Yearly Archives: 2024

An unexpected challenge in Tennessee’s first week of voting involved touchscreens in the state’s two largest counties resulted in no recorded irregularities and an unlikely fix: coffee stirrers that allow voters to choose with precision their preferred candidate. The stirrers, which since 2020 have been doled out to voters to use as styluses, were ditched for environmental reasons – then readopted after the first days of early voting led some Tennesseans to accidentally select their undesired candidate because of small boxes next to the candidates’ names. Some voters in Davidson and Shelby County, home to Nashville and Memphis, respectively, tried to pinprick that small box with their thumb or pointer finger, but – it being so near to the name of an opponent on a line above – they hit another candidate’s name. Read Article

Texas prepares for Nov. 5 with paper ballots and strengthened security | María Méndez/The Texas Tribune

Only six Texas counties will have in-person voters at the polls use direct-recording electronic, or DRE, voting systems that do not rely on paper ballots, according to Secretary of State data mapped by the group Verified Voting. Paper-backed systems have made a comeback among growing cybersecurity concerns, aging voting machines and changes following the 2020 election, said Mark Lindeman, Policy and Strategy Director of Verified Voting. “What makes the 2024 election fundamentally even more secure than the 2020 election is that almost everyone is voting on paper,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong. It means that even if things go wrong, the problems can be corrected.” This transition doesn’t mean voting machines are now “foolproof,” but “paper ballots can cut through a lot of the noise,” and concerns about election hacking, Lindeman added. Read Article

Virginia: Waynesboro Voters Sue to Ensure Election Officials Will Certify Election | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

Five voters in the city of Waynesboro, Virginia filed a lawsuit on Monday against the city’s Board of Elections Chairman Curtis Lilly and Vice Chairman Scott Mares to ensure they’ll certify the results of the upcoming election. The lawsuit comes after Lilly and Mares filed their own lawsuit saying that they will refuse to certify the upcoming general election unless the state’s policy prohibiting them from hand-counting ballots is changed. But the new lawsuit filed by the five Waynesboro voters argues that Lilly and Mares’ declaration to refuse to certify the election violates the Virginia Constitution and asks the court to order the Waynesboro Board of Elections to certify the election once the votes have been tabulated. Read Article

Wisconsin early voting slowed by label printing problems | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Early voting kicked off in this battleground state this week with computer delays and long lines. Voters on Tuesday and Wednesday faced long waits as clerks tried to print labels with their names and addresses. The labels are affixed to the ballot envelopes that voters are required to use. Ordinarily, each label can be printed immediately. But since Tuesday, they have taken two minutes or longer to print, clerks said. Each delay causes a chain reaction that exacerbates the long lines. State election officials announced late Tuesday that the computer issues had been resolved but acknowledged Wednesday that the problems had recurred. They said the printing delays appeared to be part of an unspecified information technology problem affecting other government agencies as well. Read Article

Virginia: A lawsuit targeting voting machines could spoil election | Marc Fisher/The Washington Post

In a small Virginia city of 22,000 souls, a three-hour drive southwest from D.C. through pastoral countryside, a mechanical engineer and a bed-and-breakfast owner, worried about democracy, decided their duty as Americans was to throw a wrench in the works of the presidential election. Curtis G. Lilly II, the engineer, and Scott Mares, the innkeeper, are volunteer members of Waynesboro’s Board of Elections. In that role, they have filed a lawsuit announcing that they will refuse to certify the November vote because they believe only hand-tallied paper ballots — not voting machines — satisfy the state constitution’s ban on counting votes “in secret.” If Lilly and Mares don’t fulfill their obligation to certify Waynesboro’s votes next month, does that mean the city’s ballots won’t get counted? Will that gum up Virginia’s overall count as well? Lilly and his lawyer say they don’t know; that’s for a judge to decide. Read Article

