Arizona’s mail ballot signature verification disproportionately affects new voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad. He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election. When he submitted his mail ballot in November 2022, however, that messy signature would cost him his vote. Election officials who compared the signature on his mail ballot envelope to the electronic scribble on file weren’t convinced they came from the same person. So, as the law requires, they rejected his ballot. He didn’t find out until weeks later. Read Article

Georgia: Republican-led group sues to block rule requiring hand count of ballots | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A Republican-led group is challenging Georgia’s new requirement that poll workers count the total number of ballots by hand, saying it’s another example of the State Election Board overstepping its legal authority. Eternal Vigilance Action amended its existing lawsuit on Wednesday to also challenge that rule adopted Friday by the board. The group, founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican, was already suing the board over rules that it earlier adopted on certifying votes, a step that finalizes results. One of those rules provides for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify while another allows county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” Read Article

Ohio election administrators say their workers are overworked, underpaid, and strained by attacks | Susan Tebben/Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio’s local election workers are overworked, underpaid and strained by conspiratorial attacks, and the state could be doing more to leave politics out of the election process, according to a voting rights group who talked with local election administrators. All Voting is Local Ohio partnered with research firm Public Circle, LLC, to study the evolution of the work election administrators at the local level do as they prepare for another highly-contested election. “Today, these professionals are straining under the weight of back-to-back statewide special elections and rhetorical attacks on their trustworthiness, character and patriotism,” the report stated. Read Article

Virginia: Waynesboro election officials sue to require hand-count of ballots | Laura Vozzella/The Washington Post

Top Republican election officials in rural Waynesboro, Va., say they will refuse to certify the results of the Nov. 5 presidential election unless the city’s ballots are counted by hand, alleging in a lawsuit that voting machines could be secretly programmed to rig the outcome. Two members of the three-seat Board of Elections in Waynesboro, a small, red-leaning Shenandoah Valley city about 30 miles west of Charlottesville, contend in the suit that tallying ballots by machine amounts to counting them “in secret” — something prohibited by the state constitution. “The board members have taken an oath to uphold the Virginia Constitution, and the Virginia Constitution prohibits the counting of ballots in secret, so the board members do not believe that any election decided by voting machine total in the City of Waynesboro can be certified as accurate,” the suit says. Read Article

National: Republicans face backlash for lawsuits targeting overseas and military voting | Amy Gardner , Jacqueline Alemany and Dan Lamothe/The Washington Post

Republican lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina challenging the legitimacy of overseas ballots have prompted a backlash among military personnel, their spouses, veterans and elected officials. Scores of veterans and active-duty members of the armed forces have posted online or contacted their elected representatives out of concern that their votes might not be counted. Military and elected leaders, along with voting rights advocates, have decried the lawsuits as well, calling them a betrayal of the men and women serving the country overseas. “Literally, these are the people who are putting it all on the line for what we have in America,” said Allison Jaslow, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and now is chief executive of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “And we’re going to compromise their ability to have a say in how they vote for who sends them to war? It’s just beyond the pale.” Read Article

National: What Trump keeps getting wrong about ‘paper ballots’ | Marshall Cohen/CNN

Trump’s insistence that the US switch to “paper ballots” is nonsensical. More than 98% of voters live in jurisdictions that produce fully auditable paper trails, according to data from Verified Voting, which tracks election equipment in every county. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group, has spent the past two decades urging counties to move away from paperless voting in favor of in-person polling sites. (Vote-by-mail obviously incorporates a paper trail.) The people who run the group say they have accomplished their goal – despite claims from Trump and others that the US still needs paper ballots. “It’s really weird and I don’t understand it,” said Mark Lindeman, the group’s director for policy and strategy. “Almost everybody votes on paper ballots. Anyone who is convinced that we need paper ballots is very likely voting on paper ballots themselves.” Read Article

National: Not everything will run perfectly on Election Day but US elections are remarkably reliable | Gary Fields/Associated Press

On Election Day, some voting lines will likely be long and some precincts may run out of ballots. An election office website could go down temporarily and ballot-counting machines will jam. Or people who help run elections might just act like the humans they are, forgetting their key to a local polling place so it has to open later than scheduled. These kinds of glitches have occurred throughout the history of U.S. elections. Yet election workers across America have consistently pulled off presidential elections and accurately tallied the results — and there’s no reason to believe this year will be any different. Elections are a foundation of democracy. They also are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy. They’re conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the United States, from tiny townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some states have people. Read Article

