The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly July 25-31 2011

Getting at Voter Id at the Wisconsin DMV

The Maine GOP chairman accused university students of committing a felony for voting in the state while paying out-of-state tuition though the University residency requirements are entirely unrelated to the residency requirements for voting in the State. A Wisconsin mother filmed her son’s effort to obtain a voter ID from the DMV and discovered that sufficient bank activity has apparently become a prerequisite for the right to vote. And finding a DMV office in Wisconsin in order to prove that sufficient bank activity will become more difficult – at least in some areas – under Governor Walker’s new plan. Budget cuts in California are threatening county election offices’ ability to mail absentee ballots. India’s pilot of voter verified paper audit trail printers encountered problems. The North Carolina House fell five votes short of overriding Governor Perdue’s veto of a voter ID requirement. Kentucky legislators consider whether a fixed address is required before exercising the right to vote and a proposed internet poll for Presidential candidates fails to consider the evidence of past experiments with online voting.

Jul 30, 2011
Turning away college students in Maine | Bangor Daily News

Here’s a great economic development strategy for the oldest state in the nation — treat college-educated young people as pariahs. Rather than encourage these people to begin to put down roots and get involved in the local community, ensure that you are as unwelcoming as possible. Accuse them of fraud. Blame them when local elections didn’t go the way you wanted. Put up barriers making it harder for them to vote locally.

Earlier this week, Charlie Webster, head of the Maine Republican Party, held up a list he said showed 206 college students from other states have illegally voted in Maine.

“The simple fact that 206 people, here on ‘out of state tuition,’ are actually voting to decide who will represent our communities in the state Legislature ought to concern Mainers,” Mr. Webster said in a press release, written in all capital letters and replete with misspellings.

Actually, Mr. Webster, the U.S. Supreme Court — the ultimate interpreter of the U.S. Constitution — ruled in 1979 that college students are completely within their rights to vote where they attend school.

Mr. Webster’s evidence of fraud appears to be his combination of two lists that are not related and rely on completely different standards. One is a list of students who pay out-of-state tuition at Maine’s public universities.

The other is a list of people who registered to vote in college towns. If people appeared on both lists, Mr. Webster accused them of fraud.

Here’s a simple flaw in his logic: By University of Maine System rules, which aren’t clearly written or easy to understand, we’ll admit, a student generally must live in Maine for a year before qualifying for in-state tuition. By law, a student can legally list a college dorm as his address. By Mr. Webster’s logic, a student who comes from another state to attend college in Maine could not be allowed to vote in Maine for at least a year. This isn’t the law, even if Mr. Webster wishes it were.

Full Article: Turning away college students — Maine Opinion — Bangor Daily News.
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Jul 29, 2011
Bank Account Activity New Voting Requirement in Wisconsin? | Rock the Vote Blog

Did you know that your constitutional right to vote actually hinges on how often you swipe your debit card at Starbucks? No? Neither did a Wisconsin voter who went to the DMV to get his “free” voter ID card. Since you will need to show a government-issued photo ID to vote in Wisconsin in 2012, the requirements for actually getting an ID at the DMV are pretty important. This video showcases the apparently new requirement that a bank account has to show a certain amount of “activity” to be used to prove your residency. I don’t remember seeing that in the Constitution.

The video also highlights how the DMV automatically charge people a $28 fee unless a certain box is checked – even though clerks make no effort to educate people that the fee would be waived if the ID is for voting. Check our your new “democracy”:

Watch the Video: Bank Account Activity New Voting Requirement in Wisconsin? « Rock the Vote Blog.

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration is working on finalizing a plan to close as many as 10 offices where people can obtain driver’s licenses in order to expand hours elsewhere and come into compliance with new requirements that voters show photo IDs at the polls.

One Democratic lawmaker said Friday it appeared the decisions were based on politics, with the department targeting offices for closure in Democratic areas and expanding hours for those in Republican districts.

A high-ranking DOT official rejected that claim, saying the changes were based on economics, not politics. Rep. Andy Jorgensen, D-Fort Atkinson, called on the state Department of Transportation to reconsider its plants to close the Fort Atkinson DMV center. The department plans to expand by four hours a week the hours of a center about 30 minutes away in Watertown. Jorgensen said he was concerned doing that would discourage people from Fort Atkinson from participating in elections.

“What the heck is going on here?” Jorgensen said. “Is politics at play here?”

Transportation Department executive assistant Reggie Newson denied that politics was behind the office closure plan, saying the decisions were being made based on what made the most economic sense. “This has nothing to do with politics,” he said. “We’re trying to make sure that we can provide service in each county statewide efficiently.”

Department officials briefed lawmakers who represent areas affected by the closures this week. Newson said no final decisions have been made, but they plan to implement the changes starting in January. The recently enacted state budget requires that DMV driver license and ID card services be offered in all 72 counties at least 20 hours a week. Currently, only 30 counties have offices that meet that 20-hour requirement.

