Warren Stewart – Page 13 – The Voting News

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has announced the investigation of a voter check-in tablet purchased by the Perry County Board of Elections. County Elections Board Director Jamie Snider told The Perry County Tribune that her office noticed some “irregular activity that we needed to report, and that was done immediately when we were advised it was happening.” She said the devices “were fresh out of the box, brand new. We just purchased them in December, received them in February, and as we were unboxing them, we noticed some things on them that were out of the norm. So we reported it to the state like we should have.” Read Article

Oregon: Controversial proposal to take away vote by mail results in heated debate | Carlos Fuentes/The Oregonian

A controversial bill that could repeal Oregon’s vote by mail system resulted in a heated public hearing Monday afternoon, as dozens of individuals argued for and against scrapping the state’s first-in-nation voting system. Senate Bill 210, sponsored by Republican Sens. David Brock Smith and Kim Thatcher, would ask voters to decide in November 2026 whether to retain Oregon’s vote by mail system, which has been in place for more than two decades. The proposed measure would also require voters to present a government-issued ID when voting in person and would limit mail-in voting to citizens who are unable to vote in person. Read Article

Pennsylvania can’t reject improperly dated ballots, federal court rules | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Pennsylvania counties can’t reject a voter’s mail ballot solely because they forgot to put the date on the return envelope or put a wrong date on it, a federal judge wrote Monday in a ruling that likely applies to the upcoming primary. The ruling is the latest — and likely not the last — in a long-running legal battle over enforcing the date requirement that has bounced around state and federal courts. U.S. District Judge Susan Baxter of the Western District of Pennsylvania ruled Monday that rejecting mail ballots for issues with the date on the outer envelope violates voters’ First Amendment rights, since voting is considered an expression of free speech. Misdated mail ballots are ones where a voter writes a date on the envelope that is outside of the range between when the county can first send the ballot and the day of the election. Read Article

Texas bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote advances | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

In a quick vote after little debate, the Texas Senate approved a bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering and would restrict them to voting in congressional races only if they do not. The bill, a Republican legislative priority, still needs approval in the state House before it can become law. It would cost state officials nearly $2 million over the next five years to implement, according to the bill’s fiscal note, which doesn’t include any costs expected to be borne by local election officials. Read Article

How Wisconsin’s Washington County helped its municipalities expand early-voting hours | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Absentee voting didn’t used to be popular in Addison, a rural town of 3,300 in southeast Wisconsin. A few days before the last Supreme Court election in 2023, only about 60 residents had cast absentee ballots in person. This year, at the same point in the election cycle, that number was over 300. The sharp increase is due partly to Republicans’ recent embrace of absentee voting, especially in the nearly two-week period before Election Day when voters can cast absentee ballots in person. Washington County, where Addison is located, is one of the state’s most Republican counties, and one of many Republican-dominated areas across Wisconsin where early voting rates have surged. Read Article

Trump orders an overhaul of how elections are run, inviting a likely legal challenge | Jessica Huseman, Carrie Levine, Jen Fifield, Carter Walker, Alexander Shur, Hayley Harding and Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would dramatically change the administration of U.S. elections, including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, but experts and voting rights advocates said they expect the order to face quick legal challenges. The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” also would change the certification standards for voting systems, potentially forcing states to rapidly replace millions of dollars in voting equipment, and it would prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards, which 18 states and Washington, D.C., currently permit. Voting rights advocates and legal experts said the bulk of the executive order will certainly be challenged in court, as the Constitution grants authority over elections to states and to Congress, not the president. Should it take effect, they say, millions of voters could be disenfranchised. Read Article

Election Security Is at Risk Amid Federal Government Actions | Paul Rosenzweig, Pamela Smith and Adam Ambrogi/Newsweek

American democracy is under attack—from cybercriminals and foreign adversaries seeking to undermine trust in our elections. As members and support staff of The National Task Force on Election Crises, we have seen firsthand how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has helped build a crucial line of defense, protecting our election infrastructure from cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and physical threats. Yet, at a time when these threats are escalating, the federal government is pulling back its support, putting the integrity of our elections at greater risk. CISA was established to help secure critical infrastructure, including elections, against cyber threats and foreign interference. Its work has been instrumental in ensuring election officials on all levels have the resources, intelligence, and technical support needed to combat an increasingly sophisticated landscape of threats. It is deeply troubling that the current administration appears to be dismantling key efforts to combat election threats that we cannot afford to lose. Read Article

National: Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal? | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

President Trump pushed on Tuesday to hand the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, signing a far-reaching and legally dubious order to change U.S. voting rules. The executive order, which seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as the return of all mail ballots by Election Day, is an attempt to upend centuries of settled election law and federal-state relations. The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Instead, it gives states the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, leaving them to decide the rules, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. Congress can also pass election laws or override state legislation, as it did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Read Article

