National: A Senate Bill Would Radically Improve Voting Machine Security | Eric Geller/Wired

Congress is moving closer to putting US election technology under a stricter cybersecurity microscope. Embedded inside this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act, which funds intelligence agencies like the CIA, is the Strengthening Election Cybersecurity to Uphold Respect for Elections through Independent Testing (SECURE IT) Act, which would require penetration testing of federally certified voting machines and ballot scanners, and create a pilot program exploring the feasibility of letting independent researchers probe all manner of election systems for flaws. The SECURE IT Act—originally introduced by US senators Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican—could significantly improve the security of key election technology in an era when foreign adversaries remain intent on undermining US democracy. Read Article

National: Election offices are slowly adopting .gov domains, report finds | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

A growing number of election offices are adopting verified, top-level .gov domains to safeguard against impersonation, phishing attacks and the spread of misinformation, according to a report published by the Washington think tank Bipartisan Policy Center. The report includes analysis of a dataset maintained by the Center for Tech and Civic Life consisting of websites and contact information for all local election offices in the United States. The center found that since 2022, nearly a third of the nation’s 7,000-plus election office websites have adopted .gov domains. William Adler, associate director of the center’s Elections Project and one of the report’s authors, said he’s encouraged by the trend, but that it’s still moving slowly. Read Article

National: Russia is relying on Americans to spread election disinformation, officials say | David Klepper/Associated Press

The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election. The warning comes after a tumultuous few in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election. “The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director. Read Article

National: State election directors fear the Postal Service can’t handle expected crush of mail-in ballots | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

State election directors from across the country voiced serious concerns to a top U.S. Postal Service official Tuesday that the system won’t be able to handle an expected crush of mail-in ballots in the November election. Steven Carter, manager of election and government programs for the postal service, attempted to reassure the directors at a meeting in Minneapolis that the system’s Office of Inspector General will publish an election mail report containing “encouraging” performance numbers for this year so far. “The data that that we’re seeing showing improvements in the right direction,” Carter told a conference of the National Association of State Election Directors. “And I think the OIG report is especially complimentary of how we’re handling the election now.” Read Article

Arizona Republicans who defended election system ousted in primaries | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Many Republican state and county officials in Arizona who have defended the fairness of the state’s elections appeared to have lost primary races Tuesday to challengers who campaigned at least in part on the idea of stolen or broken elections. The apparent defeats came in key places in the state, such as Maricopa and Mohave counties, and in a race for the state Legislature, where there has been immense pressure to change how elections are run, or to even overturn election results. The initial results suggest that unproven claims of widespread election fraud continue to have a strong hold on Republican voters in the state. Read Article

California: Orange County and state say digital poll books are legal in response to lawsuit that challenges them | Hanna Kang/Orange County Register

Digital voter records are completely separate from the equipment used to tally votes, so allegations in a lawsuit that conflate the two are unfounded, lawyers for the county and state argue in a response recently filed in court. Earlier this month, lawyers representing the state and the county filed their response to a lawsuit alleging that the digital voter records, which are connected to the internet, are a part of the voting system and thus in violation of California law. The lawyers argued the lawsuit has no grounds and asked an Orange County Superior Court judge to dismiss it. Three registered Republican voters in Orange County filed the lawsuit in March against OC Registrar of Voters Bob Page, the OC Board of Supervisors, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Gov. Gavin Newsom, alleging that the California Voter’s Choice Act goes against the state election code. Read Article

Colorado elections manager in voting machine tampering trial felt ‘sick’ seeing passwords online | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News

Before a jury on Thursday, Colorado’s voting systems manager recalled feeling sick when he first saw Mesa County’s voting machine passwords posted online in August 2021. Prosecutors called Jessi Romero, voting systems manager for the Colorado secretary of state, as a witness in their case against Tina Peters, Mesa County’s former clerk and recorder now on trial for charges related to helping leak voting machine data in 2021. Prosecutors say that in May 2021, Peters instructed her deputy clerk to turn off security cameras and arranged for an associate to observe and photograph the voting machine trusted build, an update process conducted in person since the machines can’t connect to the Internet. Peters then reportedly sent data and passwords to a Florida-based company for analysis and allowed them to be posted on the social media site Telegram by Ron Watkins, a key player in the QAnon conspiracy movement. Read Article

Georgia: Presidential election audit based on ballot images on hold amid company’s protest | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The idea was to triple-check this year’s presidential election results by uploading images of every ballot cast in Georgia, scanning them with text-recognition software and creating an independent vote count. Lawmakers budgeted $5 million for the concept that would verify the results generated by the state’s Dominion Voting Systems equipment, an extra step beyond an existing hand-count audit of a statistical sample of ballots. But the recount-by-software plan is now stalled because of a protest by a company that wasn’t chosen to receive the state’s contract. It’s unclear whether the dispute will be resolved in time for November’s election. Read Article

Idaho: Will a Transparency Tool Diffuse Election Skepticism? | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

An Idaho county has built a new tool that allows the public to see cast vote records online. Ada County, Idaho, partnered with civic software company Civera on the tool, which it used for the first time during its May elections, publishing ballot images alongside corresponding cast vote records to show how the tabulator machine electronically recorded the selections. The county has so far used the tool to publish information from prior elections going back to 2022, the earliest for which it still has the data. Now, with the tool up and running, other counties around the country are reportedly in talks to adopt it, too. The tool, Ballot Verifier, allows anyone to access ballot images and cast vote record for free. It also offers infographics of election results, search functionality for specific races and the ability to download results. Read Article

