Doug Chapin blogs. … Continue reading
Category Archives: election administration
Ricard DeMillo for Bloomberg View: Yet we must also worry about elections threatened from within. While Georgia’s secretary of state has failed to reckon with the external threat, local officials have failed us, as well. Instead of acting like guarantors … Continue reading
Rachel Maddow discussing issue (and my blog post) starting around the 8 minute mark. Earlier: Alabama SOS Merrill Still Won’t Engage on the Merits Over Whether Roy Moore Can Get a Recount If He Pays for It, But Disparages Attorneys … Continue reading
Montgomery Advertiser: It was not immediately clear Wednesday if Moore could request a recount at the current margins. State law allows candidates to challenge recounts outside the automatic trigger if they are willing to pay the costs. Merrill suggested in interviews … Continue reading
As I explained in this post, it looks like Roy Moore cannot request a recount in the Alabama Senate race if the margin is greater than 0.5% (there’s an automatic recount for the 0.5% range). Last night on CNN, Alabama … Continue reading
In a prior post, I noted that under Alabama law, if the margin between the candidates is within 0.5% there is an automatic recount at state expense. That statute is Section 17-16-20. But AL SOS Merrill, pointing on CNN to a … Continue reading
[See this updated post instead of what is below.] Roy Moore just said he is not conceding and will wait to see if there is a recount. An automatic recount is triggered if the race is within 0.5%. Right now, … Continue reading
Steven Rosenfeld: The Alabama Supreme Court stepped into Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones on Monday night by blocking a lower state court’s ruling earlier in the day that ordered election officials to take … Continue reading
AL.com: A judge directed Alabama election officials Monday afternoon to preserve all digital ballot images in Tuesday’s hotly contested U.S. Senate special election. An order granting a preliminary injunction was filed at 1:36 p.m. Monday – less than 24 hours … Continue reading
Scott Douglas NYT oped: The Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday is not just about the choice between Doug Jones and Roy Moore. It’s also about a voter suppression campaign that may well sway the result of a close race. … Continue reading
In this forthcoming piece on the 2016 voting wars in the U.S., I describe in some detail the debacle that was the Detroit recount, part of the (eventually abandoned) recall attempt by Jill Stein after the 2016 presidential election. The … Continue reading
WaPo editorial: THE MYSTERY of how, why and by whom a few hundred Northern Virginians were registered to vote in the wrong state legislative districts in this fall’s elections does not look as though it will be resolved soon. For one thing, … Continue reading
Press release: A Republican, a Democrat, an Independent and a minister yesterday asked a Montgomery circuit court judge to order protection of election materials from next week’s special Senate election. The voters say these materials are essential for verifying the … Continue reading
WAAY: Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill confirms some sample ballots in one Alabama county were marked for Democratic US Senate candidate Doug Jones. This comes after Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore’s campaign wrote an open letter to Merrill … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: In Texas’ bid to keep its voter identification law intact, it was its legal foes — lawyers representing voting and civil rights groups and individual voters of color — who faced a tougher line of questioning Tuesday before … Continue reading
WaPo: More than a half-dozen technology experts and former national security officials filed an amicus brief Tuesday urging a federal court to halt the collection of voter information for a planned government database. Former national intelligence director James R. Clapper Jr., one … Continue reading
Answer from Alabama Secretary of State: Can I cast a write-in vote for my favorite cartoon character or superhero? No. Write-in votes will be counted only for live, human beings who are eligible to serve in the office for which … Continue reading
This straight ticket option on a ballot with one candidate race will allow voters to not have to say they voted for Moore while still voting for Moore (via BAN). … Continue reading
Details. … Continue reading
AL:com: The Alabama Secretary of State’s office said today it has learned that some voters are receiving erroneous messages telling them that they are not registered to vote when, in fact, they are registered. Two organizations that are contacting voters … Continue reading
Richmond Times Dispatch: Virginia’s State Board of Elections on Monday certified the results of two Fredericksburg-area House of Delegates elections, despite Democrats asking the board to delay the process because 147 people voted in the wrong House district. The elections … Continue reading
I have written this piece at Slate. It begins: This could be a very bad week for voting rights in the United States. On Friday, a federal consent decree to stop potential voter suppression by the Republican National Committee—in place … Continue reading
Oh boy if this pans out: In Fredericksburg, Elias said those results appear to show about 668 votes at precincts that Virginia’s redistricting statutes say are in outgoing House Speaker Bill Howell’s 28th District that instead were cast in Republican … Continue reading
