Arizona official who certifies elections alleges fraud after his defeat | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post
Fresh off losing a campaign for sheriff, Pinal County Supervisor Kevin Cavanaugh (R) voted “under duress” in August to certify the county’s primary election results. This week, he threatened to sue the Arizona county that employs him, claiming — much like President Donald Trump did after his 2020 defeat — that the election had been rigged against him. In a formal notification signaling he intends to pursue a legal claim, Cavanaugh alleged that the Republican county recorder and five other election officials conspired to “modify the results” of the July 30 primary election. Cavanaugh’s board term does not end until the end of the year, so he will play a role in certifying the general election results, including the presidential race. Cavanaugh has said he will fulfill his duty to accept those results, but his handling of his own loss worries county and state election officials. Read ArticleGeorgia: The election deniers with a chokehold on the state election board | Justin Glawe/The Guardian
A rule passed last week, which bipartisan election officials in Georgia say will delay the counting of votes in November, was introduced by an election denier who appears to believe in various rightwing conspiracies and whose apparent experience in elections dates only to February. The rule – which requires poll workers to hand-count ballots at polling locations – was passed by an election-denier majority on the Georgia state election board on Friday. It was introduced by Sharlene Alexander, a Donald Trump supporter and member of the Fayette county board of elections, who was appointed to her position in February. Alexander’s Facebook page alludes to a belief in election conspiracies. Alexander is oJustin Glawene of 12 people – all election deniers – who have introduced more than 30 rules to the state election board since May, according to meeting agendas and summaries reviewed by the Guardian. Of those, the board has approved several, including two that give county election officials more discretion to refuse to certify election results, in addition to Alexander’s hand-count rule. Read ArticleIllinois: Official says Illinois elections are secure, but cybersecurity threats can erode confidence | Colin Hardman/WCBU
A state election official, speaking Tuesday in Bloomington, said elections are secure, but acknowledged cybersecurity threats can and do erode confidence in the system. “If people are not confident their voter data is being held securely, then they’re not going to register to vote, and consequently they’re not going to vote. They’re not going to take part in the system,” said Matt Dietrich, public information officer for the Illinois Board of Elections. Read ArticleMichigan poll challengers get new state guidelines for 2024 election | Hayley Harding/Votebeat
Michigan poll challengers face stricter rules going into the November election, part of a wave of new requirements that aim to prevent some of the disruptions that marred the ballot counting process four years ago. Poll challengers — distinct from poll workers and poll watchers — are individuals stationed at polling places and vote-counting centers who have unique powers under Michigan law to challenge a voter’s eligibility or question the way officials are doing their jobs. Their role in Michigan elections drew national attention in 2020, when some poll challengers who were kept out of a ballot processing center in Detroit that was filled to capacity began banging on the windows and demanding a halt to the count. Read ArticleMichigan: No, officials aren’t stealing your votes in Bay County | Joey Oliver/Mlive.com
Officials with the Michigan State Police said a pair of people inside a Bay County township’s hall late Monday evening were there on official business and are dispelling rumors that they were tampering with voting equipment. Lt. Kimberly Vetter, the spokesperson for the state police’s third district, said troopers responded to the Beaver Township Hall late Monday, Sept. 23, after a caller said they went inside the building after noticing the lights inside were on. The caller, who according to Bay County 911 calls identified himself as an area firefighter, said he went inside the building and found two women claiming to be employees of the Beaver Township Clerk’s Office taking apart a “voting machine.” Vetter said troopers who responded to the scene were able to verify the two women were members of the clerk’s office and were conducting legitimate business in preparation for the Nov. 5 General Election. Read ArticleMississippi: GOP asks court to change voting rules in one state, with impact for all | Patrick Marley and Colby Itkowitz/The Washington Post
A panel of federal judges heard arguments Tuesday in a case that could upend the rules for counting a sliver of mail ballots in Mississippi just weeks before Election Day, with possible ramifications for all states. At issue is a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots to be counted if they arrive up to five days after Election Day and are postmarked by Election Day or earlier. Seventeen other states and Washington, D.C., have laws allowing postmarked mail ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day, according to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. The case in Mississippi is one example of a nationwide effort by Republicans to invalidate mail ballots over issues unrelated to whether they were cast by a legitimate voter. Republicans say they want to ensure states strictly follow voting laws, while Democrats and voting rights advocates say Republicans are trying to throw out otherwise valid votes because Democrats have disproportionately embraced mail voting. Read ArticleNorth Dakota hand-counting measure effort fizzles | Jack Dura/Associated Press
