Georgia: ‘I Refuse Not to Be Heard’: Georgia in Uproar Over Voting Meltdown | Richard Fausset, Reid J. Epstein and Rick Rojas/The New York Times

Georgia’s statewide primary elections on Tuesday were overwhelmed by a full-scale meltdown of new voting systems put in place after widespread claims of voter suppression during the state’s 2018 governor’s election. Scores of new state-ordered voting machines were reported to be missing or malfunctioning, and hourslong lines materialized at polling places across Georgia. Some people gave up and left before casting a ballot, and concerns spread that the problems would disenfranchise untold voters, particularly African-Americans. Predominantly black areas experienced some of the worst problems. With Republican-leaning Georgia emerging as a possible battleground in this year’s presidential election and home to two competitive Senate races, the voting mess rattled Democratic officials and voters, with some blaming the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state for hastily instituting a new voting system without enough provisional ballots in case the voting machines did not function. “It is a disaster that was preventable,” Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the disputed 2018 governor’s race, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is emblematic of the deep systemic issues we have here in Georgia. One of the reasons we are so insistent upon better operations is that you can have good laws, but if you have incompetent management and malfeasance, voters get hurt, and that’s what we see happening in Georgia today.”

Georgia: Georgia Betrays Its Voters Again | Charles Bethea/The New Yorker

In November of 2018, Alyssa Thys, a twenty-nine-year-old communications manager in Atlanta, waited in line for more than two hours to vote for Stacey Abrams, at her precinct in a working-class, predominantly black neighborhood. Thys, to whom I spoke at the time, called the experience “complete chaos and disorganization.” She returned to the same place, Pittman Park Recreation Center, on Tuesday, to vote in the primaries. (In the most high-profile race, seven Democrats, including Jon Ossoff, are running for the opportunity to unseat Georgia’s senior Republican senator, David Perdue, in November.) “Like, wow,” Thys, who is white, told me after another frustrating morning. “Nothing has been learned.” She’d arrived early again—at 6:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before polls opened—and there was a line “down the block,” she told me, lengthened by social distancing. A few dozen would-be voters were already queued up ahead of her. “People thought they didn’t have the correct number of machines again,” she said. As it turned out, there were more machines than two years ago—eight working machines, Thys believed, rather than the three on site in 2018. But they’re new machines, which require printing out completed paper ballots and placing them in a secured box. “They just didn’t have any of that paper that was supposed to be printed,” Thys said, “which is, like, half of the entire system meant to prevent election fraud.”

Iowa: Vote by mail: After record primary turnout, Iowa Senate Republicans try to limit vote-by-mail in presidential election | Nicole Goodkind/Fortune

Iowa set a new record for primary election turnout this month after secretary of state Paul Pate sent applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters. More than 520,000 ballots were cast, according to Pate’s office, beating the previous record of 450,000 set in 1994. Now, Republicans in the state senate are trying to prevent him from doing the same in the general election this November. The Iowa Senate State Government Committee advanced a 30-page bill on a party-line vote late last week that would prohibit Pate, also a Republican, from proactively sending applications for mail-in-ballots to all registered voters. Anyone who wanted a mail-in ballot would need to submit a written request on their own and show proof of valid voter identification. The bill would prohibit the secretary from taking emergency election action in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The secretary can make changes in cases of extreme weather or during wartime, it says, but not during a health crisis. It also prevents Pate from making any changes to the early or absentee voting process, even in an emergency.

Nevada: Long lines at few polling spots clog Nevada primary voting | Ken Ritter and Sam Metz/Associated Press

Hundreds of people waited for hours at three in-person voting sites in the Las Vegas area, and the only one in Reno, after polling places were reduced due to the coronavirus. People who did not mail in their choices were still casting ballots Wednesday in a primary to settle U.S. House races, legislative primaries and other state and local races. State election officials promised that everyone in line when polls closed at 7 p.m. Tuesday would be allowed to vote, and predicted long delays counting ballots as a result. The Republican secretary of state’s office responded to criticism from a Democratic Party leader about long lines and limited in-person polling places with a statement saying Nevada voters had “ample opportunity … to cast a ballot in the 2020 Nevada primary election.” Deputy Secretary of State for Elections Wayne Thorley said that ballots were mailed to “every registered voter in Clark County,” voters had 14 days of early voting.