National: New wave of GOP lawsuits targets overseas ballots in key swing states | Adam Edelman/NBC

Republicans have filed lawsuits over the past week in three pivotal battleground states seeking to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including military members, arguing that some votes are particularly prone to fraud. Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan voting experts strongly defended the previously uncontroversial overseas voting rules, arguing that the suits amounted to efforts to further lay the groundwork to question the veracity of the election results next month. The Republican National Committee last week sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan in state courts, alleging they had on their books unlawful rules that extended overseas voting eligibility to people whose residency in those states had not been verified. Read Article

National: Voting Wars Open a New Front: Which Mail Ballots Should Count? | Michael Wines/The New York Times

As Pennsylvania voters begin casting perhaps two million-plus mail ballots, Democrats and Republicans are in furious legal combat over a once-overlooked aspect of voting remotely: which ballots are counted, which are rejected as defective and which ones voters are allowed to correct. Simple math explains why. In the 2020 presidential contest, Pennsylvania election officials rejected more than 34,000 mail ballots. In a tight 2024 election in the most coveted swing state, even a fraction of that many rejections could spell the difference between victory and defeat — not just in the presidential race, but also in any number of others. What’s true in Pennsylvania is true, to varying degrees, in other battleground states. Michigan rejected more than 20,000 mail ballots in 2020 and even more in 2022; Arizona turned down 7,700; Nevada 5,600; and Wisconsin about 3,000. Read Article

National: Election conspiracy theories fueled a push to hand-count votes, but doing so is risky and slow | Christine Fernando/Associated Press

Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand. Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results. The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected. Read Article

National: Election officials who back Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ stir concern in swing states | Joseph Tanfani and Nathan Layne/Reuters

In Michigan’s Macomb County, the Republican head of the board that will certify November’s election results called on former U.S. President Donald Trump to fight to stay in power after his election loss in 2020. In North Carolina’s Henderson County, a Republican election board member emailed legislators in August to claim, without evidence, that Democrats were flooding the state with illegal votes. And in Pennsylvania, considered a must win for both Trump and his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, Republican officials in six counties have voted against certifying results since 2020. Four years after Trump tried to overturn his election loss, his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud have become an article of faith among many Republican members of local election boards that certify results. Their rise raises the chances that pro-Trump officials in multiple jurisdictions will be able to delay or sow doubt over the Nov. 5 presidential election if Trump loses. Read Article

National: Election offices are preparing for a smooth voting process — and angry voters | /Derek B. JohnsonCyberScoop

Roughly a month out from Election Day, officials from across the country said they remain focused on carrying out a smooth voting process while bracing for the possibility that their offices could be overwhelmed by angry voters and false claims of election fraud. Speaking at a gathering in Washington D.C. hosted by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a bipartisan group of election officials said that while they remain steadfastly confident in the integrity of past elections, they have had to put in place a host of new procedures over the past few years specifically to deal with claims of election malfeasance and fraud from local voters convinced by false claims of vote rigging by Republican candidate Donald Trump and his allies. Read Article

National: Russia, China and Iran Intend to Stoke False Election Claims, Officials Warn | Julian E. Barnes and Steven Lee Myers/The New York Times

Foreign efforts to undermine American democracy will continue after Election Day, U.S. intelligence officials said on Monday, with covert influence campaigns focused on questioning the validity of election results after polls close. Adversaries believe that the possibility of a close presidential race and contested control of the Senate and House of Representatives offer opportunities to undermine trust in the election’s integrity, the officials said as part of an update one month before the vote. The officials said they were worried about foreign adversaries amplifying domestic concerns about voting irregularities, as well as manufacturing their own allegations. After the 2020 vote, Donald J. Trump’s campaign made false allegations about voting irregularities, and he and his supporters have already advanced similar claims ahead of this year’s vote, many of them echoed by Russian state media or Kremlin-friendly organizations. Read Article

National: How China is using X to influence local elections in 2024 campaign | Jeremy B. Merrill , Aaron Schaffer and Naomi Nix/The Washington Post

