Tennessee: Shelby County Election Commission Attorney Shares Office with ES&S Lobbyist | Jackson Baker/Memphis Flyer

In advance of a scheduled meeting Thursday afternoon at which county Election Administrator Linda Phillips is expected to reveal her preference for a vendor of new election machines for Shelby County, proponents of hand-marked voting devices expressed alarm over a potential link between an Election Commission lawyer and one of the vendors bidding on the county contract. The ES&S company, vendor of the controversial Diebold election machines now in use county elections and known to be a bidder for the contract on behalf of a line of devices that mark ballots by mechanical means, is represented by the lobbying firm of MNA Government Relations, which leases space in its Nashville office to the Memphis-Nashville law firm of Harris-Shelton. Both John Ryder and Pablo Varela, attorneys for the Election Commission, are principals of the law firm, and Ryder’s name appears in tandem with that of MNA on the interactive glass register in the lobby of Nashville’s Bank of America Building. Upstairs on the 10th floor, a metal plaque outside the office door of MNA lists the two companies together, with the company name of MNA followed by a forward slash and then the name of the law firm. [See photos.]

Virginia: State Senate blocks Northam’s proposal to move May elections to November amid push for June alternative | Local News | Amy Friedenberger /Roanoke Times

Gov. Ralph Northam’s effort to move the May municipal elections to November failed late Wednesday after the state Senate rejected his recommendation. Northam wanted to postpone the May 5 elections to Nov. 3, along with the presidential and congressional contests, out of concern about people voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic. Most Democrats supported his proposal, but it gave Republicans and a few Democrats pause. Under Northam’s plan, absentee ballots that already have been cast would have been destroyed, and people would have to vote again in November. Elected officials’ with terms expiring June 30 would have seen those terms extended. The House of Delegates narrowly approved Northam’s recommendation 47-45, but the Senate declined to take up the proposal. Both chambers are controlled by Democrats. Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax City, who opposed Northam’s recommendation, said he was preparing legislation that he’d like to be considered in a special session. He would have proposed the May elections be moved to June 16 and that the party primary scheduled for June 9 be delayed to July 28.

West Virginia: Legislators call for mail-only voting for primary election, Warner says current options are safe | Lacie Pierson/Charleston Gazette-Mail

West Virginia Democratic legislators are asking Gov. Jim Justice and Secretary of State Mac Warner to go one step further in making voting accessible amid the worldwide coronavirus pandemic during the 2020 election cycle. A group of legislators on Wednesday sent out a news release asking Gov. Jim Justice to declare the state’s June 9 Primary Election a vote-by-mail-only election, as opposed to the current situation that allows all eligible West Virginia voters the option to vote absentee through the mail. In response to the call-out from the legislators, Secretary of State Mac Warner said he was not an advocate for West Virginia becoming a vote-by-mail-only state, and he wouldn’t implement such a system unless the state Legislature passed a law requiring him to do so. The legislators’ news release didn’t have exact details about how mail-only voting would work other than making it so voters wouldn’t have to physically go to a polling place to cast their vote.

Wisconsin: Milwaukee Council votes to mail absentee ballot applications | Alison Dirr/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Milwaukee Common Council voted unanimously Tuesday to create a program under which all of the city’s approximately 300,000 registered voters would receive an application for an absentee ballot in the mail.      

The “SafeVote” program also provides voters with a postage-paid return envelope so they can participate in the fall election. The measure was proposed by new Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic and passed at her first meeting on the Common Council. The resolution notes thousands of people turned out to vote in person earlier this month in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has caused government officials to limit the number of people who can gather under other circumstances. In Milwaukee, some residents reported waiting in line for more than two hours to cast their ballots at the city’s five in-person polling locations.

Wisconsin: ‘They should have done something’: Broad failures fueled Wisconsin’s absentee ballot crisis, investigation shows | By Daphne Chen, Catharina Felke, Elizabeth Mulvey and Stephen Stirling(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In Lodi and Pewaukee, voters were told the system for requesting absentee ballots crashed. In Marshfield, Shorewood and Bristol, voters threw up their hands after spending hours in front of computers trying to request a ballot. In Milwaukee and Green Bay, dozens of couples said one member of their household received a ballot while the other didn’t. “Nobody cared,” said Brenda Lewis, a 61-year-old Delafield resident who said her local clerk could find no record of her or her husband ever requesting an absentee ballot, even though both of them had. “They should have done something, some sort of public service (announcement), something, just something,” Lewis said. “But nobody did.” An investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the PBS series FRONTLINE and Columbia Journalism Investigations into Wisconsin’s missing ballot crisis reveals a system leaking from all sides, buckling under the weight of a global pandemic and partisan bickering that kept the logistics of Election Day up in the air until less than a day before polls opened. Inadequate computer systems, overwhelmed clerks and misleading ballot information hampered Wisconsin’s historic — and historically troubling — spring election.

