The Mobile Press Register reports: Elections officials have announced plans to launch a rapid new online vote reporting-system statewide for November's elections, following a largely successful test during Tuesday's primary runoffs.

The Election Night Reporting system is billed by the Secretary of State's Office as a way to bring Alabama elections "into the 21st century." It is expected to offer voting results, turnout information and possibly precinct-by-precinct data, all online and updated regularly through the night after polls close. ...

On Tuesday, election officials sought to test the system in Alabama's four largest counties: Mobile, Montgomery, Jefferson and Madison.

Apparently, the night's biggest difficulty came from the county in which the Secretary of State's Office is located. "Unfortunately, we weren't able to participate," said Trey Granger, director of elections for Montgomery County. "Our Internet went down." -- Read the entire story --> New Alabama election system to show statewide results online | al.com

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: District At­torney Randall Houston has for­warded his report about poten­tial voting irregularities during Autauga County's June 1 prima­ry elections to the secretary of state's office.

The issue came to light when a voter's name appeared on the list of those having cast absen­tee ballots when the person did not vote absentee. The Autauga County board of registrars made a complaint to the district attor­ney's office, alleging that voter had cast three votes in the pri­mary, Houston said.

"My office has determined that there was no indication of voter fraud in Autauga County, and there was only one vote cast by the person who was alleged to have voted several times," Houston wrote in a letter accom­panying the report. "However, it appears there was an error with the computer system which monitors absentee voting. There are three possible scenar­ios as to what might have oc­curred in the Autauga County primary and they include: un­lawful human intervention, simple human error, or a mal­function in the computer soft­ware."

Houston wrote that the secre­tary of state's office is best equipped to determine if any problems with the computer system exist. -- Read the whole story --> Autauga County report on voting irregularities sent to secretary of state's office | montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: After a subcommittee of the Alabama Democratic Party ruled against putting state Rep. James Thomas into a runoff with the man who beat him in the primary, the legislator's at­torney filed an appeal with the party. ...

Thomas, D-Selma, currently represents District 69, which includes all or part of Autauga, Dallas, Lowndes and Wilcox counties. He was elected in 1982.

Political newcomer David Colston won the June 1 prima­ry by 120 votes with 51 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff. Thomas finished with 32 percent.

Thomas and his attorney ex­pressed concerns about the number of absentee ballots and about one precinct in which voters were supposed to re­ceive different ballots depend­ing on their district, according to Sabel, but 302 people in one precinct did not receive the bal­lot that should have included District 69. Read the whole story --> Legislator to appeal Democrats' decision to deny runoff in District 69 | montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser

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The Opelika-Auburn News reports: Ten days after the Democratic primary, former Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford remains unsatisfied with the outcome. Ford has filed a complaint with the Alabama Secretary of State's office, citing "voting irregularities" in the Senate District 28 primary and is calling for an investigation.

Clayton pharmacist Billy Beasley, who represents the 84th District in the Alabama House (Barbour, Bullock and Russell counties), ran away with the contest, taking 48 percent of the votes (10,340), compared to Ford?s 5,976. ...

Ford charged that his name was temporarily left off of the ballot at the Jeter Street polling place in Opelika; that ballot boxes were seized by the Russell County Sheriff?s Department before they were counted last Tuesday by County Coordinator Arthur Sumbry; that 290 absentee ballots were not counted in Russell County; and that "a gross misuse of absentee ballots" occurred in Bullock County.
Read the whole story -->Ford alleges voter fraud in Democratic primary | Opelika-Auburn News

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports:
With the primary just eight days away, Secretary of State Beth Chapman is investigating allegations of voter fraud in at least four Black Belt counties.

Chapman's office announced Monday that it has received complaints of alleged voter fraud in Greene, Macon, Perry and Wilcox counties. ...

Chapman did not specify in her release how many com­plaints she's received, but her chief of staff, Emily Thompson, said in some counties there have been multiple complaints.

Thompson said the secretary of state's voter fraud unit has contacted the U.S. Department of Justice about the allegations and is working with the state to stop voter fraud statewide. Read the whole story --> Chapman: We will continue to fight voter fraud | montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser

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The BBC is reporting:
# Hundreds of people have been turned away from polling stations and police have been called at some counts.
# The Electoral Commission says it will be undertaking a "thorough review" of what happened in constituencies where people were unable to vote. -- BBC News - Election 2010 - Live coverage - General Election 2010

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The Prattville Progress reports: Three high-ranking members of Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman's office arrived in Prattville Thursday morning to conduct a basic training session for members of the Autauga County Board of Registrars. ...

Jean Brown, Chapman's chief legal advisor; Ed Packard, her supervisor of voter registration, and Adam Thompson, the secretary of state's director for the federal Help America Vote Act, remained calm as accusations flew back and forth between registrars Bobby Wise, Joan Hamburger and Keith Kuzma, the board's chair.

The major bone of contention was a growing stack of voter application forms that have not been processed, and the inability of Wise and Hamburger to gain access to the office's street files, which dictate in which geographic district each voter is to be registered.

Kuzma, who was appointed by the county commission in October 2008 as manager of the street files, filed last week an "informal complaint" against his fellow registrars for their refusal to process applications until they were granted access to the information for which Kuzma was ultimately responsible. -- Read the whole story --> montgomeryadvertiser.com :: Accusations fly during training session

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Politico reports: A Congressional Research Service report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee says ACORN hasn?t violated any federal regulations the last five years.

The report, released by Judiciary Chairman John Conyers? (D-Mich.) staff Tuesday evening, also reports that the undercover filmmakers that allegedly caught employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now breaking the law may have violated state law in their filming operation.

Separately Tuesday, a New York federal judge rejected a motion from the Justice Department to reconsider a decision that ruled a bill that stopped funding for ACORN as an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

The CRS report is part of a slew of government inquests into the group, which was swept up in a number of embarrassing situations in the last several months. The Government Accountability Office recently opened its own report and Republican Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Steve King of Iowa have led the charge in demanding more investigations and hearings into the group. -- Read the whole report --> CRS report: ACORN didn't break law - - POLITICO.com

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The Birmingham News reports: A Birmingham neighborhood president and former council member who unsuccessfully ran for city council this year said he filed a lawsuit this morning against the city because he wanted to bring it to the attention of the courts that the election was illegal.

"It's not about me or the seat," said Leroy Bandy, president of the Central Pratt neighborhood. "I just want it done right."

Bandy and another former District 9 council candidate, David Russell, filed the suit in Jefferson County Circuit Court this morning, minutes before the swearing-in ceremony began for the new council. In the suit, they contend the city should have gotten the state legislature to amend the Mayor-Council Act before changing election dates.

A hearing has been set for Dec. 3 in the case, Bandy said. -- Read the whole story --> Former city council candidate says he filed suit over election because 'I just want it done right' | Breaking News from The Birmingham News - al.com

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Ed Packard, supervisor of voter registration for the State of Alabama, suggests several amendments to the State's election laws regarding emergency balloting procedures, changed voter ID procedures for absentee voters, and confidentiality of voter information. -- Read the whole piece --> It's time to amend voting laws | Birmingham News Commentary - al.com

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President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 yesterday (28 October 2009). One part of the act is the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, reproduced below.

Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act

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The Mobile Press-Register reports: City attorney Terry Davis recommended the city appeal part of a judge's decision in the ongoing challenge of last October's mayoral vote, a move one councilman called "bull crap."

Davis said an order issued a week ago by specially appointed retired Mobile County Circuit Judge Edward McDermott declared challenger Pete Wolff III winner of the election, but incumbent Mayor Larry Fluker was "in the process of appealing" the ruling. ...

Davis said part of the order "changed the way Evergreen has been doing elections since time began" and that the city should appeal that portion of the ruling.

"It said that instead of using the voting list we have used and the process we have used for a number of years, we should have been using the secretary of state's voter list," Davis said. "The court directed in this order the city must use a process we have never used before, and we raised an objection in court that he did not rule on."

Davis said the secretary of state and the league of municipalities agreed with the way the city conducted the election, and he believed the judge was wrong. He said it would cost the city money to change the process. -- Read the whole story --> Evergreen city attorney advises appeal of judge's ruling in mayoral election challenge - al.com

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The Birmingham News reports that the City of Birmingham finally received preclearance for its earlier election date. For earlier stories on this, see here, here, and here.

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The Birmingham News reports: Just a week remains before Birmingham city officials must either set early August city elections or revert to the original fall date. Candidates, city officials and city attorneys still don't know when the election will take place.

Federal approval is needed to change the election to Aug. 25, which the council voted to do to meet a new federal rule that requires six weeks between the election and any runoffs. But to have the election that day, the city would have to receive the OK from the Department of Justice by June 26.

Department of Justice officials recently interviewed council members, the city attorney and officials in Mayor Larry Langford's office about the proposed change. Justice Department approval would have to be received 60 days before the proposed new election date. Otherwise, the City Council and school board elections will be Oct. 13. Read the whole story --> Birmingham city election date still unsettled, week remains until early date possibility dies - al.com

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The Birmingham News reports: The city last week filed its formal request with federal officials to move up the City Council and school board elections - more than two months after the City Council voted for the change. ...

However, the delay in filing the request has some asking when the actual election will be held, when qualifying will open and when the real campaign season will begin.

Council and school board elections were set for Oct. 13, but the council in February voted to move the elections to Aug. 25. Cooper had said the change was needed because of provisions in the federal Help America to Vote Act that requires six weeks between the election and any runoffs. That provision was mandated to allow absentee and overseas ballots to be counted.

Under Birmingham's schedule, there have been only three weeks between the general election and runoffs. -- Birmingham, Alabama, files request with U.S. to shift election date months after council voted for change - al.com

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Jacob Soboroff, Executive Director, Why Tuesday? wrote me:

Unbelievable! Because of you all, our question for President Obama about fixing America's broken voting system has shot onto the Ask The President front page in just half a day! We now need ONLY 750 votes to make it to the TOP SPOT so President Obama will be asked about election reform TONIGHT during his prime-time news conference!

Click here to give our question a thumbs-up so that President Obama will be asked about election reform TONIGHT!

If all of you vote, President Obama just might address how to fix America's broken voting system TONIGHT! You have the power!

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: About 75 percent of Montgom­ery County's registered voters cast their ballots in the presi­dential election, but director of elections Trey Granger thinks there still is work to be done.

He continues looking to make improvements that will get more people out to vote, bring the community together and ed­ucate voters. ...

It's been four years since he took the position as director of elections, and he said the Mont­gomery Election Center finally is beginning to brand itself as a valuable community resource. ...

Right now, the Election Cen­ter is sending people out to com­munity centers, civic clubs and church groups throughout the county, Granger said.

"They don't know where they are supposed to vote, or who is on the ballot -- all those sorts of things that people put off until as late as the day of an election," Granger said. "Anything we can do proactively to help people be­gin to do that is something that is a priority for us." -- Granger: Election system still needs work | montgomeryadvertiser.com | Montgomery Advertiser

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TPM Muckraker reports: Eleven Democratic senators led by Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island today introduced a bill designed to make GOP operatives think twice about launching indiscriminate challenges on people's right to vote. The bill would outlaw challenges to voting eligibility that are based on unreliable information.

The bill appears targeted at the GOP's "caging" tactic -- in one manifestation of which, Republicans in Michigan and other states considered challenging the eligibility of voters who were on a list of people whose homes were subject to foreclosure.

It would also appear to cover the GOP effort we reported on in New Mexico last fall, in which the state party publicly announced its intention to challenge 28 mostly Hispanic voters, based on a grab-bag of suspicions. All of those voters were later shown to be valid. ...

[From the press release:] The Caging Prohibition Act would mandate that anyone who challenges the right of another citizen to vote must set forth the specific grounds for that voter's alleged ineligibility and describe the evidence to support that conclusion, under penalty of perjury. Following allegations in 2008 that Republican Party officials in Michigan, Florida, Indiana, and Ohio were considering challenging the eligibility of voters who were on a list of people whose homes were subject to foreclosure, the sponsors updated last year's version of the Caging Prohibition Act to explicitly prohibit challenges based on the foreclosure status of a voter's residence. -- TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo | Dem Bill Would Crack Down On Voter Caging

Note: This year's bill is not on Thomas yet, but last year's bill is.

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The Birmingham News reports: In other business, the council in Tuesday's 7½-hour meeting unanimously approved moving the city and school elections to August. City attorney Lawrence Cooper said the city is violating federal voting rules because there were only three weeks between the general election and any runoffs. Federal law now requires six weeks between the election and runoffs, to allow absentee and overseas ballots to be counted.

City Council and school board elections originally were set for Oct. 13, but now will be held Aug. 25. -- The Birmingham City Council rejected three plans proposed by Mayor Larry Langford - al.com

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Politico reports: For weeks, Republican leaders have warned that widely reported problems with fake voter registrations could result in a flood of phony votes in pivotal states.

But Ronald Michaelson, a veteran election administrator and member of the McCain-Palin Honest and Open Election Committee, said in an interview that he could not name a single instance in which this had occurred.

“Do we have a documented instance of voting fraud that resulted from a phony registration form? No, I can’t cite one, chapter and verse,” he said. ...

Republican elected officials and lawyers for state Republican parties have made similar claims in court and in statements to the press. So far, however, they have failed to provide significant supporting evidence.

A review of prosecutors’ statements and documents filed by Republicans in the most serious new cases alleging voter fraud shows that none offer an example in which a fraudulently registered person managed to cast a valid vote. While several cases argue that such frauds are possible, none sketched a scenario for how massive numbers of people could fake registrations and then vote. -- GOP offers scant proof of voter fraud

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The Obama-Biden campaign has produced videos for Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Virginia. The state videos at short and mention the polling hours and some forms of acceptable ID.

There is also a national video entitled "How to prtect your vote and spot dirty tricks." Topics covered on the national video are the (1) myth of voter fraud, (2) voter caging, (3) misinformation,and (4) intimidation.

All videos suggest going to VoteForChange.com for more information. That site not only gives the address of a polling place, but a map showing the shortest route to the polling place (although the one for my polling place does not seem to know that College Ave. is one-way during certain hours of the day). -- Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need | State Election Protection Videos

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ProPublica's VoteWatch culls breaking news on voting issues from around the web, focusing in particular on key swing states where problems (ranging from voter registration to machine malfunction to alleged fraud or suppression) are anticipated. -- ProPublica VoteWatch - ProPublica

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The Washington Post's Trail blog reports: The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will send 800 federal observers and justice department staff to 59 jurisdictions in 23 states on Election Day to monitor polling places and elections.

Jurisdictions will include Chesterfield County, Va., which had ballot shortages and delays during the presidential primary that received nationwide attention during Congressional hearings earlier this fall, when voters said the problems cost them a chance to cast ballots.

In 2004, 1,090 observers traveled to 25 states for Election Day. During the deadlocked 2000 election, there were 317 observers watching for problems.

The department is required to monitor polling places covered by the Voting Rights Act or related court orders. In addition, its Civil Rights Section will send watchers to counties in several battleground states.

In September, in response to concerns about voter intimidation raised by numerous civil rights and voting rights groups, the department agreed not to use criminal prosecutors as elections observers, as had been done in the past with observers from U.S. Attorneys' offices. -- Justice Dept. Will Send 800 Monitors to Polls | The Trail | washingtonpost.com

Note: the story has a list of counties with federal monitors.

