Yearly Archives: 2024

In what appears to be an organized effort, right-leaning activists have challenged the mail ballot applications of hundreds of voters in the Philadelphia suburbs in recent days, claiming their targets no longer live at the addresses where they are registered to vote. But voting rights advocates broadly dismiss the effort as baseless, legally invalid, and born of a misunderstanding of government data. While they predict most of the challenges will be swiftly rejected, they say the campaign is yet another instance of a loose network of right-wing organizers billing themselves as “election integrity” advocates sowing confusion about state voting laws and creating headaches for elections administrators already bombarded by misinformation surrounding the voting process. Read Article

As Texas refuses online voter registration, paper applications get lost | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Last year, Hannah Murry remembers, she filled out every line of her paper voter registration. She then gave it to a volunteer deputy registrar at a registration drive at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she’s a student. “I thought that was handled, so I just went on with my life,” said Murry. It wasn’t handled. Murry, 21, found that out when she went to an early voting location in Nueces County last fall to cast her first ballot, in the constitutional amendment election. She handed her ID to an election worker — who told her she wasn’t on the rolls. At that point, it was too late to fix it. Poll workers let her update her registration on site for the next election, which she did. She left confused and frustrated. Read Article

Virginia: US Supreme Court allows purge of suspected noncitizen voters | Ann E. Marimow, Justin Jouvenal and Gregory S. Schneider/The Washington Post

A divided Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday for Virginia officials to remove about 1,600 people from the state’s voter registration rolls less than one week before the presidential election. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) asked the justices to intervene after two lower courts blocked his efforts to cancel the registrations of voters who could be noncitizens — an issue Republican officials have seized on nationally even though noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Youngkin signed an order in August to expedite the removal of registered voters whose driver’s license applications indicated or suggested that they were not U.S. citizens. The effort was opposed by the Justice Department and civil rights groups, which said many being kicked off the rolls were actually eligible and were targeted because of outdated or erroneous information. Read Article

Washington: Hundreds of damaged ballots saved following fire at drop box | Dani Anguiano/The Guardian

Officials in south-west Washington were able to salvage almost 500 damaged ballots from a ballot box that was set on fire on Monday in what officials have called an attack on democracy ahead of a contentious US election. An unknown number of ballots were destroyed when someone placed incendiary devices in a drop box in Vancouver, Washington, while three ballots were damaged in a fire at a box in nearby Portland, Oregon. Those fires and one other are linked, officials have said. Workers in Washington will begin searching through the damaged ballots for voter information in order to contact people about getting a new ballot, said Greg Kimsey, the Clark county auditor. Workers should be able to collect information from the ballots despite the damage, he said. The attacks are under investigation by the FBI as well as state and local officials. Read Article

National: ‘Firehose’ of election conspiracy theories floods final days of the campaign | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

In the final days of the presidential election, lies about noncitizens voting, the vulnerability of mail-in ballots and the security of voting machines are spreading widely over social media. Fanned by former President Donald Trump and notable allies such as tech tycoon Elon Musk, election disinformation is warping voters’ faith in the integrity of the democratic process, polls show, and setting the stage once again for potential public unrest if the Republican nominee fails to win the presidency. At the same time, federal officials are investigating ongoing Russian interference through social media and shadow disinformation campaigns. The “firehose” of disinformation is working as intended, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that advocates for responsible use of technology in elections. “This issue is designed to sow general distrust,” she said. “Your best trusted source is not your friend’s cousin’s uncle that you saw on Twitter. It’s your local election official. Don’t repeat it. Check it instead.” Read Article

‘Is it going to be safe?’: Suspicions and fear dominate a crucial Michigan county in lead-up to US election | Chris McGreal/The Guardian

Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him. But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters. “I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra. Read Article

