AP: Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a measure Monday allowing automatic voter registration in Illinois, a move that comes a year after he rejected a similar measure over concerns about voter fraud. Illinois joins more than half a dozen other … Continue reading
Category Archives: election administration
William Hicks, Seth McKee, and Dan Smith have written this article for State Politics & Policy Quarterly. Here is the abstract: We examine state legislator behavior on restrictive voter identification (ID) bills from 2005 to 2013. Partisan polarization of state lawmakers … Continue reading
Interview with Harri Hursti. … Continue reading
John Myers for the LAT: A lawsuit filed in a California appeals court on Thursday alleges the ballots of as many as 45,000 voters weren’t counted last November because of the state’s flawed rules for verifying the signatures of those … Continue reading
This 27-page opinion and order explains the basis for the trial court’s decision to hold that Texas’s voter identification law may not be enforced at all. It is an important ruling, but a more important one is yet to come … Continue reading
AP: A conservative firebrand promoting President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud oversees a Kansas election system that threw out at least three times as many ballots as any similarly sized state did, fueling concerns about massive voter … Continue reading
News and Observer: Investigators from the N.C. State Board of Elections determined that Rawling, 59, ran or ordered others to run provisional ballots through tabulators more than once and made manual changes to the ballot count so the results of … Continue reading
Darren Grant for Public Choice: Primary and runoff elections in Texas provide an ideal test of the ballot order hypothesis, because ballot order is randomized within each county and the state offers many counties and contests to analyze. Doing so … Continue reading
Pema Levy for Mother Jones: Christy McCormick, a Republican commission member, said in a statement the next day that Russian interference was a hoax used by the federal government to gain access to state-run election systems. “This declassified report was not about … Continue reading
Franita Tolson: Husted is, therefore, more than just a case about statutory interpretation. It also implicates the Constitution’s allocation of power to the states and the federal government under the Elections Clause. As both the Arizona and Ohio laws illustrate, allowing … Continue reading
Looking forward to reading this last one of the trilogy. Book descriiption: Today a general mood of pessimism surrounds Western efforts to strengthen elections and democracy abroad. If elections are often deeply flawed or even broken in many countries around … Continue reading
Doug Chapin with exciting news. … Continue reading
The Arizona Republic reports. … Continue reading
Sue Halpern NYRB. … Continue reading
Sun Sentinel: A ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom isn’t expected for several months. The ACRU, which filed the suit a year ago, is being represented by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Both are conservative organizations that say their … Continue reading
R. James Woolsey and Brian Fox NYT oped. … Continue reading
Mic: A watchdog group is pushing the state of Georgia to explain why more than 591,000 people were struck from the voter rolls. “Each of the 591,548 voters affected by the move had already been on the state’s ‘inactive’ registration … Continue reading
Lawrence Journal-World: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach does not appear to have conducted any public information campaign, as required by law, to publicize the fact that the state recently shifted the election cycle for municipal elections from the spring … Continue reading
Gizmodo: When 650 thousand Tennesseans voted in the Memphis area, they probably didn’t expect their personal information would eventually be picked apart at a hacker conference at Caesars Palace Las Vegas. … Continue reading
I spoke with Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio. … Continue reading
Josh Douglas oped. … Continue reading
New & Observer: Republicans and voting-rights advocates went head-to-head over a proposal that would have people make fact-based claims when they allege voters have committed fraud. The State Board of Elections has proposed a stiffer standard for elections protests that … Continue reading
WSJ: Officials from a dozen states and the federal government took preliminary steps this week toward more formal cooperation regarding election-security efforts at a two-day meeting near Albany, N.Y. Attendees at the meeting Tuesday and Wednesday discussed coordinating information-sharing about … Continue reading
Politico: Verified Voting, Simons said, plans to partner with Braun and several other groups that have not yet been named to aggressively campaign for increasing DHS grants that would pay for states to make specific upgrades to their election security … Continue reading
The Nation: Recently, policy-makers have begun examining automatic voter registration (AVR). It has generated a lot of excitement, and rightly so. New research from Demos examines the effects of Oregon’s recent adoption of AVR on the level and composition of turnout in … Continue reading
KQED: Hackers successfully penetrated state-run online voter registration systems in 2016, triggering confusion and heated exchanges between voters, poll workers and poll watchers during California’s June 7 primary, Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin said Friday. “I think that pretty … Continue reading
