirleaf from the ruling Unity Party got 513,320 votes, which constitutes 90.8 percent of the total votes. Her rival Winston Tubman from the opposition party Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), got 52,071 votes, which constitutes 9.2 percent. With 4,457 polling places across the country, 3,859 have been counted and tallied. The turnout of the run-off is 37.4 percent.

Sirleaf’s main challenger, Winston Tubman boycotted the polls citing frauds and called for recount of the votes cast in the first round as precondition to his participation. Tubman’s boycott action to some extend had a negative effect on the turnout on polling day.

Addressing a news conference this afternoon, Acting National Election Commission Chairman Elizabeth Nelson disclosed that voting was peaceful and the electoral body was successful in implementing their mandate.

“Because the run-off election was one election with only two candidates in the race, the tally process is also proceeding much faster than during the Oct. 11, 2011 presidential and legislative elections,” Madam Nelson noted. Meanwhile, Nelson said that the demonstration by CDC was not against the electoral laws of Liberia. She said CDC action is a security issue that has no bearing on the electoral process.

Full Article: Liberian incumbent president wins run-off: preliminary results.

Low voter turnout has become a lot like bad weather — something everyone talks about, at least around election time, but something that seems beyond remedy. Since various appeals to democratic principles have failed to move people off their couches to vote, some governments are considering internet voting to try and increase voter turnout.

Electronic voting has already been used in some provincial party leadership races and in municipal elections from Huntsville, Ont., to Halifax. But it also has staunch opponents, who warn it can be hacked and suggest it may not do anything to engage voters who are turned off politics.

“Technology … can be hacked to distort voter results in ways that can never be traced,” warns Duff Conacher, of the Ottawa-based advocacy group Democracy Watch.

Personal identification numbers, which are usually mailed to people’s homes in order to allow them to vote electronically, can be stolen from mailboxes and used by other people, Conacher said. He also believes there is no way to prevent one person in a household from collecting PINs and casting ballots for every family member.

There are also more high-tech concerns. J. Alex Halderman, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, hacked into a pilot e-voting project last year in the District of Columbia. D.C. officials had invited the public to test the system’s security as part of an open-source initiative.

Full Article: Can internet voting boost turnout without risk? — Politics — CBC News.

Tuesday is Election Day in the United States, and although the mostly state and local races won’t stir the same passions as next year’s presidential contest, millions of people will cast ballots. They’ll do it in much the same way that Americans have for centuries: by showing up at a polling place and ticking off boxes for their candidates of choice.

All of which raises the question: In an era when virtually every daily task can be done on the Internet, why can’t we vote online, too? The answer depends on whom you ask. Advocates say the time is right to seriously consider letting voters cast a ballot from the comfort of their homes or even on the screens of their mobile phones.… But critics, many of them in the cybersecurity world, argue that letting people cast votes from their home computers is a recipe for chaos.

“My position hasn’t changed over the years,” said Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in computer security. “Which is that online voting is a very unsafe idea and a very bad idea and something I think no technological breakthrough I can foresee can ever change.”

Rubin said that, in addition to politically motivated reasons for attempting to corrupt online votes, many hackers with no real political agenda could still see the challenge of tinkering with an election too attractive to pass up. “People’s computers are not getting more secure,” Rubin said. “They’re getting more infected with viruses. They’re getting more under the control of malware.”

Full Article: Why don’t Americans vote online? — CNN.com….

Dawn Quarles, a high school teacher, is facing a $1,000 fine for doing something Florida has been cracking down on lately: registering students to vote. The state’s leaders want to stop registration drives that add more qualified voters to the rolls – and they are having a disturbing level of success.

Florida’s crackdown on voter registration is part of a larger national campaign against voting, which includes tough new voter ID laws in many states, rollbacks on early voting and other anti-democratic measures. Supporters of these laws argue that they are concerned with deterring fraud. But the real driving force is keeping down the number of voters – especially young, old, poor, and minority voters.

Quarles is a government teacher at Pace High School in the Florida Panhandle. Along with teaching her students about democracy, she has tried to get them to participate, by helping them register to vote. This should be a good thing. Our nation’s founders insisted that government should operate with the consent of the governed. Ideally, everyone who is eligible should be registered and vote.

In recent years, civic-minded organizations and political groups of various kinds have been conducting mass voter registration drives across Florida – and they have been signing up a lot of voters who lean Democratic. The state’s Republican elected officials have responded with a series of laws that make voting and voter registration much harder.

The rule that Quarles is accused of violating says that people who register others to vote must submit the filled-out forms within 48 hours, down from a previous requirement of 10 days. There is a $50 fine per late form, up to a maximum of $1,000. Even if a teacher puts the forms in the mail right away, depending on mail service, he or she could miss the deadline. The 48-hour rule serves no practical purpose except creating the fear that among people and groups who register voters that they will be late – and face large fines.

Full Article: When Voter Registration is a Crime | TIME Ideas | TIME.com….

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The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly November 7-13 20011

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