National: Trump’s executive order on elections is far-reaching. But will it actually stick? | Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking broad changes to how elections are run in the U.S. is vast in scope and holds the potential to reorder the voting landscape across the country, even as it faces almost certain litigation. He wants to require voters to show proof that they are U.S. citizens before they can register for federal elections, count only mail or absentee ballots received by Election Day, set new rules for voting equipment and prohibit non-U.S. citizens from being able to donate in certain elections. A basic question underlying the sweeping actions he signed Tuesday: Can he do it, given that the Constitution gives wide leeway to the states to develop their own election procedures? Read Article

National: Trump’s voting rights order targets anybody who’s ‘not white,’ advocates say | Trevor Hughes Deborah Barfield Berry/USA Today

President Donald Trump’s new executive order aimed at tightening up election administration has triggered a wave of concern among voting-rights advocates who say it will likely make casting a ballot harder for millions of American citizens. Liberal-leaning advocates are also concerned Trump’s order gives the federal government unusually broad power to dictate how elections are managed, a process that’s typically run by county-level officials and overseen by secretaries of state. Conservative activists welcomed Trump’s order as a necessary step to ensuring the sanctity of American elections, though studies have consistently shown that very few non-citizens cast illegal ballots. Read Article

National: Supreme Court confronts another challenge to the Voting Rights Act | Nina Totenberg/NPR

Race and politics were front and center at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday as the justices took up a voting rights case involving Louisiana’s congressional redistricting after the 2020 Census. The case is nearly identical to a case the Supreme Court ruled on two years ago from Alabama, though the outcome could make it more difficult for minorities to prevail in redistricting cases. Louisiana’s population is roughly 30% Black, but after the 2020 Census, the state legislature drew new congressional district lines that provided for only one majority-Black district in a state that has six congressional seats. That’s the same thing Alabama did after the Census, only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court two years ago when a narrow court majority ruled that the state had illegally diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Read Article

National: Republican National Committee asks states for details about their voter files, part of a larger effort to question elections | Christine Fernando and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The Republican National Committee on Tuesday launched a massive effort to probe voter registration lists nationwide amid a broader strategy to seize on voter rolls to question the integrity of elections. RNC sent public records requests asking for documents related to voter roll list maintenance to the top election officials in 48 states and the District of Columbia, asserting that the public should know how states are removing ineligible people from voter rolls, including dead people and non-citizens. The move came the same day President Donald Trump took sweeping executive action seeking major changes to U.S. elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. It also coincides with common misinformation narratives about non-citizens and dead people voting, cases of which are exceedingly rare and are largely caught and prosecuted when it does occur. Read Article

National: Trump Anti-Voting Order Draws Furious Pushback | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

After President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday that experts said could potentially disenfranchise millions, Democratic election officials and voting rights advocates swiftly vowed to fight it. “This is not a statute. This is an edict by fiat from the executive branch, and so every piece of it can be challenged through the regular judicial process,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said in an interview with Democracy Docket. Fontes called Trump’s order a “cheap substitute” for the SAVE Act — the GOP’s nationwide proof of citizenship bill — that he doesn’t think will pass through the Senate, but also offered a particularly nefarious reading of its true purpose: setting up a way to cancel the 2026 midterm elections. Read Article

Opinion: Stop gutting America’s cyber defense agency | Mark Montgomery and Johanna Yang/The Hill

The Trump administration’s cuts in cyber programs are putting national security at risk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem defended such cuts in her confirmation hearing, saying that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency needed to be “smaller, more nimble to really fulfill their mission.” She is mistaken. Over the past three weeks, the agency has reduced staff, slashed budgets and terminated programs, with the administration suggesting that these cuts will “eliminate redundancies” and focus its work on “mission critical areas.” However, the cuts, imposed by the Department of Homeland Security, are in fact undercutting the agency’s core mission areas, weakening U.S. national resilience and casting doubt on America’s ability to repel, thwart and deter attacks in cyberspace. Read Article

Arizona Secretary of State says Trump’s election order is a ‘power grab’ | Mary Jo Pitzl/Arizona Republic

President Donald Trump has issued a wide-ranging executive order that would wrest the ability of states to control federal elections, arguing the country has a “patchwork of voting methods” that his order seeks to streamline. The March 25 order sparked alarm among voting rights groups, with Democratic attorney Marc Elias promising an imminent legal challenge. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called it a “power grab,” and predicted it could derail the mid-term elections of 2026. “(I)t appears as though this is another one of the administration’s building blocks in an attempt to avoid having to face the voters in 2026,” Fontes told Democracy Docket, an organization Elias founded that tracks election litigation. Read Article