Wisconsin voters are hearing a lot about noncitizen voting that rarely happens | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Melissa Kono had just finished a training session with a new Republican poll worker in 2014 when she asked the poll worker if she had any questions. “Her question was, ‘What do I do when all the Mexicans come in to vote?’” recalled Kono, the town clerk in Burnside, in western Wisconsin’s Trempealeau County. “And I was speechless, because I was like, that just doesn’t happen. There’s all this other stuff you should be asking questions about because it’s new to you … I was just flabbergasted by that comment.” Since then, as she trains poll workers and clerks across the state, Kono said she has seen the worry over noncitizen voting grow. At this point, she said, the baseless concern that noncitizens will vote en masse in the Nov. 5 presidential contest is the election conspiracy theory she hears about most from GOP poll workers and voters. The suspicion plays into growing doubts about the integrity of elections and century-old stereotypes of immigrants as criminals. GOP talking point on noncitizen voting permeates Wisconsin – Votebeat

‘People are scared’: Election workers brace for threats | Mike Wendling/BBC

A survey earlier this year by the Brennan Center found 38% of local election officials had experienced threats, harassment or abuse. More than half were concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff, a level of anxiety that has remained more or less constant since the 2022 midterm elections. “People are scared,” says Melissa Kono, the elected town clerk in Burnside, Wisconsin. Ms Kono travels around Wisconsin delivering state-mandated election training to volunteer poll workers. She says the kinds of scenarios she’s being asked about have changed dramatically over the last five years, to the point where she’s increasingly included material in her sessions about dealing with threats. “I’m concerned for the clerks and the election workers,” she said. Read Article

National: What Trump keeps getting wrong about ‘paper ballots’ | Marshall Cohen/CNN

Trump’s insistence that the US switch to “paper ballots” is nonsensical. More than 98% of voters live in jurisdictions that produce fully auditable paper trails, according to data from Verified Voting, which tracks election equipment in every county. Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group, has spent the past two decades urging counties to move away from paperless voting in favor of in-person polling sites. (Vote-by-mail obviously incorporates a paper trail.) The people who run the group say they have accomplished their goal – despite claims from Trump and others that the US still needs paper ballots. “It’s really weird and I don’t understand it,” said Mark Lindeman, the group’s director for policy and strategy. “Almost everybody votes on paper ballots. Anyone who is convinced that we need paper ballots is very likely voting on paper ballots themselves.” Read Article

National: Republicans face backlash for lawsuits targeting overseas and military voting | Amy Gardner, Jacqueline Alemany and Dan Lamothe/The Washington Post

Republican lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina challenging the legitimacy of overseas ballots have prompted a backlash among military personnel, their spouses, veterans and elected officials. Scores of veterans and active-duty members of the armed forces have posted online or contacted their elected representatives out of concern that their votes might not be counted. Military and elected leaders, along with voting rights advocates, have decried the lawsuits as well, calling them a betrayal of the men and women serving the country overseas. “Literally, these are the people who are putting it all on the line for what we have in America,” said Allison Jaslow, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and now is chief executive of the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “And we’re going to compromise their ability to have a say in how they vote for who sends them to war? It’s just beyond the pale.” Read Article

National: Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’ | Lisa Lerer and Michael Gold/The New York Times

With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him. In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle. A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents. “They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.” Read Article

National: Dominion voting systems is still a GOP bogeyman ahead of the election | Chris Stokel-Walker/Fast Company

The election is nearly here, and Dominion Voting Systems is once again on Republicans’ minds. The voting machine-maker became the subject of conspiracy theories following the 2020 election, which Donald Trump falsely claims was rigged against him. The smear campaigns against Dominion led to death threats and, eventually, lawsuits: In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion nearly $800 million to avoid a trial in a case that could have shown how the network promoted lies related to the 2020 election. But the GOP is back at it, with Republicans in Georgia filing last month a lawsuit in state court, claiming without evidence that Dominion’s voting systems are not secure. That case was quickly thrown out by a judge who said any such claims were “purely hypothetical”: Not a single vote in the 2024 presidential election had been counted at the time the lawsuit was filed. Apparently even the idea that Dominion might be involved in counting and tabulating ballots was too much for some in the GOP to bear. Read Article

