South Carolina: Aiken County election’s office fails first effort to certify | Anna Wilder/Hilton Head Island Packet

Despite initially certifying the wrong election results and failing its audit, all votes in Aiken County have been accurately counted and certified, despite a software glitch, state and county election officials said. South Carolina Election Commission spokesperson John Michael Catalano said some of the vote totals in Aiken were incorrectly counted in the wrong voting-method category, but the total votes for each candidate were correct. “It was the makeup of the vote, and it was basically absentee votes were showing up in election day totals,” Catalano said. Catalano said no other county has failed an audit since 2020 when South Carolina changed the voting system process to include paper ballots. Read Article

National: Election denialism emerges on the left after Trump’s win | Kat Tenbarge and Bruna Horvath/NBC

In the days following the presidential election, a familiar strain of denialism and conspiracy thinking began to emerge in the corners of some social media platforms. On the right, familiar conspiracy theories about voting popularized by President-elect Donald Trump continued to circulate. But similar ideas also took hold among some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and have continued to spread. NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation, found that nearly 800 social media accounts and video channels had published false or egregiously misleading claims about the 2024 election starting on Sept. 1, along with over 960 websites and more than 1,200 “partisan sites masquerading as politically neutral local news outlets.” Sam Howard, NewsGuard’s U.S. politics editor, said that the misleading election claims had been seen on a variety of platforms, including X, Threads, Reddit and Facebook. Read Article

Pennsylvania: New fight over ballot dating rule as Senate recount gets underway | Carter Walker/Votebeat

At least three Pennsylvania counties are accepting and counting mail ballots from last week’s election that lack a proper date on the envelope, prompting a new legal clash in a long-running disagreement over how to handle these ballots. The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party filed a lawsuit Thursday asking the state Supreme Court for an immediate ruling on the issue. Counties are in the last stage of counting their ballots and finalizing their original election results as they prepare for a recount in the U.S. Senate race starting next week. What the counties do with ballots that are undated or that have an incorrect date are a particular concern because of how close that race is. As of 4 p.m. Friday, fewer than 23,000 votes separated Republican Dave McCormick and incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, according to results from the Department of State’s website. Read Article