Archive for September 2014

UC-Irvine’s Rick Hasen has a fantastic piece over at Slate setting the scene for the next round of “voting wars” litigation now reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Says he: “We ignore what’s coming at our peril.”

California’s Secretary of State candidates are vying for the opportunity to serve in a high-visibility job with a long, long to-do list that covers the entire landscape of election policy issues from voter registration to voting machines – and the money to fund it all.

This week’s electionlineWeekly takes on the considerable task of compiling the latest news on the various pre-election lawsuits underway across the country. As electionline’s Mindy Moretti says, there are still several legal shoes yet to drop.

The 6th Circuit’s opinion upholding the expansion of early voting in Ohio tees up a conflict with other courts on the technical but vitally important question of retrogression – in particular, the baseline for comparison when considering Voting Rights Act complaints.

Florida’s county election supervisors have come together in a bipartisan call to their state legislature to enact online voter registration next year – with implementation delayed until after the 2016 Presidential election. It’s a pretty big deal.

The U.S. Senate controversy in Kansas has hit local election officials particularly hard, as court action and other uncertainty occurred right at the federal deadline for sending out military and overseas ballots.

A new controversy has erupted in Wisconsin over the state’s proposed ballot design, with Republicans claiming it unfairly advantages their opponents, and many Democrats making changes to improve its clarity and usability – all in the crucial weeks before Election Day.

Colorado’s outgoing SoS Scott Gessler is the subject of the latest First Person Singular from Mindy Moretti and electionline.org … and the “Honey Badger of Colorado politics” has a lot to say about his tenure and the future of election administration in Colorado.

Rick Hasen, UC-Irvine law professor and the Hardest Working Man in Election Law Business, has a fantastic new piece looking at the issue of uniformity in election administration which urges a focus on voters and not just entities like counties.

The main challenger to Massachusetts’ long-serving Secretary of State is trying to use online voting as a campaign issue in an effort to paint the incumbent as out of touch. It isn’t likely to succeed but is definitely a sign of the times.