The Voting News for November 7, 2011
Dawn Quarles, a high school teacher, is facing a $1,000 fine for doing something Florida has been cracking down on
lately: registering students to vote. The state’s leaders want to stop registration drives that add more qualified
voters to the rolls – and they are having a disturbing level of success.
Florida’s crackdown on voter registration is part of a larger national campaign against voting, which includes tough new
voter ID laws in many states, rollbacks on early voting and other anti-democratic measures. Supporters of these laws
argue that they are concerned with deterring fraud. But the real driving force is keeping down the number of voters –
especially young, old, poor, and minority voters.
Quarles is a government teacher at Pace High School in the Florida Panhandle. Along with teaching her students about
democracy, she has tried to get them to participate, by helping them register to vote. This should be a good thing. Our
nation’s founders insisted that government should operate with the consent of the governed. Ideally, everyone who is
eligible should be registered and vote.
Transparency advocates yesterday excoriated the Federal Election Commission for what they called increasingly lax
oversight of campaign finance as the country barrels toward what are expected to be the most expensive elections in
history next year. The advocates - including nonpartisan watchdogs Democracy 21, Public Citizen, and the Campaign Legal
Center - said the FEC has repeatedly failed to issue new regulations clarifying aspects of a Supreme Court ruling last
year allowing companies and other organizations to spend unlimited amounts on elections.
Among the questions still unanswered: Can foreign companies with some US operations legally contribute to US elections?
In the past, foreign citizens and companies have been barred from spending money in the American political system. Also
unanswered: Should American organizations that spend money to influence elections have to disclose the source of the
money?
Voters in San Francisco will use a system called ranked-choice voting, or instant runoff, to elect a mayor on Tuesday.
The city is one of many around the country, including Portland, Maine, and Telluride, Colo., using the system, which
allows voters to rank their favorite candidates; the winner is determined using a complicated mathematical formula.
Ranked-choice voting, which eliminates the need for primary elections, will be put to the test in San Francisco where 16
candidates are on the ballot.
At a city senior center recently, elections worker John Draper explained the system to some elderly voters, assuring
them that it was simple. "We just want to ask ourselves: Who do we want to win this election; Who is our favorite
candidate? And vote for them in the first column," Draper said.
When Bloomington residents vote in municipal elections on Tuesday, they'll be making marks on paper ballots, which
they'll slip into a box. At the end of the day, the votes will be tallied by hand. That's the same system local voters
used more than 100 years ago.
In the November 2010 general election, Monroe County voters used electronic voting machines that automated tallying.
Even in the May 2011 primary election, the votes -- on paper ballots -- were tallied using a high-speed optical scanner.
Monroe County voters have been using voting machines, mechanical or electric, since the '60s, but on Nov. 8, 2011, they
will use the same system used by America's founding fathers.
What happened? ES contract In December 2010, Monroe County signed a contract with Elections Systems and Software, of Omaha, Neb., for the
purchase of digital scanners that would read paper ballots and tally votes. Such a system allowed verifiability: paper
ballots, or a sample of them, could be compared to the machine's tally to ensure accuracy.
For nearly 40 years, voters in Maine have been able to walk into a polling place or town hall on Election Day and
register to vote. But the Republican-controlled legislature this year decided to remove the option, citing the stress on
municipal clerks and concerns about the potential for voter fraud.
Angry Democrats responded by launching a people's veto campaign, and come Election Day this Tuesday, voters will
consider whether to restore same-day registration. When Richard Vargas retired from the Marine Corps and returned home
to coastal Maine 16 years ago, he was surprised to run into problems at the local polls, not once, but twice.
In cities across the state, North Carolinians are going to the polls this week to exercise the most fundamental right of
our democracy: the right to vote. The underlying principle of our democracy is that we are all equal in the voting
booth: black or white, young or old, rich or poor. When we cast our ballot, we all raise an equal voice to determine the
shape of our government.
Sadly, some North Carolina legislators seem determined to reduce the chorus of voices that will be heard in the 2012
elections. Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed an onerous bill to make voters show a government photo ID when
they vote. It may seem like a common-sense requirement, but more people than you may imagine don’t drive or have a photo
ID — and they are disproportionately people of color, the elderly, low-income citizens, women who change their names and
the young. For example, a match-up of motor vehicle and election databases shows that while African Americans are 22
percent of N.C. registered voters, they are 32 percent of the roughly 500,000 registered voters without a state-issued
ID.
All 26 campuses in the UW System use "smart" cards for student identification. These cards can be used for a wide array
of monetary and security functions. But the issue at hand is that across the System's 26 campuses, there are as many as
14 different versions of student IDs, and not all of them meet the new requirements, said David Giroux, spokesman for
the System.