Nevada: Long lines to vote delay Nevada election returns | John Sadler/Las Vegas Sun

Early returns from Nevada’s primary election Tuesday were delayed after polling places in the state’s two most populous counties were kept open to allow those waiting in long lines to vote. Voters at some Las Vegas-area polling places Tuesday were waiting in lines of three hours or more despite Nevada officials encouraging people to cast their primary election ballots by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. In the Reno area, Washoe County officials reported delays of at least an hour. Hundreds were still in line when polls were supposed to close at 7 p.m. The top-ticket races that voters were settling included contests for Nevada’s four U.S. House seats, but the incumbents — three Democrats and a Republican — are expected to sail through primary challenges. The biggest question Tuesday was which candidates will try to unseat them in November. Nevada reduced in-person voting sites for the primary because of the coronavirus and instead sent absentee ballots to voters that could be mailed back or dropped off. For those who still showed up at the limited number of polling places, they were casting ballots Tuesday on paper rather than voting machines to limit contact with shared surfaces.

New Hampshire: State approves letting anyone register to vote by mail | Kevin Landrigan/New Hampshire Union Leader

Voters may register to vote by mail for New Hampshire elections if concerns over COVID-19 are why they do not wish to sign the paperwork in person, according to a new legal opinion. Secretary of State Bill Gardner and Attorney General Gordon J. MacDonald have said the risk of the novel coronavirus calls for loosening up the requirement in state law that voter registration business has to be done at the city or town clerk’s office. “Registrants who are unable to register to vote in person because of illness from COVID-19 or because they fear registering in person may expose themselves or others to COVID-19 may use absentee registration,” Gardner and MacDonald ruled. Those seeking to register to vote by mail must request by mail, email, fax or phone to be sent these voter registration forms. Once the voter receives the forms, they still must have someone witness signing those documents.

Pennsylvania: Mail-in voting delays in primary cause Pennsylvania to sound alarm about November | Meg Cunningham and Quinn Scanlan/ABC

With Pennsylvania’s presidential and statewide primary June 2 its first election in which any voter could choose to vote by mail, election officials were always prepared for an increase in applications to do so. What they weren’t expecting was the coronavirus pandemic and the 17-fold increase in voters wanting to cast their ballots away from the polling precincts. Now, a week after the primary, votes are still being counted, leading local election officials to sound the alarm, warning America may not know the outcome in the battleground state on election night in November. “We don’t want the world on our front step, waiting for us to tell them who won. It’s as simple as that,” said Lee Soltysiak, the chief operating officer and chief clerk for Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia. Soltysiak told ABC News Monday that he expected to be done tabulating all the ballots received by the time polls closed at 7 p.m. on June 2 but that didn’t include any of the approximately 5,800 additional ballots received after that point that still need to be counted.

Pennsylvania: Mail ballots for 2020 primary election arrived late by the thousands | Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters were almost disenfranchised last week. Thousands of others actually were. And things could be even worse in November. That’s the clear takeaway from a review of state data on mail ballots, along with interviews with elections officials in several of Pennsylvania’s largest counties: Tens of thousands of ballots arrived in the week after the June 2 primary election, and thousands more voters who applied to vote by mail ended up using provisional ballots at the polls instead. Most of those votes will be counted after orders from Gov. Tom Wolf and judges extending ballot deadlines for specific counties. But that leaves thousands of votes in the rest of the state uncounted. And those orders applied only to this election, leaving in place what many election officials say are problematic deadlines that will continue to ensnare voters in November and future elections. “These deadlines have real consequences,” said Delaware County Council Member Christine Reuther. “And one of them is, people are going to be disenfranchised.”

South Carolina: Voters report races missing from ballots at Richland polls during primary | Greg Hadley/The State

On an unprecedented Election Day, reports of problems at polling stations across Richland County have been rolling in. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic that led to increased requests for absentee ballots, there has been a shortage of poll workers at combined precinct locations and issues with ballots, as well. “We’re not off to the start I’m looking for,” Terry Graham, interim director for the Richland County Elections Board, told The State on Tuesday morning. Graham could not immediately be reached for comment in the afternoon. Graham also told the newspaper that he went into the day knowing there would a shortage of poll workers but didn’t expect so many to be unavailable. State Rep. Beth Bernstein, whose 78th district is based in Richland County, said the number of poll workers was significantly down. “When we normally have 900 to 1,000 poll workers for our election, a month out we were at like 300 and something,” she said. “I do believe it came up to maybe 500 or 600, I don’t have those exact numbers, but it was significantly less.”

