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New from States -
Minnesota
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By Analysis by Edward B. Foley
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July 01, 2009 |
This analysis was published at MinnPost.com.
Now that Norm Coleman has conceded in the aftermath of today's
unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court ruling, the eight-month-long battle
to determine who won last November's election for the state's U.S.
Senate seat is finally over. Even as the concession eclipses the
opinion in political importance—and appropriately so—the opinion will begin its life as one of the most legally significant resolutions of a disputed election in U.S. history.
Its
historical significance lies in the fact that it is the first appellate
court resolution of a major statewide election after Bush v. Gore. The
seven-month dispute over Washington's gubernatorial election of 2004
resulted in a trial court ruling, but it was never appealed. Puerto
Rico's disputed gubernatorial election of the same year did result in a
4-3 decision of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court (as well as a federal
appeals court decision declining to intervene), but that precedent
lacks the direct relevance to future U.S. elections that today's
decision has.
Today's opinion discusses Bush v. Gore and its treatment of that U.S.
Supreme Court decision in the 2000 presidential election is the most
important judicial analysis of that precedent to date. The reason for
its importance is that it analyzes Bush v. Gore in a setting most
comparable to Bush v. Gore itself: a post-election fight over which
candidate won more votes. Citations to Bush v. Gore in other
contexts, like pre-election disputes over how to count provisional
ballots, are merely invocations of that precedent for whatever
analogical force it might have. Coleman v. Franken is a consideration
of Bush v. Gore in a situation where it most closely applies.
The
Minnesota Supreme Court opinion, like the unanimous trial court ruling
it affirms, holds that the Equal Protection principle of Bush v. Gore
is not violated when a state statute provides a clear and specific rule
for local officials to follow in the counting of ballots, even if some
local officials fail to follow that clear rule. As long as the local
officials' failure to follow the clear and specific state rule, even if
deliberate, was not designed to favor one candidate over another (or
otherwise discriminate improperly among classes of citizens), that
failure—while regrettable—is not unconstitutional.
Read the Entire Analysis at MinnPost.com
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New from National Issues -
Election Assistance Commission (EAC)
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By EAC Media Release
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July 01, 2009 |
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has released a report on voter registration statistics in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA). It presents information provided by the states on the number of registered voters, the registration process and voter registration list maintenance. The full report can be dowloaded here, and the data are available here.
The report covers registration information from after the 2006 general election through the 2008 general election. The following highlights are among the findings. |
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New from National Issues -
Federal Legislation
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By The New York Times
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June 22, 2009 |
The House leadership should make passing Mr. Holt’s bill a priority.
Few issues matter as much as ensuring that election results can be
trusted.
This editorial was published in the New York Times on June 22, 2009.
Electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record of every vote cast cannot be trusted. In 2008, more than one-third of the states, including New Jersey and Texas, still did not require all votes to be recorded on paper. Representative Rush Holt has introduced a good bill that would ban paperless electronic voting in all federal elections. Congress should pass it while there is still time to get ready for 2010.
In paperless electronic voting, voters mark their choices, and when the votes have all been cast, the machine spits out the results. There is no way to be sure that a glitch or intentional vote theft — by malicious software or computer hacking — did not change the outcome. If there is a close election, there is also no way of conducting a meaningful recount.
Mr. Holt’s bill would require paper ballots to be used for every vote cast in November 2010. It would help prod election officials toward the best of the currently available technologies: optical-scan voting. With optical scans, voters fill out a paper ballot that is then read by computer — much like a standardized test. The votes are counted quickly and efficiently by computer, but the paper ballot remains the official vote, which can then be recounted by hand.
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New from National Issues -
Federal Legislation
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By VerifiedVoting.org
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June 17, 2009 |
VerifiedVoting.org praised U.S. Representative Rush Holt's introduction today of HR 2894, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009. Cosponsored by 75 House members, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act would require voter-marked paper ballots in all federal elections. The bill would authorize funding for states to purchase new voting equipment, require hand-counted audits of electronic vote tallies, and reform the process of testing voting equipment.
"This bill is so long overdue. It provides a basic element of democracy: a verifiable ballot for every voter," said Warren Stewart, Legislative Policy Director for VerifiedVoting.org. “And it does its job in the most reliable way, with paper ballots marked by the voters. That is a cost-effective technology that a majority of Americans already use; HR 2894 simply makes it our nationwide system,” Stewart said.
In 2008, almost 60 percent of the nation's voters cast their votes on paper ballots that were read by electronic scanning devices. In the last several years, voter-marked paper ballots have become the most popular means of providing a paper record of each vote. “Paper trail” printers attached to voting machines are an alternative method of providing a paper record, but have reliability problems, such as printer jams. They are cumbersome to recount, raise privacy concerns because they store all votes on a continuous roll, and go unchecked by significant numbers of voters.
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New from National Issues -
Federal Legislation
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By Rep. Susan Davis Press Release
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June 10, 2009 |
No Excuse Absentee, Absentee Tracking and Election Integrity Bills Approved
A package of election reform bills sponsored by Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) cleared an initial hurdle today. The House Administration Committee approved legislation to allow for national no-excuse absentee voting, help voters track absentee ballots, and prevent a state’s chief elections official from serving on federal campaign committees.
“Democracy flourishes when all Americans have a fair chance to participate in elections and have confidence that the process is fair,” said Davis, a member of the committee. “I’d like to thank Chairman Brady and my colleagues on the committee for passing this package of bills.”
The bills passed by the committee were:· Universal Right to Vote by Mail Act (H.R. 1604) - Allows all eligible voters nationwide to vote by mail for any reason in federal elections. Currently, 22 states and the District of Columbia restrict an eligible voter’s ability to vote by mail, also known as absentee. The bill also removes the doctor’s note, notary and privacy information requirements imposed by some states.
· The Absentee Ballot Track, Receive and Confirm (TRAC) Act (H.R. 2510) - Helps states, through a grant program, to establish absentee ballot tracking systems. An absentee ballot tracking system allows voters to easily find out, online or through an automated phone system, whether an elections office has sent out a ballot, whether a completed ballot has arrived back at the registrar’s office and whether the ballot was actually counted. Davis worked with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), also a member of the committee, in sponsoring H.R. 2510.
· The Federal Election Integrity Act (H.R. 512) - Prohibits the chief elections official of a state from serving on federal campaign committees or engaging in other political activity, such as fundraising, on behalf of federal candidates in any election over which the official has supervisory authority. The action by the House Administration Committee clears the bills to be considered by the full House of Representatives. |
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New from States -
South Dakota
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By Kim Zetter
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June 05, 2009 |
This article was posted at Wired.com's Threat Level blog and is reposted here with permission of the author.
A software glitch in an optical-scan voting system added nearly
5,000 ballots to the tally of a South Dakota election this week. The
error was discovered only after the election results were called,
according to the Rapid City Journal.
The problem occurred when officials combined tallies from optical-scan machines
in three precincts in Rapid City in Pennington County. The tabulation
software used to combine the totals added 4,875 phantom ballots to the
count. The system indicated 10,488 ballots were cast when, in reality,
only 5,613 ballots existed, indicating that the glitch wasn’t simply a
matter of doubling the votes.
Oddly, no one caught the problem during the initial count. City
election officials hadn’t bothered to keep a manual tally of the number
of ballots cast as voters handed them in and they were scanned into the
machines — a procedure designed to catch exactly such a discrepancy. It
was only after someone began to question the high voter turnout for the
small election, that officials went back to count the ballots.
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New from National Issues -
Internet Voting
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By Ed Felten, Princeton University
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June 05, 2009 |
This article was posted at the Freedom to Tinker blog and is rreposted here with permission.
Yesterday I chaired an interesting panel on Internet Voting at CFP.
Participants included Amy Bjelland and Craig Stender (State of
Arizona), Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat (Overseas Vote Foundation) Avi
Rubin (Johns Hopkins), and Alec Yasinsac (Univ. of South Alabama).
Thanks to David Bruggeman and Cameron Wilson at USACM for setting up the panel.
Nobody advocated a full-on web voting system that would allow voting
from any web browser. Instead, the emphasis was on more modest steps,
aimed specifically at overseas voters. Overseas voters are a good
target population, because there aren't too many of them -- making
experimentation less risky -- and because vote-by-mail serves them
poorly.
Discussion focused on two types of systems: voting kiosks, and Internet transmission of absentee ballots.
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New from National Issues -
Internet Voting
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By John H. Fund
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June 04, 2009 |
"Internet voting is potentially prone to
manipulation and distortion."
This article originally appeared in the Hawaii Reporter.
Penny wise, pound foolish. That looks to be the result of Honolulu's
experiment with saving money by holding the first all-digital election,
in which voters cast ballots over the Internet or by phone for their
Neighborhood Commissions. The result? An 83% drop in voter turnout.
Only 7,300 people bothered to register their preferences last week,
down from 44,000 who voted in the last elections two years ago.
"That is of great concern to me. It is disappointing, compared to two
years ago," said Joan Manke, who headed the commission that supervised
the Internet voting. "This is the first time there is no paper ballot
to speak of."
Granted, the use of electronic voting did save money, but it appears
people are unwilling to embrace the concept yet. But that does not faze
Bob Watada, a consultant for Everyone Counts, which sold city officials
on using its equipment for the election.
All-digital voting "gives access to a lot of people who haven't had the
access, and you don't have the hanging chads, you don't have the
miscounted absentee ballots, you don't have the ballots lost," he told
reporters.
Well, maybe. But with fears about the security of electronic voting
machines still widespread, Internet voting is potentially prone to
manipulation and distortion. In addition, something is lost when an
election becomes a mere exercise in clicking a computer mouse.
We have come a long way from when voting was held on the same day by
having citizens of all social classes gather in the same spot to cast
their ballots. I am not sure if we want to dispense with that tradition
so easily -- especially if it leads to fewer votes being cast.
John Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal |
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New from National Issues -
Internet Voting
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By Barbara Simons and Justin Moore
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June 04, 2009 |
Recently the Huffington Post published an article about Hawaii's recent Internet and phone-based elections ("America's Newest State Holds America's Newest Election"). The article presents an optimistic and patriotic view of the Everyone Counts (E1C) election system that allows voters to cast their ballots from their home computers or over the phone. It was written by E1C executive Aaron Contorer and is effectively a marketing piece for E1C that exaggerates the scope of the election, overlooks or insults other election methods, and glosses over the formidable technical challenges and dangers posed by the electronic submission of voted ballots.
The election in Honolulu was for neighborhood board members, and thus was not covered by Hawaii's public election laws. That matters because Hawaii's election laws, fortunately, require a voter-verified paper ballot and a post-election hand audit of a percentage of these ballots. Since such verification and audits are impossible with a purely Internet-based voting system, there is no legal way to use the E1C system under current Hawaii state law.
Nevertheless, because this small election is being used to promote Internet voting generally, and because Internet voting schemes are being proposed across the United States, the issue demands thorough discussion.
In response to multiple efforts to allow voting over the Internet in major elections, many of our nation's prominent technology experts have signed a statement cautioning against adopting Internet-based voting systems without first understanding and guarding against the numerous and well-documented dangers. This is not because, as Mr. Contorer suggests, those opposing Internet voting find "[t]he introduction of technology to any process ... scary". The signatories to this statement are not at all intimidated by technology; in fact many are established experts in voting systems who are most certainly aware of the major risks associated with Internet voting.
The article asserts that since we are able to conduct banking and commerce over the Internet, we should also be able to vote over the Internet. This is a common misconception (or misrepresentation) that is often made when attempting to support Internet-based voting. Banks spend considerable time and money to ensure the security of our assets, yet there are still risks. Identity theft and fraud affect millions of Americans and cost billions of dollars each year. When we can detect such fraud it is because we are able to track our money through each transaction from start to finish, including the people associated with those transactions.
However, elections by their very definition disallow this type of explicit end-to-end auditing. Voters must cast their ballot in secret and not be able to prove to others how they voted. Election officials must not be able to tie votes to citizens except in very narrow circumstances as carved out by law. The lack of these basic protections make Internet-based voting a dangerous idea and place it so far from the realm of Internet banking or commerce as to make the author's point moot.
There are significant security issues that any vendor must address before declaring such a system fit for public elections. Yet the author glosses over these security issues raised by Internet voting, referring several times to "military-grade encryption." It is a well-known marketing technique of voting system vendors to tout the strength of their encryption because it sounds impressive. But the fact is that encryption is only a secondary part of any electronic security. It does nothing at all to protect against insider attacks, denial of service attacks, various forms of spoofing, viruses, or many kinds of ordinary software bugs.
Even the most secure military computer networks have been compromised, including a recent serious breach of the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project.
Even in the absence of malicious adversaries, software, especially a networked system such as the one E1C sells, is fundamentally difficult to get right. Aviation and military software, written to standards requiring development efforts tens or hundreds of times as costly as voting software, is undergoing constant review and upgrades.
Americans deserve the best electoral system available. There are many options for making elections more accessible, secure, and efficient, and the Internet will have a role to play. Current possibilities that show promise include the easier maintenance of voter registration records and the distribution of blank absentee ballots. But we should not subject our democracy to the costs or risks of current Internet-based voting schemes. Rather than rushing to implement Internet voting systems because we don't want to be "stuck in the past," we should instead focus on improving our elections using innovations that build upon mature and well-understood technologies. Let's leave the bluster and insults behind, and build a reliable, accurate, and secure electoral system of which we can all be proud. |
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New from National Issues -
Voting Rights
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By ACLU Press Release
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June 01, 2009 |
A Coalition Of Voting Rights Advocates Challenged Illegal Voter Registration Procedures
A coalition of voting rights groups and attorneys today praised a decision by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to block the use of flawed and racially discriminatory voter registration practices by Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel. In a letter sent this past Friday from Civil Rights Division Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King to Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, the DOJ informed the state that it had failed to establish that two new voter verification procedures did not have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Georgia is required to submit new voting procedures for federal review before they are implemented.
The voting rights coalition, which includes the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, Georgia attorney Brian Spears and the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, represents Cherokee County resident Jose Morales, the Georgia NAACP, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and the Center for Pan Asian Community Services in a federal lawsuit against Secretary Handel. That lawsuit, which was filed last October in Atlanta, forced Secretary Handel to submit the contested voter registration procedures for Section 5 review, which Handel had refused to do despite the federal requirement.
"We are pleased that the Department of Justice correctly found that Secretary Handel's verification procedures are inaccurate and discriminatory," said Jon Greenbaum, legal director, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "Preventing these procedures from going into effect will prevent Secretary Handel from keeping many thousands of eligible Georgia voters off the rolls."
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