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NPR announces: If you have any voting problems, NPR wants to hear about them. As part of Twitter Vote Report – a project born out of a collaboration of volunteer software developers, bloggers and the NPR social media desk – we'll be monitoring voting irregularities, everything from long waits and broken voting machines to polling places with insufficient ballots.

An interactive map will track election problems reported by voters. The map will display eyewitness reports as they come in, so most of them will not be verified by NPR. As reporters look into some of them, you'll find stories on our voting problems page.

Here's how to participate:

Text: Send a text message to 66937. Begin the message with the phrase #votereport, include your ZIP code and a very brief description of the problem.

Twitter: Send a tweet with the phrase #votereport making sure to include your zip code and a description of the problem.

iPhone and Google phone: Download the iPhone app from the education section of the iPhone app store. For the Google phone, go to the Android Market and search for "votereport."

YouTube: In conjunction with PBS and YouTube's Video Your Vote project, you can upload a video to report any problems you experience.

Also, if you need more detailed instructions, visit Twitter's help page and the project's home page, where you will find a short video tutorial and lengthier explanation of how these tools are being used.

Tags For Your Submissions

#zip code to indicate the zip code where you're voting, for example, "#20002"

L:address or city to drill down your exact location. Example: "L:1600 Pennsylvania Ave. D.C."

#machine for machine problems, Example: "#machine broken, using prov. ballot"

#reg for registration troubles. Ex.: "#reg I wasn't on the rolls"

#wait:minutes for long lines. Example: "#wait:120 and I'm coming back later"

#early if you're voting before Nov. 4

#good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience -- Vote Report: Help NPR Identify Voting Problems

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Danielle Citron writes on Concurring Opinions: A cherished right in the United States is to vote in secrecy. But what if we don't want to exercise that right in secret? What if in this age of insecure and inaccurate e-voting machines we want to record our votes and our voting experiences, say with cell phones or video cameras? According to The New York Times, many voters plan to do just that, making it likely that this election will be the "most recorded in history."

Much like the online communities that came together to expose flaws in Diebold's source code in 2003 after activist Bev Harris discovered the code on an unsecured website, Web 2.0 platforms are emerging for the sole purpose of recording voting problems. Jon Pincus's Voter Suppression Wiki will let voters collaborate to collect examples of problems with voting, from exceptionally long lines or more direct actions to intimidate voters. Allison Fine and Nancy Scola are using Twitter to monitor voting problems. YouTube has created a channel, Video Your Vote, to encourage submissions. Even The New York Times has a Polling Place Photo Project on its website. Such public participation will no doubt generate crucial information for states and the Election Assistance Commission to study and may even enhance the legitimacy of this election. -- Concurring Opinions

Note: please visit Concurring Opinions for the links in Citron's post.

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Heather Gerken writes on Balkinization: A few months ago, I blogged about a new strategy for "popular monitoring of popular elections" – Harvard professor Archon Fung's proposal for harnessing the power of the wiki to monitor election problems by creating "a real-time 'weather map' of voting conditions across the country." The site is now up and running, and I urge Balkinization readers to check it out. By enabling thousands of citizens to rate their voting experiences and identify problems, the site should be extremely helpful for election officials and campaigns trying to prevent modest glitches from developing into genuine problems, while enabling reporters to do a better job of reporting on conditions on the ground. Very few election systems in the U.S. have the capacity to engage in real-time monitoring, but myfairelection.com could well develop into such a system.

In addition to these practical advantages, myfairelection.com may help with the core problem in election reform -- it's tough to get reform passed. One of the main reasons election reform is hard to pass is that election problems are largely invisible to the average voter. Discarded ballots, long lines, machine breakdowns, registration problems -- these all occur routinely during the election process. But voters only become aware of these problems when a race is close enough for the problem to affect the outcome. Given that most races are not competitive, that's a bit like tracking annual rainfall by counting how often lightening strikes. Because voters learn about election administration problems in a haphazard, episodic fashion, politicians have no incentive to pay attention to them unless there's what Rick Hasen calls an "electoral meltdown."

The magic of Fung's idea is that it makes election problems visible even in the absence of an electoral meltdown. If enough people participated so that coverage is thorough and consistent -- and that’s a big “if,” as Fung recognizes -- the site would be a great way to draw people's attention to routine election problems. -- Wiki-ing our way to better elections

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Election Protection's Our Vote site is up and running already. You can find it here.

Election Protection has added a new wrinkle -- Our Vote Live -- "the official site documenting the groundbreaking voter assistance work of the Election Protection Coalition. Here, you can review in real-time reports of voter assistance calls made to 866-OUR-VOTE, Election Protection's toll-free hotline."

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Description: Voter fraud, faulty equipment, voter purges, 3rd party registration problems-These are just some of the issues plaguing elections past and present. Law.com blogger and host, J. Craig Williams welcome experts, Attorney Brenda Wright, Legal Director of Demos, and Attorney Edward Still a Birmingham lawyer who specializes in voting law and founder of the blog, Votelaw.com. They will discuss legal issues surrounding voter’s rights, voter fraud, election litigation and what can and can't be done to recruit voters. -- LegalTalkNetwork, MP3 Link, and WMA Link.

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Computerworld reports: The Web site of Ohio's secretary of state was shut down after it was hacked Monday, according to the site and local media reports. The site was later restored, but with only limited functionality.

Tuesday morning, the site devoted to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner still displayed a terse notice of the breach. "Due to security concerns experienced by the Secretary of State's website, full functionality of the website has been suspended to protect the integrity of state records and data," the message read. "Full functionality will be restored when we are assured that all data has been protected and restored to acceptable levels of security." ...

The incident is only the most recent involving Brunner's office. Ohio's State Highway Patrol is also investigating a suspicious package that was delivered to her office last week, as well as threatening phone calls and e-mails, the newspaper reported yesterday. -- Breach cripples Ohio Secretary of State's site

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The Bill Moyers Journal on PBS reported: As election day approaches and both Democracts and Republicans warn that the other side may be planning to tamper with the results, voters may be wondering if their vote will be counted properly.

Mark Crispin Miller joins Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL to discuss challenges legitimate would-be voters face at the polls — from voter purges to electronic voting — and reforms the U.S. should make to ensure everyone's right to vote is protected and every vote is counted. -- Bill Moyers Journal

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Gerry Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center, says, "Silence about protecting the right to vote is simply not acceptable." The fact that Mukasey has not said anything about the leaked reports that the FBI is investigating ACORN says a lot to Hebert. -- The Hill Blog» Blog Archive » Campaign Justice?

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes in Rolling Stone: But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad3 never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote4 — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations5. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states6, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations7. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes8, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots9. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast10.

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count11.

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 200412 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes13. -- Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

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The Monroe Journal reports: Jack Botta has filed an official protest against poll worker Deloise Dailey in last Tuesday’s Runoff Election in Frisco City.

“The difference in the vote totals was so great that this may not have been a significant factor in the outcome; however, the principle of a private, secret ballot was violated,” Botta said in his protest letter.

In the Oct.7 election, Sue Starr defeated Botta in the mayoral race by 79 votes, 262-183. ...

“The actual voting machine was placed in a position next to the poll workers and Deloise Dailey situated herself on a high stool near the voting machine which allowed her to read the ballots as they were entered into the machine,” Botta said. -- Botta accuses poll worker of intimidating voters

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NPR's Morning Edition has this story: Millions of newly registered voters are expected to turn out for next month's presidential election. Supporters of Barack Obama have been e-mailing and text-messaging them about what not to wear. Depending on what state they live in, if voters show up at the polls with a candidate's name on a T-shirt or hat, they could be turned away.

The elections office in Horry County, S.C., bustles as people stream in on one of the last days to register to vote.

Elections manager Lynn Marlowe says if one of these new voters tries to cast a ballot wearing a political hat, button or T-shirt, he or she will be asked to take it off or cover it up. -- At Polls In S.C., Don't Wear Politics On Your Sleeve : NPR

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The Caucus blog of the New York Times reports: If voters in swing states think they are inundated with campaign ads, they are unlikely to find refuge in the military.

The Pentagon has a spirited “Get Out the Vote” campaign going for soldiers, sailors and airmen. Whether they are in Iraq, Afghanistan, stateside or in any other foreign post, the troops would have a diffiult time avoiding one of the 40 “Get Out the Vote” television ads being broadcast over the American Forces radio and television network in 177 countries.

The ads also appear on the Pentagon’s Defenselink Web site and on the Pentagon Channel, which is broadcast at more than 400 stateside military installations. Overall, the ads are running as often as 140 times a day.

The ads are non-partisan and merely urge members of the military to register and to vote. And some of them do it with a flair. -- Military Being Urged to Vote

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The Huntsville Times reports: Secretary of State Beth Chapman agreed Thursday to give the Alabama Democratic and Republican parties updated voter lists as part of a settlement reached in Montgomery County Circuit Court. ...

The Democratic Party sued Chapman after she had refused to give the party a second voter list this year, saying that she would have to charge the party 1 cent for each of the state's more than 2.94 million registered voters on the list, or more than $29,000.

Judge William Shashy said he would sign an order later to validate the agreement.

But in an agreement worked out behind closed doors, Chapman said she would give the list to both parties by 5 p.m. Thursday. And she agreed from now on to give both parties copies of the voter lists before each primary election and each general election. -- Parties will get new list of voters - al.com

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A Washington Post story begins: Faced with a surge in voter registrations leading up to Nov. 4, election officials across the country are bracing for long lines, equipment failures and confusion over polling procedures that could cost thousands the chance to cast a ballot.

The crush of voters will strain a system already in the midst of transformation, with jurisdictions introducing new machines and rules to avoid the catastrophe of the deadlocked 2000 election and the lingering controversy over the 2004 outcome. Even within the past few months, cities and counties have revamped their processes: Nine million voters, including many in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Colorado, will use equipment that has changed since March.

But the widespread changes meant to reassure the public have also increased the potential for trouble.

"You change systems and throw in lots of new voters, and you can plan to be up the proverbial creek," said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a consulting firm that has tracked the voting changes. -- High Turnout, New Procedures May Mean an Election Day Mess

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A post on Doc's Political Parlor begins: Most of the municipal elections Alabama this year have gone smoothly however, some still remain in doubt

In Hodges, one vote seperates the two candidates and a petition for a recount has been filed. There are also concerns that election procedures were not followed. Related story at the Times Daily.

In Centre, a lawsuit has been filed by three candidates over possible mishandling of absentee ballots. -- Election contests and small town Alabama

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The Hill reports: Hurricane Gustav is disrupting the GOP convention and a hotly contested Republican primary in Louisiana.

GOP candidates hoping to succeed retiring Rep. Jim McCrery (R) have suspended their campaigns, and their primary, set for Sept. 6, may be postponed because of the storm.

State officials are drafting contingency plans for potentially delaying the election one week, to Sept. 13, or further if necessary.

Jacques Berry, a spokesman for the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office, said in a telephone interview that setting the date any later than the 13th would cause the state to also move the primary runoff, which is set for Oct. 4. -- TheHill.com - Hurricane puts La. primaries on hold

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A Birmingham News report begins: A Jefferson County probate court judge on Monday asked Attorney General Troy King whether the county can hold a nonbinding advisory election to consider solutions to the sewer debt crisis.

The Office of the Attorney General has issued previous opinions that counties don't have the authority to include an advisory referendum on a ballot.

The county is asking residents to vote Nov. 4 whether they prefer filing the largest municipal bankruptcy on record or taking other measures to avoid defaulting on the county's $3.2 billion sewer debt.

Judge Alan King sent a one-page letter to the attorney general's office asking:

"Does Jefferson County have the legal authority to include an advisory referendum on the general election ballot absent specific legislative authority, or otherwise."

"If Jefferson County has the legal authority, does Jefferson County have the authority to pay additional costs, if any, such as the printing of ballots, that are associated with the referendum?" -- Judge asks Attorney General King if Jefferson County can hold sewer debt vote - al.com

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From the Campaign Legal Center: The Campaign Legal Center today launched the Voters’ Rights Protection Project, to provide generic drafts of potential court filings to individuals, organizations, and political parties who must resort to the courts to protect the fundamental rights of citizens to vote. In a letter today to both major parties and copies to the respective presidential campaigns (full text below), the Legal Center announced the project and said it would make the legal templates publicly available. Information announcing the project is also being sent to national, state, and local party committees, as well as third party organizations and numerous community and grassroots organizations from coast to coast.

“The legal documents being drafted by the Legal Center will facilitate and expedite the process of securing court orders against those state or local election officials or others who take actions harmful to the electorate,” said J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director and Director of Litigation for the Campaign Legal Center

The use of such legal templates, will allow individuals, as well as advocacy groups, political parties, and candidates to obtain pre-election or Election Day relief for a host of problems, including extension of polling hours, insufficient ballots, and prevention of voter harassment or intimidation. -- Election Day Voter Protection Initiative Launched

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A New York Times editorial begins: Much about the presidential election is up in the air, but one thing is certain: voters will have trouble casting ballots on Election Day. In a perfect world, states and localities would handle voting so well that the public could relax and worry about other things. But elections are so mismanaged — and so many eligible voters are disenfranchised — that ordinary citizens have to get involved.

Since the meltdown in Florida in 2000, a large, nonpartisan coalition called Election Protection — made up of civil rights groups, good-government organizations and major law firms — has been doing critical work in standing up for voters. It is an effort that anyone who cares about democracy should get behind.

The civic books say that any eligible voter who registers in time can cast a ballot on Election Day. The reality is not so simple. People file registration forms that are not properly processed, or their names are wrongly purged from the voter rolls. They are required to present photo ID even when the law does not require it. They arrive at polling places and find machines that do not work properly or lines that take hours to get through. -- The Right to Vote

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From a press release: Today the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) unveiled its new comprehensive non-partisan voter awareness program "Prepared to Vote."

"Prepared to Vote is a program designed to raise every voter s awareness of the many obstacles in the electoral process that could affect their right to vote in the 2008 election. Through Prepared to Vote we hope to ensure that every eligible voter cases a vote that counts " said John Payton LDF President and Director-Counsel.

Inspired by the Freedom School Model from the Civil Rights Movement, the Prepared to Vote Campaign seeks to empower communities of color by providing essential information prior to Election Day. Program components include community-based workshops, the dissemination of user-friendly materials, meetings with election officials, and a dynamic educational website preparedtovote.org.

The Prepared to Vote program will help reveal and address voting barriers, such as voter ID requirements, voter purges, faulty voter rolls, poorly trained elections officials, felon disfranchisement statutes and a host of other potential obstacles. -- NAACP Legal Defense Fund -- Issues

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Andrew O'Hehir writes on his Beyond the Multiplex blog: I don't mind that Dorothy Fadiman's film "Stealing America: Vote by Vote" raises once again the massively vexed question of whether the 2004 presidential election was fixed. That spectral possibility lingers in many people's minds, retains at least a general outline of plausibility and, thanks to the electronic voting systems in use in so much of the country, can never be conclusively proven or disproven. I do mind, though, that "Stealing America" is a clumsy if well-intentioned work of recycled propaganda, a mixture of hard evidence, random anecdote and far-flung inference that may convince some viewers that a clear verdict can be rendered on that impossibly murky event.