Georgia Republicans backtrack on some election rules after sharp criticism | Jeff Amy/Associated Press

Georgia lawmakers are retreating from election proposals that could have allowed a Donald Trump-aligned state board to strike thousands of challenged voters from the rolls and would have required polling officials to count the number of ballots by hand. House Bill 397 was rewritten to remove those provisions before it was passed Thursday by the Senate Ethics Committee, sending it to the full Senate for more debate. The bill still seeks to force the state to leave the Electronic Records Information Center. Some question the funding and motives of that multistate group, which tries to maintain accurate voter rolls. But Georgia now would not be required to exit until mid-2027 instead of within months, as was earlier proposed. Read Article

Georgia is planning one of the largest cancellations of voter registrations in U.S. history | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia election officials plan to cancel about 455,000 inactive voter registrations this summer, one of the largest registration removals in U.S. history. More than half the registrations scheduled for cancellation were identified by a 24-state organization called ERIC, which reports when a voter has moved and is no longer eligible to vote in Georgia. The mass cancellation by the Georgia secretary of state’s office arrives as conservative critics of the state’s voter registration list allege it’s inaccurate and vulnerable to voter fraud. They say ERIC hasn’t been effective in finding outdated registrations among the state’s 8.3 million registered voters. Read Article

Iowa House passes bills on voter roll verification, election recounts | Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch

The Iowa House passed two bills making changes to state election laws Tuesday, including a measure introduced by Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate on noncitizen voting. House File 954, approved by the House 65-31, contains multiple changes to state election law, including a prohibition on ranked choice voting and increasing the requirement for candidates of a party to receive at least 10% of the general election vote to gain “political party” status. It also has language introduced by Pate ahead of the 2025 legislative session to allow the Secretary of State’s office to contract with federal and state agencies, as well as private entities, for verification and maintenance of the state’s voter rolls. Read Article

Kansas has among the shortest windows for voting by mail in the US. It will get shorter next year | John Hanna/Associated Press

Republican legislators in Kansas on Tuesday shrunk what already was among the nation’s shortest windows for voting by mail, arguing that problems with the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of ballots required the move. Critics called it voter suppression. The GOP-supermajority Legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill eliminating an extra three days after Election Day for voters to return mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day. The change will take effect in 2026. It is not clear how much the change will affect election outcomes. About 11% of registered Democrats cast mail ballots in Kansas in November, compared with 6% for Republicans. But the Kansas secretary of state’s office said only 2,110 of the more than 1.3 million ballots counted arrived during the grace period. Read Article

Michigan lawmakers seek U.S. Supreme Court’s help in effort to overturn voting expansion | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Eleven Republican Michigan legislators want the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a case that could overturn some of the biggest expansions of voting rights in Michigan’s history. They’re asking the nation’s highest court to determine whether they have the right to sue to overturn a set of popular statewide measures approved by voters through ballot initiatives, claiming those measures violate the U.S. Constitution. These include automatic registration, no-reason absentee voting, and straight-party voting, passed as part of 2018’s Proposal 3, as well as early voting, the permanent absentee-ballot list, and ballot drop boxes from Proposal 2 in 2022. Read Article

New Hampshire House passes bill allowing voters to request their ballot be hand-counted | Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin

The New Hampshire House passed a bill Wednesday allowing voters to request that their ballot be hand-counted by cities and towns, even if their polling place uses machine counting. House Bill 154 would allow any voter to make that request to a poll worker; if they did so, town election officials would be required to deposit the ballot in an “auxiliary compartment” of the ballot-counting machine to be hand-counted after the polls closed. The legislation comes amid a conservative movement against the use of voting tabulators in recent years. It also comes months after the state Supreme Court ruled that New Hampshire voters do not have a right to have their ballots counted by hand in towns that use machines. Read Article

As North Carolina Supreme Court case drags on, some voters can’t help but feel ‘targeted’ | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

In less than 24 hours, Danielle Brown left an out-of-state bus tour, came home to North Carolina to cast a vote in the 2024 general election and then boarded a plane to rejoin the tour. Now, her vote is one of nearly 67,000 ballots contested by Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin as part of his attempt to overturn his apparent loss to Democratic Judge Allison Riggs for a seat on the state Supreme Court. On Election Night, Griffin appeared to be the victor. However, as provisional and absentee ballots were counted, he slowly lost his lead. By the time election staff tallied official results during their canvasses, Riggs was up by a mere 734 votes. Two recounts confirmed Riggs’ win. Griffin then filed a series of election protests attempting to discard tens of thousands of ballots from the count, on grounds that the State Board of Elections illegally allowed certain categories of voters to cast a ballot. In the past four months, Griffin’s election protests have journeyed through state and federal courts. Read Article

