Rightwing sheriffs’ groups ramp up drives to monitor US midterm elections | Peter Stone/The Guardian

Two groups of rightwing sheriffs that echo some of Donald Trump’s false claims about widespread voting fraud in 2020 are ramping up drives to monitor this year’s elections for potential voting and election fraud. The two Arizona-led groups together boast over 350 sheriffs as members nationwide, and have forged various ties with Texas-based True the Vote, which has a history of making unverified claims of voting fraud, spurring watchdogs and law enforcement veterans to voice alarms of looming threats to voting rights and election workers. The burgeoning sheriffs’ drive to investigate so-called voting fraud was evident at a secretive Arizona meeting on 13 August that drew a crowd of some 200 allies, including former sheriff Richard Mack and current sheriff Mark Lamb, who each lead sheriffs’ groups. The True the Vote chief, Catherine Engelbrecht, arranged the event, Mack told the Guardian. The gathering lasted about seven and a half hours and featured talks by Engelbrecht and Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal county, Arizona, who teamed up in June to create ProtectAmerica.Vote. to promote a larger role for sheriffs in election monitoring, said Mack. “I totally support what they’re doing,” said Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which has thousands of members around the country, including hundreds of sheriffs. The event, to which Mack invited several of his staff and two former law enforcement officials, provided “more evidence of quite extensive election fraud”, said Mack. “There’s no way anyone in this country should be trusting computers to tabulate votes.” The meeting, which was covered live by the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, was held at a venue “ that was very surreptitious”, added Mack, former sheriff of Graham county, Arizona.

Full Article: Rightwing sheriffs’ groups ramp up drives to monitor US midterm elections | US midterm elections 2022 | The Guardian

DEF CON Voting Village takes on election conspiracies, disinformation | AJ Vicens/CyberScoop

The DEF CON Voting Village made headlines for giving hackers access to voting machines and putting election vulnerabilities on full display when it first launched in 2017. But in the era of the “Big Lie,” the unfounded theory of election rigging in 2020, the village has another — and possibly more challenging — mission. “Today, the main thing is still the same — tell what are the real vulnerabilities — but fight against conspiracy theories, misinformation, claims of hacks that didn’t happen, claims of weirdness that didn’t happen,” said Harri Hursti, the co-founder of the Voting Village and a pioneer election security researcher. This year at DEF CON, which wrapped up Sunday in Las Vegas, the Voting Village took place against a backdrop of perhaps the most contentious time for election administrators in decades. Aside from working through COVID-19 modifications, public questioning of election administration has reached fever pitch. Election offices are, at times, buried in records requests looking to expose fraud. Elections officials in Colorado and Michigan stand accused of giving unauthorized access to voting infrastructure in a quixotic effort to prove the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Election officials from Georgia in June detailed the threats they’d received from Trump supporters, a disturbingly common report across the country over the last two years.

Full Article: DEF CON Voting Village takes on election conspiracies, disinformation

National: GOP operatives’ troubling trend of copying election systems | Tim Starks/The Washington Post

Donald Trump-allied attorneys directed a team of computer experts to copy sensitive data from Georgia election systems, part of a broader trend of assorted GOP efforts to copy such data, The Post reported Monday. … The copies of Dominion voting software in several locations would include “object code,” or the language that allows machines to understand the underlying source code, said University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman. Such code is mostly straightforward to reverse-engineer. “The format is a speed bump for someone wanting to understand or exploit the system, not a real roadblock,” Halderman told me. Halderman said election security is too often a game of “security by obscurity,” one where everything is kept secret until suddenly “the cat’s out of the bag” with, say, imaged voting systems making their way into the broader public. That creates a period of heightened vulnerability, he said, where the bad guys have the edge over good guys who have to spend a lot of time working to patch flaws.

