Battle for the Ballot

Voter who sued Louisiana for ballot access says voting should always be easy

BY: - November 12, 2020

When Jennifer Harding started caretaking for her mother, father and grandmother in March, she and her family started isolating from the rest of the world. “Before even the stay-at-home order went into place, we took our son out of school,” Harding said. Harding was worried about the safety of her mother, who has post-polio syndrome, […]

More Louisianans cast a ballot this year than any other in the past 30

BY: - November 4, 2020

With 92 percent of precincts reported as of 12:30 on Nov. 4, 2,100,291 voters cast their ballots in Louisiana, the most ever in a presidential election. 2,100,291 of the 3,092,871 is an unofficial turnout of 69.4 percent. An increase of the 67 percent voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election. Before Nov. 3, about a […]

COMMENTARY

Republican ‘hyper partisan’ attempt to curtail governor’s power could decrease access to the polls

BY: - October 16, 2020

When state Sen. Sharon Hewitt was taking questions from her Senate colleagues Oct. 1 about a bill she’d drafted to weaken the governor’s role in establishing an emergency election plan, Sen. Regina Barrow asked Hewitt point blank, “Is this a method to try to suppress the vote?”   Though Hewitt, a Slidell Republican, had previously expressed […]

Election Plan Kyle Ardoin

Appeal of Louisiana’s emergency election rules comes too late to change Nov. 3 rules

BY: and - October 13, 2020

In a move that has the potential to confuse Louisiana residents who will start voting Friday for president, the U.S. Senate and U.S. Congress, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry on Tuesday appealed a federal judge’s ruling that establishes the emergency rules for that election. However, the appeal will […]

Trump’s rhetoric on election integrity unfolds in courtrooms, tweets

BY: - October 9, 2020

See you in court! It is a threat President Donald Trump and his re-election campaign have lobbed — sometimes verbatim — at states across the country this year. Last week, the campaign threatened litigation in Pennsylvania if it wasn’t allowed to observe activity inside satellite election offices — access election lawyers say would be unprecedented, […]

List maintenance or voter purges: How the practice of maintaining voter lists became so polarized

BY: - October 8, 2020

In the last decade, millions of registered voters across the country have been removed from voter rolls. In 2019, Ohio removed more than 460,000 voter registration files from its list. Georgia removed 313,000 people from its rolls in October 2019 alone, and in Michigan, from 2011 to 2018, 1.2 million voters were removed from voter […]

Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act opened floodgates for new restrictions

BY: - October 7, 2020

It hadn’t even been a day since the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled one of the pillars of voting rights in America, and North Carolina lawmakers weren’t wasting any time. Republican legislators had been contemplating a bill that would require photo identification to vote. The bill had plenty of support, but it had spent the past […]

Nation’s voting machines remain vulnerable to hacking

BY: - October 6, 2020

There is no evidence, despite partisan claims to the contrary, that mail-in ballots are rife with voting fraud — but there are parts of the election system that security researchers say are at far greater risk for malicious activity. National elections like the one in November, when Americans will decide whether Donald Trump or Joe […]

Voter fraud myth persists despite constant failure to prove claims

BY: - October 6, 2020

TOPEKA, Kansas — Scott Moore had never heard of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program before election officials in Kansas and Florida exposed his personal information, along with 944 other Kansas voters. The now-defunct Crosscheck was designed to help county clerks clean up registration lists by looking for voters who had moved to neighboring states. […]

‘I just don’t trust the system any more’: Voters on edge as election nears

BY: and - October 5, 2020

WASHINGTON—Widespread anxiety and confusion around voting, compounded by the pandemic that has spread to millions of Americans, including President Donald Trump. A vastly underfunded and decentralized electoral system that could take days and possibly weeks to certify results.  Attempts to suppress voting, interfere with elections and cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots — […]