National: Trump Empowers Election Deniers, Still Fixated on 2020 Grievances | Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Election officials from nearly all 50 states gathered on a call last month with the Homeland Security Department’s point person on “election integrity,” eager to hear how the woman filling a newly created Trump administration position might help safeguard the vote ahead of next year’s midterms. But many of them left alarmed. Rather than offering assurances that the federal government’s election protection programs would continue uninterrupted, the new official, Heather Honey, instead used portions of the meeting to echo rhetoric that has infused the right-wing election activist movement that emerged since President Trump falsely claimed that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, according to five people with knowledge of the call. Read Article

National: Trump’s Most Reviled Voting Company Sold to a GOP Official. That’s Not the Worst of It. | Susan Greenhalgh/Slate

Earlier this month, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems had been sold to a former Republican election official.The announcement that the second-largest U.S. voting system vendor would be in the hands of a self-declared partisan sparked concerns and speculation on blogs and social media. Should a former Republican official be charged with providing and programming the voting machines to count more than a quarter of all U.S. ballots?As someone who has studied election systems and the election industry for 20 years, I’ve gotten questions from family and friends wanting to know if this is something to be worried about.My response has been: Not particularly. But don’t misunderstand the nonchalance—it’s not because it’s not wildly inappropriate and troubling for a declared partisan to control voting equipment. It’s because the partisan ownership of an election supplier is merely one aspect of the badly broken, opaque, and corrupted election system industry that we’ve been subjected to for decades. Read Arrticle