Sam Levine for HuffPost: After over two months of silence, there was a blip of activity from President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission this week when a commissioner sent an email requesting information on voter fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice and suggested the agency … Continue reading
Doug Chapin: A tight House of Delegates race in Stafford County (Quantico), Virginia is generating frustration and controversy after the county board of elections voted to exclude 55 absentee ballots that arrived in the election office on Wednesday morning after … Continue reading
Idaho Statesman: Ada County elections employees have been leery of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program since 2014 — the year they got burned by it. It was Idaho’s first year as a member. Ada County received a list of … Continue reading
BuzzFeed reports. … Continue reading
Big from Gizmodo on Crosscheck: A program overseen by the head of President Trump’s so-called “election integrity” commission—which is now largely a tool for driving conspiracy theories about “massive voter fraud” in the United States—is placing the personal data of millions of … Continue reading
WaPo: Republicans, who held 66 of 100 seats in the lower house of the state legislature, saw their majority melt away Tuesday in a Democratic wave that felled at least 12 GOP incumbents and flipped three open seats to the … Continue reading
Extensive CS Monitor report. … Continue reading
HuffPost: Alabama’s chief election official suggested nearly 700 people in the state may have committed voter fraud in an August runoff election, but a new review of records by local election judges shows that number is considerably exaggerated. John Merrill (R), the … Continue reading
John Fortier and Don Palmer for the BPC. … Continue reading
A three judge state court, on remand from the NC Supreme Court, unanimously held that the changes to the Election board rules came up as a nonjusticiable political question, meaning the courts were without the power to reach the merits. … Continue reading
AP: A government watchdog group is suing Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, accusing her office of allowing voters to be illegally purged from the state’s voting roles. Common Cause Indiana is asking a federal judge to put a stop … Continue reading
Arizona Republic: Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan broke the law when her office failed to mail publicity pamphlets to hundreds of thousands of voters in time for the May 2016 special election, a state-appointed investigator has concluded. But, the investigator found, there is no provision in state law … Continue reading
AP: A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned. The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at … Continue reading
Cleveland.com: A grand jury voted not to charge 17 Cuyahoga County residents who were among dozens of non-U.S. citizens identified by Ohio Sec. of State Jon Husted’s office as illegally voting or registering to vote in past elections. The grand jury voted late … Continue reading
Lexington Herald-Leader: The recently fired assistant to the director of the State Board of Elections alleged in a letter to some members of the board that the office of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes improperly gathered voter information from … Continue reading
News from Israel: Israel is on guard against hacking ahead of the next general election, one of its most senior cyber security officials said, identifying Iran as posing the greatest overall risk to the country’s cyber security. The government is … Continue reading
Think Progress: Merrill told ThinkProgress in an interview Tuesday that he thinks the individuals who switched party affiliations should be sent to prison for five years and hit with a $15,000 fine, the maximum allowable punishment for the low-level felony. … Continue reading
WNYC: The New York City Board of Elections is admitting it broke state and federal law when it improperly removed voters from the rolls ahead of the presidential primary last spring, including more than 117,000 voters in Brooklyn. That’s according … Continue reading
Witness list for Wed. hearing. … Continue reading
ProPublica: The voter-fraud-checking program championed by the head of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity suffers from data security flaws that could imperil the safety of millions of peoples’ records, according to experts. Indivisible Chicago, a progressive advocacy group … Continue reading
Chicago Tribune: Voter rights advocates are pushing Illinois election officials to withdraw from a longtime multistate voter registration database over questions of accuracy, security and voter suppression. The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program is aimed at cleaning voter records and … Continue reading
Pam Fessler for NPR: Efforts to boost public confidence in U.S. elections are proceeding on two parallel tracks right now. One is moving slowly, but steadily. The other is hardly moving at all. Most of the attention has gone to … Continue reading
Adam Liptak’s Sidebar column on the upcoming Husted oral argument at the Supreme Cour.t … Continue reading
NYT editorial. … Continue reading
Details on Oct. 24 meeting. … Continue reading
Capitol Fax: * Indivisible Chicago… Crosscheck is an interstate data-sharing program between 28 states. Participating states send their entire voter file to a server in Arkansas. Kansas then downloads all of this data, runs a rudimentary name matching algorithm, and then … Continue reading
Chapinblog. … Continue reading