South Carolina: Missing $4 million? State investigations? Election Commission awash in drama | John Monk and Lucy Valeski/The State

A missing $4 million, a $10 million loan installment coming due with no money to pay for it and whether former State Election Commission director Howard Knapp misrepresented the price of buying new machines for the state in 2024. Those were three questions about a $28 million purchase for machines to count voter’s ballots aired Wednesday during an unusually open public meeting of the State Election Commission board. “We know that we authorized $28 million (for the voting machines) … but the loan appears to be for $32 million,” said Commission chairman Dennis Shedd during the meeting. The three other commission members agreed that they had approved a $28 million loan. Read Article

Texas: Voter system switch leaves thousands of residents unverified ahead of early voting, | Shakari Briggs, John Lomax V/Houston Chronicle

Elections officials across Texas are scrambling to register voters after the near-collapse of a voter registration company led counties across the state to transfer to a system provided through the Texas Secretary of State’s office. Votec, a California-based company that has run voter registration everywhere from Harris County to Travis County, warned officials in August that a grim fiscal outlook had cast doubt on their ability to register voters ahead of the November election. The scare sparked a mass exodus of counties from Votec to the Texas Elections Management System, a statewide database that has been used by the Secretary of State’s Office to manage voter registration information since the early 2000s. But the transition to TEAM has been bumpy, and came just as the state rolled out a major update to the system. All told, the switch has left as many as 17,000 voters in Harris County and 400 in Fort Bend County in limbo with just days before early voting is scheduled to begin. Read Article

Wisconsin: Bill to allow candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to withdraw from ballots is sent to Governor | Molly Beck(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin lawmakers this week sent Gov. Tony Evers a bill that seeks to avoid a scenario that played out during the 2024 presidential election when independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was blocked in attempting to take his name off the ballot in an effort to widen President Donald Trump’s vote tally. The bill allows independent candidates for president and all candidates for statewide and legislative offices to remove their names from ballots before Election Day — a move currently barred for all reasons except death. Kennedy sought to remove his name from ballots in Wisconsin and other swing states after ending his presidential campaign as an independent candidate and endorsing Trump. Read Article

Dominion, Company at Center of False 2020 Voting Conspiracies, Is Sold | Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of election machines that were at the center of multiple false accusations and conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, has been sold to Liberty Vote, a new group run by a former local election director. Liberty Vote announced the acquisition in a brief news release that proclaimed the mission of the new company would be “to restore public confidence in the electoral process.” It featured language favored by conservatives, professing to “improve election integrity in America” and “leveraging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump’s executive order,” a reference to the president’s effort in March to overhaul electoral processes that has been largely blocked by courts. The founder of Liberty Vote, Scott Leiendecker, is a former Republican election official from St. Louis with years of experience in elections. He also is the chief executive officer of KNOWiNK, a company that produces electronic poll books, digital devices that are used across the country to help election workers upload and maintain voter rolls at voting sites. In July, KNOWiNK announced that its Poll Pad “was the first electronic poll book to earn certification from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.” Read Article.com

National: ‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The US supreme court is set to hear a case this month that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, effectively killing one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement and the nation’s most powerful statute to prevent discrimination in voting. The court is considering the constitutionality of the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act: section two. The measure outlaws election practices that are racially discriminatory and has been the tool that minority voters and voting rights advocates have frequently turned to challenge redistricting plans – from congressional districts to county commissions and school boards – that group voters in such a way to dilute the political influence of a minority group. Read Article

National: Congress hears pleas for more election funding. Will it respond? | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

On the eve of a government shutdown Tuesday, dozens of local election officials from around the country wandered the labyrinth of office buildings adjacent to the U.S. Capitol, lobbying members of Congress for more federal funding of elections. In some ways, the local election officials were among the only people in the Capitol complex who didn’t really have to worry about the pending shutdown: The $15 million in election security grants that Congress appropriated for the states this year has already been doled out. But that amount helps explain why they were on Capitol Hill. States and local jurisdictions are primarily responsible for running elections, and bear most of the costs. But elections have become increasingly complex and expensive, because of changes to state laws and cybersecurity concerns, and they’re under unprecedented scrutiny, from ordinary voters right up to the president. Read Article

National: Voting groups ask court for immediate halt to Trump admin’s SAVE database overhaul | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database. Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans. On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits. Read Article

National: Supreme court appears open to Republican challenge over Illinois mail-in ballot law | George Chidi/The Guardian