Once the changes are made, there will be 625 more hours of DMV service to the public a week or about 32,000 hours more a year, said Kristina Boardman, the department’s director of field services who is overseeing the plan.

Starting next year, voters must present a valid driver’s license or other acceptable photo identification in order to vote. Critics of that new requirement have said it would be unconstitutional if courts determined voters couldn’t easily access DMV centers where they can obtain the ID cards required in order to vote.

The state currently operates 88 DMV centers but it would drop to 78 under the tentative plan, Newson said. Many of those targeted for closure, like the one in Fort Atkinson, are temporary sites and not leased spaces, like the larger office in Watertown, he said.

Under Wisconsin’s law, voters will have to present a driver’s license, state ID, passport, military ID, naturalization papers or tribal ID in order to vote. College students could vote with an ID from their school as long as it has their signature and an expiration date that falls within two years of the card’s issuance.

Full Article: Wis. DMV says closure decisions aren’t final — BusinessWeek.

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Jul 28, 2011

Vote-by-mail service under threat in California budget cuts | San Jose Mercury News

California’s beloved vote-by-mail system will remain largely intact, despite state legislators’ raid on its relatively small pot of dollars. County election clerks say they likely will scrape up the $33 million the state sliced from the budget for elections. Permanent vote-by-mail allows voters to sign up once and automatically receive ballots. Under the old system, voters who wished to vote by mail requested a ballot each election.

Nearly half of the 10.3 million residents who cast ballots in November did so through the mail. The percentage topped the halfway mark in most counties, offering further evidence that voting by mail has become an indispensable feature for many.

However, the fact that the fate of permanent vote-by-mail service rests with each of California’s 58 counties now that the state suspended reimbursement is prompting voting rights advocates to rekindle their calls for a stronger state role in elections. California’s decentralized election system means counties could “decide to eliminate the permanent vote-by-mail option,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “Voter access is already uneven from county to county, and the suspension of the mandates is only going to make it worse.

“What do we tell voters when they want to know if they can vote by mail?”

California law mandates that counties offer permanent vote-by-mail, but the law also requires the state to pay for it. With no state funding, counties may opt out — although it appears none plan to do so.

At the annual California Association of Clerks and Election Officials convention in South Lake Tahoe last week, none of the 45 counties represented indicated that they would discontinue permanent vote-by-mail.

“Not every election official has the sole discretion to make that decision, though, so each county will have to decide what they are going to do during these tough fiscal times,” said Gail Pellerin, the association’s president and Santa Cruz County clerk. “Some counties may decide they cannot afford it. Tough cuts are being made everywhere.”

California has paid counties $88 million in the past three years for costs associated with permanent vote-by-mail and voter registration programs, according to the State Controller’s Office.

Counties may be able to recoup some of next year’s election costs from cities and other local agencies.

Full Article: Vote-by-mail service under threat in budget cuts — San Jose Mercury News.

In a setback to the Election Commission (EC), its pilot poll conducted on Sunday to establish a paper trail for electronic voting machines (EVMs) reported significant errors. Preliminary results of the EC pilot poll indicated discrepancies between votes polled in EVMs and the paper trail, according to three people involved and familiar with the testing process. Two of them are EC officials who confirmed the mismatch, but did not give any more details. EC will release a comprehensive report on the pilot poll in a few days.

“Even a difference of one vote is not acceptable,” said one of the EC officials, who, like the other EC official familiar with the matter, asked not to be identified given the controversial nature of the findings.

To be sure, the discrepancy does not necessarily vindicate the stand of critics who have argued that EVMs can be manipulated, but raises questions on the efficacy of the back-up system that EC was considering to enhance transparency in theelectoral process.

According to an analysis by the Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Elections (VeTA), an activist group campaigning against EVMs, almost one in 20 votes polled in Delhi, one of the four places where the pilot poll was conducted, didn’t have a corresponding paper ballot. VeTA’s representatives were invited to be part of the election process.

“This definitely is some sort of embarrassment for us. However, these are not issues that cannot be resolved. They are…technical problems which are not difficult to sort,” said the second EC official.

Several political parties, including the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), too, claim EVMs are not tamper-proof and have been demanding a paper backup.

To assuage them, the trial –conducted in Leh (Jammu & Kashmir), Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala), Jaisalmer (Rajasthan) and in Delhi–tested the voter verifiable paper audit trail prototypes made by Bharat Electronics Ltd and Electronics Corp. of India Ltd. The pilot took place in Meghalaya on Tuesday.

The system on trial comprises an interface that connects an EVM to a printer and has a list of candidate details corresponding with the EVM. When a person votes for a candidate on the EVM, a paper ballot with a serial number, name and symbol of the candidate will be printed.
“There were 35,791 votes polled in Delhi, each of which had two paper backups. So of what should have been around 70,000 paper trails, around 3,500 were missing. This means there was an error rate of 5%,” said G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, president of VeTA, and a member of BJP’s electoral reforms committee.

www.menafn.com…{8673bdc4-1345-4bf7-bbc7-257fdc2416d2}
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Jul 27, 2011
North Carolina House falls short of canceling governor’s veto of photo identification mandate for voters | The Republic

Republican lawmakers failed Tuesday to override a veto by Gov. Beverly Perdue that would have required voters to show photo identification before casting an in-person ballot. The House voted 67–52 in favor of the override, five votes short of what’s needed to move it to the Senate.

