‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: local election officials fear for safety | Dani Anguiano/The Guardian

Inside the office of the Shasta county clerk and registrar of voters, which runs elections for about 111,000 people in this part of far northern California, Cathy Darling Allen can see all the security improvements she would make if she had the budget. “We have plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said. For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point considered removing, though not any more. Elections offices didn’t used to think about security in this way, Allen said. Now they can’t afford not to. Following Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Allen says the once low-profile job of non-partisan local election official has transformed in counties like hers. A culture of misinformation has sown doubt in the US election system and subjected officials from Nevada to Michigan to harassment and threats. The FBI has received more than 1,000 reports of threats against election workers in the past year alone.

Source: ‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: local election officials fear for safety | US news | The Guardian

Nevada hand vote count on hold after high court says illegal | Gabe Stern, Ken Ritter and Scott Sonner/Associated Press

An unprecedented hand-count of mail-in ballots in a rural Nevada county is on hold and may not resume after the Nevada Supreme Court said in an after-hours ruling the current process is illegal and the Republican secretary of state directed the county clerk to “cease immediately.” Volunteers in rural Nye County had wrapped up a second day of hand-counting the ballots on Thursday by the time the Supreme Court issued a three-page opinion siding with objections raised by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, who is in charge of elections and has been been one of the GOP’s most vocal critics of the sort of voter-fraud conspiracy theories that fueled the hand tallying of ballots, said the “hand-counting process must cease immediately.” She requested in a letter to Nye County Clerk Mark Kampf that he confirm to her office Thursday night that the hand count process “had been stopped.” Cegavske’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests from The Associated Press for an update. But the ACLU said in a statement that Nye County’s attorneys had informed the organization’s legal staff that “its hand-count process has been shut down.”

Full Article: Hand vote count on hold after Nevada high court says illegal | AP News

Georgia: Mark Meadows ordered to testify before grand jury in election probe | harlie Gile and Summer Concepcion/NBC

A South Carolina judge ruled Wednesday that Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows must testify before a special grand jury in Georgia investigating possible interference in the 2020 presidential election. At a hearing Wednesday morning, South Carolina Circuit Judge Edward Miller ruled that Meadows must comply with a petition seeking his testimony before the grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, the clerk of court for Pickens County, South Carolina, told NBC News. Meadows, who lives in South Carolina, has tried to avoid testifying before the grand jury probe into possible election interference by then-President Donald Trump and his allies. An attorney for Meadows did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has sought Meadows’ testimony, saying he was in communication with Trump, his campaign “and other known and unknown individuals involved in the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney agreed to her request and ordered Meadows to appear last month.

Full Article: Mark Meadows ordered to testify before grand jury in Georgia election probe

National: ‘Our security here is a joke’: Election workers lament lack of federal spending on security ahead of crucial midterms | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

Millions in federal dollars could have gone to protect election workers and improve the physical security of their offices, but in a classic tale of bureaucratic red tape, most of it remains untapped less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The botched funding opportunity comes as election officials across the country have faced an unprecedented wave of violent threats stemming from conspiracy theories about the voting process. Now, things like additional lighting or security guards for some election offices may not be in place for Election Day on November 8. “Our security here is a joke,” said Scott McDonell, the Democratic clerk for Dane County, Wisconsin’s second largest. His office is a block from the state capitol building in Madison, where thousands of people have previously gathered to protest the 2020 election results. McDonell worries that people “could walk right in” to confront him. In April, the Department of Homeland Security reviewed the security of McDonell’s office and found glaring shortcomings, including doors within the facility that visitors could pass through unchecked, according to the DHS assessment obtained by CNN. Yet, until CNN told him about it, McDonell said he was unaware of a DHS grant program that has in recent years made millions of dollars available to state and local government offices for various security and counterterrorism projects to bolster their physical security. Instead, Dane County plans to spend $12 million in county money to move to a more secure facility next year. “Everyone agrees that something has to be done,” McDonell told CNN. “A lot of it is the employees. They have to feel safe on the job.”

