Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: Poll workers are short-staffed, under attack — and quietly defending democracy | Amy Sherman and Hana Stepnick/PolitiFact

There’s no doubt about it: For election officials across the country, recruiting poll workers is more challenging than ever. COVID-19 made people with health worries want to stay home. Rampant misinformation about election fraud spurred vitriol and even death threats against election workers. Long hours and paltry pay for a seasonal job have never been that enticing. Election officials are struggling to recruit workers, but people who are taking the jobs — some for the first time — say they’re doing so out of a commitment to their country and to democracy itself. PolitiFact interviewed multiple poll workers nationwide and found they were undeterred by threats or falsehoods. Some poll workers are inspired to do this work by new laws that make it harder to vote, or by the way some politicians refuse to certify elections or spread falsehoods about voting. Democracy in the balance motivated Robin Levin, a retired schoolteacher, to become a newly trained poll worker in Florida’s Broward County. “Democracy has been challenged, and it’s all based around voting,” Levin said. “Our whole democracy is voting, and when you lose voting, you have no democracy. That’s my biggest fear. That is my whole reason to get more involved.”

Full Article: PolitiFact | Poll workers are short-staffed, under attack — and quietly defending democracy

The Results Are In: U.S. Moves Toward Paper-Based Elections | Andrew Adams/Governent Technology

Most voting systems are designed to last 10 to 20 years. In the 2022 elections, 24 states will be using voting machines that are more than 10 years old, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice. In the coming years, hundreds of jurisdictions around the country will be in the market for new election technology.
Increasingly, local election authorities are turning to ballot marking devices or recommitting to paper ballots marked by hand. In 2022, 92.2 percent of voters will live in a jurisdiction using one of these voting methods. Peoria County, Ill., a mid-sized county in central Illinois, held its primary elections on June 28, marking the halfway point through the 2022 primary season. This was the first election in Peoria with paper ballots in more than 10 years. Prior to this year, they had been using Hart InterCivic eSlate, a type of direct recording electronic (DRE) device. These types of devices record votes to electronic memory. In the 2012 midterms, about one-third of voters lived in jurisdictions using these machines, but they have fallen out of favor across the board. This year, 7.5 percent of voters live in a jurisdiction that uses them, according to data compiled by Verified Voting.

Full Article: The Results Are In: U.S. Moves Toward Paper-Based Elections

National: Election officials face security challenges before midterms | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Election officials preparing for the upcoming midterms face a myriad of threats, both foreign and domestic, as they look to protect voting systems and run a smooth election while fighting a wave of misinformation that has been undermining public confidence in U.S. elections. The nation’s top state election officials gathered Thursday for the start of their annual summer conference, with a long list of challenges that begins with securing their voting systems. While a top concern heading into the 2020 presidential election was Russia or another hostile nation waging a disruptive cyberattack, the landscape has expanded to include ransomware, politically motivated hackers and insider threats. Over the last year, a small number of security breaches have been reported at local election offices in which authorities are investigating whether office staff improperly accessed or provided improper access to sensitive voting technology. Jen Easterly, who leads the nation’s cybersecurity agency, said Russia, China and North Korea remain “very dynamic and complex cyber threats” and that criminal gangs pushing ransomware were also a concern. But she noted election security officials could not afford to prioritize one over the other.

Full Article: Election officials face security challenges before midterms | AP News

National: Insider threats a growing concern for election security efforts | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

While state and local election officials deserve a “huge amount of credit” for improving their defenses against cyberthreats like ransomware and foreign-backed actors, top officials from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Thursday that insider threats — from individuals within election administration offices — are an increasing concern. Speaking at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, CISA Director Jen Easterly said election officials need to focus on an entire “landscape” of threats. “If we focus too intently on one set of threats, we are very likely to miss those coming from another direction,” she told reporters. “Insider threats can do malicious things. They can also pose malicious physical threats.” In recent months, breaches of election equipment have come under investigation across the country, following incidents in which unauthorized third parties have been given access to vote-tabulation devices, servers and other technology assets in attempts to prove baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Full Article: Insider threats a growing concern for election security efforts

National: ‘It’s a sham’: fears over Trump loyalists’ ‘election integrity’ drive | Peter Stone/The Guardian

A conservative group called the America Project that boasts Donald Trump loyalists and “big lie” pushers Roger Stone and Michael Flynn as key advisers, has begun a self-styled “election integrity” drive to train activists in election canvassing and poll-watching, sparking fears from voting rights watchdogs about voter intimidation. Patrick Byrne, the multimillionaire co-founder of the America Project, has said he has donated almost $3m to launch the drive, dubbed “Operation Eagles Wings”, with a focus on eight states including Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump lost, plus Texas and Florida, which he won. The drive was unveiled in late February at a press event where Byrne touted plans to educate “election reform activists” to handle election canvassing, grassroots work and fundraising “to expose shenanigans at the ballot box” in what has echoes of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, and could become a sequel to those charges. Byrne, for instance, has said the operation’s mission is to “make sure that there are no repeats of the errors that happened in the 2020 election”, and stressed the “need to protect the voting process from election meddlers who care only about serving crooked special interest groups that neither respect nor value the rule of law”.