Tennessee: State, Groups Clash Over Compliance in Vote-By-Mail Ruling | Jonathan Mattise/Associated Press

Attorneys for voting rights groups want Tennessee officials held in contempt of court over claims they have not immediately let all Tennessee voters get ballots to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic as ordered. The state, in turn, has contended it is complying and the groups are citing out-dated instructions for local election officials. That fight over whether Tennessee officials are meeting their obligations on the court-ordered absentee voting option for all 4.1 million of Tennessee’s registered voters is headed for a hearing Thursday in Nashville. At the same time, the state is also fighting to have the expansion blocked on appeal. In a Davidson County Chancery Court filing Monday night, plaintiffs attorneys wrote that the judge didn’t order the state to create a new form with a COVID-19 option, though it still did. The judge’s ruling directed voters to select an existing illness and disability box. The new option says, “I have determined it is impossible or unreasonable to vote in-person due to the COVID-19 situation, and therefore qualify as hospitalized, ill, or disabled and unable to appear at my polling place.” The filing points out there’s no explanation of what constitutes “impossible or unreasonable.”

Australia: Electoral Commission makes progress with 2018 modernisation project | Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is heading a project to modernise its systems, having reached out to the market in 2018 for help on shaping the future of its IT backend. At the time, the AEC said the core software platforms in place had been in use for around 30 years, with its systems environment comprising of approximately 93 systems and supporting sub-systems. The commission has this week published a request for tender (RFT) for an enterprise architecture tool (EA tool), seeking help with the delivery of its modernisation project. The AEC normally operates out of 90 premises around Australia and has 780 staff. When an election is announced, that scales to more than 7,900 premises and approximately 90,000 staff. AEC offices are organised geographically, with a national office in Canberra, an office in each state, and divisional offices in or near each of the electoral divisions. The AEC currently has a small enterprise architecture practice team located within its Information and Communication Technology branch.

Russia: Moscow Said to Hire Kaspersky to Build Voting Blockchain With Bitfury Software | Anna Baydakova/CoinDesk

Voting and blockchain have been a controversial couple but Moscow appears determined to use the technology for a national referendum involving President Vladimir Putin. Russia will vote on changing its constitution, adopted in 1993, on July 1. The main issue to be decided is whether to allow Russia’s president to stay in power for more than the current limit of two consecutive six-year terms. Most of the nation will use traditional paper ballots, but residents of Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod region will have the option of casting their votes electronically and, at least in the Muscovites’ case, having them recorded on a blockchain. According to an official page dedicated to electronic voting, Moscow’s Department of Information Technologies, which is working on the technical solution, plans to use Bitfury’s open-source enterprise blockchain, Exonum. “The blockchain technology is working in the Proof of Authority mode,” the page says in Russian. “A smart contract for the ballot ledger will be recording the votes in the system, and after the voting is complete it will decode them and publish them in the blockchain system.” The Department of Information Systems did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment by press time. Bitfury’s spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s involvement in the project.

National: Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks | Elise Viebeck/The Washington Post

As nearly every state expands its capacity for absentee voting this year, President Trump and his GOP allies have attacked the process as prone to rampant fraud. But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent. The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election. The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims. Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

National: Online Voting System Used in Florida and Elsewhere Has Severe Security Flaws, Researchers Find | Kim Zetter/OneZero

New research shows that an internet voting system being used in multiple states this year is vulnerable to hacking, and could allow attackers to alter votes without detection. On Sunday, researchers published a report that details how votes in OmniBallot, a system made by Seattle-based Democracy Live, could be manipulated by malware on the voter’s computer, insiders working for Democracy Live, or external hackers. OmniBallot is currently used in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia. Though online voting has typically been used by overseas military and civilian voters, it could expand to more voters in the future due to the pandemic. The researchers found that bad actors could gain access to ballots by compromising Democracy Live’s network or any of the third-party services and infrastructure that the system relies on, including Amazon, Google, and Cloudflare. “At worst, attackers could change election outcomes without detection, and even if there was no attack, officials would have no way to prove that the results were accurate,” the researchers, Michael Specter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, write. “No available technology can adequately mitigate these risks, so we urge jurisdictions not to deploy OmniBallot’s online voting features.”