Republicans argued the photo ID mandate would discourage voter fraud. Democrats said the requirement is unnecessary because reports of fraud are few and that it would only lead to voter suppression, particularly older people, minorities and women.

The override question spurred passionate debate about voting in an era in which citizens show identification to enter government buildings or get on an airplane but only a half-century since blacks in the Jim Crow-era South were discouraged from voting because of the color of their skin.

“This bill is an insult to me. It’s an insult to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King,” said first-term Rep. Rodney Moore, R-Mecklenburg. “Right now, I feel like my rights have been raped. Yes I do because there is no substantive problem in North Carolina with voter fraud and this is purely, purely an attempt at voter suppression.”

Perdue said in her veto message that no one should make it tougher to vote. GOP legislative leaders contend polls show strong support for voter ID and that Perdue vetoed the measure to please her base of Democratic supporters.

Several Republican House members have said voter identification is one of the most important issues to their constituents.

“How can you possibly vote against a requirement where in one instance you have to show a photo ID (in Winston-Salem) to panhandle but not show a photo ID to do the most important and sacred thing that we do as citizens?” said House Speaker Pro Tempore Dale Folwell, R-Forsyth.

Democrats argue the bill was purely partisan. About 147,100 active black voters do not have photo ID, according to the election reform group Democracy North Carolina. The bill didn’t even consider potential fraud problems with obtaining absentee ballots, said House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange.

Full Article: NC House falls short of canceling governor’s veto of photo identification mandate for voters | The Republic.

Secretary of State Elaine Walker and Boone County Clerk Kenny Brown will address state legislators Tuesday afternoon on the issues surrounding homeless voter registration. They will speak before the Interim Task Force on Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs to talk about the concerns raised over a memo last month from the Kentucky Board of Elections on the process for homeless voter registration.

Committee co-chairman Sen. Damon Thayer, R-Georgetown, said he called the meeting with Walker and Brown to help lawmakers decide whether legislation will be necessary to allay concerns. “I want to have a committee hearing about it so we can look at potentially addressing it in the next session,” Thayer said.

The June 30 homeless voter registration memo from Board of Elections Executive Director Sarah Ball Johnson to all county clerks drew the objection of Boone County Clerk Kenny Brown.

Brown said he’s not against homeless people voting, but he objected to the memo’s last line that states, “If the application has homeless, place to place, in my car or has no residential address listed; place the voter in the precinct containing the county clerk’s office.”

The placement of someone in the precinct with the county courthouse regardless of whether they live there or not could lead to voter fraud, Brown said. “It is the statutes, the legislators that make it clear,” Brown said. “In Kentucky, you need to vote in the proper precinct.”

He said someone can put their address as a park bench, a homeless shelter or draw a map on the registration form so long as they have an identifiable location. Brown said he hopes the secretary of state can clear the issue up at Tuesday’s meeting.

Full Article: Legislators to look at homeless voter issue | Kentucky Politics.

Apart from the various considerations of political ideology, influence and process regarding Americans Elect, there’s the simple matter of technology. Americans Elect plans to use all-internet-voting to nominate a presidential candidate and to broker the selection of the actual president in an Electoral College showdown. Will a binding internet vote be pulled off with accuracy and without getting hacked? Or is online voting subject to tampering?

Internet votes can be pulled off. The city of Honolulu managed an internet election for neighborhood councils in 2009. Estonia is often mentioned by internet-voting advocates, although more than 98% of votes cast in Estonia’s 2005 e-vote were old-fashioned paper ballots, and Estonia is a small country that had 9,681 electronic votes to verify that year.

The scale is much larger and the stakes are much higher in an internet election for the President of the United States, the single most powerful position on the planet. And we’re not just talking about a vote to select an Americans Elect nominee, either. In its bylaws, Americans Elect makes plans to hold a second internet vote if the Americans Elect candidate doesn’t win an outright majority of electoral votes, but neither does the Republican or Democratic party candidate. This second vote would decide which major party candidate would receive the electoral votes of Americans Elect. That vote would decide the presidency. All Americans Elect needs to put itself in that position is Election Day victory in one of the fifty states.

So when we evaluate Americans Elect, we should pay close attention to the current state of internet voting. And as Jim Soper points out, recent excursions into internet voting are sobering. The city of Washington, DC planned to start offering an internet vote system for residents of DC living overseas; last fall it launched the enterprise with an invitation for experts to try and hack its security system. Within three days, J. Alex Halderman and a small team from the University of Michigan had won complete control of the DC internet voting system.

Full Article: Americans Elect Internet Vote for President? Consider how it worked in DC 2010 | Irregular Times.

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The Voting News Weekly: TVN Weekly July 25-31 2011

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