Warren Stewart – Page 103 – The Voting News

National: In key battlegrounds, races for secretary of state take on new weight | Simon Montlake/CSMonitor

May 20, 2022

Most voters can’t name the secretary of state where they live. Traditionally a low-profile office, it doesn’t often merit much in the way of media coverage or fundraising when on the ballot, as it is in 27 states this fall. In Georgia, however, GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has become a household name. His now-famous refusal to “find” 11,780 more votes for former President Donald Trump – and his insistence on the accuracy of the 2020 results in his state – made him both a hero to Democrats and a villain to many Trump supporters. “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” President Trump told Mr. Raffensperger in a recorded phone call that was later made public, after he’d recertified Joe Biden’s victory. Now Mr. Raffensperger is facing a tough four-way GOP primary on May 24, in a contest that will test Republican voters’ concerns about “election integrity” and the salience of Mr. Trump’s disproven claims of widespread fraud. Whoever wins the primary, which polls suggest could go to a runoff, will face a Democratic opponent in November’s midterms. Candidates hewing to Mr. Trump’s “election fraud” narrative are running for secretary of state in 17 of the 27 states where the office will be on the ballot in the fall, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group, the States United Democracy Center. And Trump-endorsed candidates are running in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona, all states where Mr. Trump contested the 2020 results.

Full Article: In key battlegrounds, races for secretary of state take on new weight – CSMonitor.com

National: Klobuchar, Warren introduce bill to provide $20 billion for election administration | The Hill

May 20, 2022

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to provide $20 billion in federal funding to help states and localities to administer elections, train poll workers and eliminate barriers to voting. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by nine other Senate Democrats, would secure election infrastructure by upgrading voting equipment and registration systems, help recruit and train nonpartisan election officials and poll workers, protect election officials from threats and increase ballot access for minorities, voters with disabilities and those who live overseas or on Indian lands. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, but in recent years we have seen a barrage of threats seeking to undermine our elections,” said Klobuchar. “It is critical that we respond to these threats head-on by ensuring that state and local governments have the resources needed to strengthen the administration of our elections, protect election officials on the frontlines, and provide all eligible voters with the opportunity to make their voices heard,” she said. Klobuchar called on the Biden administration to prioritize election security funding in his 2023 budget proposal, something the administration later did.

Full Article: Klobuchar, Warren introduce bill to provide $20 billion for election administration | The Hill

Arizona would likely see recounts after every election under popular bill | Jen Fifield/AZ Mirror

May 20, 2022

Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, would likely be required to recount all ballots cast in every election moving forward if a proposed change to state law passes. The bill, awaiting a final vote as early as today in the Arizona Legislature after garnering bipartisan support, would vastly widen the margin of votes between candidates that triggers an automatic recount in primary and general elections, for almost every type of race. The change would prompt more frequent recounts in large and small counties alike. In the 2020 general election, it would have triggered two statewide recounts and two countywide recounts in Maricopa County, including the presidential race which Joe Biden won narrowly in the state. The stated goal is to build voter confidence in election outcomes in a battleground state where margins are often tight and recounts are currently rarely allowed. State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, who introduced Senate Bill 1008, says it would still only require recounts on races that are very close. “Here is an opportunity to help reinforce the process,” Ugenti-Rita said. “To give the voters confidence that, when races are razor tight, we make sure they were counted accurately.”

Full Article: Arizona would likely see recounts after every election under popular bill

One Colorado Race Will Be About Voters’ Faith in Elections. It’s Not Looking Good. | Jennifer Oldham/Politico

May 20, 2022

Spring snowflakes floated outside wall-to-wall windows framing Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s downtown Denver office as she reached for one of her two cell phones. She was looking for a video in which MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the Donald Trump ally and conspiracy theorist, accused her of murder. “Jena Griswold is a criminal beyond all criminals,” said Lindell on his online show, the “Lindell Report,” which broadcasts on frankspeech.com, his face in one box on the screen adjacent to another with the face of his co-host Brannon Howse. “I got news for you, Jena, it’s too late, you already committed a murder and we caught you.” The statement caught the attention of Howse, who paused from moving things around his desk and asked: “A murder? A murder? A murder?” “It’s a para … a … a … it’s an analogy,” Lindell responded. This, Griswold says, is a large part of what has made her job so difficult over the past two years. “It seems fantastic, the fact that [Lindell] called me a murderer,” said Griswold, 37, the first Democrat to win secretary of state in Colorado in more than 50 years. “Except it generates tons of death threats.”

Full Article: One Colorado Race Will Be About Voters’ Faith in Elections. It’s Not Looking Good. – POLITICO

Colorado: Mesa County District Attorney finds human error behind election audit used to prop up fraud claims | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News Service

May 20, 2022

Following a criminal investigation, the Mesa County, Colorado, District Attorney’s Office concluded human error, not criminal fraud, caused anomalies identified in an election audit used to prop up county elections chief Tina Peters’ claims of voter fraud. The audit, compiled at Peters’ request, found three suspicious events occurred in October during the 2020 election and in March 2021 during the Grand Junction municipal election. After ruling out county elections staff, the report suggested these events were triggered by either Dominion Voting Systems staff or an unknown remote party via the internet. Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein disagreed with the audit’s conclusion during a presentation to the Board of County Commissioners on Thursday. “We can prove what actually happened, and that was human error,” Rubinstein said. “We have evidence that [elections manager] Sandra Brown did both. We have no evidence that what Sandra Brown did was in ill intent or a criminal offense. We find no evidence that it affected the election at all.” Brown was fired from her position this past November. Rubenstein said neither Brown nor the audit report’s authors, Walter Daugherity and Jeffrey O’Donnell, agreed to speak with investigators. In a statement provided to Rubenstein, O’Donnell said he declined to cooperate because “the report clearly states that it was written in defense of Tina Peters and others’ legal cases.”

Full Article: Mesa County DA finds human error behind election audit used to prop up fraud claims | Courthouse News Service

Georgia county under scrutiny after claim of post-election breach | Emma Brown and Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

May 20, 2022

A former elections supervisor in rural Coffee County, Ga., has told The Washington Post that she opened her offices to a businessman active in the election-denier movement to help investigate results she did not trust in the weeks after President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat. Trump had carried the conservative county by 40 points, but elections supervisor Misty Hampton said she remained suspicious of Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. Hampton made a video that went viral soon after the election, claiming to show that Dominion Voting System machines, the ones used in her county, could be manipulated. She said in interviews that she hoped the Georgia businessman who visited later, Scott Hall, and others who accompanied him could help identify vulnerabilities and prove “that this election was not done true and correct.” Hampton said she could not remember when the visit occurred or what Hall and the others did when they were there. She said they did not enter a room that housed the county’s touch-screen voting machines, but she said she did not know whether they entered the room housing the election management system server, the central computer used to tally election results. “I’m not a babysitter,” she told The Post. Hall, who owns a bail bond business, did not respond to requests for comment.

Full Article: Coffee County, Georgia, under scrutiny after claim of post-election breach – The Washington Post

Michigan election chief: Trump suggested I be arrested for treason and executed | ynthia McFadden, Kevin Monahan and Alexandra Chaidez/NBC

May 20, 2022

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s top election official, faced an onslaught of threats after the 2020 presidential election for refusing to overturn results that showed Joe Biden had won the state. In those hectic weeks, she says she also received an especially disturbing piece of information: President Donald Trump suggested in a White House meeting that she should be arrested for treason and executed. Benson, a Democrat, revealed the alleged remark for the first time in an interview with NBC News. She said she learned of it from a source familiar with Trump’s White House meeting. “It was surreal and I felt sad,” Benson said, recalling her reaction. “It certainly amplified the heightened sense of anxiety, stress and uncertainty of that time — which I still feel in many ways — because it showed there was no bottom to how far he (Trump) and his supporters were willing to stoop to overturn or discredit a legitimate election.” Reached for comment, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said: “I have it on good authority that Secretary Benson knowingly lied throughout her interview with NBC News.” Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, is now locked in an election fight with a Republican candidate who parrots Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. In speeches and on her podcast, Kristina Karamo has said the election was “rigged and stolen” and “Secretary of State Benson should go to jail.”