National: Bulletproof vests, snipers and drones: Election officials beef up security at the polls | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Election officials across the country are ramping up their security measures at polling places with voting underway in the presidential race, from beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment. The once-routine business of running elections in America has become much more fraught with risk in the wake of the 2020 campaign, with poll workers facing harassment, violent threats and chaotic protests. It’s a dynamic that has forced many election officials out of the industry, while those who remain have taken in some cases dramatic steps to protect poll workers and voters ahead of Election Day. Read Article

National: Trump’s Allies Revive Debunked Voting Machine Theories | Danny HakimNick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

It has been nearly four years since a parade of judges dismissed wild claims from Donald J. Trump and his associates about hacked election machines and a year and a half since a leading machine company obtained a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over the debunked conspiracy theories. But Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and his closest allies are again trotting out the theories as part of a late-campaign strategy to assert that this year’s election is rigged — although this time Mr. Trump’s campaign appears to be largely acting behind the scenes. The theories are rampant on social media and widely embraced by activists. Read Article

National: What to Know About the Looming Election Certification Crisis | Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

The false narrative of a stolen election that inspired hundreds of Americans to storm the U.S. Capitol in 2021 is now fueling a far more sophisticated movement, one that involves local and state election boards across the country. What was once the Stop the Steal movement is now the “voter integrity” movement. Its aim is to persuade the people who are responsible for certifying local elections of the false notions that widespread fraud is a threat to democracy and that they have the authority and legal duty to do something about it: Deny certification of their local elections. Read Article

National: Election officials fight a tsunami of voting conspiracy theories | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting. With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5. “Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.” Read Article

National: Intelligence officials warn foreign disinformation from Russia may flood post-election period | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The U.S. intelligence community is anticipating a potentially tumultuous post-election period this year, where foreign governments will seek to amplify domestic unrest to cast doubt about the legitimacy of the winner while undermining confidence in democracy. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out Russia, using some of their strongest language to date to warn that leaders in Moscow are preparing a full-court press in the final weeks of the election and beyond. “The intelligence community is increasingly confident that Russian actors are considering — and in some cases implementing — a broad range of influence efforts timed to the election,” an ODNI official told reporters Tuesday. Read Article

National: American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show | /Catherine BeltonThe Washington Post

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video. Read Article

National: Election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing states | Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer and Tim Reid/Reuters

Be aggressive,” Jim Womack, a local Republican Party chair in North Carolina, told the grid of faces who joined the Zoom training session for volunteers to monitor voting on Nov. 5. “The more assertive and aggressive you are in watching and reporting, the better the quality of the election.” During the two-hour session, conducted from a Republican Party office featuring a placard of an AR-15 rifle and photos of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Womack, 69, an army veteran and a retired information systems engineer, instructed 40 volunteers on how to spot “nefarious activity.” He mentioned a local clergyman who accompanied dozens of Latino parishioners to a voting site “like a shepherd leading a sheep.” Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States – despite Trump’s false claim, supported by a majority of Republicans in Congress, that the 2020 election was stolen. US election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing statRead Article

Arizona GOP county recorder candidates campaign on election distrust | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona’s election system has been thrown into turmoil over the past four years by false claims of widespread fraud and some real instances of mistakes in running elections. Now, Republican candidates for county recorder across the state are playing up those false claims and errors as they try to get elected. Their opponents acknowledge that Arizona elections can be improved, but warn voters to be wary of turning over crucial decisions about voting to candidates who seek to leverage distrust in the system. The most closely watched race is in Maricopa County, where Republican state Rep. Justin Heap is running for recorder against Democrat Tim Stringham on a pledge to “secure our elections.” Heap defeated the current recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, in the August primary after claiming that Richer ran “the worst election in history” in 2022. Read Article

Colorado: Scheme to cast votes on stolen mail ballots thwarted by election officials | Jesse Paul/Colorado Sun

