Georgia: Election Board OKs Continued Use Of Absentee Drop Boxes, Early Processing Of Ballots | Stephen Fowler/Georgia Public Broadcasting
The Georgia State Election Board Wednesday voted to extend a pair of emergency rules that make it easier for some voters to cast absentee ballots and for counties to process them. One emergency rule passed mid-April allowed Georgia counties to set up secure 24/7 drop boxes for voters to return absentee ballots without relying on the mail system or needing to vote in person for the June 9 primary. Several counties opted to purchase and use drop boxes as part of an overall shift to more absentee-by-mail voting in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The amendment passed Wednesday removes language limiting drop boxes to the June primary election and added additional requirements for opening and closing the drop boxes and when county officials had to empty them out. A second amendment allows counties to continue to begin processing absentee ballots before Election Day, as a record 1.1 million people voted absentee for the primary and twice that is expected in November. The State Election Board also voted to require counties to post the dates and times they will be processing absentee ballots more prominently on the secretary of state’s website and on the local county’s site.National: Red states advancing bills to curb mail-in voting | Gabby Birenbaum/The Hill
GOP legislators in states across the country are advancing bills that would prevent elections officials from sending out absentee ballot applications ahead of November's election, even in states where those top officials are fellow Republicans. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, secretaries of state in places like Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, South Dakota and Wyoming encouraged residents to cast ballots from home by sending out absentee ballot request forms. Those forms led to increased participation during the primaries, with many states seeing record turnout. But now, Republican state legislatures are pushing back on those secretaries of states’ efforts by authoring bills to thwart their ability to send out ballot applications for the general election. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) last week signed a bill that requires the secretary of state to receive approval from a bipartisan legislative council before authorizing the mailing of absentee ballot request forms, after Secretary of State Paul Pate (R) sent applications to active voters. Eighty percent of the 524,000 votes cast in Iowa's June primary were absentee ballots. In Ohio, legislators proposed a measure to bar Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) from sending out request forms en masse, even though the secretary of state's office has done so for years. The bill was later amended to stop the state from paying for postage on the return envelope after LaRose lobbied legislators.National: Language to boost election security removed from Senate intelligence legislation | Maggie Miller/The Hill
A measure that would require presidential campaigns to report attempts by foreign nationals to interfere in elections was removed from the Senate’s bipartisan Intelligence Authorization Act, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Tuesday. The clause was based on Warner’s Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, which requires presidential campaigns to report all contacts with foreign nationals seeking to interfere in the election process to both the FBI and the Federal Election Commission. The Intelligence Authorization Act will be included in the Senate version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but according to Warner, the FIRE Act clause was taken out as part of a “backroom deal” in order to get the intelligence legislation included in the must-pass defense funding bill. Warner announced he was proposing the legislation as a separate amendment to the NDAA in order to force members of the Senate to vote on the record about where they stood on election security. The Senate this week is debating its version of the 2021 NDAA. Warner criticized President Trump and Republicans for removing the clause, noting that the Senate had not voted on any standalone election security legislation since Russian agents interfered in the 2016 presidential election.National: Can’t Request an Absentee Ballot Online? This Group Wants to Help | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times
As state after state has held primary elections in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, interest in voting from home using mail-in absentee ballots has soared. Yet many voters face a barrier when trying to request their ballots online from the safety of their own homes. Though 41 states allow people to register to vote online, only 18 states allow voters to request absentee ballots online, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which works to expand voting access. (In other states, voters need to send in absentee ballot applications by mail or complete them at election offices, a more cumbersome process.) There is, however, a bit of a loophole that exists in 13 of the states that don’t offer an online absentee ballot request: If voters can download, print and sign a ballot request form at home, they can either scan it or fax it back to the election office. Yes, fax it. That relatively archaic technology gave Debra Cleaver, the founder of VoteAmerica, a voting rights group, an idea: Her organization could establish an online portal for voters in those 13 states, and do the faxing, or scanning and emailing, for them.National: Democrats, voting rights groups pressure Senate to approve mail-in voting resources | Maggie Miller/The Hill
A group of Senate Democrats and multiple voting rights advocacy groups stepped up efforts on Tuesday to pressure Senate Republicans to support and pass legislation that would provide states with election resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), along with five other Senate Democrats, came to the Senate floor in an attempt to pass the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act that would expand mail-in and early voting. “If we are defending our elections, then we must protect our democracy, and if our elections are not safe, then our democracy is not secure,” Klobuchar said of election efforts during the pandemic. The bill was blocked by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who said he was worried the bill could be part of a “federal takeover of elections,” while noting that he may support sending states funding to boost election preparations during the pandemic. This was the second time in less than a week that Klobuchar brought the bill to the Senate floor for a vote and was blocked by Blunt. The two senators lead the Senate Rules Committee, with Blunt saying the committee would hold an elections-focused hearing sometime next month that would include local and state officials as witnesses.National: The Republicans Telling Their Voters to Ignore Trump | Russell Berman/The Atlantic
