The Voting News Weekly: The Voting News Weekly for July 6-12 2015

The U.S. Vote Foundation’s report “The Future of Voting: End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting Specification and Feasibility Assessment Study” asserts that Internet voting systems must be transparent and designed to run in a manner that embraces the constructs of end-to-end verifiability – a property missing from existing Internet voting systems. A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected a challenge to a long-standing ban on U.S. government contractors making campaign contributions in federal elections, emphasizing that the policy was put in place to prevent corruption. The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday rejected political gerrymandering by state legislators and ordered eight congressional districts redrawn within 100 days, a decision likely to complicate preparations for next year’s elections. New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan vetoed a bill that would have required a 30-day waiting period to vote saying the bill placed unreasonable restrictions on citizens’ voting rights. Lawyers for Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell claimed that partisan politics targeting Democrats fueled the 2011 redistricting process rather than race. Wisconsin Democrats sued election officials over legislative maps Republicans drew in 2011 that helped give them a firm grip on state government. Local police raided the home of an Argentinian programmer who reported a flaw in an electronic voting system that was used last weekend for local elections in Buenos Aires and Burundi’s ruling party swept to an expected overwhelming victory in controversial parliamentary elections that were boycotted by the opposition.