Full Article: ‘Our security here is a joke’: Election workers lament lack of federal spending on security ahead of crucial midterms | CNN Politics

National: New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots | Areeba Shah/Salon

In what election experts call the latest effort to stoke widespread doubt about election security and the accuracy of vote-counting, Republicans in many rural counties are pushing to hand-count ballots in the upcoming midterms, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or voting machine irregularities. Hand-counting is far less accurate than machine counting, experts say, and is likely to create errors and delay results by hours, days or even weeks. In at least six states, Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation this year that would require hand-counting of all ballots instead of electronic tabulation. None of those bills have passed so far, but similar proposals have gained traction in some county and local governments. … Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for the responsible use of technology in elections, said that these efforts are part of a broader effort to discourage voters from trusting any part of the election process. American elections “objectively are more trustworthy now than they have been in decades, but the fear-mongers are broadcasting the exact opposite,” Lindeman said. Attacks on voting technology are “creating an environment in which some really dedicated public servants are leaving the profession because they’re demoralized and in many cases afraid. That is a tragedy that injures all of us.”

Full Article: New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots | Salon.com

National: How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable | Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel/The New York Times

On the morning of July 8, former President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he founded with people close to him, to claim that he had in fact won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, despite all evidence to the contrary. Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. And yet Mr. Trump’s baseless claim pulsed through the public consciousness anyway. It jumped from his app to other social media platforms — not to mention podcasts, talk radio or television. Within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post, more than one million people saw his claim on at least dozen other sites. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Full Article: Ahead of Midterms, Disinformation Is Even More Intractable – The New York Times

National: A Scientist’s Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine | Spencer Mestel/Undark

In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert’s office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic. Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration. After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.” Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished — to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine. Their access would be unfettered — no tamper-evident seals to avoid, chain of custody procedures to subvert, or mock poll workers to dupe — and they’d have to agree to only one condition: Flip every vote to the same candidate. By this point, Gilbert had published a video of his ballot-marking device, or BMD, in action, but he was unsure how the hacking community would respond. “There’s a part of that community that’s very confident in what they do,” he said. “And if they hear how it works, they may run away from it.”

Full Article: A Scientist’s Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine

National: Pro-Trump Republicans court election volunteers to ‘challenge any vote’ | Patrick Marley, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times. Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt. “We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.”

Full Article: Trump supporters say they’re training poll watchers to spot fraud – The Washington Post

National: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Early voting for midterm elections is well underway in many states, and so far has proceeded without major incident. But a new Reuters/Ipos poll finds that four in 10 of American voters are worried they will encounter intimidation or threats of violence at polling places. (Two out of three fear actual violence from extremists if they are displeased with election outcomes.) In a paradoxical crusade for transparency, armed “observers” stationed themselves near Arizona ballot boxes with their faces and license plates masked, taking photos of voters and their vehicle tags. A group of retired and Latino voters filed a lawsuit against the organization the watchers claim to represent. Responding to news of such activity, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the Justice Department “will not permit voters to be intimidated” during midterms. Last year, the DOJ established a task force to address threats against those involved in administering elections and an 800 number and online complaint form for reporting threats to the FBI. The prospects for disruption vary within the more than 170,000 electoral precincts in the country, but physical and cybersecurity are priorities for all. Moreover, vigilantes can create uncertainty by menacing officials across state and local borders.