Full Article: Michigan election chief: Trump suggested I be arrested for treason and executed

Nevada: Lawsuit seeks to change how public can observe vote counting in Washoe County | Mark Robison/Reno Gazette Journal

May 20, 2022

A lawsuit to decide just how closely the public can observe the vote-counting process will be heard Wednesday in Washoe County District Court. Robert Beadles is funding the two-pronged effort – one here and one in Clark County – which he says he’s doing to create more transparency in elections. A California transplant who moved to Reno in 2019, he was recently elected to the Washoe County Republican Party central committee. He’s spoken frequently at public meetings about widespread voter fraud in Nevada, despite the Secretary of State’s investigation finding there was no evidence of such fraud in the 2020 general election. “This isn’t one of those things where it’s Republican or Democrat,” Beadles said in a phone call with the RGJ. “It’s literally for every single legal voter and so that anybody who wants to make sure their vote is counted legitimately can be a part of the process. There’s just too much secrecy when you look into how our election system actually works.” Attorneys for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada filed documents opposing the efforts, saying they would “upend Nevada’s election administration just a few weeks before the primary election, on a legal theory that was uniformly rejected by Nevada courts prior to the 2020 election and has no basis in Nevada law.”

Full Article: Election security: Suit seeks changes in vote counting observation

New York: ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby Legislature on Risky Voting Machines | Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker

May 20, 2022

The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would ban all-in-one voting machines. That is, voting machines that can both print votes on a ballot and scan and count votes from a ballot – all in the same paper path. This is an important safeguard because such machines, if they are hacked by the installation of fraudulent software, can change or add votes that the voter did not intend and never got a chance to see on paper. One voting machine company, Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), which makes an all-in-one voting machine, the ExpressVote XL, is lobbying hard against this bill. As part of its lobbying package, ES&S is claiming that “Rochester Institute of Technology researchers found zero attacks” on the ExpressVote XL, based on an article (included in ES&S’s lobbying package) from Rochester Institute of Technology entitled “RIT cybersecurity student researchers put voting machine security to the test.“ If this were actually a scientific article, one could critique it as actual science. But it’s not a scientific paper: The article is written by Scott Bureau, Senior Communications Specialist, RIT Marketing and Communications in the RIT public relations department. The article describes an undergraduate student “capstone project.” The students were interviewed by ES&S, allowed ES&S to inspect their testing site, and then signed a nondisclosure agreement with ES&S. The students made up two attack scenarios, then spent 10 days trying to find attacks. They found some vulnerabilities, but not one that could change votes.

Full Article: ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby New York Legislature on Risky Voting Machines

Pennsylvania Department of State addresses three Election Day issues, including two in midstate counties | Robby Brod/WITF

May 20, 2022

Pennsylvania’s primaries mostly went smoothly, but there were three incidents that prompted state officials to respond. Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, said about 22,000 mail-in ballots in Lancaster County printed by a new vendor had a code that couldn’t be read by the scanner. “To address this, the department recommends the best practice of assigning two-person teams to handmark new ballots. One will read out the marking from the original ballot; the second person will mark the ballot,” she said. “There’s also an observer who watches the process to make sure the re-marked ballot is accurate.” She said it will take “days” to count the affected ballots, which involves hand-counting them and putting them through the county-owned optical scan machine. Chapman said other counties in Pennsylvania use the same vendor, but the issue was contained to the Lancaster County ballots. Election officials in Berks County reported programming errors with their new electronic poll books. As a result, some polling places opened late, and lines were reported at about two dozen precincts.

Full Article: Pennsylvania Department of State addresses three Election Day issues, including two in midstate counties | WITF

Pennsylvania: Inside the Lancaster County operation where staff are remarking 16,000 mail ballots that could decide the GOP U.S. Senate primary | Gillian McGoldrick/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

May 20, 2022

The fate of Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary race has come down to two of the state’s most populous counties — Lancaster and Allegheny — where there are still potentially significant numbers of ballots uncounted in a contest that’s still too close to call. Lancaster County is one of the most populated Republican strongholds in the state, meaning the remaining Republican ballots — approximately 5,500, according to the county’s GOP chair — likely will help decide the outcome of this race. Candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dave McCormick were still within recount territory — within 0.5% of one another — as of Wednesday afternoon. In Allegheny County, a small number of votes are still uncounted — about 2%. But in a race this close, any of those votes could change the outcome of the election. Those results aren’t expected to be posted until Friday, according to county officials. Christa Miller, the chief elections clerk in Lancaster County, her staff and elections volunteers, are responsible for remarking 16,000 ballots that wouldn’t scan on Tuesday due to a printer error.

Full Article: Inside the Lancaster County operation where staff are remarking 16,000 mail ballots that could decide the GOP U.S. Senate primary | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Wisconsin judge skeptical of election grant arguments | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

May 20, 2022

A judge on Tuesday voiced skepticism about a lawsuit challenging the legality of private grant money awarded to Madison to help run the 2020 election, calling some of the arguments “ridiculous,” a “stretch” and “close to preposterous.” The lawsuit argues that private grants given to Madison from a group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg amounted to illegal bribery. The Wisconsin Elections Commission in December rejected that complaint, and this lawsuit is an appeal of that decision. Four nearly identical lawsuits are also pending in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Racine and Kenosha. The case in Madison was the first to hold arguments. Three Wisconsin courts have previously rejected similar lawsuits arguing that the grants were illegal. Similar lawsuits filed in other swing states have also been rejected. Dane County Circuit Judge Stephen Ehlke referenced those rulings when he questioned attorney Erick Kaardal Tuesday. Kardaal said the commission got it wrong and Madison should not have been allowed to use a portion of the grant money to pay for absentee ballot drop boxes because, he said, they are illegal, based on a Waukesha County circuit court ruling issued after the election. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is currently weighing an appeal of that ruling.

Full Article: Wisconsin judge skeptical of election grant arguments | AP News

Wyoming: Crook County may have to reduce polling locations due to continued concerns over election integrity | Hugh Cook/Wyoming Public Media

May 20, 2022

Skepticism about election integrity and voter fraud persists in Wyoming, even though local and state officials say elections are safe and secure. These beliefs could lead Crook County to reduce the number of polling locations. “If people continue to be concerned about election integrity, then we would have to shut down some polling places so that we could monitor them closer,” explained Crook County Clerk Linda Fritz. There are several factors that must be taken into consideration to provide enhanced security measures, which would be costly to the county. “If the community is concerned about the security of the machines, we would have to go to buildings that are monitored daily with cameras or that have staff there to know that they’ve not been, [that] they’re locked in one room that no one else has access to until election day, like the city halls,” she said. “Crook County wouldn’t have that ability in some of the rural areas because there isn’t either internet access so that we could be monitoring them or the expense alone. To put up that kind of security would almost require us to shut down some of those rural polling places.” That extra cost, Fritz said, could reduce the 13 polling locations countywide to five or six locations. To provide a greater level of security, some counties have invested in game cameras to monitor polling sites to alleviate concerns about alleged wrongdoing, she said. But there’s no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in Crook County or Wyoming. For the level of fraud to take place that some allege has occurred, there would have to be widespread involvement and complicity with the system, she explained.

Full Article: Crook County may have to reduce polling locations due to continued concerns over election integrity | Wyoming Public Media

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