Voting Rights

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 »

Washington Post by David Nakamura

Back in the summer of 2007, Sen. Barack Obama stood near a community center with D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and said: "Folks in D.C. still don't have a voice in their national government. That's wrong. Residents shouldn't be treated like tenants."

Now that Obama (D) is poised to become the 44th president and both houses of Congress are majority Democratic, District leaders and activists say they're in the best position ever to secure representation for the city on Capitol Hill.  read more »

Wired.com by Kim Zetter

Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the top four voting machine vendors in the country, failed to print and deliver more than 18,000 absentee ballots to Denver County, Colorado, even though the company had assured officials the ballots were delivered, according to the Denver Post.

California-based Sequoia has a $742,000 contract with the county to print the ballots. Sequoia had told officials it sent some 21,000 ballots to a Denver postal facility on October 16, but postal officials said only about half that number arrived.  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 »

Democracy Now

In voting news, voter rights activists have won another major victory, this time in Colorado. State officials have agreed to reinstate tens of thousands of people whose names had been removed from the rolls. Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman said he had removed up to 30,000 voters because they appeared twice on the rolls or had moved out of state. But in a lawsuit against Coffman, the civil rights group the Advancement Project accused of him of an illegal purge.  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 »

Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson

Over the weekend the New York Times ran an alarming — and as it turns out flatly untrue — story that blamed Rock the Vote for disenfranchising as many as 100,000 voters in the state.

The story, Voters in Electoral Limbo, opens with a vignette of a alleged victim who registered with the youth voting group, but whose registration was nowhere to be found on the voter rolls.  read more »

The Indypendent by F. Timothy Martin

If the presidential race in Florida is as close as it was in 2000 there may be new reason for concern.

The state announced a new “no match” list this week that included over 12,000 names of newly registered voters whose identities cannot be verified, and who therefore will likely be ineligible to vote. While that’s just a fraction of the 438,000 new voters registered here since September 8, the fact that a disproportionate number of them are African-Americans, Hispanics, and Democrats, has watchdog groups crying foul.  read more »