To those who've been following the work of investigative journalist Greg Palast, New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller and activist attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the last four years, there's not much that's new in "Stealing America." (Palast and Kennedy appear in the film, and Miller is listed as a consultant.) Fadiman has compiled a greatest-hits collection of problems, anecdotes, rumors and theories about what happened in 2004, with only the briefest lip service paid to the crucial information that hardly any of that year's problems were new, even the ones that appeared to be unique. -- The stolen election of 2004: Chapter 53 - Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com

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The House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing today on Hearing on Lessons Learned from the 2004 Presidential Election. J. Gerald Hebert will be testifying. I have an advance copy of his testimony here.

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The New York Times reports: With millions of new voters heading to the polls this November and many states introducing new voting technologies, election officials and voting monitors say they fear the combination is likely to create long lines, stressed-out poll workers and late tallies on Election Day.

At least 11 states will use new voting equipment as the nation shifts away from touch-screen machines and to the paper ballots of optical scanners, which will be used by more than 55 percent of voters.

About half of all voters will use machines unlike the ones they used in the last presidential election, experts say, and more than half of the states will use new statewide databases to verify voter registration.

With Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy expected to attract many people who have never encountered a voting machine, voting experts and election officials say they are worried that the system may buckle under the increased strain. -- Influx of Voters Expected to Test New Technology - NYTimes.com

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Heather Gerken writes on Balkinization: Archon Fung, one of the most interesting thinkers at Harvard's Kennedy School, has just come up with an intriguing idea for monitoring elections: a teched-up, wiki-based system for reporting problems on election day. It's modeled on the award-winning British site, fixmystreet.com, where people report maintenance problems (graffiti, potholes, broken street lights), locating the problem on a map and often attaching photographs to the entry. The site is interactive; it reports when a problem has been fixed and maps where current problems are so that you can figure out how things are working in your neighborhood. As you'll see from his introductory site, Fung envisions a much bigger version of this idea -- a national "weather map of election conditions" that would show you where the biggest problems are occurring based on real-time entries by trained election monitors and everyday citizens. You could then drill down into the map, figuring out exactly where problems were occurring in your state, city . . . even your polling place. The visuals would look something like this map of gas prices. ...

The magic of Fung's idea is that it makes election problems visible even in the absence of an electoral meltdown. If enough people participated so that coverage is thorough and consistent -- and that's a big "if," as Fung recognizes -- the site would be a great way to draw people's attention to routine election problems. Indeed, I suspect that the site would be highly addictive. Like many others, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading the updates on election problems that Talking Points Memo and Ben Smith's Politico blog provided during the primaries. Those blogs, however, could provide only piecemeal information to their readers. By harnessing the power of the wiki, Fung's "myfairelection" site could provide coverage that is both more systemic (giving you a sense of the big picture) and yet more personalized (letting you see what's going on in your own neighborhood). -- Popular Monitoring of Popular Elections

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The Birmingham News reports: With qualifying beginning today for municipal elections, cities are finding out they have an unexpected expense - at least $50 a day for city clerks to handle absentee ballots.

In 2006, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill stating absentee election managers - which in most cases are city clerks - are entitled to receive the pay for 45 days prior to the election. The pay is for duties such as processing ballots, updating voter lists and verifying the identification of voters. By law, clerks can decline the pay.

Some cities say they just found out about the expense a few days ago, which has left them scrambling to set up provisions to pay the unbudgeted expense. -- Cities finding out they have an unexpected expense - at least $50 a day for city clerks to handle absentee ballots- al.com

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The Herald reports: Electoral law needs a major overhaul, clearer accountability to voters, with more flexible investigation powers and penalties to take on illegal fundraising, according to Scotland s chief elections adviser.

John McCormick, the member of the Electoral Commission with a special remit for Scotland, has spoken out about the confusion over responsibility when elections go wrong and votes are not properly counted.

His comments come in advance of a major report by the UK-wide commission setting out which lessons have to be learned for the whole of Britain s electoral system from the ballot paper and counting fiasco at last year s Scottish elections. Having recently taken on the commissioner role, the former controller of BBC Scotland told The Herald that election law is currently too fragmented, with 19th- century legislation being used to meet 21st-century technology and voter expectations. -- Election Law Needs To Be Overhauled Says Adviser from The Herald

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The Birmingham News reports: A Jefferson County judge said Thursday he wanted to resolve by April a legal dispute over this month s District 1 Jefferson County commission special election.

Until then, certification of William Bell as winner of the Feb. 5 special election will remain on hold and George Bowman, Gov. Bob Riley s appointee to the post, will remain in the District 1 seat.

Three voters filed suit in Circuit Court in late January saying the Feb. 5 election date was illegal. They contend it should be held during the statewide primary vote on June 3. Qualifying for Jefferson County offices in that race begins in April.

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court blocked the county s election commission from certifying Bell as winner of the Feb. 5 election.

On Wednesday, the state s high court ordered Circuit Judge Scott Vowell to make a ruling on whether the lawsuit has any legal merit.

Since the case was filed, Bell has been added as a defendant and another candidate, Fred Plump, has joined the case to argue that the Feb. 5 election date was legal. -- Jefferson County judge sets April deadline for ruling on William Bell commission seat dispute- al.com

Disclosure: Jim Blacksher and I represent Mr. Plump.

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The Birmingham News reports: Jefferson County voters challenging the Feb. 5 County Commission special election have renewed their call for a judge to declare the vote illegal before William Bell is certified Friday as the winner.

Court documents filed Tuesday and Wednesday in Jefferson County Circuit Court and the Alabama Supreme Court say certifying the election would cause irreparable harm to voters.

Circuit Judge Scott Vowell said Wednesday he does not plan to change an earlier ruling that he lacks the legal authority to hear the case. The state's high court did not respond Wednesday.

Bell, a Birmingham city councilman, won the special election for the District 1 seat after five other candidates failed to force a runoff.

Under Alabama law, Bell will be declared the official winner Friday at noon if a court does not intervene. -- Challenge of William Bell's Jefferson County Commission election renewed- al.com

A copy of the supplemental memo filed by the plaintiffs in Working v. Jefferson County Election Commission is here.

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The Washington Post reports: As icy weather descended on the region late yesterday, Maryland gave voters an extra 90 minutes to reach the polls, while Virginia and the District shut down on time. ...

In Maryland, after receiving complaints about road conditions for several hours, the State Board of Elections obtained a court order at 7 p.m., an hour before that state's closing time, to extend voting hours.

Judge Ronald A. Silkworth wrote that he extended the hours "to provide a remedy that is in the public interest and protects the integrity of the electoral process."

Only provisional ballots were cast after 8 p.m., and they will not be counted for a week. Even so, the margins of victory for Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) appeared so decisive that uncounted ballots were unlikely to change the outcome. Some local contests, however, might yet hinge on those ballots. -- Voters Persevere Despite Ballot Shortages, Lines - washingtonpost.com

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports: John McCain is still narrowly winning Saturday's Republican presidential caucuses, state GOP Chairman Luke Esser said late Monday.

The overall numbers shifted little in the latest count with 96 percent of precincts reporting, although Esser said party officials had to make adjustments to initial tallies because of incorrect reporting from Snohomish, Benton, Grant and Jefferson counties. ...

Esser's declaration Saturday night that Arizona Sen. McCain had won the precinct caucuses, based on reports from 87 percent of precincts statewide, infuriated the campaign of the announced runner-up, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. ...

With 96 percent of results in, Esser said McCain had 3,191 precinct delegates (25.6 percent) to Mike Huckabee's 2,898 (23.3 percent) -- a difference of just 293.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul won 21 percent of Washington's precinct delegates, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who dropped out of the race this past week, got 15 percent, according to the latest numbers from the GOP. -- Errors surface in initial GOP results

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Fox News reports: Mike Huckabee is challenging the results of the Washington state Republican caucuses, his campaign announced Sunday, after accusing the state party chairman of calling the election for John McCain before all the votes were counted.

The campaign will be pursuing a full investigation, including sending in lawyers to join those already on the scene in the state, officials told FOX News.

Washington State Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser announced late Saturday that McCain had won the 2008 Republican caucuses in the state with 87.2 percent of precincts reporting. McCain had 25.5 percent over Huckabee’s 23.7 percent in that race.

Esser issued a statement congratulating McCain on a “hard-fought win,” and Huckabee on a “strong second-place finish.”

Ed Rollins, Huckabee campaign chairman, directly challenged Esser’s move, saying the count was incomplete because the other 12.8 percent of precincts could tip the scales since McCain was beating Huckabee by only a couple hundred votes. -- Huckabee Challenges Washington Caucus Results

Note: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer just called me for a quote. They are working on a story that Esser has now announced he will count all the votes.

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The Birmingham News reports: A Jefferson County judge declined to act Friday on an emergency request to block officials from certifying the votes in Tuesday's special election for the Jefferson County District 1 commission seat.

In a four-page order, Circuit Judge Scott Vowell said he did not have jurisdiction in the case because plaintiffs Patricia Working and Rick Erdemir did not serve the state attorney general's office or candidates seeking the commission seat.

Vowell's ruling stemmed from a request filed Thursday evening on behalf of the two District 1 residents who sued the Jefferson County Election Commission and Probate Judge Alan King, Sheriff Mike Hale, Circuit Clerk Anne-Marie Adams, and the commission members. Vowell heard arguments Friday morning.

The commission set the election to fill the seat left vacant after Larry Langford became Birmingham's mayor. -- Judge does not rule in emergency bid to keep Jeffco officials from certifying District 1 commission vote results- al.com

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The Birmingham News website reports: A Jefferson County judge Friday afternoon did not decide on an emergency request to block officials from canvassing the votes in Tuesday's special election for the Jefferson County District 1 commission seat.

In a four-page order, Circuit Judge Scott Vowell said he did not have jurisdiction in the case because the plaintiffs did not serve the state attorney general's office or candidates seeking the commission seat. The judge put the case on hold.

Vowell's ruling stemmed from a request filed Thursday evening on behalf of two Jefferson County voters, Patricia Working and Rick Erdemir, who filed suited against the Jefferson County Election Commission.

Vowell heard arguments this morning. -- Judge decides he has no jurisdiction in Jeffco commission case - Breaking News from The Birmingham News - al.com

Disclosure: I represent Fred Plump, one of the candidates in the special election.

Download the complaint and the order here.

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The New York Times reports: The advocacy group Human Rights Watch on Thursday said that the Bush administration was giving lip service to the promotion of democracy around the world by endorsing suspect elections while allowing human rights violations in those countries to go unchecked.

In a scathing report, the organization blamed the United States and Europe for undermining human rights by allowing autocrats to pretend they are democratic. The report cited Bahrain, Jordan, Nigeria, Russia and Thailand as acting “as if simply holding a vote is enough to prove a nation democratic, and Washington, Brussels and European capitals played along.”

Russia, Jordan and “even China,” the group said, have “gotten into the game” of merely using the word democracy to claim real democratic credentials. -- Rights Group Says U.S. Is Too Eager to Endorse Suspect Elections

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Alan Lange writes on Y'all Politics (and provides copies of the relevant pleadings): On January 9, Governor Barbour's legal team unleashed a load of legal documents and answers in Hinds County Circuit Court for the lawsuit that Attorney General Jim Hood has filed over the election to replace former Senator Trent Lott. Jim Hood's office has gone against the advice of both Governor Barbour and outgoing Secretary of State Eric Clark, who both believe that a November 2008 special election is the appropriate measure for replacement. Of course, Governor Barbour has appointed former Representative Roger Wicker to the post. The Democratic Party and Hood have both claimed that a special election must be held within 90 days (approximately March) to satisfy the requirements of Mississippi Code. The political ramifications are substantial as the Democratic Party and its two main candidates, former Governor Ronnie Musgrove and former US Rep. Ronnie Shows, do not relish a long and expensive fight against a sitting US Senator. Plus with the litany of charges in the trial lawyer community, stalwart donors for Democratic candidates may not answer fundraising calls from Democratic candidates. -- Yall Politics

Hat tip to Old Southwest for the link.

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The Scotsman reports: SNP ministers hope a majority of MSPs will back plans this week to transfer responsibility for Scottish elections to Holyrood.

Parliament will debate the issue on Thursday as part of the long inquest into last year's voting fiasco which resulted in more than 140,000 spoiled ballot papers.

Ron Gould, the Canadian expert brought in to review the chaos, concluded that responsibility for elections should be handed over to the Scottish Parliament.

This is something the SNP is keen to secure as it would allow MSPs to change the voting system for Holyrood and make the Scottish Parliament more autonomous.

The Gould Report will be debated by MSPs this week and Scottish Government sources made clear last night that they wanted to send a message to the UK government that Holyrood wants control of its own elections. -- Holyrood hopes for remit to run Scots elections - The Scotsman

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Pacific Magazine reports: Opposition leaders in the Marshall Islands accused the government of illegally counting hundreds of ballots 10 days after all other domestic votes had been tabulated, erasing victories of four opposition candidates in closely fought races, with the incumbent ruling party candidates winning. ...

But adding to the confusion over who has won and lost, nearly three weeks after the election, the government¹s Electoral Administration has not issued a final unofficial result, and the government¹s official Web site has not updated since incomplete preliminary results were posted November 27, although all votes have now reportedly been counted.

Poor management of the election on November 19 and tabulation delays and lack of timely release of voting data to the public have marred the national election, the eighth since constitutional government began in 1979.

Opposition Aelon Kein Ad (Our Islands) party officials said they still had the required 17 senators-elect to form a government when Parliament meets in early January, and will also file court challenges to what they say was improper ballot counting nearly three weeks after the vote. -- Pacific Magazine: Marshalls Election Mess Gets Worse

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The Herald reports: Douglas Alexander, the minister criticised over the Scottish election fiasco, last night demanded an apology from those politicians who had "impugned his integrity".

After the publication of a critical report into the voting shambles earlier this week the former Scotland Secretary, who is now at the International Development Department and Gordon Brown's General Election co-ordinator, was accused by MPs of "having his finger in the till" and of "attempted gerrymandering".

But yesterday Ron Gould, the Canadian election expert who wrote the report, said in a letter to the Electorial Commission that he had never suggested specific actions were taken by ministers to advance their own party's interests.

n the light of Mr Gould's comments Mr Alexander now wants an apology from politicians including Tory leader David Cameron, shadow Scotland Secretary David Mundell, First Minister Alex Salmond and Scottish LibDem MP Alistair Carmichael. -- The Herald : Politics: MAIN POLITICS

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The Herald reports: Scotland needs to have a national returning officer and one layer of government controlling elections, according to a hard-hitting review of the fiasco that hit the May 3 ballots this year. It is understood that Ron Gould, the Canadian elections expert who has led a five-month review of what went wrong at the Holyrood and council votes, will report this morning that the fractured nature of elections in Scotland needs to be confronted.

Instead of 32 returning officers, each having autonomy over their own count, he is thought to conclude that there should be a streamlined, national system with one person overseeing the process.

The report is understood to be critical of the division between the Scotland Office in Whitehall having responsibility for Holyrood elections, while the Scottish Government in Edinburgh oversees council elections.

Moving to a single tier taking control would be likely to mean a significant devolution of power from Westminster to Holyrood.

It could open the door to a change of voting system for the Scottish Parliament, as there is probably a majority in favour of moving to the electoral system used for the first time for local authorities this year, meaning preferential votes for multi-member constituencies. The Gould report is also thought to confront the controversial question of how parties can describe themselves on the ballot form, after the SNP used "Alex Salmond for First Minister" to gain a prominent position on the form. -- The Herald : Politics: MAIN POLITICS

The report is here (but none of the links work as of this posting).

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The Birmingham News has a strange "something happened but we don't have the details" story: A congressional committee's attention turns this week to November 2002, which is when a Rainsville lawyer contends she heard a telephone call that included claims Republicans were plotting to prosecute former Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman.

Jill Simpson's May affidavit describing the call caught the attention of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which has scheduled a hearing Tuesday on the Siegelman case. But another affidavit, sworn in the middle of the 2002 election recount that is the focus of Simpson's allegations, has received little notice.

During the recount challenging Republican Bob Riley's tiny edge over Siegelman, Rob Riley, the governor's son, was pursuing claims made in a sworn affidavit that accused Siegelman supporters of possible voter fraud. ...

Rob Riley in November 2002 showed The Birmingham News a copy of the affidavit signed and sworn by Eddie Spivey, who had worked with a consulting group on Siegelman's 2002 campaign. Spivey claimed in the one-page sworn statement that Siegelman supporters were manipulating votes in ballot boxes.

"The concern was there was some type of irregularities going on, some stuffing of ballots out there," Toby Roth, who was the 2002 Riley campaign director, said in an interview last week. -- Vote fraud claim pursued by Riley camp in 2002 recount- al.com

And, it was so important that, even though the News had the evidence in 2002, it did not report on it.

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AP reports: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a series of right-to-vote bills Thursday, including a measure that would have suspended the voter registration deadline for people who become citizens just before an election.

The Republican governor, an Austrian immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1983, said the measure, created “both logistical and security concerns.” It would have allowed recently sworn-in citizens to register, and then vote, on Election Day.

“Voter registration deadlines are in place to provide elections officials a reasonable opportunity to verify registration information,” he said in a veto message.

The California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials supported the bill by Sen. Jenny Oropeza, D-Long Beach, saying there were enough protections in the measure to prevent fraud. -- Governor turns down right-to-vote bills

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Scotland on Sunday reports: THOUSANDS of votes could be lost amid widespread ballot box chaos if Gordon Brown calls a snap Westminster poll, the UK's leading election official warned last night.

As election fever continued to mount, disturbing new details emerged from the Association of Electoral Administrators of delays in printing and distributing postal ballots, an out-of-date electoral roll and loopholes in anti-fraud laws. ...

Concerns centre on the problematic postal voting system, which continues to place election officers under a huge burden. The AEA has called on the Government to change the law to extend the time limit between the dissolution of parliament and an election by at least another five working days to 22 days.

However, if he goes ahead with an early election, Brown looks set to restrict the time limit to the current 17 days.

Turner said: "The small number of specialist, commercial printers who produce the ballot packs will have significant problems in dealing with the additional volumes within the limited time available."

The AEA is also warning that some people will be unable to vote or to receive a postal vote because the new electoral roll is not published until December 1. -- Scotland on Sunday - Politics - Snap election 'will cause chaos'

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: Montgomery officials will know by Friday whether the city elections will be held Aug. 28 or at a later date, according to attorney Edward Still, who argued on behalf of a City Council member and two mayoral candidates in a telephone conference with the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday.

District 3 council member Janet May and mayoral candidates William Boyd and Jon Dow filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court last week claiming a city ordinance that moved the election from October to August was a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The lawsuit contends the date change will confuse potential voters, including as many as 3,000 in May's district. On June 5, the City Council voted 9-0 to change the election date. ...

The city argues its date change was pre-cleared in a June 14 letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. However, the Justice department followed that letter with another saying that new information led it to believe that the city had not carried out its burden of proof, Still said.

"The city wants to ignore that and say the Justice department does not have the authority or that they did not say it in the right way or that the time for them to say anything has passed," he said. -- Printer-friendly article page

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The Montgomery Advertiser reports: A Montgomery city councilwoman and two mayoral candidates are suing the city and Mayor Bobby Bright to cancel the Aug. 28 municipal election.

Councilwoman Janet May, who is seeking re-election, and Bright challengers Jon Dow and William Boyd have filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court, claiming a city ordinance that moved the election from October to August was a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The lawsuit contends the date change will confuse potential voters, as many as 3,000 in May's District 3. The councilwoman did not return calls for comment. -- montgomeryadvertiser.com :: Election prompts lawsuit

Disclosure: As noted previously, I am one of the counsel for the plaintiffs.

The complaint is here.

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Three Montgomery voters have filed suit in federal court to stop the city of Montgomery from moving its election from October to 28 August because the change has not been precleared by the Justice Department. The suit also charges a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the invalidity of the city ordinance (for inconsistency with state law).

Cecil Gardner, Sam Heldman (both of the The Gardner Firm), and I are the attorneys for the plaintiffs.

I will post some of the pleadings when I get some computer problems worked out.

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Heather Gerkin writes on Balkinization: About a month ago, I posted about what I called the "here to there" problem in the field of election law. The problem is that we spend a great deal of time thinking about what an ideal election system ought to look like, but almost no time figuring out how to get from here to there: how reform actually takes root. Although we purport to study the political process, remarkably little scholarship is devoted to remedying the crucial problem within election law -- it is extraordinarily difficult for reform proposals to get traction in this country. We thus rarely write about the type of institutional fixes and wedge strategies that would help reform proposals (of whatever sort) get adopted. The dearth of scholarship on these topics is particularly interesting given that election law scholars tend to eschew pie-in-the-sky reform and pride themselves on their pragmatism. ...

Although reformers are more aware than anyone of how difficult it is to get reform passed, they may be least equipped to address the "here to there" problem. First, reformers are beholden to funders. And funders tend to favor big over small, end goals over interim solutions, silver bullets over wedge strategies, substantive proposals over procedural fixes. As one of my friends put it, "process is not sexy." Second, the reformer's job is to lobby elected officials. It is one thing to have a conversation with elected officials about the end goals of reform. It is another to have a conversation about what, precisely, prevents us from reaching those goals. The foremost obstacle to reform is self-interested politicians. That is an awkward subject to raise with people on whose good will your work depends. Finally, while reformers spend lots of time thinking about the "here to there" problem at what Justin Levitt of the Brennan Center calls the "micro-level" (the tactics required to build support for a particular policy proposal), they lack the resources to think systematically about the "here to there" problem at the macro-level. -- Setting the Agenda for Scholarship on Election Reform

Comment: As I said to the Election Law class last week, "Most politicians believe that the system that got them elected is the best one."

I look forward to Heather's continued comments on this problem.

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The Gotham Gazette reports: Governor Eliot Spitzer has announced a package of reform proposals that could fundamentally change many aspects of elections in New York State. But despite its sweeping nature, the plan, coming in a flurry of activity in the closing days of April, received little if any fanfare.

The election changes include proposals for Election Day voter registration, altering the state’s redistricting process, uniform poll site hours, less burdensome signature requirements for candidates seeking office, and reform of the system for selecting candidates for judgeships. In announcing reforms, Spitzer said, “This package will effectively end the gerrymandering that has led New York to the highest incumbency rate in the country and preserved a status quo that for years has been counterproductive to the public interest. It will break down the barriers to voter registration and employ simple and effective methods to improve voter turnout and access to the polls.” -- Election Reform: Big Changes, Little Notice

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Rob Richie's article on observing the Scottish election begins:
On May 3rd, Scotland held groundbreaking elections for its regional parliament and for local government, using two different proportional voting methods. As a result of these new, fairer methods, the Scottish National Party (SNP) ousted the Labor Party from power in the parliamentary vote and with other opposition parties gained major ground in local elections. At the same time, however, a sharp rise in invalid ballots and delays in the count caused a storm of controversy.

I was part of a 25-member delegation of civic leaders, city councilors and election officials organized by FairVote and the British Electoral Reform Society that observed the elections and attended pre-election and post-election briefings on redistricting and election administration in Britain. We need more such delegations, as there is much we can learn from the experiences of other advanced democracies as they work to reform their election practices. -- IN THE NEWS » Blog Archive » Election Observers Abroad

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The Election Assistance Commission announces: The EAC Standards Board will review and provide comment on a draft EAC report that was developed by Design for Democracy. The draft report contains best practices suggestions on the design of voter information, optical scan ballots and direct recording electronic (DRE) ballots based on legislative guidelines, information design principles and user centered research. The EAC Standards Board Virtual Public Meeting Room was established to enable the Standards Board to review and discuss draft documents in a public forum when it is not feasible for an in-person board meeting. The Standards Board will not take any votes or propose any resolutions during this 5-day forum. Members of the Standards Board will post comments about the draft best practices suggestions for the design of voter information and ballot.

Activity Open to Public. The public may view the proceedings of this special forum at any time between Thursday, May 17, 2007, 7:00 a.m. EDT and Tuesday, May 22, 2007, 7:00 a.m. EDT. The public also may view the draft report of suggested best practices for voter information and ballot designs. The public also may file written statements to the EAC Standards Board. Data on EAC's website is accessible to visitors with disabilities and meets the requirements of section 508 of the rehabilitation act.

For Public Viewing - Click Here to Enter the EAC Standards Board Virtual Public Meeting Room

Click on any one of the eight (8) links to view each section of the draft report and comments posted by Standards Board Members about that section. You may also download the sections of the report. Written statements to the Standards Board may be filed at standardsboard@eac.gov. Any problems encountered when visiting this site may be emailed or you can call EAC at 1-866-747-1471 and ask for Liria Figueroa-Berrios.

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The Wisconsin State Journal reports: Madison election workers would be banned from certain political activities under an ordinance to be introduced at tonight's City Council meeting.

The ethics code amendment, proposed by Ald. Zach Brandon, 7th District, would affect officers or directors of campaigns, political parties, political action committees and other political organizations as well as candidates.

They would be barred from being poll workers or from handling election material -- such as nomination papers or finance reports -- in the city clerk's office if they held the political role within a year before an election. Candidates and their campaign officers would not be barred from working at polls outside their district.

Brandon said he's "trying to prevent someone who is the head of an organization which has the sole mission of influencing the outcome of an election from having direct oversight of that election."

The proposal follows an ethics complaint Brandon filed against Mike Quieto, who worked as an election official and also filled out campaign finance reports for the Teaching Assistants' Association Political Action Committee. The city's Ethics Board is scheduled May 29 to decide if Quieto violated rules that prohibit employees from using their office to benefit an organization with which they are affiliated. -- Wisconsin State Journal

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The Nashville City Paper reports: The Davidson County Election Commission is trying to shake itself of some city lawyers.

Davidson County Administrator of Elections Ray Barrett, requested a temporary restraining order against Metro Tuesday in federal court to force the Metro Legal Department to drop its attempt to intervene, on his behalf in the lawsuit that two Jewish voters filed against Metro earlier this month.

The voters are attempting to force a rescheduling of this year’s mayoral run-off vote from the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, which falls this year on Sept. 13.

Reacting to the lawsuit, the Election Commission voted last week to reschedule the potential run-off to Sept. 11. The commission then hired local attorney Dewey Branstetter to see the rest of the lawsuit through.

But three days later, on April 19, the Metro Legal Department filed pleadings arguing that rescheduling the run-off could not legally happen because of a Metro Charter provision requiring a runoff election be held the second Thursday in September — Rosh Hashanah this year. -- City, Election Commission tussle over elections chief

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From an EAC press release: U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Chair Donetta Davidson today issued a formal request to the commission's inspector general to conduct a review of the commission's contracting procedures, including a review of two recent projects focusing on voter identification and vote fraud and voter intimidation. ...

"The actions taken by the commission regarding these research projects have been challenged, and the commissioners and I agree that it is appropriate and necessary to ask the inspector general to review this matter," said EAC Chair Davidson.

Chair Davidson has requested that the inspector general specifically review the circumstances surrounding the issuance and management of the voter identification research project and the vote fraud and voter intimidation research project. -- 2007- 13 ( 4-16-07 ) EAC Requests Review of Voter ID, Fraud & Intimidation Research Projects.pdf (application/pdf Object)

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The New York Times reports: Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show. ...

Mistakes and lapses in enforcing voting and registration rules routinely occur in elections, allowing thousands of ineligible voters to go to the polls. But the federal cases provide little evidence of widespread, organized fraud, prosecutors and election law experts said. -- In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud - New York Times

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The New York Times reports: A federal panel responsible for conducting election research played down the findings of experts who concluded last year that there was little voter fraud around the nation, according to a review of the original report obtained by The New York Times.

Instead, the panel, the Election Assistance Commission, issued a report that said the pervasiveness of fraud was open to debate.

The revised version echoes complaints made by Republican politicians, who have long suggested that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states.

Democrats say the threat is overstated and have opposed voter identification laws, which they say disenfranchise the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely to have photo IDs and are more likely to be Democrats. -- Panel Said to Alter Finding on Voter Fraud - New York Times

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Paul Kiel writes on TPMmuckraker: We already know that Karl Rove passed along complaints to Alberto Gonzales about certain U.S. attorneys' performance on voter fraud prosecutions. And in the case of New Mexico's David Iglesias, that complaint likely contributed to his firing.

But it's clear this is something of an obsession to Rove.

One year ago, April 7, 2006, he gave a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, in which he covered a number of topics of interest to his audience (i.e. tort reform), but one topic seemed to hold the audience's attention in particular: voter fraud. To quote an audience member: "The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud."

Rove had clearly spent a lot of time on it -- rattling off statistics and referring to problem counties in far-flung states with familiarity. He also showed no shyness at over-hyping the issue: "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses." -- TPMmuckraker April 10, 2007 06:32 PM

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The Boston Globe reports: A consultant's audit of the Boston Election Department has found that years of understaffing and underfunding have left the department incapable of consistently conducting elections properly.

Even as the demands on election workers increased because of federal voting rights legislation, the city continued to cut the department's budget, forcing it to operate with a skeleton staff and outdated tools, according to the audit conducted by David King, an elections specialist at Harvard University.

The city will not be able to run elections effectively unless it overhauls the department, reclassifying jobs to create clear areas of responsibility and committing to a "sustained investment in personnel and training" that would increase the size of the department's staff by more than a third, King said in a 12-page draft of his conclusions released to the Globe. -- Audit says cuts left Election Dept. unfit - The Boston Globe

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The Brennan Center for Justice has opened a new website, The Truth About Fraud, explaining: Allegations of widespread fraud by malevolent voters are easy to make, but often prove to be inflated or inaccurate. Crying “wolf” when the claims are unsubstantiated distracts attention from real problems that need real solutions. Moreover, these claims are frequently used to justify policies – including restrictive photo identification rules – that could not solve the alleged wrongs, but that could well disenfranchise legitimate voters.

On a related note, the Washington Post publishes today an op-ed by Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt of the Brennan Center collecting the evidence for the tie-in between the firing of the Gonzales-8 and charges of "voter fraud."

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I will be traveling to Scotland in a little over 5 weeks to observe the 3 May parliamentary and local elections. As a part of my self-study course in preparation for the trip, I thought I would post on what I learn. Over the next several weeks, I will be posting what I learn here.

Let's begin with Wikipedia: The Scottish Parliament election, 2007, will be the third general election[1] to the devolved Scottish Parliament since it was created in 1999. Polling will take place on Thursday May 3 unless two-thirds of MSPs vote to dissolve Parliament before then. The election falls two days after the tricentenary of the political union of Scotland and England.