A proposed ballot measure in North Dakota that sought to require hand-counting of every election ballot, among other proposals, won’t advance. Initiative leader Lydia Gessele said Thursday the group won’t be submitting signatures by a Friday deadline because they fell short by about 4,000 signatures of the 31,164 needed for the constitutional measure to appear on the ballot. The group had one year to gather signatures. Deadlines for the measure to make the state’s June and November 2024 ballots came and went, though the group could have submitted signatures to appear on the June 2026 ballot. The measure proposed myriad changes including mandating hand counts of all ballots; banning voting machines, electronic processing devices and early voting; restricting mail ballots; and allowing any U.S. citizen to verify or audit an election in North Dakota at any time. Read ArticlePennsylvania court says county should have warned voters before rejecting their mail ballots | Carter Walker/Votebeat
A Western Pennsylvania county that rejected hundreds of mail ballots in the April primary should have notified voters beforehand, a state appellate court ruled Tuesday. The ruling could add pressure on other counties to notify voters of errors with their mail ballots for the November election. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the Commonwealth Court agreed with a lower court judge that Washington County erred when it adopted a policy to reject mail ballots without telling voters and had a duty to inform them of their errors. “The current policy emasculates the Election Code’s guarantees by depriving voters … the opportunity to contest their disqualification or to avail themselves of the statutory failsafe of casting a provisional ballot,” Judge Michael Wojcik wrote for the majority. The decision applies to Washington County and does not set a statewide legal precedent, but county attorneys are likely to take note of the court’s opinion when advising their boards of elections about how to handle mail ballots with errors. Read ArticleWisconsin: Department of Justice sues 2 Rusk County towns over accessible voting machines | Mary Spicuzza Jessie Opoien/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The U.S. Department of Justice has sued two northern Wisconsin towns accusing them of not having voting machines accessible to people with disabilities. The DOJ said it had reached an agreement with the Town of Lawrence to resolve its complaint, but not the Town of Thornapple. Both towns are in Rusk County. The complaint also said the State of Wisconsin failed to ensure every polling place within the state was accessible to voters with disabilities, as required by federal law. "Our democracy works when voters with disabilities have the right to vote on the same terms as any other voter. By failing to offer accessible voting systems, Thornapple and Lawrence shirked their responsibilities under the Help America Vote Act to provide equal access to the ballot for all voters," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division said in a statement. Read ArticleWisconsin Elections Commission spars over how absentee ballots must be returned on Election Day | Rich Kremer/WPR
During a sometimes tense meeting Tuesday, Republicans and Democrats on the Wisconsin Elections Commission battled over how absentee ballots from voters should get to clerks. The discussion stems from two complaints alleging clerks in Greenfield and Brookfield broke the law by requiring ballots to be delivered to the clerks’ offices rather than allowing voters to drop them off at their polling place. The clerks also ended drop-off times for absentee ballots before the close of in-person voting on election day. Draft memos from Wisconsin Elections Commission attorneys found the Greenfield and Brookfield clerks “abused” their discretion and didn’t follow state law, but because of a recent court ruling, the final decision had to come from the commission’s six-member board. Read ArticleNational: Russian threat groups shift attention to Harris-Walz campaign, researchers find | Tim Starks/CyberScoop
It took a little while for Russian influence operation peddlers to shift their attention from the Biden campaign to the Harris campaign, Microsoft said in a report published Tuesday, but now Kremlin-affiliated groups are ratcheting up fake videos about the Democratic presidential ticket. In late August and September, the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center observed two separate Russian groups pushing videos designed to discredit Vice President Kamala Harris in places like a fake San Francisco news website and on the social media platform X. The phony videos claimed Harris was involved in a fabricated hit-and-run accident, depicted an attack by alleged Harris supporters on a purported Trump rally attendee and showed a fake New York City billboard making false claims about Harris’ policies. Read ArticleGeorgia: 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