For example, the cards currently issued by UW-Madison do not meet the new voter ID law's standard for voter
identification. Wiscard IDs expire every five years, exceeding the two-year allowable time between issue and expiration
dates on student IDs for voting, said Government Accountability Board Spokesman Reid Magney.
The first and the second round of Bulgaria's presidential and local elections were held in compliance with the law,
according to Krasimira Medarova, Chair of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC). In a Saturday interview for Darik
radio, she confessed that the electoral process had been riddled with difficulties which led to "substantial problems in
the processing of the protocols and the announcement of the results", but nevertheless insisted that no serious
irregularities had taken place.
The CEC Chair noted, however, that it was the courts and not CEC which had the final say on contested election results.
Medarova was adamant that she had not come across any of the allegedly flawed protocols from Sofia containing signatures
of representatives of the Municipal Electoral Commission instead of the respective sectional electoral commissions.
The New Indonesia Party (PIB), the majority party on the Singkawang Legislative Council, may not be able to maintain its
existence on the council should the much-debated bill on legislative elections be enacted in its current state.
Singkawang regency, which is dominated by Chinese-Indonesians, saw four of its 25 legislative council seats filled by
members of the PIB, a party known for its policies that accommodate the interests of the Chinese descents.
Although the party only gained 0.19 percent of votes nationwide in the 2009 polls, putting it in 34th position on the
list of the total 38 political parties in the country, the PIB managed to win the majority of 11.91 percent of regional
legislative votes in Singkawang. But that would mean nothing if the House of Representatives decided to approve the
election bill that critics say would jeopardize democracy in the regions.
Official campaign for the 2011 run-off presidential election in Liberia scheduled for Tuesday ends mid-night Sunday,
according to the National Election Commission guideline. The election takes place despite boycott by main opposition
party Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) leaded Winston Tubman.
Tubman was recently summoned to the Nigerian Federal Capital, Abuja by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to convince
him to take part in the run-off following his party's boycott threats. The ruling party, UP and the CDC were winners and
runners-up in the first round of voting and were scheduled to contest for the presidency in a run-off on Nov 8, 2011.
Despite the resignation of the former chairman of National Electoral Commission (NEC), James Fromayan, the commission
said the election process will go ahead as all election materials and staffs have been deployed throughout the country.
Observers from the European Union and the Organization of American States reported Sunday that they had detected serious
irregularities in voting in what is expected to be a re-election victory for Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Ortega,
a onetime leftist guerrilla leader and acolyte of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, is seeking his third term in office despite
the Nicaraguan Constitution's ban on presidents serving consecutive terms.
Voting was marred by scattered violence, including reports of gunfire that wounded four people near the coffee-growing
city of Matagalpa and arson attacks on several rural precincts. Elsewhere, voting occurred without incident as
Nicaragua's 3.4 million voters aged 16 and older cast ballots for president, vice president and 90 deputies of the
National Assembly. Even so, chiefs of the two major international observer teams in Nicaragua for the election voiced
deep reservations about how the vote was conducted.
The advisor to the Ex-CM Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on political affairs, Sikandar Aziz Khan has suggested to the Election
Commission of Pakistan to immediately impose the system of proportional representation for the larger interest of the
country and the people as in this system votes will be cast in support of the political parties and not candidates that
will result in enhancement of the percentage of cast votes.
Addressing a press conference in the press club on Thursday, Sikandar Aziz Khan advised the Election Commission of
Pakistan to make immediate amendments in the law in this connection and adopt the system in which the seats in the
national and provincial assemblies would be allotted to the political parties according to the percentage of received
votes. He said the existing system had created a lot of defects in the ruling party and majority of the people were
reluctant to cast their votes. He said from the existing system it was clear that those rich candidates were being
brought to power who had spent huge funds on the elections and after wining the polls use every underhand method to get
the money back.
he National Citizen’s Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel) believes that Internet voting for overseas Filipinos is not
yet possible because the country is not equipped technologically. Namfrel senior operations associate Paolo Maligaya
said there are other aspects of overseas absentee voting (OAV) that need to be modified to lure Filipinos abroad to
register and vote.
“While it may be easy to say that all it takes to vote electronically is a…
The Elections Commissioner’s Department of Sri Lanka is to hold a series of discussions and seminars at district level
to discuss and receive proposals on the introduction of an electronic voting system for the country.
Elections Commissioner Mahinda Deshapriya has decided to hold the series of discussions in three stages.
The discussions are to be held with the participation of officials from the Elections Commissioner’s Department, senior
government officials…
*************