China is increasingly targeting downballot elections in America, according to a Washington Post analysis and senior U.S. intelligence officials, using fake accounts on social media to spread divisive and sometimes explicitly antisemitic claims and conspiracy theories about politicians — part of an effort to inflame tensions in the country just one month before the 2024 election. One covert influence operation has focused on Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.), who is running to retain his House seat. A China-linked account on X called Moore “a Jewish dog” and claimed he won his primary because of “the bloody Jewish consortium,” among other derogatory tropes, according to a Post analysis of thousands of posts on X, of which about 75 concerned Moore. Moore, who recently backed new sanctions on Chinese officials, is not Jewish. Read Article

Arizona: Pinal County’s $150,000 audit confirms that its primary election was accurate and secure | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Pinal County spent at least $150,000 on an independent audit of its primary election after a losing candidate claimed fraud, a county spokesperson said Thursday, and the audit came back completely clean. The county’s supervisors, all Republicans, commissioned the audit in August to prove that the election was fair after one of them, Kevin Cavanaugh, blamed his loss in the sheriff’s race on malfeasance and voted to certify the results “under duress.” Brett Johnson of Snell & Wilmer, the law firm hired to lead the audit, presented the findings at a public meeting Wednesday afternoon, saying that the firm and the three technical experts hired to conduct the audit found no evidence of fraud or data manipulation. Read Article

California: How an ultra-right majority in Shasta County picked a novice to run its elections |  | The Guardian

When Shasta county had to search for a new official to oversee its elections earlier this year, there was an obvious candidate. Her name was Joanna Francescut, and she had been the assistant elections clerk and registrar of voters in this remote region in California’s far north. Francescut had worked in elections for more than 16 years, oversaw the office of the county clerk and registrar of voters for months after her boss went on leave, and was endorsed by elections officials and prominent area Republicans alike. Instead, the ultra-conservative majority on Shasta county’s board of supervisors in June selected Tom Toller, a former prosecutor who had never worked in elections and vowed to change the office culture, improve public confidence, and “clean up” voter rolls. Read Article

Colorado judge who sentenced Tina Peters to prison receives threats | Amy Beth Hanson/Associated Press

A rural Colorado county courthouse beefed up security Friday after threats were made against staff and a judge who sentenced former county clerk Tina Peters to nearly nine years behind bars and admonished her for her role in a data breach scheme catalyzed by the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Courthouse staff in Grand Junction, Colorado, received multiple threats that were being vetted by law enforcement while extra security was provided, said spokesperson Wendy Likes with the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. She did not say how many threats were made or how they were received. She also declined to describe the extra security. Read Article

Florida: Hurricanes force changes to election procedures | David A. Lieb and Brendan Farrington/Associated Press

With Florida still recovering from Hurricane Helene, some state and local officials are bracing for more disruptions from Hurricane Milton that could affect how people vote in the general election. Gov. Ron DeSantis already has granted counties hardest hit by Helene greater flexibility in distributing mail-in ballots and changing polling sites for in-person voting. Further changes might be necessary after Hurricane Milton. “It’s possible mail ballots could get lost, either getting to the voter or being returned by the voter. They could be damaged, especially if there are high winds and waters,” said David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research. In such cases, voters can request a replacement mailed ballot or still vote in person. Read Article

Georgia: Judge dismisses Republican lawsuit alleging voting machine vulnerabilities | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A judge threw out a DeKalb County Republican Party lawsuit Friday that claimed Georgia’s voting system was made vulnerable by the public disclosure of security features and computer code. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the case because Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger complied with state law when he certified the Dominion voting system as “safe and practicable” before it went into use in 2020. “Although applicant may firmly believe that the secretary’s current processes are ‘nonsensical’ and ‘appalling,’ and good-faith concerns over how to better secure our elections should be taken seriously, this matter is currently one that must be deferred to the policymaking branches,” McAfee wrote in the dismissal. Read Article

Michigan: ‘What the hell’: Sheriffs dive into presidential race | Craig Mauger and Melissa Nann Burke/The Detroit News

Some Michigan sheriffs in charge of enforcing the law in their counties have gotten heavily involved this year in a heated presidential race, drawing criticism from opponents who argue the politicking — often done in uniform — has gone too far. From both sides of the aisle, sheriffs, elected on a partisan basis in Michigan, have been attempting to navigate a challenging political climate. Some have exercised their freedom to endorse candidates, while one sheriff used government resources for a campaign event to make a political contribution that’s now under investigation over its legality. Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy, a Republican, used his government email account in August to help organize a campaign event for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump that took place inside a sheriff’s department garage. Read Article

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