Missouri enacts new voter rules, including a photo ID requirement, and nixes presidential primaries for caucuses | Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

Missouri overhauled its election rules on Wednesday, enacting a voter identification law similar to one the state’s highest court blocked two years ago and doing away with its presidential primary in favor of a caucus system. The new law, which Gov. Michael L. Parson signed at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, requires voters to present a photo ID when casting a regular or absentee ballot. Those without such documentation will be required to fill out a provisional ballot that would be segregated until they provide photo identification or their signature is matched to the one kept on file by election officials. The voter identification rule was the latest instituted in a Republican-controlled state, and reflected the party’s continued mistrust of common voting practices, including the use of voting machines. It requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots statewide starting in 2023, with limited exceptions for certain touch-screen systems until the end of next year. Among the other changes is a prohibition against the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — a practice that many Republicans criticized during the 2020 presidential election — and replacing Missouri’s presidential primary, held in recent years in March, with a series of caucuses.

Full Article: Missouri Enacts Strict New Voter Rules and Will Switch to Caucuses – The New York Times

New Mexico Secretary of State says she was threatened | Morgan Lee/Associated Press

New Mexico’s top elections regulator says she received threats to her safety via an email and telephone calls to her offices and that the FBI has been notified. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver on Tuesday told The Associated Press that there have been three instances of threats against her within the last two weeks and that federal investigators have been alerted. Two threats were made indirectly in phone calls to the office of the secretary of state. The FBI in Albuquerque did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Toulouse Oliver previously went into hiding in response to online threats by leaving her home for several weeks in December 2020 and January 2021. Investigators linked those threats on a website against multiple election officials to Iran. “I went a nice, long period with anything” threatening, Toulouse Oliver said. “My election security officer has referred them over to the FBI. They’re looking into it obviously.” Toulouse Oliver said the threatening email touched upon social media and video commentary by a conservative filmmaker in defense of his widely debunked documentary “2000 Mules” that alleges widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Full Article: Top New Mexico elections regulator says she was threatened | AP News

Nevada: Gilbert says video proves fraud; election official says it proves security | essica Hill/Las Vegas Sun

A video that Reno attorney Joey Gilbert says proves fraud in last month’s primary election actually shows a Washoe County election official doing his job, a county official says. Gilbert is refusing to concede his loss in a 12-way primary election for the Republican nomination for governor, despite coming up about 26,000 votes short of the declared winner, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo. On Tuesday, Gilbert shared a two-minute, 27-second video on his Facebook page of a portion of a livestream of the Washoe County ballot room. The video shows a man walking down an aisle and stopping at different machines. Gilbert’s accompanying comments included “talk about guilty as sin” and “CORRUPT as hell.” He suggested the man was entering and uploading something into the computers. Bethany Drysdale, media and communications manager for Washoe County, said the man in the video is the county’s department systems specialist, who was closing down an imprinter at the end of the work day, as required by Nevada state law. The specialist was also verifying that office laptops were shut down for the day and that the spreadsheets on them were complete. The laptops have Excel spreadsheets that track the groups of mail-in ballots and what bins they are in, so that when a risk-limiting audit is performed, the election officials know what bin a certain group of ballots is in, Drysdale said. There is no tallying of votes on those computers, she added.

Full Article: Gilbert says video proves fraud; Nevada official says it proves security – Las Vegas Sun Newspaper

Pennsylvania: Fight over 2020 election records lands in court | Mark Scolforo/Associated Press

A county judge in Williamsport has to decide whether to force officials to provide voter-by-voter electronic election records after the state Office of Open Records ruled Pennsylvania law makes them confidential. Heather Honey, who heads the Lebanon, Pennsylvania-based firm Haystack Investigations, sought in October a digital copy of Lycoming County’s “cast vote record” for the 2020 General Election in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden unseated Republican President Donald Trump. Lycoming told Honey no, saying Honey was essentially asking for the contents of ballot boxes and voting machines, information that the state Election Code declares off-limits for public inspection. In a January decision, Office of Open Records appeals officer Erin Burlew agreed with the county elections director that the cast vote record “is the digital equivalent of the contents of ballot boxes.” Honey challenged that decision in county court in February, likening the cast vote record to a spreadsheet and describing it as “merely a digital report tallying the results of ballots scanned into a tabulator. The CVR is a report that is prepared after an election from a desktop computer that is not and never was the contents of a ballot box.”

Full Article: Fight over 2020 election records lands in Pennsylvania court | AP News

Virginia lawmakers punt on bills aimed at limiting partisan election oversight | Graham Moomaw/Virginia Mercury

Despite getting several extra months to negotiate, Virginia lawmakers went home for the summer without a deal on proposals to limit partisan influence in the state’s election bureaucracy. Legislation that would have removed the governor’s power to appoint the state elections commissioner and given the two major parties equal representation on the State Board of Elections effectively died for lack of a final vote. The General Assemly didn’t take up two pending bills on the topic when lawmakers met in Richmond this month to finish work on the state budget, which was supposed to be done in March. All the bills left unfinished are technically still alive because the General Assembly adjourned its special session to Sept. 7, a move explained as a way to take action later on an unfilled seat on the State Corporation Commission. But anything not approved at this point is effectively dead, said Garren Shipley, a spokesman for House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah. “The remaining conference reports, while they are still technically viable until the session adjourns sine die, are unlikely to move forward,” Shipley said. It’s unclear exactly what caused the talks to fail, but the state elections board flipped to Republican control during the negotiations due to the resignation of a Democratic member who had been appointed to a judgeship. While the bills were pending, Gov. Glenn Youngkin swapped out the state’s former elections commissioner, Chris Piper, for his own appointee, Susan Beals, a former Republican member of the Chesterfield County Electoral Board.

Full Article: Virginia lawmakers punt on bills aimed at limiting partisan election oversight – Virginia Mercury

Wisconsin: A year in, legal fight over Gableman election investigation keeps growing | Shawn Johnson/Wisconsin Public Radio

More than a year after Wisconsin Republicans tapped former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to lead a wide-ranging election investigation, the number of court cases connected to the probe continues to grow with no end in sight. This week, the liberal watchdog group American Oversight filed its fourth lawsuit connected to the investigation, this one against Gableman’s Office of Special Counsel after he admitted to deleting some documents connected to the probe. Lawyers for Gableman have also filed an appeal of a judge’s ruling that found him in contempt of court in another case where American Oversight is seeking open records. “The investigation has become a morass of competing lawsuits back and forth between different parties in the state and outside the state,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And those legal debates have sort of overtaken the substance of the investigation itself.”

Full Article: A year in, legal fight over Gableman election investigation keeps growing | Wisconsin Public Radio