Full Article: GOP operatives’ troubling trend of copying election systems – The Washington Post

National: Poll worker recruitment efforts are in full swing for midterms amid shortage | Barbara Rodriguez/The 19th

When Power the Polls launched in 2020, the nonpartisan nonprofit aimed to recruit 250,000 people to sign up as poll workers around the country during the COVID-19 pandemic. The response was overwhelming. Power the Polls, through its partnerships with about 200 nonprofit organizations and businesses, estimates it recruited more than 700,000 prospective poll workers. Jane Slusser, program manager for Power the Polls, said 97 percent of those sign-ups were people who had never been a poll worker before. She said afterward, many expressed an interest in doing the work again. “Overwhelmingly, people were like, ‘Now I’m a poll worker for life. It was a tough day, but it was one of the most rewarding things I ever did,’” she said. Poll workers — the people, sometimes paid and sometimes not, who help voters check in, manage lines, troubleshoot equipment or assist with office duties — have historically been older women, though data is limited. Power the Polls wants to help election administrators recruit poll workers again amid new challenges. The election system is being tested in the face of lies spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies about widespread voter fraud, and members of the majority-women election official workforce have faced threats.

Full Article: Poll worker recruitment efforts are in full swing for midterms amid shortage

National: Republicans Turn Against the League of Women Voters | Megan O’Matz/ProPublica

For decades, the League of Women Voters played a vital but largely practical role in American politics: tending to the information needs of voters by hosting debates and conducting candidate surveys. While it wouldn’t endorse specific politicians, it quietly supported progressive causes. The group was known for clipboards, not confrontation; for being respected, not reviled. But those quiet days are now over, a casualty of the volatile political climate of the last few years and the league’s goal of being relevant to a new generation. n 2018, the league’s CEO was arrested, along with hundreds of other protesters, for crowding a Senate office building to demand lawmakers reject Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative accused of sexual harassment. Two years later, the league dissolved its chapter in Nevada after the state president penned an op-ed in July 2020 accusing the Democrats of hypocrisy for opposing gerrymandering in red states while “harassing” the league in Nevada over its activism on the issue.

Full Article: Republicans Turn Against the League of Women Voters — ProPublica

National: Trump supporters’ threats to judge spur democracy concerns | Gary Fields and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Hundreds of federal judges face the same task every day: review an affidavit submitted by federal agents and approve requests for a search warrant. But for U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, the fallout from his decision to approve a search warrant has been far from routine. He has faced a storm of death threats since his signature earlier this month cleared the way for the FBI to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of a probe into whether he inappropriately removed sensitive materials from the White House. Reinhart’s home address was posted on right-wing sites, along with antisemitic slurs. The South Florida synagogue he attends canceled its Friday night Shabbat services in the wake of the uproar. Trump has done little to lower the temperature among his supporters, decrying the search as political persecution and calling on Reinhart to recuse himself in the case because he has previously made political donations to Democrats. Reinhart has also, however, contributed to Republicans. The threats against Reinhart are part of a broader attack on law enforcement, particularly the FBI, by Trump and his allies in the aftermath of the search. But experts warn that the focus on a judge, coming amid an uptick in threats to the judiciary in general, is dangerous for the rule of law in the U.S. and the country’s viability as a democracy. “Threats against judges fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities strike at the very core of our democracy,” U.S. Second Circuit Judge Richard J. Sullivan, chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on Judicial Security, said in a statement issued recently in the aftermath of the search. “Judges should not have to fear retaliation for doing their jobs.”

Full Article: Trump supporters’ threats to judge spur democracy concerns | AP News

Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | Francesca Tripodi/WIRED

Google’s aesthetic has always been rooted in a clean appearance—a homepage free of advertising and pop-up clutter, adorned only with a signature “doodle” decorating its name. Part of why many users love Google is its sleek designs and ability to return remarkably accurate results. Yet the simplicity of Google’s homepage is deceptively static. Overtime, the way that the corporation returns information has shifted ever so slightly. These incremental changes go largely unnoticed by the millions of users who rely on the search engine daily, but it has fundamentally changed the information seeking processes—and not necessarily for the better. When Google first launched, queries returned a simple list of hyperlinked websites. Slowly, that format changed. First Google launched AdWords, allowing businesses to buy space at the top and tailoring returns to maximize product placement. By the early 2000s it was correcting spelling, providing summaries of the news under the headlines, and anticipating our queries with autocomplete. In 2007 it started Universal Search, bringing together relevant information across formats (news, images, video). And in 2012 it introduced Knowledge Graph, providing a snapshot that sits separate from the returns, a source of knowledge that many of us have come to rely on exclusively when it comes to quick searches.