National: Study finds vulnerabilities in online voting tool used by several states | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Michigan found multiple security vulnerabilities in an online voting tool being used by at least three states. The study evaluated Democracy Live’s OmniBallot, a program that Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia are using to allow military personnel and voters with disabilities to cast ballots amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also has a contract with the Defense Department to provide ballots to military personnel overseas. According to the paper published Sunday, the system opens up the voting process to a range of vulnerabilities that could lead to election interference. “We conclude that using OmniBallot for electronic ballot return represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection,” the researchers wrote.

National: Hackers Are Already Screwing With the 2020 Election | Eric Lutz/Vanity Fair

Donald Trump has spent months promulgating bad-faith attacks on remote voting, masking his fears that high turnout could favor his Democratic opponent with unfounded claims that it would result in widespread fraud. “WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION,” he tweeted of mail-in voting last month. But while the president’s attacks on proposals to ensure votes can be safely cast amid the coronavirus pandemic may be obvious lies, some remote voting measures have raised legitimate concerns about the risk of foreign interference. With COVID-19 almost certain to remain an enormous public health issue through election day in November, several states—including ones led by Republicans—have sought to expand access to mail-in voting. A handful are going even further, experimenting with or ramping up online voting. According to the New York Times, the latter is potentially vulnerable to hacking, with researchers warning that online voting could present opportunities for foreign manipulation. “Online voting raises such severe risks that, even in a time of unrest and pandemic, these jurisdictions are taking a major risk of undermining the legitimacy of their election results,” University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman told the Times.

National: DARPA wants hackers to try to crack its new generation of super-secure hardware | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The Pentagon’s top research agency thinks it has developed a new generation of technology that will make voting machines, medical databases and other critical digital systems far more secure against hackers. Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which helped invent GPS and the Internet, is launching a contest for ethical hackers to try to break into that technology before it goes public. DARPA is offering the hackers cash prizes for any flaws they find using a program called a “bug bounty.” The new technology is based on re-engineering hardware, such as computer chips and circuits, so that the typical methods hackers use to undermine the software that runs on them become impossible. That’s far different from the standard approach to cybersecurity, in which tech companies release a never-ending stream of software patches every time bad guys discover a new bug.

National: COVID-19 Adds to US Election Security Challenges: Report | Ishita Chigilli Palli/GovInfo Security

The global COVID-19 pandemic has created a new series of cybersecurity challenges for election officials across the U.S., including concerns about the security of mail-in ballots and whether attackers will target vulnerable networks for those local election workers still working remotely, according to a new report. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and public policy institute connected to New York University Law School, released a report on Friday urging Congress to provide states with the required resources to ensure more secure election process. “Effective digital resiliency plans can ensure that operations continue and eligible citizens are able to exercise their right to vote even in the face of cyberattacks or technical malfunctions,” according to the report.

National: Chinese and Iranian APT Groups Targeted US Presidential Campaigns | Kelly Sheridan/Dark Reading

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) recently saw a China-linked cyberattack group targeting Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign staff, and an Iran-linked attack group targeting Donald Trump’s campaign staff. Both incidents involved phishing; neither one indicated a compromise. TAG director Shane Huntley posted a tweet about the findings late last week. Both campaigns were notified of the attempts and informed federal law enforcement, he wrote. This isn’t the first time that attackers have attempted to infiltrate the Trump campaign: Last year, Microsoft found a group seemingly linked to the Iranian government targeted Trump’s 2020 reelection efforts. Because this year’s elections are only a few months away, this discovery isn’t surprising. If the Trump and Biden campaigns represent the major political parties on November 3, there will be more intelligence value placed on their communications, says Charles Ragland, security engineer at Digital Shadows.

National: As states explore online voting, new report warns of ‘severe risk’ | Susan Miller/GCN

As states look for alternatives to in-person voting in the event the coronavirus flares again in the fall, researchers at MIT released a report on the security of OmniBallot, an internet voting and ballot delivery system that been used by the military and overseas and disabled voters in approximately 600 jurisdictions. The platform was developed by Democracy Live, a company providing cloud-based voting technologies, that describes its OmniBallot Online product as an electronic, fully accessible ballot solution for vote-by-mail and absentee voters as well as for those covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Qualified voters can use the service to print their ballots, fill them out and mail them or deliver them in person. An online ballot marking version is used by disabled voters who use it to electronically select candidates, print the completed ballot and then mail it in or deliver it. This year, however, three states are allowing some voters to use the web application to return their ballots online, MIT researchers said.