The US supreme court appeared sympathetic on Wednesday to a challenge brought by a Republican congressman to an Illinois law governing how the state counts mail-in absentee ballots received after election day. The lawsuit challenging Illinois’ election law from Mike Bost, a Republican representative from Illinois, is viewed by Trump-aligned conservatives as an avenue to continue attacks on mail-in voting. Bost filed the suit to argue that the Illinois law allowing ballots to be counted up to two weeks after election day if they are postmarked by the deadline unconstitutionally allows an extension of the election period. Arguments center on whether a federal candidate has standing to challenge the law, not whether the practice itself is constitutionally valid. Justices asked questions about whether they should view a political candidate as an “object” of the law – an entity for whom a regulation bears a direct consequence, and whether the odds of mail-in ballots tipping an election had bearing on whether a candidate had a right to challenge the law. Read Article

National: Smartmatic scores win against Fox in election machine defamation case  | Nina Pullano/Courthouse News Service

A New York judge said court documents from a Murdoch family trust dispute are fair game for discovery in election technology company Smartmatic’s defamation case against Fox News. Ruling from the bench at a two-hour hearing on a slate of motions from both parties, Judge David Cohen tossed a judicial hearing officer’s finding that the material from court proceedings in Nevada was not relevant to Smartmatic’s case. Smartmatic sued Fox Corporation and its right-wing news network in early 2021 over broadcasts that falsely claimed the company interfered in the 2020 election. Read Article

National: Does Donald Trump really believe he can be president again? | obin Abcarian/Los Angeles Times

On Tuesday, in the middle of a meeting between President Trump and Democratic leaders over the impending government shutdown, red “Trump 2028” baseball caps suddenly appeared on the Resolute Desk. “It was the strangest thing ever,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN. Not really. Trump teasing a third term is getting to be, well, old hat at this point. Last March, he told Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he would not rule out pursuing an unconstitutional third White House stint. But is he serious? “Some of this is trolling,” said Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan. “But the man has the largest ego of any person out there and he will do whatever it takes to be the center of attention.” Read Article

California Governor Newsom warns of possible Trump interference in California election | Sophia Bollag, Alexei Koseff/San Francisco Chronicle

As Election Day approaches, Gov. Gavin Newsom is raising concerns that President Donald Trump may try to interfere in California’s special election to redraw congressional districts. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, Newsom pointed to Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops, the government shutdown and the president’s past criticisms of mail voting. Trump first federalized thousands of California National Guard troops in June over Newsom’s objections and deployed them to Los Angeles to quell protests over his mass deportation campaign. On Aug. 15, the same day Democrats released proposed new congressional maps, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent Newsom and the head of the California National Guard a letter saying most soldiers would be released from the L.A. mission but that 300 would remain under federal control through Nov. 4. Read Article

Georgia: Judge extends deadline for naming new prosecutor in election interference case | Olivia Rubin/ABC News

A judge on Wednesday extended the deadline for a replacement to be named in place of District Attorney Fani Willis in the Georgia election interference case against President Donald Trump and others. Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee extended the deadline to Nov. 14, after the group tasked with finding the replacement said they needed additional time, in part due to the case’s complexity. McAfee’s original order gave the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia just 14 days to appoint a replacement. Read Article

Maine: Amid ongoing investigation into found ballots, Secretary of State Bellows underscores election security | AnnMarie Hilton/Maine Morning Star

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is confident law enforcement will ultimately uncover why 250 official ballots were allegedly delivered to a Newburgh home in an Amazon package. She also said the incident underscored that Maine’s processes work and that the state’s elections are safe and secure. “Even if the most enterprising criminal were able to fabricate Maine ballots or Maine absentee ballot envelopes or if that chain of custody were broken, our elections would remain free, safe and secure because of the checks and balances in absentee voting itself,” Bellows said at a news conference at the State House Monday afternoon. Monday also marked the first day of in-person absentee voting throughout the state for the November election. In order to vote absentee, lawfully registered Maine voters must specifically request a ballot, Bellows explained. Those requests are tracked in the central voter registration system. Additionally, the Secretary of State’s office uploads public files in the lead up to the election that list absentee ballot requests. Read Article

Michigan: Prosecutors begin laying out evidence in high-profile tabulator cases | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A voting machine company determined tabulators that were obtained and inspected by supporters of President Donald Trump after Michigan’s 2020 election had been “tampered” with and should not be reused, an executive with the company testified in court Thursday. Guy Riner, vice president of account management for Election Systems & Software, was the first witness presented by prosecutors on the opening day of preliminary examinations for Matt DePerno, the 2022 GOP nominee for attorney general, and Daire Rendon, a Republican former state representative from Lake City. DePerno and Rendon — two vocal purveyors of unproven claims of fraud in Trump’s 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden — are facing felony charges for allegedly participating in a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to five voting machines that were transported to Oakland County for analysis by a group of so-called cybersecurity experts. Read Article

Nebraska secretary of state wants to hand over voter data to feds, but says lawsuit blocks it | Juan Salinas II/Nebraska Examiner

Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen last week weighed in on the latest request from the U.S. Department of Justice for the state’s voter registration data — showing a willingness to fulfill the request. Federal officials have asked states for detailed information from their voter rolls, including names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, saying they want the information to ensure accurate voter registrations. Democratic-led states and some led by Republicans have declined or are pushing back against federal efforts to gather the data over state laws protecting data and privacy concerns. Critics have questioned the safety and potential national security risks of letting any administration consolidate such voter data in one place. Read Article

Pennsylvania counties erroneously issue dozens of duplicate ballots | Carter Walker/Votebeat

A handful of Pennsylvania counties mistakenly issued duplicate mail ballots to a few of their voters in recent weeks. Why that happened is unclear — state and county officials gave different explanations — but they cautioned that the error would have not resulted in anyone being able to have their vote counted twice. State and county officials said they have found that a total of 68 potential duplicate mail ballots were mistakenly issued. In some of these cases, they said, the ballots may not have reached voters, as the mistake may have been caught after a second ballot label was generated but before a duplicate ballot was actually mailed to the voter. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Luzerne County, state disagree on cause of ballot release error | Michael P. Buffer/The Citizens’ Voice

Luzerne County and the Pennsylvania Department of State offered different assessments of what caused the release of two mail ballots to 31 voters for the Nov. 4 general election. According to a statement from the Department of State, Luzerne County “inadvertently and incorrectly generated duplicate mailing labels.” Luzerne County Director of Elections Emily Cook noted “an apparent error with the state’s SURE system” in a news release on Tuesday that disclosed the inadvertent and “isolated” release of two mail ballots to 31 voters. The Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system serves as the database for the state’s 67 counties to ensure the accuracy and integrity of voter registration rolls. It allows counties to update voters’ registration information statewide, eliminate verified duplicates and deceased voters from the rolls and transfer records electronically between counties. Read Article

South Carolina: Judge Diane Goodstein’s home burns to ground after ruling against Trump | Alia Shoaib/Newsweek

The home of a South Carolina judge was destroyed after it went up in flames on Saturday. A fire engulfed the home of Judge Diane Goodstein, who serves on the state Circuit Court, and led to three people being hospitalized with injuries, including her husband, according to a report from The Post and Courier. The fire comes weeks after Goodstein issued a ruling against the Trump administration. Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the blaze, and there is currently no evidence to suggest it was an act of arson. The incident quickly sparked online conversation hostility toward members of the judiciary who rule against Trump and his allies. Read Article

Texas: Dallas County GOP’s push to hand-count 2026 ballots could upend voting for Democrats | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters. The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own. Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary. Read Article

Virginia: Fairfax Democrats’ online primary crashes, forcing voting to extend after system failure | Princess Harrell/WJLA

What was supposed to be a test of modern voting technology turned into a weekend of frustration for some Fairfax County voters. The Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s first all-digital primary election experienced a major technical failure that temporarily shut down the online voting system and forced organizers to extend voting into Sunday. The three-day primary, held to select the Democratic nominee for the Braddock District seat on the Board of Supervisors, used the platform Election Buddy and introduced ranked-choice voting for the first time. There were no paper ballots. Read Article

Washington: USPS rule changes may complicate mail-in voting, risking late ballots in November election | Joel Moreno/KOMO

Ballots go out starting next week for the November general election but people who mail them back through the United States Postal Service (USPS) could risk not having their votes counted. It all has to do with a rule change regarding postmarking and the point at which voters mail their ballots back. “We encourage all voters to return their ballot as early as possible but that is especially true if you plan to return your ballot by mail,” said Halei Watkins, the communications manager for King County Elections. The rule change involves added language around how the USPS postmarks mail. The postmark will now confirm the Postal Service’s possession of the letter or parcel on the date that is printed, but the postmark date “does not inherently or necessarily align with the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mail piece,” according to a recent news release. Read Article

Wisconsin Elections Commission challenges order on citizenship verification | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Wisconsin state agencies on Monday asked a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge to stay his ruling requiring election officials to verify the citizenship of existing voters and those seeking to register. The Wisconsin Department of Justice filed the motion on behalf of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the Department of Transportation, and related state officials. In it, the respondents called Judge Michael Maxwell’s Friday ruling “impermissively vague,” because the order bars election officials from processing new registrations without “verification” of applicants’ citizenship but doesn’t define the verification process. The filing says that any new citizenship verification process for online voter registration would require months of testing and development, and that disabling the electronic registration system in the meantime would conflict with state law requiring that system to exist. Read Article

America’s underfunded elections: a national security risk we can’t ignore | Adam Hinds/CommonWealth Beacon