Full Article: Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy | WIRED

Arizona: Maricopa County recorder says threats against election officials unlikely to stop,  | Gloria Rebecca Gomez/Arizona Republic

The state’s top elections official received a death threat last year. It wasn’t the first, and he fears it won’t be the last. On Tuesday, 50-year-old Missouri resident Walter Lee Hoornstra was indicted on suspicion of sending a threatening voicemail to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in May 2021. In it, Hoornstra warned Richer to stop speaking out against the Arizona Senate audit, or Richer would “never make it to (his) next little board meeting,” according to the indictment. Baseless claims that fraud occurred during the 2020 election sowed mistrust among voters, and election officials have borne the brunt of their vitriol. Across the country, election officials have resigned after dealing with relentless harassment. Richer estimates that he’s received thousands of hateful messages during his tenure since January 2021. So many that the threat from Hoornstra, at that point, wasn’t enough to cancel meetings or give him pause. “This would’ve been one of a deluge of voicemails, emails and social media messages at this time,” Richer said Thursday in an interview with The Arizona Republic. Allegations from the Arizona Senate audit inspired many of the messages, Richer said. Hoornstra’s voicemail came after the audit’s Twitter account falsely accused election officials of deleting electronic databases. In fact, contractors had simply been looking in the wrong place for the information, Richer said.

Full Article: Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer talks threats, voter vitriol

Connecticut: Overheated voting machines and poll workers disrupted last week’s primaries | Sten Spinella/The Day

Voting machines throughout the state were damaged on primary Election Day due to high temperatures, election officials said this week. Norwich and Stonington registrars told The Day that multiple machines at polling locations in the two municipalities malfunctioned during the state’s primary election on Aug. 9. Approximately 50 machines were affected throughout the state, according to the Secretary of the State’s office. Machines that were not at air-conditioned polling locations partially “melted,” officials say, and were unable to tabulate vote totals. With low voter turnout and only Democratic and Republican primaries for the Secretary of the State and U.S. Senate, Norwich and Stonington election workers were not made to stay much later than usual to count ballots, and none of the vote counts were affected by the machine errors. Norwich had four tabulator machines “melt down” at two separate locations on Aug. 9, according to Republican Registrar Cheryl Stover. The malfunctioning machines were at Moriarty Elementary School and Stanton Elementary School. “At first we began opening new tabulators not knowing what was going on. Once we lost more tabulators we realized something is happening due to the heat,” Stover said. “At the end of the day we opened tabulators in air-conditioned facilities and ran all those ballots through. We only had to do that for one of our stations. We had three tabulators at that specific location that melted down during the day, so we were unable to get any numbers off of them because they were completely nonfunctional.”

Full Article: Meltdown: Overheated voting machines and poll workers disrupted last week’s primaries

Georgia County Commissioners pass resolution urging lawmakers to remove QR codes from elections | Isaiah Singleton/Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News

The Cherokee County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday urging the Georgia legislature to eliminate the QR codes used in the statewide voting system. Commission Chairman Harry Johnston said the board received many requests from the public to change the voting system in Cherokee County, but does not have the power to do it. “We’ve researched it, our attorney has researched it, and we’ve determined that we don’t have that power, while there are some points in the law that might seem to indicate we do, the preponderance of the law clearly says that we do not and so we just can’t do that,” he said. “Furthermore, I’m not sure we really would want to change Cherokee County in a way that would be unique from other counties. My personal belief is that 159 different voting systems across Georgia would not necessarily move us toward greater election integrity, but it might actually move us away from that.” In May, over 100 protesters gathered at the Albert Stone Elections Building in Canton to call for the elections board to hand count ballots from the May 24 primary. They said they had concerns about the state’s voting machines, specifically the QR codes, which they said were “unverifiable” and “illegible.”
Full Article: Commissioners pass resolution urging Georgia lawmakers to remove QR codes from elections | Local News | tribuneledgernews.com