Jack McConnell, as First Minister, will go into the election commanding a small majority consisting of a Labour and Liberal Democrat coalition. The coalition has been in power, with three different First Ministers, since the first Scottish Parliament election in 1999. Opinion polls suggest its majority could be lost in 2007, due to falling support for the Labour Party and rising support for other parties. No single party is likely to acquire an overall majority. Nor is there an obvious alternative coalition ready to form a new Executive. -- Scottish Parliament election, 2007 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (go to Wilipedia for the links)

Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not have much an explanation of the method of election (note to self: correct that omission), but you can find it on the votescotland.com site. After you read the technical explanation, go to this page of the site to vote in fun practice session.

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Missouri Secretary of State Robyn Carnahan' s report on the 2006 election was issued about a month ago. Here's

an excerpt from the executive summary:

It is particularly noteworthy that the type of voter fraud allegedly prevented by photo ID — voter impersonation at the polls — was not reported as a problem in Missouri. At the time of this report, no such cases from anywhere in the state had been reported to the Secretary of State’s office. Although there were no reports of voter impersonation or voting fraud, there were isolated incidents of alleged registration fraud that were reported in advance of the 2006 general election. Allegations of fraudulent voter registration cards surfaced and were investigated in St. Louis and Kansas City, and three individuals were indicted in Kansas City for alleged registration fraud, one of whom pleaded guilty. Such examples of investigation and prosecution of voter registration fraud are evidence that the safeguards in place in Missouri are working.

Finally, this report identifies two significant dangers to the democratic process in Missouri: long lines or delays at polling places, and the intimidation or misinforming of voters. The incidents of long lines at the polls function as a deterrent to voting. Cases of voters being intimidated or misinformed on or before Election Day were also reported and are described in this report.

You can download the news release or the report.

Thanks to Michael Slater, Deputy Director, Project Vote, for sending these links.

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The Washington Post reports: White House officials, in providing new explanations of how and why several U.S. attorneys were fired in December, have said that President Bush mentioned to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had heard complaints from Congress that some federal prosecutors were lax in pursuing voter fraud.

In attributing the firings at least partly to an inattentiveness to voter fraud, the White House is invoking a contention that has gained prominence in Republican circles starting with the 2000 presidential election, as both political parties have become aggressive in trying to leverage election law into Election Day victories.

The GOP allegation, repeated in several swing states where voting margins have been narrow, is that Democrats have illegally ratcheted up their tallies by permitting ballots to be cast by felons, by residents without proper identification, or by people who forged signatures on absentee ballots.

Democratic-leaning groups reject that allegation and counter by accusing Republicans of blocking fair elections by suppressing the votes of some eligible citizens.

Glimpses of the role those charges and countercharges have played in firings of at least some of the U.S. attorneys have begun to emerge in recent days. Yesterday, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told reporters accompanying Bush in Mexico that "over the course of several years, we have received complaints about U.S. attorneys, particularly when it comes to election-fraud cases." Bartlett said those complaints have stemmed from New Mexico, where U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias was fired, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. -- White House Cites Lax Voter-Fraud Investigations in U.S. Attorneys' Firings - washingtonpost.com

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The New York Times reports: Late in the afternoon on Dec. 4, a deputy to Harriet E. Miers, then the White House counsel and one of President Bush’s most trusted aides, sent a two-line e-mail message to a top Justice Department aide. “We’re a go,” it said, approving a long-brewing plan to remove seven federal prosecutors considered weak or not team players. ...

The White House said Monday that Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove had raised concerns about lax voter fraud prosecutions with the Justice Department. And several of the fired attorneys told Congress last week that some lawmakers had questioned them about corruption investigations, inquiries the prosecutors considered inappropriate. The documents do not specifically mention either topic.

While the target list of prosecutors was shaped and shifted, officials at the Justice Department and the White House, members of Congress and even an important Republican lawyer and lobbyist in New Mexico were raising various concerns. ...

The focus on Mr. Iglesias intensified in June 2006, when Mickey Barnett, a Republican Party activist in New Mexico, requested “a meeting with someone at DOJ to discuss the USATTY situation there.”

The e-mail message alerting Justice Department officials, sent by a senior official in the White House Office of Political Affairs, noted that Mr. Barnett is “the president’s nominee for the US Postal Board of Governors. He was heavily involved in the president’s campaign’s legal team.” The next day, Mr. Barnett and Patrick Rogers, a New Mexico lawyer who has led a campaign against voter fraud, met with Justice Department officials. Conservatives often worry that Democrats will inflate their vote count with fraudulent or illegal immigrant voters. -- ‘Loyalty’ to Bush and Gonzales Was Factor in Prosecutors’ Firings, E-Mail Shows

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AP reports: Dozens of veterans gathered outside the Tullytown Municipal Building with an American flag to protest a decision not to allow a borough councilman serving in Afghanistan to vote on borough matters.

Councilman Joe Shellenberger, a 46-year-old Air Force reservist, was sent to Afghanistan in January. Councilman Ed Czyzyk made a motion at the Feb. 6 council meeting to allow Shellenberger to vote while overseas, but the motion died for lack of a second. Czyzyk argued that Shellenberger should have a right to vote because, "He's over there defending our right to vote here."

During public discussion on the matter Tuesday night, many argued that Shellenberger was staying informed and should be allowed to vote via Internet or phone. He has been receiving borough documents through his wife and borough staff. -- AP Wire | 03/07/2007 | Veterans protest barring councilman from voting while on duty

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The Hill reports: Pressure from the leading presidential candidates has set the stage for a Feb. 5 national primary that will likely include 20 states, possibly more.

Working behind the scenes and mostly through surrogates, Democratic Sens. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), and Republicans Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), former Gov. Mitt Romney (Mass.) and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani have fueled a rush of states to hold primary elections on Feb. 5 next year, or earlier. As many as 23 states are in the frame to hold primary elections on that date.

Delaware, Missouri, New Mexico and Oklahoma in 2004 held their nominating contests on the first Tuesday of February, and are likely be joined this time by such big states as California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Texas. They may be joined also by smaller states including Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, North Dakota, Utah, Kansas, Colorado and (for the GOP only) West Virginia and Nevada. The legislatures of Pennsylvania and North Carolina are holding hearings on the issue but the outcomes of these are uncertain.

Allies of candidates who expect to do well in these states are taking lead roles in moving primaries there to early February. By holding primaries soon after the Iowa caucuses, the first contest of the year, such states will have a bigger impact than before on who becomes the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees. -- Feb. 5 national primary

Thanks to Political Insider for the link.

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The Centre Daily reports: State Sen. Jake Corman said Thursday that he will convene a joint hearing in three weeks on whether Pennsylvania should move up its 2008 presidential primary election to early February.

If such a move were to be made, the most likely date would be Feb. 5, the date that other big states -- California, Michigan, Illinois and Florida -- are considering for their 2008 primaries.

"I'm open to hearing more about it," Corman said in an interview Thursday. "I think there's some logistical problems, but it would be good for our economy to have that campaign in Pennsylvania. If it can be done, we should try it."

Corman, R-Benner Township, is Senate majority policy chairman, a Senate Republican leadership position. He asked his Democratic Party counterpart, state Sen. Richard A. Kasunic, of Fayette County, to make it a joint hearing. Kasunic aide Will Dando said that Kasunic agreed. -- Centre Daily Times | 02/23/2007 | Pennsylvania eyes moving up primary

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Marketplace reports (audio report): A California Assembly committee today voted to move up next year's presidential primary from June to February. If approved, candidates' campaign costs will rise considerably. -- Marketplace: Golden State raises ante for 2008 campaign

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My old friend George Pillsbury at the Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network has emailed me about a new report NVEN has published.

America Goes to the Polls is a comprehensive report on voter turnout in the 2006 elections. It charts voter turnout in midterm elections over the last 30 years, ranking the states by 2006 turnout and their turnout growth over 2002. America Goes the Polls also discusses election reform ideas that could improve voter participation as well as the challenge to voter mobilization of reaching today’s diverse electorate of over 200 million voters.

Scroll down a little further on their home page to get the "Ohio Voter Participation Notebook" and "Nonprofits, Voting and Elections."

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The New York Times reports:
As many as four big states — California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey — are likely to move up their 2008 presidential primaries to early next February, further upending an already unsettled nominating process and forcing candidates of both parties to rethink their campaign strategies, party officials said Wednesday.

The changes, which seem all but certain to be enacted by state legislatures, mean that the presidential candidates face the prospect of going immediately from an ordered series of early contests in relatively small states in January to a single-day, coast-to-coast battlefield in February, encompassing some of the most expensive advertising markets in the nation.

The changes would appear to benefit well-financed and already familiar candidates and diminish the prospects of those with less money and name recognition going into such a highly compressed series of contests early next year.

Associates of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New York Democrat, and Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, said that should either of them stumble early on, the respective party primaries in California and New Jersey — two states that would seem particularly hospitable to them — could offer an expensive but welcome firewall. -- Big States’ Push for Earlier Vote Scrambles Race - New York Times

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TalkLeft.com reports: Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-CA) has introduced the Federal Election Integrity Act (H.R. 101.) It would prohibit chief state election officials from engaging in political activity on behalf of federal candidates over whose elections the officials have supervisory authority. -- Election Integrity Bill Introduced in Congress

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WTVY News 4 reports: It has been nearly a half-century since a small Wiregrass town was reinstated. Since 1957 an election has never been held in the town of Eunola. But some residents want that changed.

A group of Eunola residents say they've never been given the right to vote for their mayor and five-member council and essentially, that's against the U.S. Constitution of having free elections.

Geneva attorney, Jeffrey Hatcher, represents a group of citizens asking for the forfeiture of Eunola's charter.

Hatcher says Eunola has never held a municipal election contrary to its 1957 charter.

Over the last five-decades, members of the council have appointed others to fill vacancies on the board that includes the mayor's post. -- WTVY | Election Has Never Been Held in the Town of Eunola

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AP reports: The Department of Justice is allowing Texas to go forward with the Dec. 12 date for a congressional runoff after federal judges ruled early voting could be extended because the election falls on an important religious day for Catholic Hispanics.

The decision to hold the runoff Tuesday has angered some Hispanic groups who have said it is an attempt to suppress the Latino vote to boost election chances for Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla.

Bonilla faces Democrat Ciro Rodriguez, a former congressman, in the runoff because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote in the Nov. 7 election.

Dec. 12 is the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the day many Hispanics mark the appearance of the Virgin Mary before Indian peasant Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. Many Hispanics attend Mass, hold processions and gather with family and friends. -- Dallas Cars & Trucks | DallasNews.com | Dallas Morning News | Texas/Southwest

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Alex Koppelman and Lauren Shell write in Salon: Before the 2006 midterm election, you couldn't escape the predictions of Election Day disaster: voting machine meltdowns, interminable lines, endless recounts. But the control of both houses of Congress was decided without interference from Diebold or hanging chads, so few (outside of Florida's 13th Congressional District) are suffering flashbacks of 2000 and 2004.

But while this year might not have included any repeats of Palm Beach County or Ohio, that doesn't mean the midterm elections were squeaky clean. This November there were some old-school dirty tricks that had nothing to do with voting machines or secretaries of state. An unscientific sample seems to show that most were the product of a party that was desperate for something, anything, that would help it protect its doomed congressional majorities. The bulk of this year's murky dealings took place in those tightly contested races -- from the battle for Virginia's Senate seat to House races in Illinois, New York and Connecticut -- that were crucial to control of Congress.

Fortunately, politicians in several states and the U.S. Senate are taking steps to criminalize some of the more heinous tricks played this year. Before any of the bad deeds from this election are forgotten, here's Salon's Cheat Sheet -- our top 10 list of dirt.

In Maryland, Republicans turn Democrat -- and truck in homeless men to spread the word ... In Virginia, voter intimidation ... The Social Security Administration gets into the act ... "Not like in Mexico, here there is no benefit to voting." ... Blood runs thicker than party affiliation ... The robot that called. And called. And called ... Push polls ... The progressive group that wasn't ... Case of the vanished polling place ... And last, but not least -- vigilantes -- The GOP's dirty deeds of 2006 | Salon News

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"Lucy Paul" (Annie Cieslukowski) completes her on-the-scene report of being a new poll worker. -- Confessions of an Ohio poll worker, Part 2 | Salon.com

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The Columbus Dispatch reports: The outcome of one of the nation’s tightest congressional races will wait until after one of its hottest college football games is played, Franklin County elections officials said yesterday.

Elections workers will delay their final, official tally of Tuesday’s ballots — a total that could add more than 38,000 votes to unofficial results in some races — until Nov. 19, the day after state law lets them begin counting provisional ballots.

They said they don’t plan to open for business on Nov. 18, a Saturday, when Ohio State plays Michigan at Ohio Stadium. But they’ll issue final election results by Nov. 21, a week before the state requires them.

They could count nearly 18,000 absentee ballots now, but they said they’ll wait to avoid more unofficial numbers. -- The Columbus Dispatch - Local/State

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Jason Conn emails: I thought that as the election nears and many attorneys sign up to serve as election monitors, there might be some interest in an article I published in the Toledo Law Review ( 37 U. Tol. L. Rev. 1021), entitled "Of Challengers and Challenges." As far as I know, it is the only academic article to look at the role poll watching and poll challenging play in our electoral process. In the article, I examine the ethical and constitutional issues that arise from lawyers' roles on Election Day.

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The Washington Post reports: Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states, including Maryland, remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States.

The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races.

The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic, an election system in flux and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide."

In a state-by-state canvass, the 75-page report singles out places, such as Indiana and Arizona, where courts have upheld stringent new laws requiring voters to show poll workers specific forms of identification. It cites states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which have switched to electronic voting machines whose accuracy has been challenged. And it points to states such as Colorado and Washington, which have departed from the tradition of polling sites in neighborhood precincts. -- Report Warns of Potential Voting Problems in 10 States - washingtonpost.com

Note: The Electionline.org report is here.

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AP reports: A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a Florida law that prohibits exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place, finding there was no evidence that such surveys were disruptive or threatened access to voting. ...

U.S. District Judge Paul C. Huck said Florida's law was unconstitutional and ordered state officials not to enforce it in the Nov. 7 election. He left intact the 100-foot limit for other activities such as distributing campaign material or peddling.

The ruling came on a lawsuit brought by The Associated Press and five television networks that want to conduct exit polls at about 40 Florida polling places next month.

The 2005 law, the judge concluded, violates the First Amendment's free speech and freedom of the press protections. The judge also said the law was too broad. -- Judge rules on exit polls in Florida - Yahoo! News

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Chicago Voter Info Vulnerable to Hackers
AP reports: The city is investigating a security glitch in its elections Web site that hackers could have used to swipe Social Security numbers and the personal information of about 1.3 million voters, officials said.

It wasn't immediately clear if anyone actually stole or misused any of the information, Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Tom Leach said.

He said the problem had been fixed and a forensic computer expert would be brought in to examine the site's logs for any signs of illegal access. ...

A watchdog group, the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project, exposed the vulnerability and alerted officials last week, Leach said.

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"No Umbrella - Election Day In The City," director Laura Paglin’s documentary chronicling 2004 Election Day troubles in one of Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, makes its television debut Thursday, November 9th, 7:30 PM (EST)/ 10:30PM (PST) on the Cinemax cable network. The half-hour film, which stars Cleveland Councilwoman Fannie Lewis and captures the chaos and frustration faced by inner city voters, was acquired by HBO Documentary Films after premiering at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and taking an Audience Award at the Sydney International Film Festival. For your own copy, go to www.noumbrella.org.

