States seek to protect election workers amid growing threats | Lisa Rathke and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Lawmakers in a handful of states are seeking greater protections for election officials amid growing concerns for their safety after they were targeted by threats of violence following the 2020 presidential election. Widespread threats against those who oversee elections, from secretaries of state to county clerks and even poll workers, soared after former President Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims about the outcome of the presidential election. “Corrupt secretaries will all hang when the stolen election is revealed” is just one example of the vitriol that has come from social media, emails and phone messages. Even in Vermont, where the outcome wasn’t disputed, election workers have faced threats. A caller to the secretary of state’s office said in 2020 that a firing squad would target “all you cheating (vulgarity),” and “a lot of people are going to get executed.” To counter the threats, lawmakers have introduced bills so far in Vermont and several other states, including Illinois, Maine, New Mexico and Washington, all of which have legislatures controlled by Democrats. Much of the legislation would create or boost criminal liability for threats and, in Illinois, for assaults against election workers.

Full Article: States seek to protect election workers amid growing threats | AP News

Michigan: ‘Show up armed’ to protect election observers, State Senate candidate suggests | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

Republican Mike Detmer, a candidate for the Michigan state Senate, told a crowd Saturday that people should “show up armed” to protect Republican election observers’ access to monitor the counting of ballots. In response Monday evening, Michigan’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, said she had referred Detmer’s comments and additional remarks from Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley to Attorney General Dana Nessel. In a statement, Benson said voter intimidation by brandishing a firearm at a polling place is illegal. Detmer made the comment at an event in Livingston County, according to a video posted by Kelley’s gubernatorial campaign. A person in the crowd had asked the two candidates what can be done to “protect people” to prevent what happened at the TCF Center, where Detroit’s absentee ballots were counted after the November 2020 presidential election. The unidentified individual suggested Republican observers had been “pushed” out of the room and police “manhandled” people. Election officials have said they allowed the maximum number of poll watchers, only restricting access to any additional observers because of COVID-19 concerns.

Full Article: ‘Show up armed’ to protect election observers, Michigan candidate suggests

National: Trump Calls for Massive Protests If He is Arrested, Calls (Black) Prosecutors Investigating Him “Racist,” and Suggests He Would Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters If Elected in 2024 | David Goodman and Emily Cochrane/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that if elected to a new term as president, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for attacking the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. He also called on his supporters to mount large protests in Atlanta and New York if prosecutors in those cities, who are investigating him and his businesses, took action against him. The promise to consider pardons is the furthest Mr. Trump has gone in expressing support for the Jan. 6 defendants. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said, addressing a crowd at a fairground in Conroe, outside Houston, that appeared to number in the tens of thousands. “We will treat them fairly,” he repeated. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” At least 700 people have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, including 11 who have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Some have said they believed they were doing Mr. Trump’s bidding. As president, Mr. Trump pardoned a number of his supporters and former aides, including Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., and Stephen K. Bannon, his former campaign strategist and White House adviser, who was charged with defrauding donors to a privately funded effort to build a wall along the Mexican border.

 

Full Article: Trump Says He Would Consider Pardons for Jan. 6 Defendants if Elected – The New York Times

National: Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines | Alan Feuer, Maggie Haberman, Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater/The New York Times

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines. Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down. The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes. The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

Full Article: Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines – The New York Times

National: Memo circulated among Donald Trump allies advocated using NSA data in attempt to prove stolen election | Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Jacqueline Alemany/The Washington Post

The memo used the banal language of government bureaucracy, but the proposal it advocated was extreme: President Donald Trump should invoke the extraordinary powers of the National Security Agency and Defense Department to sift through raw electronic communications in an attempt to show that foreign powers had intervened in the 2020 election to help Joe Biden win. Proof of foreign interference would “support next steps to defend the Constitution in a manner superior to current civilian-only judicial remedies,” argued the Dec. 18, 2020, memo, which was circulated among Trump allies. The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, laid out a plan for the president to appoint three men to lead this effort. One was a lawyer attached to a military intelligence unit; another was a veteran of the military who had been let go from his National Security Council job after claiming that Trump was under attack by deep-state forces including “globalists” and “Islamists.”