Imagine the US government declared part of our critical national security infrastructure at risk — then offered barely $1 million per state last year to protect it. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the reality of how we fund elections in America. Our elections are the backbone of our democracy. They’ve been formally designated as critical infrastructure, alongside our power grid and water supply. Yet we treat them as an afterthought in our budgets. The system we rely on to uphold the will of the people — to choose presidents, governors, mayors — operates on shoestring funding, especially at the local level where the work of democracy actually happens. American elections are intentionally decentralized, with local governments playing the central role. This design keeps elections close to voters and makes large-scale interference harder. But decentralized doesn’t need to mean underfunded. We can have locally run elections and provide the consistent, predictable funding needed to ensure they are free, fair, and secure. Read Article

National: CISA confirms it’s ending MS-ISAC support | Colin Wood/StateScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Monday announced that its cooperative agreement with the Center for Internet Security, the Upstate New York nonprofit that runs the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, will conclude Tuesday. The federal cybersecurity agency said that the end of the agreement, which had been planned for the end of the fiscal year at the close of the month Tuesday, marks a transition to “a new model” of supporting state and local government agencies in protecting their systems against digital threats. “CISA is supporting our SLTT partners with access to grant funding, no-cost tools, and cybersecurity expertise to be resilient and lead at the local level,” CISA’s announcement reads. Read Article

National: GOP push to restrict overseas and military voting continues | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

For many American citizens living abroad, making sure their ballots are returned correctly and on time hundreds or thousands of miles away, back in the United States, can be tough. But with the 2026 midterm election approaching, U.S. expatriates and their advocates say voting faces more uncertainty than usual, as Republican officials continue a push for more restrictions on overseas voters, including U.S. military members stationed abroad. Some 2.8 million U.S. adult citizens living abroad were eligible to vote in 2022, the latest year for federal estimates. And with turnout for overseas voters long trailing that of domestic voters (3.4% compared to 62.5% in 2022), voting rights advocates fear GOP-led lawsuits and proposals could drive down participation even further. Read Article

National: In Dangerous Attack on Left-Leaning Nonprofits, Trump Orders Government to Go After ‘Domestic Terrorism Networks’  | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the federal government to investigate and dismantle “domestic terrorism networks.” The move appears targeted at left-leaning progressive nonprofit groups, which Trump days ago vowed to dismantle, falsely claiming they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S. The memo directs the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after “anti-fascist” movements in the U.S. Read Article

National: Lawsuit seeks to block Trump’s personal data merging | Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

The Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to aggregate the personal data of Americans are facing a new legal challenge. A class action federal lawsuit filed Tuesday argues the Trump administration’s actions that aggregated personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from various federal agencies violated federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution, put sensitive data at risk of security breaches, and could lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. The suit argues that the Department of Homeland Security, along with the Department of Government Efficiency team, is “working rapidly to create precisely the type of ‘national data banks’ the American people and Congress have consistently resisted, and the Privacy Act was designed to prevent.” –read Article

National: MyPillow founder Mike Lindell defamed Smartmatic, federal judge rules | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, an ally of President Trump, defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled last week. But U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan deferred until future proceedings the question of whether Lindell — one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud — acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic still needs to prove to collect any damages. The judge said there are “genuine fact disputes” as to whether Lindell’s statements were made “with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity.” He noted that the defense says Lindell has an “unwavering belief” that his statements were truthful. Read Article

National: Rudy Giuliani and Dominion settle $1.3bn defamation suit over election lies | Rudy Giuliani | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

Rudy Giuliani and Dominion settle $1.3bn defamation suit over election lies. Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump, has settled a long-running defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over lies he told about the result of the 2020 presidential election. Details of the settlement, revealed in federal court in Washington DC in a filing late on Friday, are confidential. The Colorado-based voting machine manufacturer sued Giuliani for $1.3bn in 2021, citing more than 50 instances in which he made false or defamatory statements insisting the election was rigged against Trump, with the integrity of Dominion’s machinery at the heart of the conspiracy theory. Representatives for Giuliani and Dominion confirmed the resolution on Saturday but declined further comment when approached by CBS News. “The parties have agreed to a confidential settlement to this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in a short statement. Read Article

National: How House Republicans plan to rewrite history of Jan. 6 | Hailey Fuchs and Kyle Cheney/Politico

A new House panel will re-investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack with an eye toward recasting the narrative about the events in Washington that day. It’s the latest sign that the deadly riot remains a wound on Congress that might never fully heal amid ferocious partisan sparring. Retribution, not reconciliation, appears to be the prime motivation behind the new probe, with the Republicans behind it still bitter over the work of the panel’s previous iteration, which was largely led by Democrats and concluded President Donald Trump was singularly to blame for the violence inflicted by his supporters. One GOP member of the new panel, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, did not rule out questioning members of the prior committee. Read Article