Four Kansas counties complete abortion amendment recount | The Kansas City Star

Four of the nine counties ordered to undergo a hand recount of votes in Kansas’ abortion ballot initiative have finished their tallies with minimal changes to the overall vote total. Johnson County had not yet begun counting its ballots Wednesday afternoon. Mark Gietzen, a Wichita anti-abortion activist, and Melissa Leavitt, a Colby election denier, scraped together around $120,000 Monday to force a partial hand recount of the abortion rights affirming vote. They chose four of Kansas’ biggest counties — Johnson, Sedgwick, Douglas and Shawnee. They also chose five smaller counties — Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas. All but Thomas had a majority of voters reject the amendment. The recount, which began Tuesday and must be finished by Saturday, is virtually guaranteed to fail in changing the outcome of the election. Kansans rejected the amendment 59% to 41%, a gap of more than 165,000 votes.

Full Article: Four Kansas counties complete abortion amendment recount | The Kansas City Star

Michigan legislature mum on if it will allow clerks to preprocess absentee ballots in November | Jordyn Hermani/MLive.com

If preprocessing is a priority for the heads of the House and Senate’s election committees, then it’s one of several as the legislature turns its sights toward the 2022 election – and definitely not at the forefront. MLive spoke to a handful of local clerks following the Aug. 2 primary and the bulk – regardless of party affiliation – said they hope lawmakers address two main things before the Nov. 8 general election: The ability to preprocess absentee ballots and increased funding. Lawmakers though, specifically Sen. Ruth Johnson, R-Groveland Township, say it’s one of a handful of things they’re mulling this year regarding changes to how Michigan administers elections. Even with that acknowledgement, none of those topics are guaranteed to cross the legislative finish line and be implemented prior to November. Michigan flirted with preprocessing back in 2020 when 3.3 million people – 60% of voters that year – chose to vote from home in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, the legislature allowed local clerks, though only for cities and townships with least 25,000 residents, to open the envelopes that absentee ballots came.

Full Article: Legislature mum on if it will allow clerks to preprocess absentee ballots in November – mlive.com

Nevada: How should ballots be hand counted? Nye County, state election officials disagree | Sean Golonka/The Nevada Independent

As Nye County’s top new election official prepares to hand count tens of thousands of paper ballots cast in this year’s general election, the secretary of state’s office is seeking to standardize and regulate that process. But the two sides are at odds. Last week, the secretary of state’s office hosted a workshop to solicit feedback on a proposed temporary regulation for hand counting that would require local election officials to follow certain procedures for tallying votes, submit plans for meeting numerous election deadlines and ensure hand-counting teams are not all of the same political party. “We strongly urge the secretary of state to not adopt these regulations,” Mark Kampf, who started as Nye County’s interim clerk earlier this month, said during the workshop. Kampf, who is running for a full four-year term as clerk, expressed concerns over several portions of the regulation, including calling for tally forms to be prescribed by the secretary of state rather than the county official, as well as another that would require clerks to report the use of any outside vendors hired to assist with the hand count. Instead, he touted his own plan — a “parallel tabulation” process that would involve running ballots through the typical mechanical tabulators at the same time as hand counting all ballots. “Nye County is going to be the guinea pig here, let’s be realistic about this,” he said. “[M]y goal is to develop a process that can be used throughout Nevada and throughout any other state.”

Full Article: How should Nevada hand count ballots? Nye County, state election officials disagree – The Nevada Independent

Ohio Raises a Volunteer Army to Fight Election Hacking | Katrina Manson/Bloomberg