National: At least 30 election deniers and 2020 fake electors serving as Trump electors this year | Marshall Cohen, Danya Gainor, Alison Main, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Casey Tolan and Bob Ortega/CNN

More than a dozen Republicans who were “fake electors” in 2020, including several facing criminal charges, are serving as former President Donald Trump’s official electors in battleground states this year, according to a CNN survey. Another 16 GOP electors from these states are election deniers who say President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was fraudulent. Combined, these election deniers and 2020 fake electors represent more than a third of the 82 electors picked this year to support Trump in the seven states where he attempted to overturn the results in 2020. The involvement of these Republican activists in the Electoral College process this year, especially in critical battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Michigan, could lead to post-election chaos if Trump is defeated and they try again to subvert the will of the voters. Read Article

National: Election officials in southern states are grappling with fallout from dual hurricanes | Curt Devine, Devan Cole and Janat Batra/CNN

Powerful hurricanes that wreaked havoc on wide swaths of the southeast have election officials facing the dim reality that some ballots may be lost in the mail. While in many cases there are remedies to solve the problem, it’s part of the complicated preparations for the upcoming general election, especially in hard-hit North Carolina, a battleground state where communications and power remain spotty in some counties. Hurricane Helene, which hit the US late last month, caused hundreds of deaths across half a dozen states and upended carefully laid election plans as polling centers were crippled and regular communication channels were shattered. Read Article

Arizona’s mail ballot signature verification disproportionately affects new voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Nate Kennedy was in a hurry when he arrived at a Motor Vehicle Division office in 2021 to get his driver’s license. He’d just moved back from out of state and marked the box to register to vote, quickly scribbling his signature on the electronic pad. He was all set to become one of the thousands of voters not affiliated with a political party who would play a key role in determining the state’s leaders in the next midterm election. When he submitted his mail ballot in November 2022, however, that messy signature would cost him his vote. Election officials who compared the signature on his mail ballot envelope to the electronic scribble on file weren’t convinced they came from the same person. So, as the law requires, they rejected his ballot. He didn’t find out until weeks later. Read Article

Colorado voting machines not connected to the internet | Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline

Most counties in Colorado have upgraded their voting systems equipment since 2020 to models that physically cannot connect to the internet, and those that rely on older machines are statutorily required to disable any wireless capability. Election officials say that even the older models do not create a vulnerability in the voting system, as some conservative politicians and activists claim. “This is a known thing amongst the counties and amongst the Secretary of State’s office — that the (wireless) card was physically present, and so that there’s a couple of steps that were taken to ensure that it wasn’t activated or present,” Boulder Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick, a Democrat, said. Read Article

Georgia judge blocks rule requiring counties to hand-count Election Day ballots | Adam Edelman/NBC

A Georgia judge on Tuesday blocked a new rule from the state’s election board that would have required counties to count ballots cast on Election Day by hand, a provision critics had said would cause delays and disruptions in reporting results in the battleground state. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his decision that the rule would be implemented too close to the election and that it would cause “administrative chaos” given the limited time available to train poll workers. “[T]he public interest is not disserved by pressing pause here. This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” he wrote. Read Article

Georgia: County election board members must certify election results, a judge rules | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Certifying elections is a required duty of county election boards in Georgia, and they’re not allowed to refuse to finalize results based on suspicions of miscounts or fraud, a Fulton County judge ruled Tuesday. Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney rejected claims brought by Fulton County election board member Julie Adams, who voted against certifying this spring’s presidential primary. McBurney ruled that Georgia law requires certification and county election boards don’t have any discretion not to do so. “If election superintendents were, as plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” McBurney wrote. “Our Constitution and our election code do not allow for that to happen.” Read Article

Michigan judge says RNC suit challenging overseas voters could ‘disenfranchise an entire group of citizens’ | Josh Gerstein/Politico