Kansas stops enforcing a law against impersonating election officials | John Hanna/Associated Press

Kansas is no longer enforcing a 3-year-old law making it a felony to impersonate election officials as it faces a legal challenge from critics who argue that the law has hindered efforts to register new voters. Attorneys for the state and groups suing over the law agreed on stopping its enforcement, and District Judge Teresa Watson in Shawnee County, home to the state capital of Topeka, issued an order earlier this week ratifying their agreement. Her order will remain in effect at least until another court hearing after the November election. The law made “falsely representing” an elections official punishable by up to 13 months in prison for a first-time offender, though two years’ probation would have been the most likely sentence. The crime includes causing someone to believe another person is an election official. The Republican-controlled Legislature enacted the law in 2021 by overriding a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. Read Article

Michigan faces a shortage of local clerk candidates, raising alarms about how elections will be run | Jon King/Michigan Advance

They are the administrators of democracy, making sure that elections are free, fair and efficient. They maintain the records of local government and are responsible for public access to those records, including births, deaths and the marriages in between.  And yet, nearly 10% of the 1,240 township clerk positions that are up for election this year in Michigan have no candidates willing to step up and fill them. That’s according to Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist, who also serves as second vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks (MAMC). In a social media post this month, Siegrist pointed to the situation as one that’s not been experienced before. “What if I told you that 118 townships have nobody running for Clerk this year. We’ve never seen anything like this in history. 9.5% of all clerk races this year will have NOBODY elected,” he said, before posing a series of questions. “Why doesn’t anyone want to do this job? How does a state deal with such a massive labor shortage? Who will run elections in these communities?” Read Article

Michigan has fix in place after brief outage in early-voter check-in system | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

An overloaded server briefly brought Michigan’s voter check-in system to a crawl Saturday morning, a hiccup on the first day of early in-person voting in the state primary that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says she is “confident” won’t happen again. The error was the result of other applications running on the same server that also hosted the state’s electronic poll books, Benson said during a news conference Monday. When voting started, those hundreds of poll book connections plus those other applications “caused a spike in activity” that tied up the servers and forced clerks around the state to temporarily switch to paper voter records. The Secretary of State’s Office worked with the Department of Technology, Management and Budget to discuss a solution that prioritizes early voting over other applications and protects access to the servers, Benson said. Read Article

Ohio law violates rights of voters with disabilities, judge says | Haley BeMiller/Columbus Dispatch

Ohio’s election law violates the rights of people with disabilities who rely on caregivers or family members to return their absentee ballots, a federal judge ruled Monday. The decision came down in a lawsuit that challenged a rule allowing only certain family members to help relatives who are hospitalized or homebound because of an illness or disability. While the list includes spouses, parents, siblings and grandparents, the state does not allow grandchildren or caretakers to handle another person’s absentee ballot. U.S. District Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan said that violates the federal Voting Rights Act, which allows voters with disabilities to get help from anyone except their employer or union representative. Her decision means Ohio’s law can no longer be enforced. Read Article

Pennsylvania’s long-running dispute over dates on mail-in voting ballots is back in the courts | Mark Scolforo/Associated Press

A technical requirement that Pennsylvania voters write accurate dates on the exterior envelope of mail-in ballots was again the subject of a court proceeding on Thursday as advocates argued the mandate unfairly leads to otherwise valid votes being thrown out. A five-judge Commonwealth Court panel heard about two hours of argument in a case that was filed in May, even though the date requirement has been upheld both by the state Supreme Court and the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case was brought by the Black Political Empowerment Project, Common Cause and allied advocacy groups against the secretary of state and the elections boards in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. They argued that enforcing the date requirement infringes upon voting rights and that none of the prior cases on the topic directly ruled whether it runs afoul of the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause. Read Article

Pennsylvania presidential election results could again take days to count | Colby Itkowitz and Derek Hawkins/The Washington Post

mail-in ballots, his lead shrunk and then disappeared. By Saturday, Joe Biden was the clear winner of Pennsylvania — and with it, the presidency. The protracted counting process left a days-long vacuum that Trump filled with demands to stop counting the ballots while he was still ahead, declaring victory in Pennsylvania and building the false narrative that the mail-in votes were fraudulent. It became a core part of the false narrative that helped propel Trump’s “Stop the Steal” crusade and spurred election denialism among his allies and supporters that has continued to this day. The delay was caused by a quirk of Pennsylvania’s election law, which forbids the opening of mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on the day of the election. Read Article

Wisconsin judge refuses GOP request to pause absentee voting ruling sought by disabled people | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

A judge refused Thursday to put on hold his ruling that allows disabled people in Wisconsin to be emailed absentee ballots at home in November’s presidential election in the closely watched battleground state. Republicans asked the judge to not enforce his ruling while their appeal is pending. But Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell on Thursday rejected their arguments, saying putting his ruling on hold “would inflict significant harm on both the disability rights advocates and the public interest.” It will now be up to the state appeals court to decide whether to pause the ruling that opens up a new way for an unknown number of disabled voters to cast their ballots in swing state Wisconsin before the Nov. 5 election. Read Article