Georgia: How the Election-Denial Mindset Works | Elaine Godfrey/The Atlantic
It’s normal, in September of an election year, for Anne Dover to feel stressed. This week, the 58-year-old elections director of Cherokee County, Georgia, has been drowning in absentee-ballot applications and wrangling new poll workers. What isn’t normal, though, is her looming sense of dread. What if this time, Dover sometimes wonders, things get even worse? Four years ago, when Donald Trump was seeding doubt about the election, Dover’s community outside of Atlanta came unhinged. People protested as she and her team met before certifying the county’s votes. They took photos of Dover’s car; they followed her home; they left threatening voicemails; someone even called in a bomb threat to her office. The protests didn’t make much sense—Trump had won Cherokee County by almost 40 points. But sense had nothing to do with it. “People just really were so unhappy about the results, and they thought they could bring about change by being vocal,” Dover, a Republican, told me. Read ArticleNational: Election officials prepare for threats with panic buttons, bulletproof glass | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press
The election director in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb where votes will be fiercely contested in this year’s presidential race, recently organized a five-hour training session. The focus wasn’t solely on the nuts-and-bolts of running this year’s election. Instead, it brought together election staff and law enforcement to strategize on how to keep workers safe and the process of voting and ballot-counting secure. Having a local sheriff’s deputy at early voting locations and panic buttons that connect poll managers to a local 911 dispatcher are among the added security steps the office is taking this year. Read ArticleNational: Suspicious mail sent to election officials in multiple states | Maegan Vazquez and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post
Federal authorities are investigating several suspicious pieces of mail sent to election officials in at least 17 states, some of which contained a questionable substance and led to building evacuations this week. An image of one of the suspicious pieces of mail, shared with The Washington Post by an election official in a battleground state, showed that the sender was listed as the “United States Traitor Elimination Army” and it had a return address originating in Maryland. The piece of mail, a large yellow envelope, was addressed to the Nebraska Elections Division. The FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a joint statement Tuesday that they are investigating what they referred to as “a series of suspicious mailings sent to election officials in several states.” Read ArticleNational: Russia goes all-out with covert disinformation aimed at Harris, Microsoft report says | Ali Swenson/Associated Press
The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago. In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.” Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently. Read ArticleNational: US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling | Dell Cameron/WIRED
Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections. The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon the companies the need for more extensive safeguards against the disinformation campaigns being funded by foreign entities with an eye on influencing US politics. “This is really our effort to try to urge you guys to do more. To alert the public that this has not gone away,” Warner said. Read ArticleNational: Trump’s Talk of Prosecution Rattles Election Officials | Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times
Donald J. Trump’s escalating calls to investigate and prosecute election officials he sees as “corrupt” are sounding alarms among democracy experts and the local and state workers preparing to run elections and tally millions of votes across the country. In recent social media posts, Mr. Trump has said that election officials “involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” Read ArticleNational: House Defeats Spending Bill Tied to New Rules Requiring Proof of U.S. Citizenship to Register to Vote | Carl Hulse/The New York Times
The House on Wednesday defeated a $1.6 trillion stopgap spending bill to extend current government funding into March and impose new proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration, as Republicans and Democrats alike rejected Speaker Mike Johnson’s proposal to avert a shutdown at the end of the month. The bipartisan repudiation was entirely expected after several Republicans had made clear they would not back the spending plan and Democrats almost uniformly opposed the voting-registration proposal. The vote was 220 to 202, with 14 Republicans joining all but three Democrats in opposition. Two Republicans voted present. Read ArticleNational: In-person voting for the US presidential contest starts today in Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press
The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is in the bag, and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Friday is the start of early in-person voting for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, kicking off in Virginia, South Dakota and Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person come with just over six weeks left before Election Day on Nov. 5. About a dozen more states will follow with early in-person voting by mid-October. Read ArticleArizona: Errors in citizenship checks put 97,000 voters’ eligibility in limbo | Jen Fifield/Votebeat
The eligibility of nearly 100,000 registered voters in Arizona is up in the air because of an error in state systems uncovered just before the scheduled sending of mail ballots, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes announced on Tuesday. The state incorrectly marked these voters when they registered to vote as already having provided documented proof of U.S. citizenship, when really, it’s unclear whether they have, Fontes said. The error stems from the way the Motor Vehicle Division provides driver’s license information to the state’s voter registration system. The voters affected by this particular error are people who first obtained their Arizona driver’s license before October 1996 and then were issued a duplicate replacement before registering to vote sometime after 2004, according to Fontes. Read ArticleConnecticut moves to upgrade voting tabulators | Mark Pazniokas/CT Mirror
Connecticut is entering a new era with the first early in-person voting in a general election and a nearly invisible and overdue technological change — the first, if limited, use of new tabulators that will count votes. Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas and Gov. Ned Lamont held a press conference Thursday to identify the nine cities and towns that will use the new tabulators in a pilot program before they become standard next year. The new polling place scanners and tabulators are made by Election Systems & Software. Read ArticleIn Georgia, a New Showdown Is Brewing Over Election Rules | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times
A showdown is brewing between the top election official in Georgia and the State Election Board over more than a dozen new rules and procedures scheduled to be voted on by the board at a meeting on Friday. A lawyer for the election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, sent a scathing letter to the State Election Board on Monday, criticizing “the absurdity of the board’s actions” while warning that new rules under consideration are dangerously late in the election process and most likely illegal. Read Article