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AP reports: Federal elections officials told California on Monday to repay nearly $3 million in Help America Vote Act funds, saying the money was mismanaged under former Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

The tab made final the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's finding from May that the state would have to pay back federal election funds that either were misspent during Shelley's tenure or lacked adequate documentation.

Shelley's successor said the state should sue to try to force Shelley to repay the money. ...

Shelley, a Democrat, resigned in February 2005 amid allegations that he mishandled the federal money designed to upgrade voting equipment and procedures, bent state hiring rules to reward political allies and accepted questionable campaign contributions. -- Monterey County Herald | 10/17/2006 | U.S. wants voting money repaid

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports: Just when it looked like the King County Elections Department might be out of the woods, stuff happened.

After surviving the horror show of the 2004 governor's election and leading the beleaguered department back to respectability, Elections Director Dean Logan decamped for Los Angeles in July, in the middle of a year with a high-profile U.S. Senate race on the fall ballot in Washington state. A permanent successor has not been hired and likely won't be until after the November voting.

Plus, for the primary Tuesday, the department will be deploying touch-screen voting machines for the first time countywide. The electronic machines, required under federal law to improve access for disabled voters, will supplement paper fill-in-the-bubble ballots at each of the county's 508 polling places.

But department managers say they're confident heading into the primary. -- Election 2006: All-new touch screens and no one at the top

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Sasha Abramsky writes in Mother Jones: We used to think the voting system was something like the traffic laws -- a set of rules clear to everyone, enforced everywhere, with penalties for transgressions; we used to think, in other words, that we had a national election system. How wrong a notion this was has become painfully apparent since 2000: As it turns out, except for a rudimentary federal framework (which determines the voting age, channels money to states and counties, and enforces protections for minorities and the disabled), U.S. elections are shaped by a dizzying mélange of inconsistently enforced laws, conflicting court rulings, local traditions, various technology choices, and partisan trickery. In some places voters still fill in paper ballots or pull the levers of vintage machines; elsewhere, they touch screens or tap keys, with or without paper trails. Some states encourage voter registration; others go out of their way to limit it. Some allow prisoners to vote; others permanently bar ex-felons, no matter how long they've stayed clean. Who can vote, where people cast ballots, and how and whether their votes are counted all depends, to a large extent, on policies set in place by secretaries of state and county elections supervisors -- officials who can be as partisan, as dubiously qualified, and as nakedly ambitious as people anywhere else in politics. Here is a list -- partial, but emblematic -- of American democracy's more glaring weak spots. -- Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America's worst places to cast a ballot (or try)

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The Columbus Dispatch reports: A coalition of critics of the 2004 election is insisting it has uncovered new evidence of ballot tampering in Ohio that caused a number of John Kerry’s votes to get tossed out.

The group filed a federal civilrights lawsuit yesterday, asking U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley to declare that Ohioans’ voting rights were violated in 2004 and to appoint a special master to ensure fairness in the 2006 election.

The lawsuit alleges that Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and others conspired to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote. Prior election-related lawsuits by those affiliated with the coalition have been dismissed by various judges.

Richard Hayes Phillips, a Canton, N.Y., resident working with groups such as the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign, said he has examined thousands of punch-card ballots cast in heavily Democratic inner-city precincts that were tossed out because of over- or under-voting in the presidential race. ...

Someone, he said, punched the slot for an independent candidate beforehand, so a vote for Bush or Kerry was invalid. The problem, he said, impacted Kerry far more. -- The Columbus Dispatch - Local/State

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AP reports:
Four attorneys have left the secretary of state's office in the last couple of years -- two of them dismissed by Secretary of State Nancy Worley -- leaving the office for now without a lawyer to answer questions from county voting officials as the Nov. 7 election draws near. ...

Worley was left without an attorney this week when she dismissed Adam Bourne, who was working in the election office and was answering many of the voter registration questions. Staff attorney Hope Ayers also resigned from the office this week to take another job.

Bourne, who had been working in the office for about a year, said Thursday he believes he was dismissed because he turned over a campaign finance complaint against state Sen. Jim Preuitt, D-Talladega, to the attorney general's office.

"As far as I can tell, that's what happened," Bourne said. "She read in the paper I had turned a complaint over to the attorney general's office. She asked me to resign."

Bourne said he refused to resign and was informed he had been removed from the payroll. -- montgomeryadvertiser.com :: Secretary of state's office without attorney

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The New York Times reports: With paper ballots from the 2004 presidential election in Ohio scheduled to be destroyed next week, the secretary of state in Columbus, under pressure from critics, said yesterday that he would move to delay the destruction at least for several months.

ince the election, questions have been raised about how votes were tallied in Ohio, a battleground state that helped deliver the election to President Bush over Senator John Kerry.

The critics, including an independent candidate for governor and a team of statisticians and lawyers, say preliminary results from their ballot inspections show signs of more widespread irregularities than previously known.

The critics say the ballots should be saved pending an investigation. They also say the secretary of state’s proposal to delay the destruction does not go far enough, and they intend to sue to preserve the ballots. -- Ohio to Delay Destruction of Presidential Ballots - New York Times

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The Washington Post reports: Maryland's highest court yesterday ... rejected the state's early voting law 11 days before it was to go into effect for the first time, dealing a blow to Democrats who had hoped the extra polling days would bring out more of the party faithful in the fall.

That decision affirmed a ruling made two weeks ago by an Anne Arundel Circuit Court that said the state constitution does not authorize voting on any day other than Election Day. ...

The court ruling, he said in a statement, shows that "the General Assembly's early voting scheme was flawed, irresponsible and a blatant overreach of its authority."

Democrats assailed the decision.

"The Republicans may have gotten what they wanted out of this, but this is not a good day for Maryland or for democracy," said David Paulson, communications director for the Maryland Democratic Party. -- Court Rejects Perez Bid, Early Voting Law in Md.

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The Galveston County Daily News reports: The plaque outside Tom DeLay’s old office identifies it as the Texas 22 congressional office. Staff members answer the phone, “Office of the Texas 22.”

In a high-profile race, three candidates are vying to have their name on that door when the next session of Congress begins in January.

But with all eyes on the November election, overlooked is the fact that the Constitution states that the governor shall call a special election to fill DeLay’s unexpired term.

Despite previously declaring he would call a special election, Gov. Rick Perry has yet to do so. His office is now leaving open the possibility he may decide against calling one.

The deadline for calling a special election is Tuesday, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections in Texas. -- Tuesday deadline to call Dist. 22 election

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AP reports: Democrats shook up tradition on Saturday by vaulting Nevada and South Carolina into the first wave of 2008 presidential contests along with Iowa and New Hampshire -- a move intended to add racial and geographic diversity to the early voting.

The decision by the Democratic National Committee leaves Iowa as the nation's first presidential caucus and New Hampshire as the first primary, but wedges Nevada's caucuses before New Hampshire and South Carolina's primary soon afterward.

The move also packs all four state contests into a politically saturated two weeks in January. The change means a potentially huge cast of Democratic presidential candidates could winnow quickly by the beginning of February.

Party officials embraced the change, though New Hampshire Democrats joined several likely presidential candidates and former
President Clinton in opposing the move. -- Dems shake up nominating calendar - Yahoo! News

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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports: Lingering debate over the 2004 presidential election, continues to haunt Secretary of State Ken Blackwell in his campaign to become governor.

Those who blame the Cincinnati Republican for long lines and rulings leading up to the 2004 election predict even more chaos during the upcoming Nov. 7. election.

That's when a new law requiring identification for voters at the polls takes effect statewide for the first time.

Add to that a federal requirement that 68 of Ohio's 88 counties replace punch card ballots with electronic voting machines, and politicians and voting experts worry that the stage is set for another difficult election. -- The Enquirer - Blackwell's dual role criticized

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The Century Foundation has published "Improving Voter Participation": Despite much attention to election reform efforts, voter registration, and get out the vote efforts during the hotly contested presidential election of 2004, only slightly more than half of eligible voters went to the polls. As we enter another crucial election season, TCF Democracy Fellow Tova Andrea Wang examines the reasons for perennially low turn-out numbers and presents a set of common-sense proposals to boost participation.

Proposals reviewed in the brief include:

* Voters should be allowed to register up until and on Election Day.
* Election Day should be a national holiday.
* As long as a voter appears at any precinct within the county in which the voter resides, the provisional ballot cast by the voter should be counted for all countywide, statewide and presidential races.
* States should not have restrictive voter identification requirements.
* Social service agencies and departments of motor vehicles must comply with the National Voter Registration Act and provide citizens with an effective opportunity to register to vote.
* Take the partisan politics out of redistricting.
* Extend free media time to candidates.
* Parties and candidates should do more to personally engage voters. -- Improving Voter Participation

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AP reports: When the Alabama Legislature tried to make Alabama a player in presidential politics, it inadvertently moved the state's entire primary election — not just the presidential preference primary — from June to February in 2008.

Some state officials first learned of the mistake Wednesday, making it the second foul-up of lawmakers trying to make Alabama an early state for presidential candidates to court votes. Election officials already were worried that the new primary date, Feb. 5, 2008, happens to be Mardi Gras Day, a major holiday and tourist event in Mobile, where businesses shut down as tens of thousands jam streets for Carnival parades.

Alabama primaries for state and county offices traditionally have been held in June or September, never so early as February. -- al.com: NewsFlash - AP Newsbreak: Alabama moved entire 2008 primary to February

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AP reports: Episcopal clergy and lay delegates Tuesday rejected a demand from fellow Anglicans that they temporarily stop electing gay bishops, leaving little chance the proposal could be revived at a national church meeting.

Anglican leaders, angered by the 2003 consecration of an openly gay Episcopal bishop, had asked the Episcopalians pass a moratorium _ at least for now _ on homosexuals leading dioceses.

But in a complex balloting system, a majority of the Episcopal House of Deputies voted against a measure that would have urged dioceses to refrain from electing homosexuals to lead them. Conservatives said the measure stopped short of a moratorium, but supporters argued it would have at least signaled that the American church understood the concerns of Anglican leaders. -- Episcopalians Reject Ban on Gay Bishops

My comment: Notice the third paragraph's reference to a "complex system." This is a newspaper code word for "it is not like the way we vote in the good old US of A, but we don't want to explain it right now." Well, I will explain it to you.

The House of Delegates has four lay delegates and four clergy delegates from each diocese. Some states have one diocese, some more, and a few are shared between states. (Alabama for instance has the Diocese of Alabama and the Diocese of the Gulf Coast which also includes West Florida.) As you can see in these Rules of Order (page 16 of the PDF), the vote may be taken "by Dioceses and Orders." The "Orders" are the lay and the clergy.

By the way, the vote at the U.S. Constitutional Convention was taken by States, so the vote there could be "aye," "no," or "divided" -- just as provided in the Episcopal Church rules.

Here endeth the Lesson.

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Reuters reports: The U.S. Episcopal Church chose Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori on Sunday as its first woman leader, a move unprecedented in the Anglican church and one likely to produce more turmoil in a faith divided over the ordination of an openly gay bishop.

Her election came 30 years after the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, approved the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The selection seemed likely to provoke controversy, since most other Anglican communities, including the Church of England, do not allow women bishops. -- First woman named to head US Episcopal Church | Reuters.com

Bishop Schori was the leader (or tied) on all each of the five ballots, followed closely by the Rt. Rev. Henry Parsley of the Diocese of Alabama. Under the rules of the Episcopal Church [see pages 17 of this PDF], the House of Bishops first decides among the candidates and then asks for the concurrence of the House of Delegates (made up of 4 lay delegates and 4 clerical delegates from each diocese) [see this diagram for a simplified explanation of the way we Episcopalians run our church].

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The federal court in the Middle District of Alabama has issued a preliminary injunction in the United States' HAVA case against the State. Basically the injuction requires the state to file a compliance plan by 29 June. The court will hold a hearing on any objections of the United States on 20 July. The complaint is here.

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A press release dated yesterday: Today in Albany, a group of voter-eligible citizens -- which includes individuals with various disabilities and limited-English-proficient Asian American voters – joined a broad coalition of disability, civic and civil rights organizations in filing a motion to intervene in the lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against New York State and its election officials. These individuals and organizations seek an injunction requiring the State to comply with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and interrelated New York law, to submit an effective compliance plan with the court, and to ensure a legal implementation process that will vindicate the rights of all eligible voters, including those with disabilities and limited English proficiency. -- Download file

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AP reports: Secretary of State Nancy Worley's plans for a voter education advertising campaign before the June 6 primary, where she's a candidate, got blocked Thursday by the Legislature's Contract Review Committee.

Rep. Blaine Galliher, R-Gadsden, called the radio and TV campaign a waste of public funds. At his request, the committee delayed the contract proposal for 45 days, which is the maximum action the committee can take.

Adam Bourne, attorney for the secretary of state's office, said the 45-day delay would block the ad campaign for the primary election.

Worley, a former Decatur High School teacher, did not attend the committee's meeting. But, in an interview later in the day, the Democratic officeholder said "partisan political reasons" were behind the committee's action. Worley said she is required by law to do voter education, and she will look for other methods to carry out that duty. -- Worley's ad campaign scuttled

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The Mobile Press-Register editorializes: ALABAMA LEGISLATORS gave new meaning to the term "Mardi Gras madness" when they passed a bill setting the 2008 presidential primary on Fat Tuesday.

Fortunately, they can come back next year and fix this folly.

Legislators had the right idea in moving the state's presidential primary to a date that matters. Problem is, in 2008 the first Tuesday in February, the 5th, is absolutely the wrong date. Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis correctly describes the situation as "awful."

As south Alabamians well know, people are parading and partying downtown all day and into the night on Mardi Gras. Traffic is a mess, and it would be difficult even to get to Government Plaza to count the votes. Indeed, local government offices are closed for Mardi Gras, for good reason. -- Right idea for primary, wrong date for Mobile

Maybe this will be the opportunity to roll out large-scale mail-in balloting.

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The Birmingham News reports on the just-ended Legislative session: Here's a look at some of the higher-profile bills the Legislature passed or killed this spring. ...

Passed, awaiting governor's signature:

Presidential primary: Move Alabama's presidential primary from June to February starting in 2008. ...

Killed : ...

Term limits: Would have banned legislators from serving more than 12 years in the Senate and 12 years in the House of Representatives.

PAC transfers: Would have banned political action committees from transferring money among themselves, which can hide a candidate's sources of money.

Constitution: Would have let state voters decide whether to call a convention of elected delegates who could have proposed a new state constitution. ...

Citizen initiatives: Would have let citizens propose amendments to the state constitution and propose regular laws, which voters could have approved or rejected without the Legislature's approval. -- Bills passed or killed

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The Birmingham News reports: Alabama voters would pick their presidential primary favorites on Feb. 5 instead of June 3 in 2008 under a bill poised to pass the Legislature on Monday.

Alabamians with an earlier primary could help decide the Democratic and Republican nominees, said Gov. Bob Riley and other supporters.

Alabamians have been shut out of the selection process in recent elections, they said, because voters in states with earlier primaries and caucuses had already chosen the party nominees before Alabamians voted in June. -- Bill would set earlier presidential primary

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Democracy at Large - Volume 2, No. 2 from IFES just arrived in my mailbox. For those to whom the word "mailbox" means the email system, let me remind you of the metal receptable with the red flag that sits beside the street. That's where my Democracy at Large arrived. (And only one story per issue is available on the website, but you can subscribe for only $15.00 per year.)

The main story in the latest issue is "Rules do Matter." The article deals with the rules of the Palestinian and Iraqi elections and how they affected the outcome.

