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Maine on course to be the 18th state with automatic voter registration
Maine looks to become the latest state to embrace an increasingly popular initiative for boosting turnout in elections: automatic voter registration.
The Democratic-majority state Senate voted, 19-14 along party lines, for its own so-called AVR bill on Monday. As soon as Wednesday afternoon the senators were expected to cast an identical vote for similar legislation approved last week in the Democratic state House. After a budgetary review, the bill would go to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills for her expected signature.
Under the bill, starting in January 2022, eligible Mainers who have not registered in their municipalities would be automatically added to the voter rolls when doing business with the motor vehicle bureau or another agency that collects similar information – unless they ask to opt out.
Republicans in Augusta have been united in opposition to AVR. The conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center says it would open elections to "potential fraud and abuse," citing California's mistaken addition of hundreds of voters to the rolls last year.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted automatic voter registration in time for the 2020 presidential election.
The liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, which promotes easier ballot access, says that in each state where AVR has been in effect for a while, registration has increased well above what it would have been otherwise. The biggest gain was in Georgia, where between 2014 and last fall the rolls swelled to almost 7 million from 6 million — what the center calculated as a 94 percent increase above what would have happened without automatic registration.
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More states rolling the dice for election security
The paper trail has become the industry standard for giving voters and elections officials confidence that ballots haven't been hacked. Now comes another back-to-the-future move for boosting security and bolstering public confidence in elections: the return of the 10-sided dice.
The quirky toys found in many high school classrooms and role-playing games are part of a pilot program announced this week in Pennsylvania, which is joining a handful of other states in trying out a math-based system for checking the accuracy of election returns.
The "risk-limiting audit" searches for irregularities in vote tallies and relies on some seriously advanced statistical analysis combined with a bit of analog randomness, which is where auditors using those pentagonal trapezohedrons (the dice) at public audit hearings will ÂÂget involved.
Indiana moving far too slowly to thwart election hacking, lawsuit alleges
Indiana is not moving nearly assertively enough to upgrade its voting machines so they're less vulnerable to hackers, a nonprofit alleges in a federal lawsuit pressing the state to spend millions more before the presidential election.
At issue is the timetable for eliminating the direct recording electronic, or DRE, voting machines that are in use in 58 of the state's 92 counties. The complaint filed Thursday by Indiana Vote by Mail, which advocates for any array of proposals to give Hoosiers easier access to the ballot box, wants to force the state to replace the paperless devices in the next year with machines that produce a voter-verified paper audit trail.
Indiana for now looks to be among just eight states using paperless balloting in 2020, when President Trump will be counting on its 11 electoral votes. The state last went for the Democratic candidate for president in 2008.