WaPo: Elections officials in Pennsylvania are being inundated with complaints from first-time and absentee voters having difficulty registering to vote or requesting a mail ballot, fueling anxiety in the critical swing state just as the 5 p.m. Monday deadline approaches … Continue reading
Category Archives: election administration
NYT: In Georgia, the state’s voting machines have malfunctioned in three consecutive elections this year alone.In Pennsylvania, election officials are staring down possibly the biggest ballot processing backlog in the country, with no means of even touching the ballots until … Continue reading
Havard’s Ash Center: As we approach the final weeks of the election campaign, Secretaries of State – particularly in swing states – face tremendous pressures as they fulfill their responsibilities to provide a smooth, inclusive, and safe election that delivers a … Continue reading
Dayton Daily News reports. … Continue reading
Jane Harman and Deborah Pryce CNN oped. … Continue reading
WaPo: While the lines were longest in the state’s heavily Democratic strongholds in and around Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah and Macon, hours-long waits were also reported in smaller, more conservative counties, including Lowndes and Floyd, officials said. By the evening, at … Continue reading
138-page opinion. It was pretty clear that’s where this one was heading, and I have serious doubts that the Trump campaign is going to do better if they try to appeal this up the appellate ladder. As I explained in … Continue reading
Columbus Dispatch: Franklin County elections officials are scrambling to figure out how many voters received the wrong ballot in the mail as thousands more lined up across the state for the first day of in-person early voting.Problems with a thus-far undetermined portion … Continue reading
New guide from the Cleveland Clinic and the Bipartisan Policy Center. … Continue reading
LA Times: More than 2,000 Los Angeles County voters got mail-in ballots with a very egregious flaw: no way to vote for U.S. president.The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office confirmed late Monday that about 2,100 “faulty ballots” were mailed … Continue reading
Justin here. I’m tracking the litigation over election issues related to COVID-19 … and the list of cases just hit 275. (The Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project also has a really useful sortable database of these cases, with more info.) A … Continue reading
Another example of a district court case favorable to voting rights gorups getting reversed on appeal. … Continue reading
ABC News: A whirlwind of competing lawsuits and legal actions has thousands of ballots in North Carolina in limbo.With just a few weeks left until the Oct. 27 deadline to request absentee ballots, the North Carolina State Board of Elections … Continue reading
Philly Inquirer: Pennsylvania’s online system for registering to vote and applying for and tracking mail ballots crashed over the weekend, triggering an outage that stretched for more than 24 hours and prompted frustration from voters weeks before critical election deadlines.As … Continue reading
USA Today: Battleground states that could decide the presidential election face a shrinking window to take action to allow the processing of absentee ballots before Election Day to cut down on the days or even weeks it could take to have final … Continue reading
New article in Valley Lawyer by Brad Hertz (starts on p. 28). … Continue reading
Philadelphia Inquirer: The much-anticipated debut of early voting got off to a rocky start in Philadelphia on Tuesday, as technical issues left voters frustrated and confused while they waited in line, unable to cast their ballots.Philadelphia opened the first seven of 15 … Continue reading
NYT: President Trump’s proclamations at Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud, as well as frequent tweets along those lines, aren’t helping.“I have never been so upset about a sitting president attempting … Continue reading
Philly Inquirer: A laptop and several memory sticks used to program Philadelphia’s voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse in East Falls, officials confirmed Wednesday, setting off a scramble to investigate and to ensure the machines had not been … Continue reading
Release: A federal court issued a decision today that will help protect the health and right to vote of medically vulnerable Alabamians.The ruling in People First of Alabama v. Merrill means Alabama voters will not need a witness or notary to vote by mail if they have … Continue reading
New report from the Election Reformers Network. … Continue reading
AP: A federal judge ruled on Monday that every polling place in Georgia must have at least one updated paper backup list of eligible voters to help keep long lines from forming on Election Day if electronic pollbooks used to … Continue reading
AP reports. EVERY state right now should put in place rules beforehand as to how to judge whether a poorly marked oval is counted, and how. … Continue reading
AJC: Georgia election officials said Saturday they found a programming error on the state’s voting touchscreens that caused a row of candidates in the 21-person U.S. Senate special election to disappear at times when flipping back and forth between screens.The problem will … Continue reading
Axios: And Trump advisers are ready to challenge the legitimacy of the election results, especially with the expected late wave of Democratic mail ballots. They’re also ready to defend against Democratic lawyers who mount their own election challenges. One Trump campaign … Continue reading
