Voter Protection

startribune.com by Pat Doyle

Al Franken and Sen. Norm Coleman each got good news and bad news Thursday, as one of the wildest elections in Minnesota history took yet another pair of startling turns.

The Minnesota Supreme Court said improperly rejected absentee ballots must be counted by the state Canvassing Board, something Coleman tried to prevent. But they won't be counted immediately, and Coleman and Franken must agree on which ones are tallied.  read more »

Cincinnati Enquirer by Jon Craig

COLUMBUS – Setting up a possible showdown with Gov. Ted Strickland, the Ohio House passed a bill Tuesday that eliminates the “golden week”– a period when voters could register and vote by absentee ballot on the same day.

Proponents of Senate Bill 380, sponsored by Sen. Bill Seitz, a Republican from Green Township, said the overlapping registration period could lead to voter fraud. Opponents said there’s been just a handful of illegal votes in recent years, and that the change will discourage new voters trying to avoid long lines on Election Day.  read more »

Wired.com by Kim ZetterI'm receiving e-mail from a number of readers who have not received absentee ballots they requested or who mailed in their ballots but had the ballot returned to them by the postal service.
A reader has pointed me to this site for overseas voters, which discusses back-up ballots for those who requested an absentee ballot but did not receive one. The rules vary state by state but in some locations you can actually fax your back-up ballot to election officials.
 read more »

New York Times by Ian Urbina

Millions of voters will encounter an unfamiliar low-tech landscape at the polls on Tuesday. About half of all voters will vote in a way that is different from what they did in the last presidential election, and most will use paper ballots rather than the touch-screen machines that have caused concern among voting experts.  read more »

New York Times by Ian Urbina

COLUMBUS, Ohio — If the outcome of next week’s presidential election is close, this precariously balanced state could be the place where the two parties begin filing the inevitable lawsuits over voting irregularities, experts say.

The battles could be over the rules for a recount, or how to deal with voters who were not added to the rolls even though they registered properly and on time. Lawyers could fight over how to count the paper ballots used when the electronic machines break down, or whether a judge was correct in deciding to keep certain polls open late.  read more »

Boston Globe by Miles Rapoport

OVER the last several weeks, a fierce argument has broken out over voter registration, particularly the registration efforts of ACORN, accusations of voter fraud, and the ability of the election system to handle the surge of voters on Nov. 4.  read more »

Alternet.org by Steven Rosenfeld

As the 2008 presidential election heads into its final week, the current president threw a political wild card on the table late Friday, when he asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the status of 200,000 Ohio voters.

George W. Bush's request, if honored, could be politically explosive. It would remind voters of the Department of Justice's partisan abuses of power in the scandal surrounding the firing of seven U.S. attorneys in 2006 who did not deliver 'voter fraud' convictions.  read more »

Colorado Independent by Naomi ZeveloffThe Advancement Project, a national voter protection organization, filed suit on Saturday against Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman for his alleged illegal purge of tens of thousands of voters across the state.

The organization filed suit on behalf of Mi Familia Vota, the Service Employees International Union and Colorado Common Cause, a group that has been highly critical of Coffman’s election administration.
 read more »

Salt Lake Tribune by Matthew D. LaPlante

You register. You vote. That's how simple it is for most Americans to access the polls on Election Day.

But military members, especially those at war, face a voting process that one advocacy group calls "daunting." From the time of the Civil War, millions of American service members have been disenfranchised while serving in combat, including many thousands whose absentee votes in the 2004 presidential election never arrived.

Now, military and local civilian officials are determined to make a change.  read more »

Alternet.org by Steven Rosenfeld

Republican Party efforts to stop thousands of voters from casting meaningful ballots in 2008 because their registration information does not match government databases with high error rates was set back by legal rulings in Wisconsin, Ohio and Nevada on Thursday.

In Wisconsin, a judge threw out a lawsuit by the state Attorney General, who also is the McCain campaign co-chair. In Ohio and Nevada, each state's top election official issued an order or opinion rejecting such 'no-match' voter challenges.  read more »