Full Article: Memo circulated among Donald Trump allies advocated using NSA data in attempt to prove stolen election – The Washington Post

National: Rejected Mail Ballots Are Showing Racial Disparities | Mike Baker/The New York Times

Among the thousands of mail-in ballots that were rejected in Washington State during the 2020 election, auditors have found that the votes of Black residents were thrown out four times as often as those of white voters. The rejections, all of them because of problematic signatures, disqualified one out of every 40 mail-in votes from Black people — a finding that already is causing concern amid the national debate over voter access and secure balloting. Washington, a state with broad experience in mail-in balloting, found that rejection rates were also elevated for Native American, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters. State officials said there were no signs that ballots cast by Black or other minority voters were knowingly singled out by poll workers, or that any of the ballots were deliberately falsified; the rejections were a result of signatures that were missing or did not match those on file, a possible result, the officials said, of voter inexperience, language problems or other factors. “It’s not acceptable, quite frankly,” said State Auditor Pat McCarthy, a Democrat, whose office conducted the audit. She urged election officials to take steps to address the disparities. The findings in Washington State mirror mail-ballot research that has been conducted in other states in recent years, including Georgia and Florida. But they are crucial in a state like Washington, which in 2011 became the second state to adopt all-mail balloting, behind Oregon. Mail-in voting has been an option for all statewide elections since 1991.

Full Article: Rejected Mail Ballots Are Showing Racial Disparities – The New York Times

National: Trump followers zero in on secretary of state campaigns | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Donald Trump’s pick to become Arizona’s top elections official raised more campaign cash in 2021 than his two potential Democratic opponents combined — a sign of MAGA-world’s deep engagement in taking over under-the-radar positions in charge of running battleground state elections. State Rep. Mark Finchem, whom Trump endorsed for Arizona secretary of state in September of last year, has made the former president’s lies about the 2020 election results a cornerstone of his campaign. Finchem has said repeatedly, and without providing legitimate evidence, that the election was tainted by fraud, and he was a major backer of the GOP-led review of the vote in Maricopa County, which election experts and the county’s own Republican officials trashed as an unprofessional fishing expedition. Drafting off Trump’s endorsement, Finchem brought in more than $660,000 for his campaign in 2021, according to new campaign finance reports. That’s more than the combined fundraising totals of the two leading Democrats, former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes and state House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding, who respectively raised about $385,000 and $200,000 for the year. Another Republican with business ties actually raised even more than Finchem. But the financial haul from Trump’s pick, which included thousands of donations under $100 that poured in from around the country, points to a broader trend across the states.

Full Article: Trump followers zero in on secretary of state campaigns – POLITICO

Editorial: The sloppy, patchwork, spaghetti-at-the-wall effort to steal the presidency | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

It’s worth beginning with the observation that it was all so obvious. President Donald Trump’s effort to secure a second term in office regardless of the will of the electorate was so ham-handed and clumsy that it was like watching a little kid do a magic trick: You knew what was coming and how it would work and you just had to let it play out. Although of course, this particular magic trick ends with the kid’s friend furiously trying to burn your house down. As we continue to learn details of how Trump scrambled to block Joe Biden’s victory in the weeks after the 2020 election — like the report Monday evening that Trump considered various options for seizing voting machines — it is useful to fit what we know into an overarching framework. No part of the scheming by Trump and his allies is disconnected from the rest; each intertwines into an ad hoc, three-pronged ploy. He tried to prove fraud. He tried to get elections officials to act as if there had been fraud. And then he just tried to steal the election.

Full Article: The sloppy, patchwork, spaghetti-at-the-wall effort to steal the presidency – The Washington Post

Arizona bill would allow legislature to overturn election results | Reid Wilson/The Hill

An arch conservative member of Arizona’s state House of Representatives has proposed a mammoth overhaul of the state’s voting procedures that would allow legislators to overturn the results of a primary or general election after months of unfounded allegations and partisan audits. The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Fillmore (R), would substantially change the way Arizonans vote by eliminating most early and absentee voting and requiring people to vote in their home precincts, rather than at vote centers set up around the state. Most dramatically, Fillmore’s bill would require the legislature to hold a special session after an election to review election processes and results, and to “accept or reject the election results.” The proposal comes after President Biden became the first Democrat since former President Clinton to win Arizona’s electoral votes. He defeated former President Trump there by just under 11,000 votes, or about three-tenths of a percentage point

Full Article: Arizona bill would allow legislature to overturn election results | TheHill

Full Article: Arizona bill would allow legislature to overturn election results | TheHill

Arizona: Cyber Ninjas CEO Logan not ready to turn over audit records | Ryan Randazzo/Arizona Republic

Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan says he will not turn over records from the review of Maricopa County’s 2020 election until he has a “clear” ruling he can appeal to the highest court. Logan answered questions during a contentious deposition with attorneys for The Arizona Republic and American Oversight. The news organization and the left-leaning nonprofit have battled in court for months for the release of texts, emails and other documents related to the ballot recount and related investigations of the 2020 election ordered by Republicans in the Arizona Senate. “He started off very complacent and happy to answer questions, but as it went on he became more combative,” said Craig Hoffman, The Republic’s attorney, who questioned Logan during the more than four-hour deposition. “He was clearly frustrated by the end of it.” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah on Jan. 6 found Cyber Ninjas in contempt of an order to turn over the records and imposed a $50,000 a day fine against the company for not producing the records. Since then, The Republic’s lawsuit was consolidated with American Oversight’s, which is why the lawyers for both parties got to question Logan on Thursday. Logan said Hannah’s November order to the company to turn over records was the result of a “biased judge,” according to Hoffman. Logan went on “long soliloquies” during the deposition on how he did not believe his company was obligated to turn over records because they should not be public, Hoffman said.

Full Article: Cyber Ninjas CEO Logan not ready to turn over Arizona audit records

Colorado: Douglas County clerk questioned by state about allegedly copying election equipment hard drives | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state Jena Griswold is requesting more information about a potential election security breach by Douglas County’s Republican clerk and recorder Merlin Klotz. This makes Klotz the third GOP election official in Colorado under investigation for their alleged handling of sensitive election technology. Griswold said her office became aware of a social media post from last October in which Klotz wrote, “we, as always, took a full image backup of our server before a trusted build was done this year.”  The trusted build is a regular process every county goes through after an election, in which the makers of its election equipment update the operating system. Douglas is one of two counties in the state whose equipment is supplied by a company called Clear Ballot. The rest of Colorado uses technology from Dominion Voting Systems, based in Denver. A false election conspiracy circulated by supporters of former president Trump claims that Dominion used their machines to subvert the 2020 election, and then hid the evidence during the routine software update. Klotz’s social media post did not suggest that he believes Clear Ballot was involved in election fraud but has concerns about Dominion’s trusted builds.

Full Article: Douglas County clerk questioned by state about allegedly copying election equipment hard drives | Colorado Public Radio

Georgia debates if voting machines too vulnerable to hacking? | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

There’s a long-running and complicated fight over how much security is necessary to protect elections against hacking. A brewing controversy in Georgia illustrates this perfectly. A judge may soon release a sealed report which was prepared as part of a years-long lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting machines. Its author, Alex Halderman, was given rare access to dig through the machines and look for ways to hack them. He said in a declaration filed in the case that he found multiple vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to install malicious software and undermine elections. Halderman, who runs the University of Michigan’s Center for Computer Security and Society, is an expert for the plaintiffs in the case, a group of Georgia voters who want the state to replace its touch-screen voting machines that produce paper records with hand-marked paper ballots that they say are far more secure. Georgia election officials see things differently. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) says Halderman’s claims are overblown and that the bugs he found couldn’t reasonably be exploited in an actual election. He compared Halderman’s findings — discovered over 12 weeks of probing the machines — to “having the keys and alarm codes to a home then claiming he found a way to break in.” The report, which could be made public as early as this week, could shed new light on a battle between security advocates and election officials that burst into public view after the 2016 contest was marred by Russian interference. Russian hackers penetrated voter rolls in at least two states during that contest, but there’s no evidence they changed any votes. 

Full Article: Are voting machines too vulnerable to hacking? Georgia’s having that debate – The Washington Post

Minnesota Secretary of State rejects Crow Wing County request for 2020 election audit | Deena Winter/Minnesota Reformer

Minnesota’s secretary of state has flatly denied a request by the Crow Wing County Board for an audit of the 2020 election in that county, where activists have been dogging officials for months to look into unspecified claims of fraud. Convinced there was fraud to be found — and egged on by people like former President Donald Trump, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and a cadre of right-wingers — a group of activists lobbied the central Minnesota county board for months to do more examinations of the election in the county, which Trump won by 30 points. After the county attorney said the board had no legal authority to audit the election, four of the five county board members passed a resolution on Jan. 4 asking the secretary of state’s office to “undertake a full forensic audit of all election material and data” of the 2020 election. The resolution said the board “continues to have faith in the 2020 election results as valid and reliable but it is equally troubling that there are citizens who still have a sincerely held belief that it was not.” Secretary of State Steve Simon responded to the county in a letter Monday, saying that while he appreciates the “delicate balancing act” the county has undergone in trying to address constituents’ concerns, his office will not do another review of the election. “Our office will not engage in a vague and impossibly broad search for unspecified misconduct based on anyone’s gut feeling, hunch, or belief — no matter how sincerely held,” Simon said. “The 2020 general election, which took place almost 15 months ago, was fundamentally fair, accurate, honest, and secure across Minnesota.”