If you have an interest in elections, subscribe to this publication.

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AP reports: The Alabama Legislature is ready to move Alabama's primary runoff from June 27 to July 18 to give military serving overseas adequate time to cast absentee ballots and end a lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department.

The House voted 92-3 Wednesday for legislation delaying the runoff three weeks for state and municipal elections. The revised bill, sponsored by Sen. Wendell Mitchell, D-Luverne, got approved by the Senate 22-0 late Wednesday night. It now goes to Gov. Bob Riley, who plans to sign it into law, spokesman David Ford said.

Republican Attorney General Troy King and Democratic Secretary of State Nancy Worley recommended the three-week delay after the Justice Department sued Alabama, saying there is not enough time between the primary election June 6 and the runoff June 27 for military overseas, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, to receive and cast absentee ballots.

Supporters said the Legislature had the choice of negating the suit by delaying the runoff or fighting the Justice Department. -- Welcome to TimesDaily.com

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The New York Times reports: The battle among candidates for city office has begun, but running alongside it is a fight over the election itself.

Seven months after Hurricane Katrina, thousands of voters, particularly black ones, have yet to return to the city.

In their absence, community groups and activists have repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the election, on April 22, for mayor, City Council and a host of lesser offices.

On Monday, a federal judge turned away their arguments, suggesting that the need to vote trumped all.

But even as he did so, the judge, Ivan L. R. Lemelle of Federal District Court in New Orleans, told his own history of displacement and loss, acknowledging that the election, with its shifting and destroyed polling places, its thousands of absentee ballots not yet mailed and its participants scattered throughout the country, would be far from perfect. -- Judge Orders New Orleans to Proceed With Election - New York Times

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On behalf of the Policy Research Institute for the Region at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the Fels Institute for Government at the University of Pennsylvania, we would like to invite you to attend a conference on election reform that we are hosting this spring. The conference, titled "Making Every Vote Count: A Colloquium on Election Reform Legislation" will take place at Princeton on April 6th and 7th, and will bring leading figures in the scholarly, policy, and advocacy communities together to consider the myriad urgent yet delicate questions currently confronting the nation's electoral systems. For attorneys, the conference will also count as CLE credit. There is no charge to attend.

"Making Every Vote Count," will focus on three particularly important federal laws -- the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, or McCain-Feingold), the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) – with a special emphasis on the implications of these acts for practice and policy in the New York/New Jersey/Pennsylvania region. Among the questions we hope to address are:

• “How has the McCain-Feingold Act both limited and driven policymaking at the state level;�

• “In what ways does HAVA challenge common definitions of voting equity, and what are the implications of those challenges for the future of policymaking;"

• "How might the Voting Rights Act best reflect minority voters’ concerns, in the renewal process and beyond;"

• “What are some important goals in election reform that both HAVA and the VRA fail to address?�

Several pieces of specially commissioned research will provide the foundation for the event. Authors who will be presenting their work include Ned Foley of Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law, Richard Pildes of New York University School of Law, Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School, and Guy Charles of the University of Minnesota Law School. Along with panels based on these papers, there will be roundtable discussions with critical regional election officials, as well as keynote addresses by leading figures in the election reform movement, including former EAC Chair DeForest Soaries.

For more information, please contact Andy Rachlin at arachlin@princeton.edu or (609)258-9531. To register, please go to http://region.princeton.edu/conference_20.html or contact Georgette Harrison at gharriso@princeton.edu or (609)258-9065. Please register online if at all possible, as it makes it easier for us to provide updates on the conference as the date nears. Note that the conference will begin at 9:15 a.m. each day and continue until mid-afternoon.

We hope you will be able to join us for what is sure to be a timely and provocative event.

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The Seattle Times reports: The state's primary election will be a month earlier next year.

The state House on Wednesday voted 94-3 to move the primary from the third Tuesday in September to the third Tuesday in August starting in 2007. The legislation had cleared the Senate. Gov. Christine Gregoire has said she'll sign it.

Lawmakers have debated moving the primary for years, but the idea gained momentum after the tumultuous 2004 gubernatorial contest between Democrat Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi.

The Republican Party alleged, among other things, that election officials were too slow in mailing military absentee ballots. Moving the primary to a month earlier will give election workers more time to get out absentee and overseas ballots to voters for the general election.

"We had real problems of how tight that timetable was. There were only 19 days between the time the primary was certified and the time the ballots had to be in the mail," Secretary of State Sam Reed said. -- The Seattle Times: Local News: House agrees to bump primary to August

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AP reports: A federal judge Friday refuse to postpone the April 22 mayoral election in New Orleans, turning back arguments that too many black residents scattered by Hurricane Katrina will be unable to take part.

The decision was issued by U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle, who had earlier pressured state officials to make sure the election was held by the end of April.

"We're extremely disappointed," said Tracie Washington, one of the lawyers working with hurricane victim advocates who wanted to either delay the election or force the state to set up "satellite" voting operations out of state.

Mayor Ray Nagin, who has been criticized in some quarters for his response to the hurricane, is running for re-election in New Orleans, which was a mostly black city of nearly half a million people before Katrina reduced it to well under 200,000 inhabitants. The city has not had a white mayor since 1978. -- Nola.com: NewsFlash - U.S. judge: No New Orleans election delay

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The Manchester Union Leader reports: In a move to protect New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation Presidential primary, the House yesterday passed a bill that lets the Secretary of State change filing deadlines any time he thinks it necessary.

In the second of a two-day session, the House passed the bill on a nearly unanimous voice vote.

The Democratic National Committee is studying the issue of front-loading, in which too many primaries are held too early in the process. But a DNC study commission has shifted its focus toward diversity issues, and many on the commission say New Hampshire is not diverse enough to warrant its first primary status. It has proposed adding caucuses or primaries early in the process to dilute New Hampshire’s power.

Rep. James Splaine, D-Portsmouth, who sponsored HB 1125, said the bill “will make it very clear to the national parties, but more importantly to other states that we are ready to do what we need to do.� -- House passes bill to protect first-in-the-nation tradition

Thanks to Political Wire for the link.

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AlterNet has an excerpt from Andrew Gumbel's "Steal This Vote": A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. "We wouldn't think of it," the former president told a radio interviewer. "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons."

What, after all, was to be done with a country whose newest voting machines, unlike Venezuela's, couldn't even perform recounts? A country where candidates, in contrast to the more promising emerging democracies of the Caucasus or the Balkans, were denied equal, unpaid access to the media? There were a number of reasons, in the sharply partisan atmosphere surrounding the Bush-Kerry race, to wonder whether campaign conditions didn't smack more of the Third World than the First. Every day, newspapers recounted stories of registration forms being found in garbage cans, or of voter rolls padded with the names of noncitizens, fictional characters, household pets, and the dearly departed. The Chicago Tribune, a paper that knows its voter fraud, having won a Pulitzer for its work on the infamous Daley machine, found 181,000 dead people on the registration lists of six key battleground states. -- AlterNet: Excerpt: How to Steal an Election

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AP reports: The U.S. House seat vacated when Robert Menendez was appointed to the U.S. Senate would remain open until it can be filled through the November election, under an opinion issued by a state agency.

The non-partisan arm of the state Legislature, the Office of Legislative Services, has determined that Governor Corzine does not have the authority to call an early special election for a House vacancy, according to an opinion made public Thursday by Assembly Democrats. -- North Jersey Media Group providing local news, sports & classifieds for Northern New Jersey!

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The Baton Rouge Advocate reports: Under pressure from a federal judge, Gov. Kathleen Blanco set an April 22 date for New Orleans elections, postponed after Hurricane Katrina scattered thousands of city residents and destroyed hundreds of voting precincts.

Though Blanco solidified the election date Tuesday with her executive order, the state doesn’t have all the approvals it needs to proceed with April elections in New Orleans for mayor, city council, sheriff and tax assessors.

The Legislature and the U.S. Justice Department need to approve Secretary of State Al Ater’s emergency election plan for the city, which includes beefed-up absentee balloting and the creation of “mega-polling� sites to replace those damaged by the hurricane.
Meanwhile, state Attorney General Charles Foti is trying to find out whether it’s OK to release information to elected officials and prospective candidates on where hurricane-displaced residents are residing. -- April 22 firm date set for N.O. election

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AP reports: Louisiana’s top election official assured a federal judge Wednesday that hurricane-delayed elections can be held in New Orleans by late April, and the judge gave the state a week to set the dates.

U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle stopped short of saying he would order elections himself if the state fails to do so by Tuesday, but said he would take steps to make sure voters are not disenfranchised. “I feel like a bull in a China closet if you throw the elections in my hands,� Lemelle told attorneys.

Lemelle scheduled a status conference on the case for Jan. 25.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco postponed the Feb. 4 elections for mayor, sheriff, tax assessors and City Council members after Secretary of State Al Ater said it was impossible to ready the devastated city and track down voters so soon after Hurricane Katrina. -- Judge wants dates for N.O. elections set by Tuesday

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The Union Leader reports: Gov. John Lynch yesterday backed legislation designed to help the state’s top election official ward off challenges to the state’s leadoff Presidential primary from the national political parties and other states.

Portsmouth Democratic Rep. Jim Splaine’s bill allowing the Secretary of State to schedule the filing period for the Presidential primary whenever he considers appropriate will provide him “with an extra measure of flexibility, enhancing his ability to schedule the New Hampshire primary in accordance with state law,� Lynch said in a letter of the House Election Law Committee.

Lynch called efforts to protect the primary, now under siege by some national Democrats, a “critical issue.� -- Lynch backs bill to bolster protection for NH primary

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AP reports: A federal judge on Tuesday urged state officials to quickly set a date for postponed elections that would decide the next mayor for this hurricane-battered city.

The destruction of polling stations, dispersal of election day workers and the difficulties of contacting tens of thousands of evacuees prompted state and local elections officials to call off a mayoral primary set for Feb. 4.

At a hearing on a lawsuit challenging the decision to postpone the elections, U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle said voting is an essential part of democracy and that elections would give New Orleanians "a sense of normalcy." ...

But the judge denied a plaintiffs motion to get Lemelle to set an election date. Lemelle said he wanted to let the process unfold rather than stepping in. But he held up his index finger and thumb close together and said: "I came that close to doing that (taking over the election process) today." -- Judge: Set date for N.O. elections - The Clarion-Ledger

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Tova Andrea Wang, of The Century Foundation, describes "The Worst and Best in Election Reform, 2005 (Because There Was More Bad than Good)": So many grinches this year, Who-ville is more worried than ever about its democracy. The Georgia state legislature. The Department of Justice. Tom Delay. It was enough to make us believers in voting rights think we would be left with nothing under the tree. But despite a commitment to reform two sizes too small in so many quarters, there were at least some indications that 2006 might bring progress on elections after all. -- The Worst and Best in Election Reform, 2005 (Because There Was More Bad than Good)

The good/bad news for me is that Alabama is not on either list.

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BayouBuzz.com reports: On Monday, Governor Kathleen Blanco took the extraordinary step and signed an executive order delaying the qualifying period and the February 4 and March 4, 2006 elections in Orleans Parish due to the collapse of the electoral process in New Orleans.

Governor Blanco did not provide a replacement date for qualifying nor an election date.

There are many people on both sides of this issue and a lawsuit has been filed against the governor for her position.

The most important question is whether the people who would want to vote would have had the ability to cast their ballot and whether their decisions would have been based on availability of information. -- BayouBuzz.com - Louisiana Politics and News

Posted by Ed at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AP reports: The U.N.'s electoral chief vowed Tuesday to fight her dismissal, saying charges that she sexually harassed her staff and abused her authority were false. Carina Perelli said she would appeal her firing through the U.N. system and did not rule out taking further legal action outside the United Nations.

She expressed hope that her firing would not affect upcoming elections in Iraq, Congo, the Palestinian territories and Haiti.

Perelli, 48, of Uruguay, won wide praise for her work in helping organize elections in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian territories and had been considered one of the young rising stars at the United Nations. In August, the U.N. formally accused her of harassing her staff after a four-month review into the claims of an abusive and sexually offensive environment in her division. -- U.N. Electoral Chief to Fight Dismissal

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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports: The nearly yearlong investigation into voter fraud in 2004 has yielded no evidence of a broad conspiracy to try to steal an election, U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic said Monday.

He predicted that perhaps "a couple of dozen" isolated cases of suspected fraud might be charged, and he said that sloppy recordkeeping by election officials was a key impediment to proving such cases.

Nothing in the cases that his office has examined has shown a plot to try to tip an election, Biskupic said during a meeting with Journal Sentinel editors and reporters.

Critics had raised such fears of partisan voter fraud schemes in the election aftermath. But Biskupic said, "I wouldn't say that at all."

He said, "We don't see a massive conspiracy to alter the election in Milwaukee, one way or another." -- JS Online: No vote fraud plot found

Posted by Ed at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

AP reports: Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco agreed Friday to postpone New Orleans' Feb. 4 elections for mayor and City Council for as long as eight months because of the damage and dislocation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Blanco's decision came hours after Louisiana's top elections official recommended the delay, saying polling places had not been rebuilt and hundreds of thousands of voters remained scattered across the country. -- New Orleans Votes Delayed - Los Angeles Times

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AP reports: A top state official recommended Monday that elections scheduled for February in New Orleans be delayed because of Hurricane Katrina, which displaced thousands of residents and demolished polling places.

Elections Commissioner Angie LaPlace told a legislative committee that she believes the Feb. 4 mayoral primary - which would also include city council races and referendums - should be postponed.

"It would be too problematic. We're not ready," LaPlace said.

LaPlace did not specify how long the primary should be delayed or say how her recommendation might affect the March 4 general election in which Mayor Ray Nagin has indicated he will seek a second term.

She has made the recommendation to Secretary of State Al Ater. If Ater agrees with her, the governor would have to decide whether to delay the election. -- AP Wire | 11/14/2005 | State official says delay New Orleans vote

Posted by Ed at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An email from Brookings Institution Press: A new book proposes making Election Day a national holiday to reverse the low rate of American voter turnout. “Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It� (Brookings Institution Press) by Stephen Macedo and a team of leading political scientists explores why Americans have lost interest in public affairs. One of their solutions: declare Election Day a holiday or move elections to the weekend to increase participation.

According to the authors, citizens are not entirely to blame. The political system itself is responsible for making participation difficult – long presidential primaries, uncompetitive congressional elections, and excessively nasty and ideological partisan politics combine to turn people away. The system itself blocks possibilities for greater involvement, sharpens economic disparities, and discourages attention to campaigns and important political issues.

Continue reading "Should Election Day Be A National Holiday?" »

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AP reports: New Orleans is scrambling to hold credible elections next year though hundreds of thousands of voters have been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's secretary of state said Tuesday. ...

"This is probably the most important election in the history of New Orleans because whoever is the leadership in this election is basically going to be charged with rebuilding that city," Ater said at a forum in Washington sponsored by the Center for American Progress and American Constitution Society. "That is not a small test."

Ater is leading a state push to change some of the election laws before many state residents simply register elsewhere, forfeiting their right to vote in New Orleans even if they plan to eventually return.

For example, he is asking the Legislature to change the state's purge laws, which assume voters have moved elsewhere when they miss an election and a notification card sent to their home is returned as undeliverable. If such cards were sent now, the post office has said almost all registered voters in New Orleans would qualify to be purged, Ater said. -- AP Wire | 11/01/2005 | Post-Katrina elections present problems

Posted by Ed at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Washington Post reports: A plan to shuffle the 2008 Democratic presidential calendar -- placing several states between the traditional Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary -- is gaining momentum on a commission studying the party's nominating process.