LAT: Local election officials are looking for some good hackers. As part of an effort to create a new voting system, Los Angeles County computer specialists are headed this week to Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacking conventions, where … Continue reading
Texas Observer reports. … Continue reading
Eliza Newlin Carney: That’s why a Kobach-launched database dubbed the Interstate Crosscheck Program, designed to eliminate registrations in more than one state, is so riddled with errors. The program “promotes purging registration records that share a common name and date … Continue reading
Letter. … Continue reading
Quite a wow from Time: President Obama’s White House quietly produced a plan in October to counter a possible Election Day cyber attack that included extraordinary measures like sending armed federal law enforcement agents to polling places, mobilizing components of the military … Continue reading
Celeste Katz notes some good news. As I wrote Sunday: Meanwhile, House Republicans are moving to abolish the United States Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal agency that serves as a clearinghouse for information about best voting practices and certifies the security … Continue reading
Texas dragged its feet in implementing the district court’s interim remedy in the Texas voter id case, which allowed voters without one of the right (narrow) forms of identification to vote in Texas elections. The state was so bad at … Continue reading
Watch. … Continue reading
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy blogs. … Continue reading
I have posted this new draft on SSRN (for the pre-APSA event, Protecting Electoral Security and Voting Rights: The 2016 U.S. Elections in Comparative Perspective). Here is the abstract: If the “voting wars” which have broken out across the post-2000 election … Continue reading
As I noted in my New York Times piece this weekend, Since 2005, I have tracked the rate of election litigation, which tells us how often plaintiffs go to court to fight over election rules. My latest research demonstrates that election litigation in … Continue reading
WSJ: To understand the scale of the hacking attempts against election systems in the 2016 presidential election, consider South Carolina. On Election Day alone, there were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the state’s voter-registration system, according to a postelection report by the … Continue reading
I have written this piece for the New York Times Sunday Review. It begins; The strength and integrity of the American electoral process are under tremendous strain, but the worst may be yet to come. In just the past few … Continue reading
Must-read Celeste Katz: When President Donald Trump’s “voter fraud panel” holds its first meeting on July 19, members of the public won’t be able to speak. Instead, the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, which has enraged and frightened plenty of Americans by requesting detailed … Continue reading
WDRB: The nation’s Secretaries of State sent a clear message to the White House. Members of the National Association of Secretaries of State meeting in Indianapolis unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution underscoring the Constitutional rights of of states to administer local, … Continue reading
NBC News reports. … Continue reading
News and Observer: North Carolina’s election oversight board has been vacant for more than a month, but the N.C. Supreme Court is poised to decide if Gov. Roy Cooper must make appointments to the new board designed by Republicans. Cooper … Continue reading
DOJ’s position: Now that Texas passed a new law softening its voter id law, there’s nothing more the court should do. No need to find Texas acted with a discriminatory purpose, no need for an injunction, further judicial supervision, or … Continue reading
HuffPo: Former Department of Justice officials and voting advocates are seriously alarmed over a DOJ letter sent to states last week that they say could signal a forthcoming effort to kick people off voter rolls. This comes as national attention … Continue reading
Becker oped in The Hill: I led an effort several years ago, working with election officials of both parties and experts to solve the problem of inaccurate voter records, most of which are not due to fraud at all, but … Continue reading
Colorado Politics: A group of Georgia voters and a Colorado-based watchdog organization filed a lawsuit late Monday asking a judge to overturn the results of last month’s 6th Congressional District special election and scrap the state’s voting system, Colorado Politics has … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: Yet despite the hassle — and the significant cost — Phillips, Denton County’s elections administrator, is looking forward to this fall, when he will implement the county’s newest voting plan: a complete return to the paper ballot. The … Continue reading
Government Executive: A spending bill from the House Appropriations Committee unveiled Thursday would give the Election Assistance Commission 60 days to terminate itself. The small agency was created after the tightly contested 2000 presidential election. It has an annual budget of about … Continue reading
Bloomberg BNA: Republicans in Congress are supporting provisions in a new House spending bill that would eliminate the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), restrict the Internal Revenue Service from limiting political activities of tax-exempt organizations and churches, and bar the … Continue reading