A Michigan judge suggested Thursday that Republicans waited too long to file a suit challenging the right of some U.S. citizens who live abroad to vote in the swing state. During an hourlong hearing in Detroit, Judge Sima Patel said that delay and the proximity to the election were the “biggest hurdle” facing a suit the Republican National Committee and the Michigan Republican Party filed Oct. 8 to disqualify voters who registered in the state as the spouses or dependents of U.S. citizens living overseas. A Michigan law and guidance from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson allow a spouse or dependent accompanying a Michigan resident overseas to cast a ballot in Michigan, as long as they aren’t registered elsewhere in the U.S. Read Article

As North Carolina begins voting, hurricane devastation complicates casting ballots | Gabe Gutierrez and Bianca Seward/NBC

The violent water smashed into the fellowship hall, pushing a propane tank through a wall, encasing the structure in mud and devastating the church in this mountain community just over a month before the hotly contested presidential race draws to a close. “This is a flood like we’ve never had,” said Larry Jones, a deacon at Minneapolis Baptist Church, one of the polling places in rural Avery County ravaged by the remnants of Hurricane Helene last month. The site is one of several in the county unable to open in time for the election. Three days after the storm, Jones and his wife managed to hike up to his elderly mother-in-law’s house by wading through mud up to their knees. The roads and bridges were blocked. He made it to his church a few days later and has been organizing volunteer efforts ever since. Read Article

Ohio election administrators say their workers are overworked, underpaid, and strained by attacks | Susan Tebben/Ohio Capital Journal

Ohio’s local election workers are overworked, underpaid and strained by conspiratorial attacks, and the state could be doing more to leave politics out of the election process, according to a voting rights group who talked with local election administrators. All Voting is Local Ohio partnered with research firm Public Circle, LLC, to study the evolution of the work election administrators at the local level do as they prepare for another highly-contested election. “Today, these professionals are straining under the weight of back-to-back statewide special elections and rhetorical attacks on their trustworthiness, character and patriotism,” the report stated. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Election officials brace for misinformation, lawsuits | Katie Bernard, Julia Terruso and Jeremy Roebuck/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Elections officials across Pennsylvania are hopeful the 2024 presidential race won’t be a repeat of the chaos of 2020 — marked by a days-long wait for results, a deluge of misinformation, and baseless court challenges that dragged on for weeks. But even as they say they’re better prepared this year to handle the problems from four years ago, many are bracing for another tight race that could breed new areas of confusion and uncertainty amid an intensifying culture of election denialism if the nation once again waits on Pennsylvania to know who the next president will be. “The longer it takes to decide who the winner is, the more opportunity there is for unrest,” said Neil Makhija, chair of the Montgomery County Election Board. Read Article

Texas lawmakers signal push to require proof of citizenship from voters though instances of non-citizens voting are rare | Natalia Contreras and Vianna Davila/Votebeat

Texas lawmakers Wednesday signaled plans to consider a new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, though even one of the strongest supporters of such legislation acknowledged instances of noncitizens voting are rare. An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat published this week found the governor’s figure was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong. The secretary of state’s office confirmed the news organization’s reporting during the hearing Wednesday after state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat, cited the article’s findings and pressed Christina Adkins, the state elections division director. The news organizations found that between September 2021 and August 2024, counties removed 581 people from the rolls on the grounds that they were noncitizens, according to a report the secretary of state gave Abbott. Read Article

Virginia: Waynesboro election officials sue to require hand-count of ballots | Laura Vozzella/The Washington Post

Top Republican election officials in rural Waynesboro, Va., say they will refuse to certify the results of the Nov. 5 presidential election unless the city’s ballots are counted by hand, alleging in a lawsuit that voting machines could be secretly programmed to rig the outcome. Two members of the three-seat Board of Elections in Waynesboro, a small, red-leaning Shenandoah Valley city about 30 miles west of Charlottesville, contend in the suit that tallying ballots by machine amounts to counting them “in secret” — something prohibited by the state constitution. Read Article

Wisconsin: Voting rights groups seek investigation into intimidating text message | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