Oregon: Federal cuts to election security programs spark concerns among elections officials | Carlos Fuentes/The Oregonian

Oregon election officials say they are worried that recent cuts to federal cybersecurity programs may leave the state’s election systems more vulnerable to attack. For years, local election officials have relied on federal programs to monitor threats, assess election security infrastructure and coordinate response plans. Federal officials hold regular security briefings with state and local officials, according to Tess Seger, spokesperson for the Oregon secretary of state. But those safeguards are now in jeopardy after the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency last week cut funding for a program that monitors cybersecurity threats across states and helps local officials respond. Read Article

Texas: Federal judge strikes down mail ballot ID requirement | Dan Katz/The Texas Tribune

A federal judge in San Antonio has ruled that the state of Texas’ ID requirements for mail ballot applications are unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez on Thursday found that the provisions in the state’s 2021 voter security law SB1 discriminate against voters with disabilities. Mail-in voters are principally people over the age of 65 and people with disabilities. Since the law was enacted, many voters reported having their ballots rejected because they didn’t provide an ID number, or the number they provided did not match the one the state had on file. Read Article

Utah Governor signs away the state’s popular universal vote-by-mail election system, requiring opting in | Emily Anderson Stern/The Salt Lake Tribune

Tucked in the middle of a list of 100 bills Gov. Spencer Cox signed Thursday was “Amendments to Election Law,” or HB300 — the law that is set to end Utah’s popular universal vote-by-mail election system, forcing voters to opt in before 2029 to receive and send a ballot through the mail. The governor did not include a comment on his decision to sign the bill in the news release, as he has for some other bills. An initial version of the bill would have effectively eliminated Utahns’ option to vote via the postal service altogether, but the version Cox ultimately signed allows voters to opt in to participating in elections through the mail. Utahns must opt in before 2029, when counties will stop sending ballots to every voter’s mailbox. The compromise came after widespread opposition among the elected officials who oversee the state’s elections, as well as skepticism from the Senate over cutting off access to voting by mail. Read Article

Wyoming becomes first state to enact citizenship proof law for all elections, including federal | Natalia Mittelstadt/Just The News

Wyoming has become the first state to enact a law requiring proof of citizenship in all elections, including federal. The bill was passed by the state legislature and became law without the governor’s signature. The law, House Bill 156, requires voters to provide proof of citizenship and Wyoming residency, in addition to instituting a requirement to reside in the state for a period of time before being eligible to register to vote. Other states that require proof of citizenship for voters do not apply the requirement to federal elections. Read Article

Trump wants to ‘go back to paper ballots.’ Most of America already uses them. | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

President Donald Trump recently repeated his calls for exclusively using paper ballots, lauding them before the first cabinet meeting of his second term. For the sake of honest elections, he said, “We have to go back to paper ballots.” In reality, the overwhelming majority of the country already uses paper ballots. Most states use one of two methods: either voters hand-mark a paper ballot that is then read by a machine, or they use a ballot-marking device that prints a summary of their choices on a sheet of paper for verification before it’s fed into a tabulator. Read Article

National: Federal cuts to information-sharing groups may damage nation’s security posture, warn officials | Colin Wood/StateScoop

Current and former government officials told StateScoop they’re concerned by cuts at two information sharing organizations widely used by state and local governments to protect IT and election systems from cyberattacks. Pamela Smith, the president and chief executive of Verified Voting, argued that given the current threat environment, support for cybersecurity services should be expanding, not shrinking. “First it was cuts at CISA because they didn’t want to have them to have anything to do with mis- and disinformation,” she said. “But if you’ve cut funding for something like EI-ISAC, it goes to the question of whether elections are still considered critical infrastructure. If the improvement of security and resilience of critical infrastructure on which Americans rely is no longer a goal of the department literally named Homeland Security, then they should explain that. I think the American public deserves to know.” Read Article

National: Democrats push Justice Department to keep Election Threats Task Force amid rollbacks Edward Graham/Nextgov/FCW

Senate Democrats are sounding the alarm about the future of the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force in the wake of the Trump administration’s moves to curtail or disband other federal election security initiatives. In a March 17 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, 31 senators — led by Sens. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Dick Durbin, D-Ill. — called for the DOJ to continue the work of the task force, which was launched following the 2020 presidential election to investigate threats of violence made against election officials and workers. Since its creation, the group has probed thousands of extremist messages and acts targeting officials and has successfully taken enforcement actions against individuals who sought to harm election administrators. The letter’s signatories warned that “these threats have not only continued but escalated” since the task force’s establishment. Read Article

National: What’s next for cybersecurity, election info sharing? | Chris Teale/Route Fifty