National: Coronavirus displaced millions of college students, who worry how they’re going to vote | Rebecca Morin/USA Today

Ashee Groce doesn’t know if she’ll be able to vote in Georgia’s primary. Groce, 21, attends Spelman College in Atlanta but is from California and staying in South Carolina with a friend after her school closed for the the semester during the coronavirus pandemic. California voted when Groce was in Atlanta. Georgia was supposed to vote March 24 but pushed back its primary until June 9, and Groce doesn’t know if she will be able to get an absentee ballot sent to South Carolina. She didn’t return to California amid the pandemic, because she has family there who are immunocompromised. “Me and a lot of my peers are afraid,” Groce said. “I just feel like a lot of people who look like me and who are in similar situations that I’m in aren’t going to be counted, and that’s just a very big disappointment.” Many young voters’ lives have been upended after universities and colleges closed campuses and moved to online classes. As a result, millions of students have left their college housing and headed home to different cities and, in some cases, different states. More than 4,000 colleges and universities have closed or been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, affecting more than 25 million students, according to Entangled Solutions, an education consultant group.

National: How Multi-factor Authentication Enhances Election Security | Phil Goldstein/StateTech Magazine

Multifactor authentication is “a layered approach to securing data and applications where a system requires a user to present a combination of two or more credentials to verify a user’s identity for login,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security notes in its election security resource library. Election security officials should use MFA because it adds another layer of defense to their systems. Even if one credential is compromised, an attacker cannot log in without the other authentication requirement “and will not be able to access the targeted physical space, computing device, network or database,” DHS notes. Multifactor authentication includes something you know, such as a password or personal identification number; something you have, including a token or cryptographic device; and something you are — a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint. Other authentication factors can include time of day (would the user normally be logging in at this hour?) and how users access information on their personal devices over time (does the user tap into her email first or check the weather?). A document on MFA published by DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency notes that election officials should adopt MFA because it makes it more difficult for adversaries to gain access to secure databases and other election infrastructure.

National: The 2020 Elections: Is America Ready to Vote by Mail? | Carl Smith/Governing

The 2020 general election was never going to be calm, but the COVID-19 pandemic has brought worst-case scenarios out of the shadows and into the forefront of planning. That means secretaries of state, election officials, legislators, lawyers, voters rights groups and other stakeholders are gathering strategies and resources to safeguard both public health and democracy. “It’s a given that the election in November will be different than ones we’ve held in the past,” said Wendy Underhill, director of the Elections and Redistricting program for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “States can scale up their existing processes, or they can adopt new processes with the expectation of more mail-in ballots and fewer in-person voters.” “We’ve got to reduce the number of people who have to show up in person to vote, and the only way to do that is vote by mail,” said Chad Dunn, director of litigation for the UCLA Voting Rights Project and a co-author of its election policy recommendations. “We’ve got to flatten the curve,” “As election officials, we shouldn’t ignore the message that voters are sending,” said Neal Kelley, the registrar of voters for Orange County, Calif., the country’s fifth-largest voting jurisdiction. “This country has been using widespread absentee voting since the Civil War.”

National: NAACP, others: in-person voting still needed during coronavirus pandemic | Joey Garrison /USA Today

As calls mount to expand vote-by-mail options for state primaries and the November election, advocacy groups have a warning: Don’t reduce or eliminate in-person voting in the process. In a joint publication released Monday, the NAACP and the liberal Center for American Progress say curbing or entirely cutting in-person options because of the coronavirus pandemic would “inadvertently disenfranchise” African American, disabled, American Indian and other voters who rely on same-day voter registration. “To prevent the disenfranchisement of American citizens, any expansion of vote by mail must include preservation of in-person voting options for people who need them,” the groups said in the report. Their message comes as several states are working to expand vote-by-mail in case citizens are still advised to avoid public places in November because of the coronavirus. Democrats, including presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former first lady Michelle Obama, have made vote-by-mail a rallying cry while President Donald Trump opposes changes.