A consensus is developing to recommend scheduling nominating contests in two or possibly three states in the days between Iowa and New Hampshire, according to some members of a Democratic National Committee panel looking at ways to revamp the nominating schedule. ....

If such a recommendation were adopted, it likely would diminish the influence of two small states that for decades have enjoyed outsized influence in picking presidential nominees, and would cause aspiring presidential candidates to rethink their strategies about travel and spending, and potentially even their campaign messages, in pursuit of the nomination.

Some proponents of a new calendar say adding caucuses rather than primaries in states voting immediately after Iowa would be consistent with a New Hampshire state law that mandates the Granite State's primary be held at least one week before any "similar" nominating election. This would allow both Iowa and New Hampshire to claim that each preserved elements of their coveted first-in-the-nation status, while also bowing to critics who have long complained that the traditional calendar is unfair to other states. -- Deal Near on Democratic Presidential Schedule

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The American Prospect reports: It's too early to know whether early reports of implausibly high numbers of "yes" voters in Saturday's referendum in Iraq will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the country's new constitution. While there's still hope for a clean victory, sufficient doubts have been cast on the results to open a door for those who would wish to cry foul. Whether whiffs of ballot-stuffing or fraud are validated, the absence of a large-scale international observer contingent on hand to monitor this high-stakes election was a glaring gap in the planning for this pivotal event.

The presence of international observers has become a mainstay of election planning in transitional societies, as their presence deters would-be spoilers from planning shenanigans. Observers can watch balloting, oversee the collection and storage of votes, and monitor counting. Tasks range from reporting on improper campaign activities at polling stations, to preventing people from voting more than once, to imposing fair and transparent methods for tallying votes. International monitors have played essential roles in recent elections in the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. -- Ballot Botch

Posted by Ed at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Roll Call reports: A Democratic-led effort to ensure voting privileges for the displaced residents of the Gulf Coast region appears to be picking up steam in Congress, with legislation now filed in the House and Senate that would provide Hurricane Katrina refugees with the same voting privileges granted to other absentee residents.

The Displaced Citizens Voter Protection Act of 2005 was introduced in the House by Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) one month ago and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) dropped a similar version in the Senate last week. Davis and Feingold are planning to hold a news conference on Capitol Hill next week to highlight the legislation.

The bill would grant residents of hurricane-ravaged areas who have temporarily relocated to other addresses the ability to vote absentee - the same way college students, military personnel and overseas voters do - in the 2006 federal elections.

"There's no question in my opinion that displaced voters, if they choose, should be able to participate in federal races in Louisiana and Mississippi if they intend to return to those states," Davis said in an interview Wednesday.

The legislation specifies that voters would have to sign an affidavit certifying that they are qualified to vote in their original place of residence and that they plan to return to that residence in the near future. -- "Democrats Advance Effort to Secure Voting Privileges for Hurricane Victims," Oct. 12, 2005. [Sorry, no link]

Posted by Ed at 11:29 AM | Permalink

The report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform can be downloaded from this site.

Posted by Ed at 1:24 PM | Permalink

Tova Andrea Wang of The Century Foundation writes: It is truly shocking how, given all the problems in the voting system and continued disenfranchisement, the terms of the debate have shifted to that of so-called "ballot integrity." It is reminiscent of how conservatives have misappropriated the concept of patriotism and the American flag, and used the power of language and messaging to distort the discussion, by using terms such as "partial birth abortion" or "death tax." The latest example of this is the just released report of the commission on election reform co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker.

The 2001 bi-partisan commission co-chaired by former President Carter and Gerald Ford, which The Century Foundation co-sponsored and I was on the staff of (and which had an entirely different membership), had a very different approach. There were differences about how best to implement the recommendations of the report. However, while we were concerned with accuracy and preventing fraud, we did not see that as a goal that was in conflict with ensuring the right to vote.

It was the 2001 commission that promoted the idea of statewide voter registration databases, so that we could both prevent fraud and ensure every registered voter was on the voting list the list and able to vote. We proposed the idea that any voter who comes to the polls and does not appear on the list be given a provisional ballot. We stated that when a felon completes his sentence, he should get his voting rights back. We enumerated several ways to ensure that "no individual, group or community [holds] a justified belief that the electoral process works less well for some than for others." We even recommended an election day holiday!

This stands in stark contrast to the entire tenor of the Carter-Baker report, which presumes that fraud committed by voters is the biggest problem confronting our election system. There is simply no strong evidence of this, and some of the remedies proposed will take us backwards in the fight to increase voter participation. -- Carter-Baker Report: Some Bad Fixes for the Wrong Problems

Posted by Ed at 1:09 PM | Permalink

AP reports: Electronic voting machines should leave a paper trail of ballots cast and the government should provide free photo IDs to nondrivers to help check voting eligibility, a commission on election reform recommends.

The private commission, created to suggest ways to improve the electoral process, also favors four regional primaries to be held after the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Also, states should develop registration systems that allow easy checks of voters from one state to another, according to the report by the bipartisan panel led by former President Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. ...

The Commission on Federal Election Reform had to balance concerns about better access for voters and worries about preventing voter fraud. -- Newsday.com: Panel Recommends Ways to Improve Elections

Posted by Ed at 7:25 AM | Permalink

On October 7-8, the Center for Policy Alternatives, Demos and Common Cause will host an Election Reform Conference. This conference is designed to provide policy content, leadership development and networking opportunities for state legislators to advance an election reform agenda in their states. This conference, targeted to state legislators in the Midwest, has three strategic objectives:

* Raise the awareness of state policymakers of the electoral problems that need repair within their states while providing proposals and best practices that provide solutions to these challenges.
* Develop leadership capacity among policymakers and apply that capacity to effect change within their states.
* Connect these legislators to electoral policy experts, reform advocates and citizen organizers and facilitate the creation of action plans to move a reform agenda forward in their states.

This combination of strategic objectives - leadership, education and networks - has been successfully used to reform public policy and enrich democracy in America. -- CPA: Events: Election Reform Conference

Posted by Ed at 11:13 AM | Permalink

The Los Angeles Times reports: Government officials and legal experts have begun wrestling with an intriguing question posed by the evacuation of New Orleans: What happens to the politics of a region when a significant part of the electorate suddenly disappears?

The migration of hundreds of thousands of people from this urban center, many of them low-income and black, could have a dramatic effect on the political makeup of a state delicately balanced between the two major parties. If most of the evacuees choose not to return, Katrina's political legacy could be that it made Louisiana a more Republican state. -- Political Landscape May Shift on Displaced Voters - Los Angeles Times

The article also quotes me:

But political upheaval is already the second wave of Katrina's destruction. Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), whose district, which includes New Orleans, was virtually leveled by the hurricane and floods, now has constituents living in other states.

"If Orleans Parish completely empties out and a lot of people don't move back — poor people especially — then the population of his district will go down, and [there will be] a disproportionate loss of black population," said Edward Still, a lawyer in Birmingham, Ala., who specializes in voting rights. "Poor people who don't own any property are less likely to come back. If every person who left and didn't come back was black, he could lose 230,000 from his district."

In Jefferson's 2nd District, which is more than 60% black, that would represent a loss of about one-third of the population.

Such a drop in black voters could inspire a challenge from a white candidate, Still said.

Posted by Ed at 3:31 PM | Permalink

From a Justice Department press release: The Justice Department announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Ector County, Texas, alleging violations of the rights of minority- language voters under the Voting Rights Act. The Department simultaneously filed a consent decree resolving the lawsuit against the county.

Section 4(f)(4) of the Voting Rights Act requires that certain jurisdictions with a substantial minority-language voter population must provide all voting materials and assistance in the minority language as well as in English. The complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleges that the county failed to meet its legal responsibilities under section 4(f)(4) to provide effective assistance to Spanish-speaking voters at the polls. -- U.S. Newswire : Releases :

Posted by Ed at 7:39 PM | Permalink

AP reports: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has the authority to cancel the November special election and can do so anytime before voting begins, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the nonpartisan California legislative counsel.

The ruling, which was drafted at the request of state Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, came as another Democratic lawmaker announced he would introduce legislation calling on Schwarzenegger to scrap the election.

The developments were the latest in a series of skirmishes over the fate of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's embattled government reform agenda. But as Schwarzenegger expressed hope for a compromise with legislators over his ballot initiatives, his campaign team vowed to press ahead with a full-fledged campaign.

According to Deputy Legislative Counsel Christopher Dawson, the governor has the sole authority to rescind a proclamation calling for a special election. That contradicted an opinion by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, who had suggested lawmakers could approve legislation by a two-thirds vote that would call off the election. -- AP Wire | 08/02/2005 | Governor can cancel special election, legislative counsel rules

Posted by Ed at 9:48 PM | Permalink

Election Bill Tracker - Common Cause: The Common Cause Election Reform Team announces the implementation of a new Election Bill Tracker. This interactive database allows you to search for election-related bills in a particular state legislature, link to the bills' web sites for their exact language, and also find out the current status of the bills. Or, if you are interested in a particular election issue, you can find out about bills focusing on that issue all across the country, again with links to the bill's web sites and information about their current status.

Thanks to Daniel Levitas for the link.

Posted by Ed at 10:08 AM | Permalink

AP reports: Philippine opposition lawmakers filed an impeachment complaint today against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, accusing her of vote-rigging and other wrongdoing.

The filing against Arroyo, a staunch U.S. ally, claims she "stole, cheated and lied" to obtain power and hold it. Her aides have moved to block the complaint on a legal technicality.

A summary of the complaint seen by the Associated Press accuses Arroyo of 10 major crimes including election fraud and corruption. It claims she can be impeached on at least four grounds.

Arroyo has denied manipulating the May 2004 ballot by discussing vote counting with an election official before she was declared the winner. She has said she is ready to face an impeachment trial to clear her name and has announced a "truth commission" also will probe the accusations. -- Philippines leader faces more charges

Posted by Ed at 7:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

AP reports: Some bills that died on final day of 2005 session of Legislature would have:

-Banned the transfer of campaign contributions from one political action committee to another. ...

-Moved Alabama's presidential preference primary from June to the first Saturday after the New Hampshire primary. ...

-Required nonprofit organizations to disclose their source of funding for buying advertising to influence the vote on a referendum. ...

-Given Alabama a new official insect by replacing the monarch butterfly with the queen honey bee. -- Welcome to TimesDaily.com

The last one was just to see if you were paying attention.

Posted by Ed at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

AP reports: Democrats, looking to reverse their fortunes after two straight White House defeats, met yesterday to hear competing proposals to revamp the election calendar used to choose a presidential nominee every four years.

The three major proposals would focus on regional primaries. Two of those proposals would allow Iowa and New Hampshire to retain their leadoff roles in the candidate selection process.

A third plan, offered by Michigan Democrats, would create a rotating series of six regional primaries. A different region would launch each presidential nominating season.

That plan would allow single-state contests to begin the process, but those states would be rotated. -- Democrats debate plans to revamp primaries

Meanwhile, the elbowing continues. Alabama's legislature will vote tomorrow on a bill to move the Alabama presidential primary to the Saturday after New Hampshire's primary. South Carolina vows to move its primary to an even earlier date.

Posted by Ed at 8:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Steven Hill writes on the FairVote.org website: THE U.S. ELECTORAL SYSTEM is our nation's crazy aunt in the attic. Every few years she pops out and creates a scene, and everyone swears that something must be done. But as soon as election day passes, we're happy to ignore her again — at least until the next time she frustrates the will of the people.

Under a fair, equitable, and democratic system of voting, Al Gore would have been elected president in 2000, and George W. Bush would still be whacking weeds in Crawford. In 2004, even though Bush won the popular vote by some 3 million ballots, the election was still tarnished. Florida replayed its 2000 debacle with attempts to purge African-American voters from the rolls, and voters who requested absentee ballots but never received them were barred from voting in person. ...

Here are a few of Steven's suggestions:

3] DEVELOP "PUBLIC INTEREST" VOTING EQUIPMENT. The voting-equipment industry is dominated by three companies: Sequoia Voting Systems, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), and Diebold Election Systems. These companies develop their own private software and hardware that is then certified by state authorities, although the rigor of the certification procedures varies widely from state to state. Laxness is encouraged by the revolving door between state officials and the industry.

6] GIVE THIRD PARTIES A CHANCE. Our current plurality (that is, "highest vote-getter wins") method of electing political representatives hobbles our choices by casting third-party candidates as potential spoilers. Last year's furious battles over Ralph Nader's candidacy demonstrated that our system is not designed to accommodate more than two choices, yet important policy areas can be completely ignored by major-party candidates.

9] MAKE VOTING A RIGHT. As American voters
discovered in 2000, we have no legal right to vote directly for president. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that, under the Constitution, voting for president is reserved for state legislatures, who decide whether they wish to delegate it to the voters. A constitutional amendment spelling out our right to vote could guarantee the franchise to all citizens. -- F A I R V O T E -- the Center for Voting and Democracy

Thanks to Donkey Rising blog for the link.

Posted by Ed at 6:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Washington Post reports: It did not feature much in the way of butterfly ballots, hanging chads or protracted Supreme Court fights. But the first hearing yesterday of the Commission on Federal Election Reform made it clear that the 2004 election was not without problems.

Former president Jimmy Carter and ex-secretary of state James A. Baker III, who co-chair the commission, invited a dozen experts to American University to recommend ways to improve the nation's voting system. The commission will consider those suggestions, along with others expected at a second hearing in June, and submit its own recommendations to Congress.

Those recommendations are not expected until September, which is a good thing because the academics, advocacy group leaders and politicians invited to testify yesterday provided a dizzying list of electoral problems that might make some wonder how any ballots were counted in November. ...

Much of the testimony was anecdotal, with many bemoaning the lack of hard evidence that would indicate how widespread the problems are. Many disagreed on what ought to be done. But nearly all said the system can and should be improved before the next election. -- Defects In 2004 Balloting Described (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by Ed at 9:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Government Technology reports: Last week, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signed a comprehensive election reform package incorporating several bills that initiate sweeping changes in New Mexico's election process. The new law creates uniform standards for voter identification, ballot counting, voting machine records, and the training of election judges and poll workers. ...

Voter ID: Voters will be required to state their name and give the last four digits of their social security number, or show some form of physical identification prior to voting. The list of acceptable ID includes any photo ID, a utility bill, a bank statement, a government check or a paycheck. Any tribal government document is acceptable as well. ...

A voter friendly process: The bill also makes New Mexico more voter friendly by requiring maps to be posted at all polling places directing voters to their proper precincts. Voters will also be able to drop off absentee ballots at their polling location on election day, and will provide funding to re-design ballots and election materials to make them easier to understand and complete them correctly. Speaker of the House Ben Lujan will chair an interim committee to tackle additional questions that must be addressed, such as same-day registration, prepaid postage for absentee ballots, and greater uniformity in voting machines. -- New Mexico Gov. Signs Election Reform Package

I have excerpted only the most interesting of the provisions. Note the "or" in the Voter ID provision.

Posted by Ed at 7:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

AP reports: A bill that would require most voters to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot is on its way to Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels for consideration after winning final approval in the General Assembly on today.

Daniels has said he would likely sign the bill, which has been strongly opposed by Democrats who s