Full Article: Secretary of State rejects Crow Wing County request for 2020 election audit – Minnesota Reformer

New Hampshire audit bill attracts charges, threats and conspiracies | Kevin Landrigan/The New Hampshire Union Leader

The legislative campaign for a forensic audit of the 2020 election in New Hampshire elicited wild charges, threats and conspiracy theories during a public hearing Wednesday. State Rep. Timothy Baxter, R-Seabrook, said he proposed that this audit (HB 1484) be paid for with donations or private nonprofit grants to rebut critics who said the cost to taxpayers would be too high. “Let me be clear: A majority of this state thinks either the 2016 or the 2020 election was stolen. Every voter in this country deserves nothing less than that and this would allow every person to know the truth,” said Baxter, a Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat in the 1st Congressional District. An independent third party would conduct the audit, which supporters acknowledge would have to be a hand recount. That’s because many of the memory cards inside automated voting machines used to record and count votes in 2020 were reprogrammed to report results of town or city elections last year.

Full Article: Voter audit bill attracts charges, threats and conspiracies

A Pennsylvania court overturned the state’s mail voting law, but an appeal means it’s still in place | Jonathan Lai and Andrew Seidman/Philadelphia Inquirer

A Pennsylvania court on Friday struck down the state’s mail voting law, saying the state constitution requires voters to cast ballots in person unless they meet specific requirements. That almost certainly won’t be the final word on the matter, as the state quickly appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, triggering an automatic stay of the decision and leaving Act 77 in place while the high court considers the case. And Democrats believe the Supreme Court, which has a Democratic majority, will uphold the law. Democrats had feared for months that the state’s Commonwealth Court, with its Republican majority, would strike down Act 77. “This opinion is based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning, and is wrong on the law,” state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the leading Democratic candidate for governor, said on Twitter. “We are confident that Act 77 will ultimately be upheld as constitutional.” The final outcome aside, the ruling may add momentum to a GOP push in Harrisburg to enact more restrictive voting laws. Republican candidates for governor celebrated the ruling, and former President Donald Trump issued a statement saying a “great patriotic spirit is developing at a level that nobody thought possible.”

Full Article: Pennsylvania mail voting law Act 77 overturned by Commonwealth Court, state appeals

Virginia Governor says he intends to replace state’s top election official | Graham Moomaw/Virginia Mercury

Gov. Glenn Youngkin said Monday he plans to appoint someone new to serve as Virginia’s top election official when current Elections Commissioner Chris Piper’s four-year term expires this summer. The comment from Youngkin, made in an interview with Trump-supporting radio host John Fredericks, was the first clear indication from the new governor on what he has planned for the Virginia Department of Elections. In the interview, Fredericks asked Youngkin if he plans to “clean house” at the agency. “We in fact fully expect that when the current commissioner’s term is up that we will replace him,” Youngkin replied. “We have to make sure the leadership that’s in the Department of Elections is leadership that is looking out for the integrity of the election process and not trying to be political.” Youngkin’s comment drew a rebuke from current Board of Elections Chairman Bob Brink, a former Democratic delegate who said Piper has led the agency “through the extraordinary challenges of the past several years with unquestioned integrity and professionalism.” “Gov. Youngkin’s announcement that he plans to fire Chris without cause is a deeply troubling injection of politics into the administration of our elections,” Brink said in a written statement. “It is also a slap in the face to the thousands of local election workers across the commonwealth. Their nonpartisan efforts have produced efficient, accessible, secure and transparent elections that all Virginians can be proud of. Those workers and Virginia’s voters deserve better, as does Chris Piper.”

 

Full Article: Youngkin says he intends to replace Virginia’s top election official – Virginia Mercury

Wisconsin Republicans seek constitutional ban on election grants while Democrats seek ouster of elections commissioner | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Litigation of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election continued Wednesday as Republican lawmakers rolled out a constitutional amendment banning the use of grant money to administer elections while Democratic lawmakers called for a state elections commissioner to lose his job after pretending to be an elector for former President Donald Trump. The measures being put forward by Republicans are part of a nationwide effort to overhaul how elections are administered sprung from the convergence of false claims of significant election fraud by Trump and an influx of absentee voting and atypical election guidance due to the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, Democrats are focused on the actions of Republicans who submitted false paperwork claiming Trump won their state instead of Joe Biden, who actually received more votes in their states. In Wisconsin, two Republicans who pretended to be electors have been subpoenaed by the U.S. House committee convened to investigate how the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol materialized. Democratic Sen. Chris Larson of Milwaukee sent a letter signed by 13 colleagues to Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu on Wednesday asking him to rescind his appointment of Robert Spindell to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Full Article: Wisconsin Republicans seek constitutional ban on election grants