Colorado election officials say they have thwarted an effort to fraudulently cast votes on batch of stolen mail ballots in Mesa County. The scheme was blocked through the state’s voter signature verification process, which checks the signatures on mail ballots against the signatures the state has on file for each voter. If the signatures don’t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as “curing.” When election officials recently reached out to a group of voters to help them cure the signature problems with their ballots, the voters informed the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office that they hadn’t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots. Read Article

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office stops election website cyber attack | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The Georgia secretary of state’s office stopped a cyberattack this month targeted at the state’s absentee voting website. A state cyberdefense team, along with the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, prevented what is believed to be foreign hackers from shutting off the secretary of state’s absentee ballot website on the afternoon of Oct. 14, before the start of early voting. “We were able to put in an interface that says ‘I am a human,’ which immediately mitigated the issue and only slowed it down and didn’t crash the site at all,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “Our tools did everything right. This was a win.” At the peak of the incident over 420,000 different IP addresses were attempting to attack the absentee site at the same time, Sterling said. He said the state’s election process was not interrupted by the attack. Read Article

How One Georgia Voter’s Mistake Turned Into a Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theory | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

All it took was one mistake by a voter in Georgia to propel a conspiracy theory to nationwide attention and the upper echelons of Republican politics. Election officials in the state said that the voter, a woman whose name they did not disclose, visited a polling site in Whitfield County last week and used a touch-screen voting machine to cast her ballot. She mistakenly selected one candidate’s name when she had intended to choose another. The episode was over almost as soon as it began: The voter tried again, fixed the mistake and successfully cast her ballot. But online, the story quickly took on a life of its own, catapulted to prominence by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and transforming into an elaborate conspiracy theory involving voting machines that were somehow “flipping” votes between candidates en masse. Read Article

Michigan doesn’t have more active registered voters than residents | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A misleading claim promoted by right-wing activists has gained traction through X owner Elon Musk and other supporters of Donald Trump, feeding a false impression that there’s something wrong with Michigan’s voter rolls. The claim — that Michigan has more voters than people eligible to vote — has been debunked extensively by the state as well as independent experts. A federal court ruling this week weighed in on a similar GOP claim, finding flaws in the comparison of data points and no proof that the discrepancy amounts to a violation of law, just as previous courts have found. Musk and others cite the data points to argue that the discrepancy could enable fraudulent voting. The claim is based on a misunderstanding about the makeup of the state’s voter roll and what it means in relation to Census population data. It ignores the fact that the total number of registrations on the roll includes a large number of voters who are marked as inactive but who must be kept on the roll for several years under federal law. Most of those voters likely are no longer residents of the state. Read Article

Nevada GOP asks poll observers to ensure voting machines are operating accurately – critics say it invites harassment against workers and sows distrust | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

Republicans in Nevada are asking poll observers to complete a more than 15-item checklist on topics such as ensuring that voting machines are sufficiently secured and not connected to the internet, even though the poll watchers are not legally entitled to receive much of this information. State law does not explicitly give observers the right to seek much of the information on the checklists, such as inspecting the security of voting machines, receiving the serial numbers of the machines and accessing voting data at a polling location. Because election workers are not obligated to provide much of this information to observers and have many other responsibilities, critics worry that not doing so could increase harassment of election workers. “I am very concerned that this could happen, in terms of them following these individuals and harassing them and creating an unsafe environment based on this information,” said Sadmira Ramic, a voting rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada. Read Article

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Allows Provisional Votes After Mail Ballot Rejections | /Simon J. LevienThe New York Times

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that voters who submit mail-in ballots that are rejected for not following procedural directions can still cast provisional ballots. The decision is likely to affect thousands of mail-in ballots among the millions that will be cast in Pennsylvania, the swing state that holds the most electoral votes and is set to be the most consequential in the presidential election. The court ruled 4 to 3 that the Butler County board of elections must count provisional ballots cast by several voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for lacking mandatory secrecy envelopes. Read Article

Tennessee election officials iron out touch screen issues with unlikely tool: Coffee stirrers | hris Boccia/ABC News

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