Chris Riling says he “could never join the military.” He’s 37, has cerebral palsy, and wouldn’t have managed basic training, he says. Yet he recently swore an oath to protect the country and obey his commanding officers. At any moment, Ohio’s governor can call him up for active duty reporting to the state’s National Guard. And if he missteps, he can be tried under the Ohio Code of Military Justice. That’s because Riling, a systems architect at Cisco Systems Inc., is a volunteer for a novel kind of civilian reserve—a group of mostly private-sector tech professionals tasked with combating cyberattacks in the state. Right now, in the runup to the midterms, the group’s focus is election integrity: Voting-related hacking attempts could have disastrous implications for American democracy if successful, and cash-strapped state and local governments are often ill-equipped to face down new technological threats. Already, other states are seeking to copy Ohio’s model as they race to catch up with the threat of ransomware hacks, election interference, and other punishing cyberattacks, both foreign and domestic. Created just before the pandemic, the Ohio Cyber Reserve has assembled 80 members who can be called up under the command of Major General John Harris of the National Guard. They work mostly in cybersecurity by day and moonlight as crime-fighting reservists on weekends and Tuesday evenings from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The program already has state funding to expand to 200 people and could ultimately grow to 500, organizers say. Most members take leave from work to fulfill their reserve duties and receive travel expenses for training.

Full Article: Ohio Raises a Volunteer Army to Fight Election Hacking – Bloomberg

Pennsylvania: Doug Mastriano Plans to Use His Secretary of State Pick to Disrupt Elections | Jake Blumgart/Bolts

Doug Mastriano is a Donald Trump loyalist, and an ardent proponent of the former president’s baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election. He was outside the capitol on Jan. 6th, brought supporters to D.C. that day, and has been subpoenaed by the congressional committee investigating the riots. Now, Mastriano is also the GOP nominee in Pennsylvania’s governor’s race in November. His victory would hand over control of a large swing state to a hard right election denier in the lead-up to the next presidential race. “He has revealed the Deceit, Corruption, and outright Theft of the 2020 Presidential Election, and will do something about it,” Trump said of Mastriano when he endorsed him in May. A centerpiece of Mastriano’s promise to revamp the state’s election system is to flex the governor’s authority to choose Pennsylvania’s secretary of state. “As governor, I get to appoint the secretary of state. And I have a voting reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well,” Mastriano told Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for Trump, in an April interview. “That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”

Full Article: Doug Mastriano Plans to Use His Secretary of State Pick to Disrupt Pennsylvania Elections | Bolts

Rhode Island: Voting security advocates, computer scientists sound alarm over new voting law | Nancy Lavin/Providence Business News

Once a common office fixture, fax machines have been reduced to a rare, if novelty, relic. Unless, of course, you’re a military member or overseas resident who wants to vote in a Rhode Island election. The good, old-fashioned fax machine has long been the only alternative to sluggish snail mail for overseas and military voters to receive and send back ballots. Until now. A new law is poised to bring Rhode Island’s voting system into the 21st century by letting the secretary of state choose an electronic voting system. The option would only be offered to disabled, military and overseas veterans, and must meet federal cybersecurity standards. At face value, it sounds like a reasonable upgrade to antiquated technology, and a way to make voting easier for groups that have struggled in the past. But the law has raised the hackles of computer scientists and voting security advocates, who say the technology to allow safe, secure and private electronic voting simply does not exist.

Full Article: Voting security advocates, computer scientists sound alarm over new R.I. voting law

Texas: How do you run an election without elections department staff? Gillespie County in a bind | Megan Rodriguez/San Antonio Express-News

The elections administrator in Gillespie County, which includes Fredericksburg, is stepping down Tuesday over death threats, stalking and understaffing that followed the 2020 election, according to the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post. “I’m understaffed and underpaid and I’ve been asking for help for a while, and at some point, you just have to take care of yourself,”…

Wisconsin: Judge admonishes Michael Gableman’s review of 2020 election | Lawrence Andrea/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

For many months, former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 presidential election that has not produced any evidence of substantive voter fraud “accomplished nothing,” according to a Dane County judge. Gableman didn’t keep weekly progress reports as required by the Wisconsin State Assembly.  He conducted no witness interviews. And he gathered “no measurable data” over at least a four-month span in 2021, the judge found. “Instead, it gave its employees code names like ‘coms’ or ‘3,’ apparently for the sole purpose of emailing back and forth about news articles and drafts of speeches,” Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington wrote in an opinion released Wednesday. “It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written,” Remington added, “although there is no evidence any person connected with (the Office of the Special Counsel) ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions.”

Full Article: Judge admonishes Michael Gableman’s 2020 review of Wisconsin election