Full Article: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security

National: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | Colleen Long/Associated Press

Election Day is 12 days away. But in courtrooms across the country, efforts to sow doubt over the outcome have already begun. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed this year around the Nov. 8 elections. The legal challenges, largely by Republicans, target rules for mail-in voting, early voting, voter access, voting machines, voting registration, the counting of mismarked absentee ballots and access for partisan poll watchers. The cases likely preview a potentially contentious post-election period and the strategy stems partly from the failure of Donald Trump and his allies to prevail in overturning the free and fair results of the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden. That was an ad hoc response fronted by a collection of increasingly ill-prepared lawyers that included Rudy Giuliani. The current effort, however, is more formalized, well-funded and well-organized and is run by the Republican National Committee and other legal allies with strong credentials. Party officials say they are preparing for recounts, contested elections and more litigation. Thousands of volunteers are ready to challenge ballots and search for evidence of malfeasance. “We’re now at the point where charges of fraud and suppression are baked into the turnout models for each party,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network and former counsel to the George W. Bush campaign and other Republican candidates. “Republicans charge fraud. Democrats charge suppression. Each side amplifies its position with massive and costly amounts of litigation and messaging.”

Full Article: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | AP News

Arizona’s Bulwark Against Trumpism Was Just a Mirage | David Siders/Politico

On a stage backed up to a rodeo ring between a barbecue restaurant and a petting zoo, dusk fell over the Arizona desert and several thousand Kari Lake supporters fell into prayer for Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, for “the army of patriots that you are raising up in this hour” and, ultimately, for a “divine turnaround” in Arizona. The event was a rally for Lake, and following the supporter who said the prayer, Austin Smith, a Republican state House candidate, told rallygoers they were “chosen” — a state of “pioneers, ranchers, working-class families” in conflict with forces of a “global world order.” “We want to make sure that Arizona is the Wild West, right?” he asked. With their Lake flags and buckets of beer, the crowd erupted. The opening lines of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” blared and Lake strode on stage. Two years ago, the current occupant of the office Lake is seeking, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, had certified Joe Biden’s victory, the first for a Democratic presidential candidate in the state since 1996, infuriating then-President Donald Trump and his supporters. The Republican state House speaker, Rusty Bowers, also resisted Trump’s pressure campaign, then testified before the Jan. 6 committee about it. Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state and, now, Lake’s opponent in the gubernatorial race, had overseen the election.

Full Article: Arizona’s Bulwark Against Trumpism Was Just a Mirage – POLITICO

Arizona: Cochise County supervisors approve hand count of election ballots | Sarah Lapidus/Arizona Republic

The Cochise County Board of Supervisors voted Monday to require a full hand recount of ballots for the Nov. 8 election, despite dire warnings from attorneys and others that the move was unlawful and would result in a lawsuit and a potential loss of state funding. During a four-hour meeting and public testimony, Republican supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd voted for the measure put forth by Crosby. Supervisor Ann English, a Democrat, voted against it. “It’s about the people, its about our right to vote and how our votes are counted and feel confident in the election process,” Judd said during the meeting. State Elections Services Director Kori Lorick called into the meeting on behalf of the Secretary of State’s Office and said the board would face a lawsuit if the hand-count proposal passed. A state lawmaker also warned the board that he would request that the attorney general investigate the board’s move, which could result in the withholding of state funds to Cochise County. Lorick also said it would be “impossible to complete an accurate hand count of an election with dozens of races on the ballot without redirecting critical resources needed to run the election.” With just two weeks until the election, she warned the proposal would cause voter confusion.

Full Article: Cochise County supervisors approve hand count of election ballots

California: In MAGA-Led Shasta County, Election Apprehension Reigns | Shawn Hubler/The New York Times

The countdown to a November vote usually feels momentous. This year, apprehension reigns. Since the violent aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, secretaries of state, county clerks and poll workers have been besieged with intimidating threats and bogus claims of misconduct. A federal task force established last year to deal with election threats has fielded more than 1,000 reports and prosecuted about a half-dozen cases. California, Vermont, Oregon and other states have passed laws to protect election workers. California election officials have generally not had to endure the frightening tactics seen in swing states such as Colorado, where the top election official was threatened last summer on her personal Instagram page, or Arizona, where the Maricopa County recorder received a death threat on his cellphone. But officials here are worried just the same. Shasta County, in the state’s rural far north, has been among California’s most intense election-denial hot spots since former President Donald J. Trump spread the lie that voter fraud cost him the White House. The county voted 2 to 1 for Trump in the 2020 election. Electoral distrust has been nurtured by far-right activists and a pro-Trump majority on the Board of Supervisors who took control from mainstream Republicans early this year.