Full Article: ‘It’s a sham’: fears over Trump loyalists’ ‘election integrity’ drive | US news | The Guardian

National: Despite rebukes, Trump’s legal brigade is thriving | Heidi Przybyla/Politico

Full Article: Despite rebukes, Trump’s legal brigade is thriving – POLITICO

National: Taking Trump’s lead, even fringe candidates who lost badly are claiming fraud | Stephen Fowler/NPR

When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp overwhelmingly won the Republican primary in Georgia on May 24, his chief opponent former Sen. David Perdue was quick to admit it was over. “Everything I said about Brian Kemp was true, but here’s the other thing I said was true: he is a much better choice than Stacey Abrams,” he said shortly after polls closed, referring to the matchup this fall between Kemp and Democrat Abrams. “And so we are going to get behind our governor.” But another one of his opponents felt something was off. “I want y’all to know that I do not concede,” Kandiss Taylor said in a video posted to social media. “I do not. And if the people who did this and cheated are watching, I do not concede.” Kemp won Georgia’s primary with about 74% of the vote. Perdue, who had the backing of former President Donald Trump, earned about 22% of the vote. And Taylor? Just 3.4%.

Full Article: Taking Trump’s lead, even fringe candidates who lost badly are claiming fraud : NPR

National: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington | Steven Lee Myers and Eileen Sullivan/The New York Times

Full Article: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington – The New York Times

Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Republicans and other conservative groups are undertaking a huge effort to recruit election workers, a push that could install people with unfounded doubts about the 2020 election in key positions in voting precincts where they could exert considerable power over elections. At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.

Full Article: Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | US voting rights | The Guardian

National: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Controversy over election outcomes is not new. Overall voter confidence that votes were properly counted was lower after presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 than it was in 2020. What is new is the level of overt hostility toward the people who administer elections, manifested in an ongoing pattern of threats to their personal safety. Recent congressional hearings have included emotional accounts from election officials at all levels, from threats to the family members of a senior official to the crippling fallout when an election worker was falsely accused of fraud, by name, by the former president and his attorney. Spurred on by misinformation, including continued assertions from campaigning politicians that a national election was somehow “stolen,” members of the public have not backed off from such harassment. A Brennan Center poll of election officials, conducted more than two years after the 2020 election, found that one in six had experienced threats. Almost 80 percent said that threats had increased in recent years, and 30 percent knew election workers who left their jobs because they felt unsafe. More than three-fourths felt the federal government should be doing more to support them, and one in three said the same about their local government. Members of the election and law enforcement communities have joined together to help fill this void, forming the nonpartisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE).

Full Article: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security

National: How the Supreme Court could radically reshape elections for president and Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it has agreed to hear a case next term that could upend election laws across the country with the potential endorsement of a fringe legal theory about how much power state legislatures have over the running of congressional and presidential elections. The case, called Moore v. Harper, is centered on newly drawn maps of voting districts for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the next U.S. House of Representatives. Republican state lawmakers want to resurrect a map that North Carolina’s state courts struck down, finding that the map approved by the GOP-controlled legislature violated multiple provisions in the state’s constitution by giving Republican candidates an unfair advantage through partisan gerrymandering. A court-drawn map has been put in place instead for this year’s midterm elections. In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.

Full Article: U.S. Supreme Court takes on the independent state legislature theory : NPR

National: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop

U.S. Cyber Command wants more tech companies and others on the front lines of the global fight to secure the internet to share more cybersecurity intelligence so that the organization can improve its defensive capabilities, Cyber Command Executive Director Dave Frederick said in an interview Monday. Frederick said Cyber Command regularly shares information it gleans during so-called “hunt forward” operations, defensive cyber missions carried out alongside partners, but needs more private companies to fully report cyber incidents so that Cyber Command can learn from them. Frederick, who was speaking during an industry webinar organized by Billington CyberSecurity, said the 27 hunt forward operations Cyber Command has conducted in the past two years have empowered partner countries to “immediately strengthen the defenses of their networks” and have given Cyber Command “unique insights into adversary malware which we then bring home.” Those insights inform not only Department of Defense cyber defense strategy, but also are shared with the private sector, he said. “We’re able to share the indicators of compromise, new samples of malware that we discover from hunt forward, with the broader cybersecurity community, and they’re able to then build signatures to detect that malware and basically disrupt adversary operations targeting the U.S. civil sector,” Frederick said. “It’s almost like giving an antidote to a virus, so it’s really turned out to be a great model.”

Full Article: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations