Warren Stewart – Page 133 – The Voting News

Georgia: Department of Homeland Security Cyber Office Wants to See Secret Voting Machine Vulnerability Report | Shannon Vavra and Jose Pagliery/The Daily Beast

October 1, 2021

A cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security has shown interest in seeing a copy of a report alleging “severe” vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting machines—a report that a federal judge has decided to keep secret. As The Daily Beast reported last month, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ordered the report—authored by a renowned computer security academic—to remain sealed. Although the report only discusses the potential for future election interference, her restrictions appear to be driven by a desire to avoid fueling unfounded right-wing conspiracy theories that Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in 2020. But now the Streisand effect is in full swing, as the report’s secrecy is attracting even more attention from two camps: the federal agency tasked with helping protect elections and state election officials around the country who are also relying on these machines in certain jurisdictions. According to an email exchange filed in court documents, University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman reached out directly to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) one week after The Daily Beast’s reporting and quickly heard back from the department’s election security director. “Yes, CISA would be willing to receive the report regarding possible vulnerabilities in election infrastructure,” wrote Geoffrey Hale, who leads the agency’s so-called “Election Security Initiative,” according to the court filing.

Full Article: Department of Homeland Security Cyber Office Wants to See Secret Voting Machine Vulnerability Report

Here’s what Congress can do to keep the next Trump from stealing an election | Richard L. Hasen/The Washington Post

October 1, 2021

We know from the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book “Peril” that the country came closer to a stolen presidential election than was previously reported. President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman advised Vice President Mike Pence that he would be justified in single-handedly accepting some fake alternative slates of electors for states that Joe Biden won — on the grounds of supposed fraud in various states — and simply declare Trump the winner of the election. Pence would have done so on Jan. 6, when he sat in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate. Pence supposedly seriously considered the possibility, only to reject it upon getting sounder legal advice. These machinations involving Pence came on top of at least 30 direct Trump contacts with election officials, elected officials and others to cajole Republican state legislatures to send in those alternative slates of electors. (None did, but Eastman’s plan pretended that they had.) We dodged a bullet last time, and things are much worse now. Election officials have been leaving their jobs as they face threats of violence and harassment, and some of the people who will replace them have bought into the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Those are the people who will be in charge of counting the votes in some places next election. Simply put, we face a serious risk that election results will not reflect the will of the people in 2024 or some other future American presidential election. Congress has the power to put up barriers to election theft, but the window is quickly closing. That’s because Democrats may soon lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, and Republicans, fearful of Trump or complicit in his plans, cannot be expected to take the lead on deterring election subversion.

Full Article: Here’s what Congress can do to keep the next Trump from stealing an election – The Washington Post

National: Election Security Problems Still Must Be Addressed | Susan Greenhalgh and J. Alex Halderman

October 1, 2021

Since last November, Donald Trump and his allies have attempted to undermine our democratic framework with a relentless barrage of lies, fantasies and falsehoods about imaginary vote-rigging schemes. They have enabled supporters of the former president to grasp onto the most arrant nonsense and farcical theories to convince themselves that Trump did not lose to President Joe Biden by 7 million votes nationwide and 74 Electoral College votes. It shouldn’t need saying, but the lies are not true. As the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and Republican and Democratic election officials have affirmed, there is no evidence whatsoever of large-scale electoral fraud. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Period. But the fact that the presidential outcome was correct this time does not mean that our elections are well enough secured. Plenty has been written about how the Big Lie is corroding public trust and tearing at the fabric of our democracy. But in addition to these obvious harms, Trump’ insidious disinformation is also inhibiting legitimate and necessary election security reforms. Well before the 2020 election, bipartisan investigations from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee documented significant weaknesses in U.S. voting equipment. These findings only confirmed what previous studies from state election officials and academic researchers revealed—voting machines are computers with inherent vulnerabilities and weak security protocols.

Full Article: Election Security Problems Still Must Be Addressed | Opinion

National: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country | Ashley Parker/The Washington Post

October 1, 2021

A year before the 2020 election, about two dozen constitutional scholars and democracy advocates traveled to Washington to work through a range of scenarios where something goes awry on Election Day. The country’s political system was being tested by a campaign like no other in modern history, with an incumbent president, Donald Trump, who showed little regard for the democratic traditions and constitutional norms that had guided his predecessors — and who repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through rampant fraud. So the group considered a slew of hypothetical catastrophes: “What do we do if a vigilante group takes over a major county tabulation facility and burns it to the ground? What do we do if there is a military coup?” But, as Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund tells it, the experts were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States. Either we were not creative enough or the norms of civility our nation has seen over centuries were not reliable enough,” said Patrick, a former elections official in Maricopa County, Ariz. The challenges for American democracy were on stark display almost exactly two months after Election Day, on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters mounted a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. And the challenges have been clear in the eight months since the riot, as Trump and his allies have intensified false claims of election fraud and the former president has remained the Republican Party’s most popular leader.

Full Article: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country – The Washington Post

National: The Push For Internet Voting Continues, Mostly Thanks To One Guy | Miles Parks/NPR

October 1, 2021

By 2028, Bradley Tusk wants every American to be able to vote on their phones. It’s a lofty goal, and one that most cybersecurity experts scoff at. But it’s a quest that the venture capitalist and former political insider continues to chip away at. His nonprofit, Tusk Philanthropies, announced a $10 million grant program Thursday to fund the development of a new internet-based voting system that he says will aim to win over security skeptics, who have long been wary of votes being cast via digital networks rather than through the paper ballots or ATM-type machines that most Americans currently use. NPR is the first to report on the announcement. “My goal is to make it possible for every single person in this country to vote in every single election on their phone,” Tusk said in an interview with NPR. Tusk was Uber’s first political adviser, and he is also a former staffer for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He has already bankrolled a number of small-scale mobile-phone voting pilot projects across the U.S. over the past few years, in which voters with disabilities and Americans living abroad from a select few districts have been able to return their ballots digitally. However, the vendors that conducted those pilots have faced heavy scrutiny for security flaws in their systems as well as for a general lack of transparency around their software, as the source code for the underlying technology has remained private.

Full Article: Despite Security Concerns, Online Voting Gets $10 Million Push : NPR

Editorial: The GOP isn’t just re-litigating 2020. It’s pre-litigating 2022. And 2024. | Olivier Knox/The Washington Post

October 1, 2021

The best way to understand the aggressive Republican push to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and rewrite voting procedures in states the GOP controls is not as re-litigating President Biden’s victory, though that is a tool for trying to undermine him. Instead, it’s better understood as pre-litigating 2022 and 2024: Laying the foundation for challenging or even overturning Democratic victories of the lowercase “d” democratic variety in the future. Yes, I know that this has been blindingly obvious for some time. (Also, I offer my apologies to all of my English teachers for “pre-litigating.” I blame years of covering State of the Union “preactions.”) But consider what we’ve learned — though “confirmed” might be a better word — over the past week about former president Donald Trump’s avalanche of false claims he was cheated out of a second term. And consider he’s flirting with running again and has been repeating this nonsense at campaign-style rallies. First, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — hardly “Never Trump” politicians — personally investigated the Trump camp’s claims of widespread irregularities and found nothing to deter them from voting to certify Biden’s victory.

Full Article: The GOP isn’t just re-litigating 2020. It’s pre-litigating 2022. And 2024. – The Washington Post

Editorial: America would be much better off if our elections were as boring as Germany’s | Max Boot/The Washington Post

October 1, 2021

Imagine that we lived in an alternative universe where Republican George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1980 and stayed in office until 1996. He was then followed by Democrat Michael Dukakis for two terms. Then, for the next 16 years, Republican Mitt Romney was in office. And finally, in 2020, Romney was succeeded by his vice president — Democrat Joe Biden. In this universe, our politics would be more boring — and a lot more sane and sensible. That, roughly, is what Germany has achieved. Helmut Kohl of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was chancellor from 1982 to 1998. He was followed by Gerhard Schroeder of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1998 to 2005. For the past 16 years, Germany has been led by the CDU’s Angela Merkel, governing for most of that time in coalition with the SPD. Chancellor Merkel — who makes Romney look like the life of the party by comparison — leaves office with higher approval ratings than any other world leader. She has reduced the German unemployment rate, maintained stability and successfully navigated challenges such as a euro-zone debt crisis in 2009, a massive influx of refugees in 2015 and a coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Little wonder that the leaders of the CDU and SPD were competing over who would be seen as her heir. The winner, by a hair, in Sunday’s balloting was the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, who served as Merkel’s vice chancellor and finance minister for the past three and a half years. He marketed himself as “Angela the second,” right down to making the same diamond-shaped hand gesture as Merkel. His chief challenger, the CDU’s Armin Laschet — who might still be able to form a governing coalition with smaller parties — was just as dull. “It’s Election Season in Germany,” a New York Times article noted. “No Charisma, Please!”