National: How the Spanish flu nearly derailed women’s right to vote | Ellen Carol Dubois/National Geographic

“These are sad times for the whole world, grown unexpectedly sadder by the sudden and sweeping epidemic of influenza,” wrote Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, in a letter to supporters in 1918. “This new affliction is bringing sorrow into many suffrage homes and is presenting a serious new obstacle in our Referendum campaigns and in the Congressional and Senatorial campaigns,” she continued. “We must therefore be prepared for failure.” Suffragists had been fighting for women’s right to vote for 70 years, and victory seemed almost in reach. Even with the United States fully mobilized for World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had come out in support of a constitutional amendment, and the House of Representatives had passed it. Then the Spanish flu struck, and the leaders of one of the longest-running political movements in the country’s history had to figure out how to continue their campaign in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in modern times. (See how some cities ‘flattened the curve’ of the flu pandemic.)

Editorials: The Simplest Way to Avoid a Wisconsin-Style Fiasco on Election Day | Edward B. Foley and Steven Huefner/Politico

The fiasco surrounding Wisconsin’s April 7 primary election is still fresh: In the middle of a viral pandemic, crowded, in-person voting took place despite the governor’s stay-at-home order, while tens of thousands of voters did not receive absentee ballots in time to cast eligible votes by mail. Two election eve judicial decisions added to the confusion. Unfortunately, the November elections are at risk of looking similar. With coronavirus likely to remain a threat for months, some form of voting by mail, including in states historically unfamiliar with high rates of absentee voting, will be a public health necessity. But one issue with mail-in ballots, whether a state uses them just for absentee voters or for the entire election, is that they need to be postmarked or delivered to a polling station no later than Election Day. If local election offices can’t handle the increased demand for absentee ballots and voters don’t receive their ballots in time to cast them by Election Day, those voters are disenfranchised. And that, in turn, could lead to heated, possibly prolonged disputes about election outcomes. But there’s a fairly straightforward way Wisconsin could have avoided its mess—and the rest of the country could do so in the fall. In fact, this solution already exists, albeit in a limited context.

Georgia: Voting in Primaries Could Look Much Different Amid Pandemic | Emil Moffatt/WABE

Thousands of absentee ballots for Georgia’s June primary elections are set to be mailed out on Tuesday. Early voting locations will re-open their doors in less than a month in advance of Election Day, June 9. It’s all set against the backdrop of the coronavirus, which has already wrought havoc this spring on voting in the state, delaying the state’s primaries not once, but twice. “Historically in Georgia, we are a people that enjoy voting in person, about 95% usually,” said Gabe Sterling, Chief Operating Officer with Georgia’s secretary of state’s office. But with concerns over the spread of the coronavirus, Georgians have flooded county elections offices with absentee ballot applications. As of Sunday, some 526,000 applications had been received. Georgia has had “no-excuse” absentee voting since 2005, but voters have used it relatively sparingly. But after the March 24 presidential primary was pushed back, the secretary of state’s office began a push to get more people to vote by mail by mailing absentee applications to all 6.9 million registered voters.

Indiana: Election commission approves in-person early voting the week before the June 2 primary | Alexandra Kukulka/Chicago Tribune

Early voting at the polls will be limited to the week before the June 2 primary election, according to a recent decision by the Indiana Election Commission. On March 20, Gov. Eric Holcomb announced that the state’s primary election will be moved from May 5 to June 2 because of the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Secretary of State Connie Lawson said March 20 that her office, along with the chairmen of the Indiana Republican and Democratic parties, agreed to postpone the election to June and they created recommendations for the Indiana Election Commission to consider. The election commission met March 25 and approved 11 recommendations, including allowing everyone to cast an absentee ballot by mail “without having a specific reason to do so,” grandfathering absentee ballots already received and moving all election dates by 28 days, according to a Secretary of State Office press release.

Missouri: ACLU Explains Its Lawsuit To Force Vote-By-Mail Option | Sarah Fenske/St. Louis Public Radio

In Missouri, you may only vote by mail if you apply for an absentee ballot — and cite one of just six specific reasons detailed in state law. Among them are illness or disability, or the fact you’ll be traveling out of the area. “Fear of contracting COVID-19” is not listed among them. But the ACLU of Missouri believes that should, in fact, be sufficient cause to cast an absentee ballot. Working in concert with the Missouri Voter Coalition, the organization filed a class-action lawsuit last Friday against the state of Missouri, the Missouri Secretary of State and a few local boards of election. It argues that the “illness or disability” clause in state law should include those staying at home to avoid the coronavirus, since it specifically mentions “confinement due to illness” as a qualifier.

Pennsylvania: How hard will it be to vote during the coronavirus? It depends on where you live. | onathan Tamari and Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

If you’re a Pennsylvanian who wants to vote by mail this year, you can — but make sure your ballot arrives by 8 p.m. on Election Day. If you’re in New Jersey, you have more time. Your ballot will be counted as long as it’s postmarked by Election Day and arrives within 48 hours of the polls closing. Across Pennsylvania’s northern border in Erie County, N.Y. (home to Buffalo), some polling places open more than a week before Election Day and are scheduled to be available over two weekends, for convenience. In Erie County, Pa., a few miles south, voting early is less flexible. You have to do it with an absentee ballot at the county election office. Weekend hours aren’t certain. (The same goes throughout Pennsylvania.) As states scramble to adapt elections for the coronavirus pandemic, the rules vary widely, each set by seemingly small bureaucratic decisions that together determine how easy or hard it is to vote — and how many people do or don’t. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has set aside $10 million for legal battles against efforts to make it easier to vote, arguing that looser laws could lead to fraud (though studies show election fraud is rare).

Texas: Drive-thrus and free pencils: Texas plans for July elections with in-person voting | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

There will be an election in Texas in mid-July, apparently with polling sites, election workers and voting machines in place so people can cast their ballots in person. How many voters might be willing to risk a trip to the polls during a pandemic, though, remains unknown. As Texas Republicans work to block the expansion of mail-in balloting during the coronavirus crisis, local election administrators across the state are deciphering how to safely host voters for the July 14 primary runoff elections — and eventually the November general election — under circumstances unseen by even the most veteran among them. Looking to expand curbside voting, some election officials are considering retooling parking garages or shuttered banks with drive-thru lanes. Rethinking contact during a process that requires close proximity, others are toying with the idea of buying hundreds of thousands of pencils that voters would take home after using the eraser end to mark their ballots on touch-screen voting machines.

Wisconsin: At least 7 new coronavirus cases appear to be related to Wisconsin’s election, Milwaukee health commissioner says | Alison Dirr/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Officials have identified seven people who appear to have contracted COVID-19 through activities related to the April 7 election, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said Monday. Six of the cases are in voters and one is a poll worker, Kowalik said. By the end of this week, officials hope to have additional information on the cases that were reported between April 7 and Monday, she said. That includes an answer to whether any of the seven cases resulted in death and whether the cases were concentrated at any of the city’s five in-person polling locations. “There needs to be a little bit more analysis so we can connect the dots, that’s why case investigation and contact tracing is so important,” she said. Asked how to conduct contact tracing at polling sites when anyone present was surrounded by numerous strangers, Kowalik referenced doing broad notification for people who were present during a certain time frame.

Singapore: Political parties warned of cybersecurity threats, election interference | Eileen Yu/ZDNet

With general elections expected to be held within a year, Singapore’s political parties have been issued advisories about the threat of foreign interference and cybersecurity threats. They are urged to seek out precautionary measures to safeguard their ICT infrastructure, data, as well as online accounts. The city-state’s Ministry of Home Affairs, Cyber Security Agency, and Elections Department on Monday said there had been many reports of foreign interference over the past few years in elections overseas, including the French presidential and German federal elections in 2017 as well as the US mid-term and Italian general elections in 2018. These were attempts by foreign actors such as other countries, agencies, and individuals to assert influence over elections in a sovereign state, said the Singapore government agencies. “Singapore is not immune and we need to guard against such nefarious activity as we head towards our own General Election, which must be held by April 2021,” they said.

National: Coronavirus Likely To Supercharge Election-Year Lawsuits Over Voting Rights | Pam Fessler/NPR

Election year legal battles around voting procedures are nothing new. But their scope and intensity are growing this year amid deep partisan polarization and the logistical challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic. The legal fights are expected to heat up in the coming weeks. Exhibit A is a new lawsuit filed by Democrats in Nevada Thursday challenging the state’s plans to conduct a mostly all-mail primary June 2 and to drastically limit in-person polling sites. Democrats say the moves — including automatically sending ballots only to active voters who have taken part in recent elections, but not all registered ones — are an infringement of voter rights. Republicans counter that Democrats want to overturn rules intended to protect the integrity of the state’s elections and would unnecessarily put voters’ health at risk. Both Democrats and Republicans are turning to the courts to try to ensure that rules governing this year’s election don’t disadvantage their side. The litigation campaign has taken on a new urgency with the pandemic and its impact on people’s willingness and ability to go to the polls in person.

National: Mail-In Elections Can’t Be Built Overnight. Here’s What Will Happen If Every State Tries. | Tierney Sneed/Talking Points Memo

On Thursday, a niche trade organization called the National Association of Presort Mailers held the first of what is expected to be a regularly scheduled organization-wide teleconference. The call was to discuss a daunting task with which its members will be deeply involved: printing, packaging and mailing ballots for a general election in the midst of a pandemic. On the call, the companies with the most experience working in the election space issued a dire warning to their colleagues, according to the leader of the trade group: with longstanding orders from established mail-in voting states, these companies said, they were already at capacity for printing and mailing operations for November’s election. If more states and localities sought to expand their mail-in voting operations, those vendors — who typically work with the western states that already conduct massive absentee voting operations — would need to purchase more equipment. But obtaining that equipment takes several months, National Association of Presort Mailers president Richard Gebbie told TPM after the call, and vendors wouldn’t make that seven-figure investment without the contracts to justify it. The conundrum, Gebbie fretted to TPM, is that if election officials wait even more than a few weeks to put in those orders, it would be too late for those vendors to scale up their own capacity.

National: Election Modifications to Avoid During the COVID-19 Pandemic | Michael Morley/Lawfare

As we approach the presidential election this November, election officials are developing plans to deal with the unique risks posed by the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. I have written about how states have grappled with past election emergencies and am participating in a nonpartisan task force and interdisciplinary working groups to offer recommendations to ensure that election officials are adequately prepared to face the challenge before us. The recent crisis with the Wisconsin presidential primaries demonstrates the importance of states having election emergency statutes that adequately empower election officials to respond to unexpected crises, as well as contingency plans for implementing that discretion. Just as important as discussing the affirmative steps that officials should take to address the COVID-19 crisis, however, is identifying those they should avoid. Because so many groups and experts, along with my previous work, have focused on the first task, it’s time to tackle the second.

National: Coronavirus could cripple voting in November. But it depends where you live. | David Wasserman/NBC

America’s decentralized system of voting means states enjoy broad leeway on setting election rules. Many voters may not realize that state procedures vary widely on everything from registration deadlines, ID requirements and types of voting machinery to who is permitted to vote absentee and when mail-in ballots must be postmarked in order to be counted. But in the coronavirus pandemic, a lack of federal election funding, partisan disunity and legal disputes could produce last-minute logistical confusion and drastic disparities across state lines in voters’ ability to safely access a ballot. Last week’s election in Wisconsin ignited outrage from voting rights advocates, who claimed courts’ refusal to grant Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ last-minute request to suspend in-person voting and extend the absentee ballot return deadline forced voters to choose between democracy and their health. The April 7 balloting turned into an administrative fiasco of mass polling-place closures, backlogs that caused 11,000 absentee ballot requests to go unfulfilled, and at least 35,000 voters receiving absentee ballots with incorrect return instructions.

National: Coronavirus threatens to hobble voter registration efforts | Sara Swann/The Fulcrum

The coronavirus has already drastically compromised campaigns and voting this year. The next looming casualty looks to be registration drives.  With about 95 percent of the population under states’ orders to stay at home this spring, face-to-face “Get Out the Vote!” crusades so typical in election years have ceased to exist. Civic engagement groups, now forced to operate entirely online, are expressing alarm that a significant share of people who want a say in electing the president this fall won’t be able to get on the voter rolls in time. The country’s digital divide already makes accessing online registration forms and information difficult for many Americans, particularly in low-income and rural areas. And for some 28 million across nine states, it’s not an option at all because they have to complete actual paperwork. Groups focused on creating new voters, and then making them the core of efforts to boost turnout, say they’re determined to rise to the challenge. The Covid-19 crisis has underscored the importance of their mission, they say, and their staff and volunteers are using the unprecedented situation to get more creative in their approaches.

National: Coronavirus may stop hundreds of thousands from becoming citizens in time to vote in November | Suzanne Gamboa/NBC

Cancellation of citizenship oath ceremonies and in-person interviews because of coronavirus means hundreds of thousands of people may not naturalize in time for November’s elections. If ceremonies and interviews remain shut down until October without remote alternatives created by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, about 441,000 people who would have been citizens would be deprived of the chance to vote, according to Boundless Immigration, a technology company that helps immigrants apply for green cards and citizenship. “USCIS did the right thing by pausing live oath ceremonies and live interviews, there’s no dispute about that,” said Doug Rand, cofounder of Boundless Immigration. “The problem is USCIS hasn’t come up with a next step and come up with remote pathways for people to take the oath and do interviews,” said Rand, a former adviser to President Barack Obama on immigration.

National: Coronavirus Intensifies Legal Tussle Over Voting Rights | Brent Kendall and Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

Intense court battles over voting rights and election security always promised to be part of the 2020 election cycle, but the coronavirus has added new urgency to the cases, which are multiplying nationwide. This month’s fight over when and how Wisconsin voters would cast their ballots marked the unofficial start of the litigation campaign. In the two weeks since, courts in several other states have issued notable decisions about conducting elections during a pandemic, and a host of new lawsuits has been filed. “Before I’d ever heard of the coronavirus, I was convinced that this was going to be a record year for litigation,” said University of California, Irvine law professor Richard Hasen. “Now I’m even surer of that fact.” Voting-rights fights have been growing for years, a function of tighter voting regulations in several Republican-led states, intense partisanship and a realization that electoral rules can affect outcomes in close races. The cases have nearly tripled since 2000, the year of the Bush v. Gore showdown, Mr. Hasen said. According to his new book “Election Meltdown,” the 2018 election year saw a record 394 cases, surprisingly high for a nonpresidential cycle.

National: Voting by mail in the spotlight as U.S. Congress debates how to secure November elections | Richard Cowan/Reuters

Congress is scrambling for ways to safeguard the Nov. 3 U.S. elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, with a partisan fight shaping up over a Democratic proposal to require states to offer the option of voting by mail. President Donald Trump, seeking re-election this year, and some of his fellow Republicans have voiced opposition to expanded voting by mail, citing concern over ballot fraud – a worry that Democrats dispute. Democrats have said election procedures will need to change this year because many voters will be reluctant to stand in long lines or enter crowded polling sites for fear of infection. In recent years, Democrats also have accused Republicans of pursuing policies in some states to make voting more difficult in a bid to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters. Congressional Democrats are pushing for additional funding for election aid to states in the next round of coronavirus-response legislation expected to be crafted by lawmakers in the coming weeks.

Arkansas: State finds cash to buy 9 counties voting gear; cost of equipment estimated at $2.7M | Michael R. Wickline/Arkansas Democrat Gazette

Secretary of State John Thurston’s office has decided to use state and federal funds to pay for new voting equipment in the nine Arkansas counties that don’t have updated equipment for the Nov. 3 general election. The counties, initially, were to share a portion of the costs for new equipment. “Given the impact the covid-19 pandemic has had across the state, the secretary of state’s office has had to reassess our plan in working with the remaining nine counties for new election equipment,” said Kevin Niehaus, public relations director for the Republican secretary of state. “With the counties needing to realign their fiscal priorities, it became apparent to us that fully funding the election equipment for these counties was the only viable option,” he said in a written statement. “With the integrity of our elections at stake, having all 75 counties working off the new equipment has always been a top priority.” The nine counties are Bradley, Conway, Fulton, Jefferson, Lee, Monroe, Newton, Searcy and Stone.

Connecticut: Presidential primary pushed back two more months to Aug. 11 due to coronavirus concerns | Christopher Keating/Hartford Courant

In a second delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Connecticut’s presidential primary will be pushed back to Aug. 11. Gov. Ned Lamont made the announcement Friday that he was acting in concert with Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, the state’s chief elections official, to postpone the date by an additional two months. The primary was originally scheduled for April 28, the same day as New York, Rhode Island and other states, but Lamont pushed that back to June 2. He then made the second postponement Friday. The state has already set aside Aug. 11 as the day for Republican and Democratic primaries for Congress, state legislature and local offices. As a result, towns will save money by opening polling places once, instead of twice. Since local conventions have not yet been held, the candidates for those primaries will not be settled until the coming weeks and months.

Missouri: Civil rights groups sue Missouri in effort to expand absentee voting amid pandemic | Austin Huguelet/Springfield News-Leader

Civil rights groups sued state and local election authorities Friday in an effort to ensure people can vote by mail if they’re staying home amid the coronavirus pandemic. In a lawsuit filed Friday, plaintiffs led by the ACLU of Missouri asked a judge to declare that state law allowing someone to vote absentee due to “incapacity or confinement due to illness” applies to people sheltering in place. Currently, it’s not clear that’s the case, creating confusion with municipal contests all over the state set for June 2. Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, has declined to clarify the issue, saying it’s not his place.