Politico: The death of a third-party candidate running against freshman Democratic Rep. Angie Craig has triggered the postponement of this year’s vote and scheduleda special election next year in her Twin Cities-area district.The Minnesota secretary of state’s office confirmed Thursday … Continue reading
Very good bipartisan news: The Michigan Legislature gave final approvals Thursday to a bill that would give local clerks 10 hours extra before the election to begin processing absentee ballots, a nod to the expected uptick in absentee voting in … Continue reading
AP: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who has refused calls to expand mail-in voting in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic, was sued Wednesday by prominent members of his own party who now want to halt the biggest change he instead ordered … Continue reading
In the past I’ve found Secretary Frank LaRose of Ohio to be interested in bipartisan and commonsense approaches to election administration. He was one of the two keynotes (along with Michigan SOS Jocelyn Benson) at our February conference, “Can American … Continue reading
ProPublica: The previously unreported attack on Hamilton illustrates an overlooked security weakness that could hamper the November election: the vulnerability of email systems in county offices that handle the voting process from registration to casting and counting ballots. Although experts … Continue reading
Bart Gellman: There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens … Continue reading
Politico reports. … Continue reading
Michigan Advance: Citing concerns that President Donald Trump could attempt to declare victory prior to all absentee votes being counted in the Nov. 3 presidential election, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said Tuesday that he will “basically be shutting down city … Continue reading
Watch: This webinar, recorded on September 21, 2020, covers international perspectives relevant to the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election. Co-sponsored by The UCI Office of Global Engagement, UCI Law and the Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy, this … Continue reading
The federal case that had been put on hold pending the resolution of a parallel case in the Pa Supreme Court is now back on following the Pa. Supreme Court’s resolution of related state law claims. Here’s the Trump Campaign’s … Continue reading
Justin here. I’m tracking the litigation over election issues related to COVID-19 … and the list of cases just hit 250. (The Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project also has a really useful sortable database of these cases, with more info.) A … Continue reading
“60 Minutes” reports. … Continue reading
NYT: Ahead of an election that seems certain to have the most litigated voting rules ever, Democrats won important cases over the past week in the critical states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.But appearances can be fleeting. Even with only … Continue reading
NYT oped from Nate Persily and Charles Stewart. “Step 1: Know how and when you’re going to vote.” … Continue reading
Axios reports. … Continue reading
Listen. … Continue reading
You can find the opinion here. I expect this will be appealed as have other Michigan fights over the ballot rules. One notable finding: One of the issues in this case concerns evidence—or lack thereof—of voter fraud and threats to … Continue reading
Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial: Contrary to LaRose’s own pledges to do everything possible to help county elections officials prepare for an election in which record numbers are choosing to vote absentee, LaRose has used the power of his office improperly … Continue reading
Jon Ward: If Pennsylvania has a repeat performance of its primary, America is in trouble.Election results in Pennsylvania’s June 2 primary took weeks to be announced. And because it is such a crucial swing state, a similar delay in the Nov. 3 … Continue reading
WPR: The violations were: Seven reports of an undeliverable Election Day registration confirmation postcard.Four reports of an individual attempting to vote twice in the same election by trying to cast a ballot in two different municipalities.Three reports of an individual providing … Continue reading
Governing: With seven weeks left until voters step into the ballot box — and even less time until voters can begin sending in absentee ballots — Michigan lawmakers are considering changes to the state’s election laws in anticipation of record … Continue reading
This is quite odd. The court decision was a declaratory judgment that the one drop box per county rule was arbitrary and contrary to law. The court did not back up the declaration with an injunction because SOS LaRose has … Continue reading
Josh Douglas and Michael Zilis have posted this draft on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Americans overwhelmingly support various safety measures at polling places for the November 2020 election. Issues like face mask requirements, social distancing, and sanitizing polling equipment … Continue reading
AP: A Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission advised a Green Party representative about who to hire as an attorney after its presidential nominee was denied ballot access in the key battleground state, records obtained by The Associated Press … Continue reading
Zach Montellaro for Politico: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are expecting huge surges in ballots cast by mail in 2020, like most states preparing to vote during the coronavirus pandemic. But all three Midwestern battlegrounds, which President Donald Trump flipped in … Continue reading