National: Rights Groups Say Age-Based Laws on Absentee Voting Are Unconstitutional | Travis Bubenik/Courthouse News

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to prompt concerns about the safety of in-person voting, a coalition of voting rights groups argues in a new report that Texas, South Carolina and multiple other U.S. states are violating the U.S. Constitution by only letting older citizens vote by mail. In the report released Thursday, the Voting Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles, the National Vote at Home Institute and other groups claim that placing age restrictions on absentee voting violates the 26th Amendment, which guarantees Americans the right to vote at the age of 18. “These laws use age to create two classes of voters – one with easier access to the ballot box than the other – and work to abridge the voting rights of younger voters,” the groups behind the report said in a statement. The coalition is pushing for “immediate litigation” against states with age restrictions on absentee voting.

National: U.S. states see major challenge in delivering record mail ballots in November | Jason Lange/Reuters

With a health crisis expected to drive a surge in mail voting in November, U.S. election officials face a major challenge: Ensure tens of millions of ballots can reach voters in time to be cast, and are returned in time to be counted. Recent presidential nomination contests and other elections held in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic – a warm-up for the Nov. 3 general election if COVID-19 remains a threat – showed some states have been overwhelmed by the sudden rush to vote by mail. Nearly half of U.S. states allow voters to request absentee ballots less than a week before their elections. Even under normal circumstances, that often is too little lead time to guarantee voters will receive their ballots and have sufficient time to return them, election experts and state officials say. In Ohio, for example, whose nearly all-mail election on April 28 was marred by ballot delivery delays, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose has asked state lawmakers to change the deadline for voters to request a mail ballot to one week before an election, up from three days currently. “It is not logistically possible” for all voters asking for ballots at the last minute to get them in time to return them by mail, LaRose told Reuters. “That relies on a lot of luck.”

Georgia: Absentee voting embraced equally by voters of both parties | Mark NiesseGreg Bluestein/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

No matter their political party, Georgia voters quickly adapted to voting by mail in a primary election hindered by the coronavirus pandemic. Over 1.2 million people have already voted — about three-quarters of them on absentee ballots — according to state elections data after early voting ended Friday. Voters were closely split between Democrats and Republicans heading into election day on Tuesday.Georgians embraced voting from home, avoiding human contact at polling places. A record 943,000 voters had returned their absentee ballots through Sunday, a 2,500% increase compared with absentee-by-mail voting in the 2016 presidential primary.But the coronavirus brought problems to both in-person and absentee voting. Voters waited in line for hours Friday because of social distancing requirements, and voters were also slowed by a long ballot of candidates for president, Congress, the courts and other offices. In Fulton County, some voters reported they never received their absentee ballots after requesting them weeks beforehand. The secretary of state’s office opened an investigation into Fulton, and the voting rights group Fair Fight Action said it might go to court to ensure votes are counted.

Iowa: County auditor, local political and advocacy groups express concern over Senate bill that curbs absentee ballot, emergency powers – News | Robbie Sequeira/The Ames Tribune

The campaign by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate to encourage voters to shift to absentee voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic paid off during last week’s elections when the state set a record for primary turnout. Statewide, turnout was 24% for the June 2 voting. In Story County, it was 22%, also a record, with a total of 13,936 ballots cast. But it’s unclear whether the widespread mail-in balloting will be repeated in November. A state Senate bill authored and advanced by majority Republicans would prevent the secretary of state from repeating his pre-primary mailing of absentee ballot requests to every registered voter in the state. Instead, his office would only be permitted to mail ballot request forms to people who ask for them in writing. The bill also would limit the emergency powers of local election officials during the pandemic. including restricting the power of county auditors to reduce polling location by more than 35 percent during an emergency situation.