Voting rights advocates on Tuesday asked state and federal authorities to investigate anonymous text messages apparently targeting young Wisconsin voters, warning them not to vote in a state where they are ineligible. Free Speech for People, on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, made the request to the U.S. Department of Justice as well as the Wisconsin Department of Justice. The letter says that “thousands of young voters across Wisconsin” received the text message last week, including staff members at the League of Women Voters and students at the University of Wisconsin. The text in question cites Wisconsin state law prohibiting voting in more than one place and says that violating the law can result in fines of up to $10,000 and 3.5 years in prison. “Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible,” the text said. Read Article

National: Not everything will run perfectly on Election Day but US elections are remarkably reliable | Gary Fields/Associated Press

On Election Day, some voting lines will likely be long and some precincts may run out of ballots. An election office website could go down temporarily and ballot-counting machines will jam. Or people who help run elections might just act like the humans they are, forgetting their key to a local polling place so it has to open later than scheduled. These kinds of glitches have occurred throughout the history of U.S. elections. Yet election workers across America have consistently pulled off presidential elections and accurately tallied the results — and there’s no reason to believe this year will be any different. Elections are a foundation of democracy. They also are human exercises that, despite all the laws and rules governing how they should run, can sometimes appear to be messy. They’re conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the United States, from tiny townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some states have people. Read Article

National: New wave of GOP lawsuits targets overseas ballots in key swing states | Adam Edelman/NBC

Republicans have filed lawsuits over the past week in three pivotal battleground states seeking to challenge the legitimacy of some ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including military members, arguing that some votes are particularly prone to fraud. Election officials in those states — Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — and nonpartisan voting experts strongly defended the previously uncontroversial overseas voting rules, arguing that the suits amounted to efforts to further lay the groundwork to question the veracity of the election results next month. The Republican National Committee last week sued election officials in North Carolina and Michigan in state courts, alleging they had on their books unlawful rules that extended overseas voting eligibility to people whose residency in those states had not been verified. Read Article

Georgia: Republican-led group sues to block rule requiring hand count of ballots | Jeff Amy and Kate Brumback/Associated Press

A Republican-led group is challenging Georgia’s new requirement that poll workers count the total number of ballots by hand, saying it’s another example of the State Election Board overstepping its legal authority. Eternal Vigilance Action amended its existing lawsuit on Wednesday to also challenge that rule adopted Friday by the board. The group, founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican, was already suing the board over rules that it earlier adopted on certifying votes, a step that finalizes results. One of those rules provides for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify while another allows county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.” Read Article

National: Voting Wars Open a New Front: Which Mail Ballots Should Count? | Michael Wines/The New York Times

As Pennsylvania voters begin casting perhaps two million-plus mail ballots, Democrats and Republicans are in furious legal combat over a once-overlooked aspect of voting remotely: which ballots are counted, which are rejected as defective and which ones voters are allowed to correct. Simple math explains why. In the 2020 presidential contest, Pennsylvania election officials rejected more than 34,000 mail ballots. In a tight 2024 election in the most coveted swing state, even a fraction of that many rejections could spell the difference between victory and defeat — not just in the presidential race, but also in any number of others. What’s true in Pennsylvania is true, to varying degrees, in other battleground states. Michigan rejected more than 20,000 mail ballots in 2020 and even more in 2022; Arizona turned down 7,700; Nevada 5,600; and Wisconsin about 3,000. Read Article

National: Election conspiracy theories fueled a push to hand-count votes, but doing so is risky and slow | Christine Fernando/Associated Press

Four years of Donald Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election have kindled growing suspicion of voting machines among conspiracy theorists. One of their solutions is to replace the tabulators that count every vote with people who will do that by hand. Controversies over the issue have flared periodically in pockets of the country before the 2024 presidential election even though research has shown that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results. The few counties that have attempted the massive task have found the process more time-consuming, expensive and inaccurate than expected. Read Article

National: Election officials who back Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ stir concern in swing states | Joseph Tanfani and Nathan Layne/Reuters