Full Article: Shasta County Elections Chief Describes November Concerns – The New York Times

Florida elections officials grapple with misinformation, myths | Tampa Bay Times

First came a contagion of disbelief in election results. Then, a surge of public-records requests seeking details such as voting-system security processes. Now, fears of being arrested for voting. Elections supervisors in Florida have grappled with these and other issues as they oversaw the state’s August primary elections and prepared for the Nov. 8 general election. The challenges have come amid supervisors’ yearslong battle to convince voters that election processes aren’t rigged, an issue that took root and spread after former President Donald Trump and his supporters insisted — and continue to maintain — that Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was fraudulent. Trump defeated Biden in Florida by more than three percentage points but, even in the Sunshine State, skepticism about how elections are operated continues to swirl. And the arrests in August of 20 people for alleged illegal voting haven’t helped, according to experts. County supervisors of elections are combating a steady drumbeat of myths about election fraud from an increasingly wary public.

Full Article: Florida elections officials grapple with misinformation, myths

Michigan Election conspiracists have checklist for poll challengers: What’s on it | Clara Hendrickson/Detroit Free Press

Set up hidden cameras to capture license plate numbers. If you go at night, show up armed. These aren’t battlefield directions. They’re instructions laid out as part of a strategic operation spearheaded by prominent election conspiracists seeking to keep close tabs on Michigan’s upcoming midterm election. Michigan is one of several states targeted by the America Project, an organization led by allies of former President Donald Trump to recruit citizen election monitors in ways election experts worry blurs the lines between lawful oversight and vigilantism. In a promotional video touting the America Project’s launch, Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn calls the 2020 presidential election “an assault on our sacred election process.” The America Project’s website lists former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne as part of the “fearless, battle-tested team.” Byrne and Flynn participated in failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election that included an attempt to persuade Trump to order the military to seize voting machines. Two leaders from the Michigan GOP — ethnic vice chair Bernadette Smith and grassroots vice chair Marian Sheridan — appeared on panels supported by the America Project.

Full Article: Election conspiracists have checklist for Michigan poll challengers

Nevada’s Republican election deniers prepare to sabotage the midterms | Dana Milbank/The Washington Post

If the midterm elections degenerate into chaos in a couple of weeks — a very real possibility — then Nevada is poised to lead the way. Indeed, the chaos here has already begun. The election supervisors in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have already quit, been forced out or announced their departures. Lower-level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. The state’s elections staff has lost eight of its 12 employees. The (Republican) secretary of state, who vigorously defends the integrity of the 2020 election, is term-limited, and the GOP nominee to replace her, Jim Marchant, leads a national group of election deniers running for office. Marchant is on record saying that if he and his fellow candidates are elected, “we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again.” In Reno’s Washoe County, the state’s second largest, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist led a harassment campaign against the registrar of voters, accusing her of treason and addiction, and she quit in fear for her family’s safety. In her absence, the county recently mailed a sample ballot to voters laced with errors: a missing contest, a missing candidate, a contest that didn’t belong on the ballot and a misspelling.