Maryland: Some of Baltimore ballots left to be counted could be time-consuming as workers create forms to scan | Emily Opilo/Baltimore Sun

Of the approximately 12,000 ballots left to be counted as of 10 a.m. Monday, about 5,000 were ballots sent to voters by email, according to Armstead Jones, director of Baltimore’s Board of Elections. That means the votes must be manually copied onto ballots that can run through ballot scanners. The work of duplication is tedious. Elections staffers work in teams, the first person calling out the votes on the original ballot as a second person fills in bubbles on a fresh copy. The teams then swap roles, with the second person reading aloud from the new ballot, while the first person checks the original responses. Days ago, staff started using the same process to correct a ballot error that affected voters in City Council District 1. While ballots cast by those voters were the right size for the scanner, they were missing a line of type. That caused the information to be out of alignment with what the scanner was reading. Employees manually copied the information from the problem ballots to new ones to create ballots the scanner would read correctly. Last week, that process took a pair of workers 2½ minutes per ballot. About 15 teams started the process Monday of recreating the emailed ballots, Jones told the Baltimore Board of Elections members during a special meeting.

Nevada: Officials see better-than-expected turnout ahead of Nevada’s first mail-in primary election | James DeHaven/Reno Gazette Journal

After months of partisan mudslinging, and no shortage of lawsuits, Nevada’s first vote-by-mail primary will go ahead as planned on Tuesday — the last day voters can send in or drop off ballots with county elections officials. Almost 343,000 Silver State residents, around 21 percent of the state’s active voters, have already mailed in their picks for dozens of federal, state and local offices. Early turnout has been slightly higher in Washoe County, where more than 64,000 residents either mailed in a ballot or turned up at one of the “extremely limited” in-person polling places state officials have kept open during the coronavirus outbreak. County Registrar of Voters Deanna Spikula doesn’t expect those numbers to change much after polls close on Tuesday, but said she was pleasantly surprised to see interest in the election exceed the 20 percent turnout normally seen in primaries.

North Dakota: Voter participation could hit all-time high among statewide June elections | David Olson/Grand Forks Herald

The Tuesday, June 9 election in North Dakota could historically rank among the top June elections when it comes to voter participation, county and state election officials said Monday. Tuesday’s vote — which is being conducted solely with mail-in ballots — is a primary election for state races and a general election when it comes to things like city and school board races. As of Monday afternoon, about 37,000 ballots had been mailed to Cass County voters and, of those, about 23,000 had been completed and returned to Cass County election officials. That put the voting on pace to surpass the 23,950 ballots cast during a June election in 2006, which stands as a high-water mark for June elections, according to DeAnn Buckhouse, election coordinator for Cass County. It is the first time Cass County has used mail-only voting. To be eligible for counting, Buckhouse said completed ballots returned by mail must be postmarked no later than June 8.

Editorials: Pennsylvania’s Mail-In Primary Pains | Wall Street Journal

Pennsylvania last year passed legislation to allow mail-in voting, and the June 2 primaries were the first test of this new system. Nearly a week later, voters still don’t know the victors for some races, and don’t be surprised if some candidates challenge the results in court. Behold the messiness of mail-in voting—and brace for November. The vote-by-mail law passed before the coronavirus hit, but the pandemic prompted many to ditch the ballot box for the mailbox. Pennsylvania saw some 1.8 million applications for absentee and mail-in ballots, up from some 108,000 in 2016. In some counties, mail-in ballots must be opened by hand before they can be counted. That meant some delays were inevitable, even if Election Day went as planned. It did not. Protests broke out across Pennsylvania in the days leading up to the primary. In Pittsburgh police cruisers were set on fire over the weekend, and in Philadelphia police arrested more than 250 people on June 1 and the morning of June 2. Citing the unrest, Gov. Tom Wolf issued an executive order extending the mail-in deadline.

Texas: Voters will decide for themselves if they need mail-in ballots for July runoffs | Taylor Goldenstein/Houston Chronicle

As Democrats and civil rights groups sue to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic, a recent decision by the Texas Supreme Court has left it up to voters to decide for themselves whether they qualify for vote-by-mail. In its decision in late May, the highest civil court in the state ruled that lack of immunity to COVID-19 alone does not constitute a disability that would allow those under 65 years old to vote by mail rather than at the polls, under the Texas election codes. But it added — which legal experts say is crucial — that a voter can take the possibility of being infected into consideration along with his or her “health” and “health history” to determine whether he or she needs to vote by mail under the ‘disability’ provisions in the law. “I think really the story here is that it’s going to be up to individual voters to decide whether they fit this definition or not,” said Joseph Fishkin, a University of Texas professor who studies election law and has closely followed the cases. So while the court battle continues with Democrats on one side, and on the other side Republican state leaders who argue that an expansion of mail-in voting would encourage more voter fraud, it will be up to elections officials across the state to set the tone for mail-in voting.