Full Article: Opinion | America would be much better off if our elections were as boring as Germany’s – The Washington Post

Arizona: ‘We won’: Trump and his allies barrel ahead with election lies despite review confirming his loss | Jeremy Herb and Fredreka Schouten/CNN

October 1, 2021

The Cyber Ninjas failed to prove fraud in the Arizona 2020 election, but former President Donald Trump’s election fraud crusade is now proceeding as if they’d won — pushing for more “forensic audits” and restrictive voting in that state and elsewhere across the country. Trump’s allies are already demanding a new review of another Arizona county won by President Joe Biden. They are launching more partisan ballot reviews in other states following the Arizona playbook after passing laws making it harder to vote earlier this year. And they are calling for decertification of Arizona’s 2020 election despite the lack of fraud, as part of a larger effort to validate Trump’s “Big Lie” and undermine the 2020 election results. The lesson they’re taking from Arizona’s Maricopa County ballot review is not that they failed and should stop, but rather that they should try to avoid the negative scrutiny that hounded the Cyber Ninjas’ review and “do it better” in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, even if there’s no evidence of fraud, said Sarah Longwell, a conservative publisher and executive director of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together. “It has nothing to do with auditing votes,” Longwell told CNN. “It has to do with creating a cloud of suspicion around the elections and keeping their fraud narrative front and center.”

Full Article: Arizona election audit: Trump and his allies barrel ahead with election lies despite review confirming his loss – CNNPolitics

Arizona Secretary of State’s Ability to Defend Election Laws Restored By Judge’s Ruling | Mary Ellen Cagnassola/Newsweek

October 1, 2021

Republican-passed laws in Arizona that ban schools form requiring masks and restrict the ability of local governments to enact COVID-19 requirements were dismantled by a judge Monday, a devastating blow to a nationwide GOP effort to limit pandemic rules. The decision by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Katherine Cooper could create a path for Arizona cities and countries to enact mask requirements, if it withstands an impending appeal. Nearly 30 public school systems ignored the laws and required masks for students and staff. Republican Governor Doug Ducey‘s office called the ruling “clearly an example of judicial overreach.” “Arizona’s state government operates with three branches, and it’s the duty and authority of only the legislative branch to organize itself and to make laws,” C.J. Karamargin said in a statement. “Unfortunately, today’s decision is the result of a rogue judge interfering with the authority and processes of another branch of government.”

Full Article: Arizona Secretary of State’s Ability to Defend Election Laws Restored By Judge’s Ruling

California Governor Newsom signs bill to make voting by mail permanent in California | Emily Deruy/Marin Independent Journal

October 1, 2021

In a move that cements California’s future as a vote-by-mail state, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed a bill that makes permanent what Golden State voters experienced during the pandemic elections of 2020 and last month’s recall: Every active registered voter will receive a ballot in the mail for every election. Advocates hailed the new law — Assembly Bill 37 from Menlo Park Assemblymember Marc Berman — as a way to make it more convenient for people to vote, which could increase participation in elections. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least five other states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already conduct elections by mail. California’s more permissive voting system stands in stark contrast to efforts in other states to tighten voting requirements. Earlier this year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature that included new ID mandates and banned around-the-clock early voting. Georgia recently passed a law requiring voters to provide their driver’s license number or other form of ID to get or return an absentee ballot. “As states across our country continue to enact undemocratic voter suppression laws, California is increasing voter access, expanding voting options and bolstering elections integrity and transparency,” Newsom said in a statement.

Full Article: Gov. Newsom signs bill to make voting by mail permanent in California – Marin Independent Journal

Colorado Judge to rule on Mesa County Clerk case next month | Charles Ashby/ Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

October 1, 2021

A planned hearing today to discuss any potential disagreements in the facts behind the case of whether Mesa County Court Tina Peters should be temporarily barred from conducting this fall’s election has been canceled. Instead, District Judge Valerie Robison will decide the case between Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Peters and her deputy, Belinda Knisley, solely on the legal briefs that have been filed to her court, and issue her ruling by Oct. 13, possibly before. That’s several days after the first day that county clerks can mail ballots to voters, which they can do on Oct. 8. Robison’s decision will be based on multiple briefs and exhibits filed by Peters’ attorney, former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Mesa County attorney Todd Starr over the past week. While Gessler argues that Peters was merely doing her job and should remain doing it, Weiser said Peters and Knisley committed extreme violations of election security protocols that make them both untrustworthy to conduct the upcoming election. Starr, meanwhile, simply argues that the county commissioners had little choice but to appoint former Secretary of State Wayne Williams to oversee the county’s elections when Griswold issued an order last month to appoint Mesa County Treasurer Sheila Reiner to head it. In those briefs, Gessler admits that Peters had allowed a non-county employee access to sensitive election equipment, saying she was within her rights to bring in a computer expert.