Full Article: Opinion | Nevada’s Republican election deniers prepare to sabotage the midterms – The Washington Post

New York: Officials say Suffolk County cyberattack won’t have impact on upcoming election | Tim Gannon/The Suffolk Times

Suffolk County’s elections will not be impacted by the Sept. 8 cyberattack that has shut down many county functions, officials said. However, the way the county reports election results will be different. “At this point, everything is as it was,” said Board of Elections deputy commissioner Gail Lolis. “And in terms of operating the election, there’s absolutely no impact whatsoever. The only potential impact may be how we post results on our webpage on election night.” The county Board of Elections traditionally posts up-to-the minute elections results that are hosted by the county’s website. But that site may not be up and running by Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 8. The BOE is now working on an alternate plan, whereby New York State will provide web space for the county’s election results. The county BOE’s own site, suffolkvotes.com, also remained down as of early this week. County Executive Steve Bellone states on the county’s current one-page website that officials believe the Sept. 8 hackers accessed and/or acquired certain personal information from one or more county agency servers. The county has since hired multiple cybersecurity firms to conduct an examination to protect employees and residents as well as restore online services, according to Mr. Bellone.

Full Article: Officials say county cyberattack won’t have impact on upcoming election – The Suffolk Times

Pennsylvania counties can help voters fix mail ballot errors after state Supreme Court deadlocks on the issue | eremy Roebuck and Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for counties to help voters fix errors like missing signatures on mail ballots before Election Day. A lower court last month denied an attempt to block counties from helping voters “cure” their ballot errors. The state Supreme Court on Friday said it had deadlocked on the appeal of that decision, which means the lower court decision is automatically affirmed. The high court normally has seven members, but Chief Justice Max Baer died last month. Of the remaining six members, Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht said they agreed with the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court’s decision that allowed ballot curing to continue. Chief Justice Debra Todd and Justices Sallie Updyke Mundy and Kevin Brobson said they would have reversed it. The three-sentence order dealt a defeat to the Republican National Committee and other GOP groups, which had filed the appeal in one of the latest fronts in the state’s contentious partisan battle over which ballots should be counted.

Full Article: Pa. counties can help voters fix mail ballot errors after state Supreme Court deadlocks on the issue

Texas Secretary of State denies any claims of ‘vote switching’ | Priscilla Aguirre/MySA

The Office of the Texas Secretary of the State denies any claims of “vote switching” at election machines in Texas. Sam Taylor, communications director for the Secretary of State, told MySA that no machines are switching votes after conversations on Twitter suggested so. On October 26, a Texan tweeted that there were several reports coming out about voting machines changing votes from Democrats to Republican candidates and said it’s being investigated. The tweet received more than 3,500 retweets and over 8,400 likes. Many in the comments mentioned how it occurred to them while they voted. Taylor said the “changing votes” speculation occurs every election cycle, such as in 2018 when some straight-ticket Texas voters reported that voting machines recorded them selecting the candidate of another party for the U.S. Senate. That problem occurred on the Hart eSlate voting machine – which only a few counties use now – when voters turn a selection dial and hit the “enter” button simultaneously, according to the state.  At the time, the state confirmed that the cases were all user errors or a result of voters not properly using the machines. This can be caused by the voter taking keyboard actions before a page has fully appeared on the eSlate, thereby de-selecting the pre-filled selection of that party’s candidate.

Full Article: Texas Secretary of State denies any claims of ‘vote switching’

Wisconsin judge won’t allow partial addresses on ballots | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

A Wisconsin judge on Wednesday rejected an attempt backed by liberals to allow absentee ballots containing an incomplete witness address to be counted, saying that would disrupt the status quo and cause confusion with voting underway less than two weeks before Election Day. The ruling was a win for the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature, which intervened in the lawsuit. The case focused on how much of the address of a witness needs to be included on an absentee ballot certificate in order for the ballot to be counted. The Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that an address must include three elements: a street number, street name and municipality. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin sued, seeking a ruling that an address can only be missing when the entire field is left blank. Dane County Circuit Judge Nia Trammell on Wednesday rejected the league’s request for a temporary injunction that would have allowed ballots with incomplete addresses to be counted. Trammell said she feared that loosening the witness address requirement would “would upend the status quo and not preserve it” and also “frustrate the electoral process by causing confusion.”

Full Article: Wisconsin judge won’t allow partial addresses on ballots | AP News