Archive for 2015

The Washington Post has a new piece looking at the push to establish local voting rights for legal non-citizens – a practice that exists in a handful of communities and has roots in recent history, even if its immediate future prospects (and current effects) are somewhat limited.

DC pollworker and election geek Sam Derheimer shares the details of a new data collection effort in the Nation’s Capital – a simple, straightforward project that promises to generate data to improve elections for voters and election officials alike.

Nebraska’s Unicameral Legislature may soon take up the issue of voter ID after a bill was reported out of committee yesterday. The proposal includes an interesting twist: a provision that allows voters to be “positively identified” using county voter registration documents.

MSNBC has a quick rundown on five states likely to debate voter ID in the near future. It’s an easy bet that the partisan cross fire on ID will open up in one or more of these state capitols very soon.

Oregon is once again proposing to use state databases to automatically register eligible but unregistered voters. Despite legislative misgivings, it isn’t clear that it has a partisan effect, but the implementation challenges are real.

New data from CQ Roll Call illuminates the sharp difference in the scope and pace of activity between Congress and state legislatures. While the figures are admittedly crude, they still reinforce the notion that on most issues, state legislatures are where it’s at.

Orange County, CA conducts a series of surveys intended to identify to move past anecdotes and learn how its election system is performing so the office can focus on constant improvement. That project is the subject of this week’s electionlineWeekly profile.

North Carolina’s State Board of Elections has notified counties that existing DRE machines will be decertified in 2018 – and they will be financially responsible for replacing them. Counties are unhappy – both about the required switch and the cost.

Washington State is once again discussing whether or not to cover the cost of ballot postage – a proposal that would cost the state about $2.7 million over the next two years, though state and local officials (while supportive) are careful not to oversell the benefits.

Three months after Mineral County, NV elected new local officials, discovery of a missing cartridge containing as many as 172 votes (which could swing outcomes) may trigger a criminal investigation and presents the County with a dilemma of how to respond.