There’s a major complication in President Donald Trump’s recent crusade against voting by mail, which he has called “a scam” that will lead to “the greatest Rigged Election” in history: In states that Trump desperately needs to win this fall, Republicans love it. Take Arizona, where polls show Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden after he carried the state narrowly in 2016. Republicans pioneered Arizona’s mail-in balloting system, which now accounts for about 80 percent of the state’s vote. “It’s been remarkably successful,” Chuck Coughlin, a longtime GOP operative and a onetime aide to the late Senator John McCain, told me. “There’s been minimal to no fraud for a long period of time.” Republicans say the same in Florida, the quadrennial swing state where voting by mail has become more and more popular in recent years, especially with older GOP voters. (One of the older GOP voters who uses the system is Trump himself.) “Yes, Florida Republicans over the last two decades have dominated absentees,” Joe Gruters, the state’s party chairman, told me. Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the integrity of mail-in voting are puzzling for a variety of reasons, not least because they are unfounded. But they’re particularly awkward for Republican leaders—especially those allied with the president—who need their voters to continue using a system Trump is trying to discredit. The president has, for example, gone after Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, for mailing absentee-ballot applications to every voter in the state as part of an effort to avoid depressed turnout due to the coronavirus pandemic. But GOP leaders in several other states have done the same thing.Alabama: State asks U.S. Supreme Court to block curbside voting ruling | Mike Cason/AL.com
Alabama has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal judge’s order that the state cannot prohibit counties from offering curbside voting during the July 14 runoff. Plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state argued that counties should be able to offer curbside voting to accommodate voters who are concerned about exposure to COVID-19. The state argues that if federal courts order the state to allow curbside voting they are effectively changing state law for an election that’s just two weeks away. Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour of the state attorney general’s office filed the emergency application for stay on Monday with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. LaCour asked the Supreme Court to block a lower court ruling in favor of four voters and three organizations who claimed that certain Alabama laws violated the rights of some voters who are at serious risk of illness from the virus.Arkansas: In filing, state GOP chief, legislator urge dismissal of absentee-voting suit | John Lynch/Arkansas Democrat Gazette
A lawsuit over absentee voting in Arkansas during the covid-19 pandemic should be dismissed because the litigation is unnecessary, the head of the state Republican Party and a GOP state House of Representatives member argue in pleadings filed Monday. Republican Party Chairman Doyle Webb and state Rep. Doug House, R-North Little Rock, have responded to the week-old lawsuit before the only defendant, Secretary of State John Thurston, has answered the suit. The lawsuit seeks to ensure that voters who fear exposure to covid-19 do not have to vote at the polls where large crowds carry the risk of infection, but can cast absentee ballots without having to justify their reasons to authorities. Absentee votes can be cast either by mail or by dropping off a ballot before Election Day. Arkansas law requires voters to explain, under penalty of perjury, why they need to vote absentee before being allowed to do so.Florida: Election supervisors can use auditing systems to recount ballots | Jeffrey Schweers/Tallahassee Democrat
Florida’s local election supervisors can use their independent auditing systems – which are not part of the voting system – to recount ballots under a bill signed over the weekend by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The long-sought permission will save time and taxpayer money resolving disputed or close elections by allowing supervisors to use high-speed automatic tabulators that run on an independent system to quickly do what it normally takes hundreds of hours for paid, part-time workers to do, according to election supervisors who support the measure.
Florida is known for its hyper-close elections that trigger automatic recounts. In 2018, recounts were required in the races for governor, agriculture commissioner and U.S. Senate. County supervisors of elections had to hire extra staff and pay overtime to plow through the mountain of ballots that needed to be fed a second time through the same equipment.
Using the auditing system will go a long way toward improving the reputation of the state’s election system, said state Sen. Bill Montford, D-Tallahassee, and sponsor of the bill in the Senate.
“Not only does it save time during a recount when you have people at the door for results, it will be far more accurate than going through thousands of ballots by hand,” Montford said. “I think this will create far more accuracy and lend far more credibility to the recount process.”
Under state law, if the first unofficial results indicate a margin of victory in any race is one-half of one percent or less, each canvassing board must run the ballots through their automatic ballot counters again to see if the returns correctly reflect the votes cast.
If the machine recount indicates a margin of victory of one-quarter of one percent or less, each canvassing board must conduct a manual recount of the overvotes and undervotes.
Under the new law, endorsed by the Florida Supervisors of Elections, all 67 county election supervisors have the option of using “automatic tabulating equipment” to process ballots in a recount, if they have them.
Currently, nine counties have the audit tabulators: Bay, Broward, Columbia, Indian River, Hillsborough, Leon, Nassau, Putnam, and St. Lucie.
They won’t get to use them in the upcoming August primary and November elections, however, because the law does not take effect till Jan. 1.
Because the system’s roots are in auditing, it is designed with transparency in mind, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley said.
“We were already doing recounts with this system, but were not allowed to record the results,” Earley said. “We were doing it for the audit.”
Automatic tabulators examine, count and record votes just like ballot tabulators do, but are run on independent software and equipment, he said.
If a machine recount is required, the new law allows ballots to be run through the auditing tabulating equipment instead of the voting system’s ballot counters that performed the original tally, according to the bill analysis.
Overvotes and undervotes can be identified and sorted at the same time the machine recount is conducted in case a manual recount is needed.
Georgia: Secretary of State: Audit confirms presidential primary results | Adrianne Murchison/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Following widespread criticism of the voting process in Fulton County, an audit has confirmed the outcomes of the presidential preference primaries.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said a secure paper-ballot system was used Monday to verify Fulton’s results in the June 9 primary. According to the statement, Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections officials conducted an audit of the primary contests by comparing results on a random group of paper ballots in a selected race with results on the election equipment.
A formula was used to select a random sample of 27 ballots with the assistance of VotingWorks, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that works to ensure secure software in voting machines, said Walter Jones, a spokesman for Raffensperger.
Long lines, technical problems with election equipment and late opening precincts were complaints from voters on Election Day that left many concerned with the accuracy of the state’s new voting machines.
Raffensperger has said his office plans to provide more support to local offices and he would put forth legislation giving him the power to intervene in county elections management, if necessary, for November’s presidential election.
He was confident that Monday’s audit validated “results produced by Georgia’s new secure paper-ballot system.”
“Auditing returns can now be a regular part of elections because we have paper ballots,” he added. “That gives Georgians confidence that their votes are counted fairly and accurately.”
Full Article: Raffensperger: Audit confirms presidential primary results.