Full Article: Judge to rule on Peters case next month | Western Colorado | gjsentinel.com

Georgia: High-stakes election tests Fulton County amid state takeover threat | Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

October 1, 2021

Fulton County is running an election for its life in this November’s race for Atlanta mayor. If the county stumbles, Georgia’s government might take over.
Fulton will try to prove itself after 2020 elections scarred by slow results, long lines, lost absentee ballot requests and constant criticism from Republican President Donald Trump and his supporters. But the county will be challenged by the higher standards required of Georgia’s new voting law, which demands quick ballot counting, greater transparency and investigations of discrepancies. Failure comes with potential consequences, including the replacement of Fulton’s majority-Democratic elections board with an appointee by Republicans. Republican Georgia legislators have already launched a performance review of the heavily Democratic county, a step under the state’s voting law toward ousting its election board, which oversees polling place locations, staffing and certification of results. The Republican-controlled State Election Board could then install its own county elections superintendent.

Full Article: High-stakes election tests Fulton amid state takeover threat

Idaho Election Officials Reject Fraud Claims After Hand Recounts | James Dawson/Boise State Public Radio

October 1, 2021

Idaho’s top election officials are refuting claims that the results of the 2020 presidential race were rigged in the state, conducting recounts in two counties within the past week. The Idaho Secretary of State’s office said it recently investigated claims that votes cast for former President Donald Trump were electronically switched for President Joe Biden. Trump won Idaho with nearly 64% of the vote. The assertions from MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell, dubbed “The Big Lie,” have been found to be baseless in other states. They raised red flags for Idaho state officials. “There’s illogical arguments that are made and they’re made on such a blanket level, it’s almost impossible to comprehend how something like that could be pulled off,” said Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck. For example, at least seven of Idaho’s counties, which run their own elections, have no electronic components to their vote counting process. And no voting machine certified for use in Idaho can be connected to the internet or accessed remotely over something like Bluetooth. “That was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly,” Houck said. All votes in the state are also recorded on paper to preserve an audit trail. The secretary of state’s office conducted hand recounts in Butte and Camas counties last week. They found a 10-vote discrepancy in the two counties – well short of Lindell’s claims of 116 and 54 votes respectfully that supposedly swapped to Biden. Another partial recount is set for Bonner County Saturday.

Full Article: Idaho Election Officials Reject Fraud Claims After Hand Recounts | Boise State Public Radio

Idaho Secretary of State refutes Mike Lindell’s statewide election manipulation claims | KMVT

October 1, 2021

Staff from the Idaho Secretary of State’s office visited two Idaho counties last week following receipt of information that alleged statewide manipulation of Idaho’s election results. “The office of the Idaho Secretary of State takes free, fair, and accurate elections seriously,” says Secretary of State Lawerence Denney, “so when we are presented with allegations that come with specific details which we can examine, we want to do so.” The document in question, dubbed “The Big Lie” and shared publicly by a website bearing the copyright of Michael J. Lindell, claims that votes actually cast for Donald J. Trump had been switched electronically and recorded as votes for Joseph Biden. “Once we had the document in hand, we immediately believed there was something amiss,” says Chief Deputy Secretary Chad Houck. “This document alleged electronic manipulation in all 44 counties. At least 7 Idaho counties have no electronic steps in their vote counting processes,” states Houck, “That was a huge red flag, and one we knew we could either prove or disprove fairly directly.” Houck, along with members of the IDSOS Elections team, visited Camas and Butte counties, the 42nd and 43rd smallest counties on the list on Sept. 23rd. Not suspecting any issues, these two counties were selected due to their small size, and ease of recount.

Full Article: Idaho Secretary of State refutes Mike Lindell’s statewide election manipulation claims

Split Michigan Legislature Approves Election-Related Bills | Michigan News | David Eggert/Associated Press

October 1, 2021

The Michigan Legislature on Thursday passed election bills that would limit who can access the state voter file, keep voting equipment from being connected to the internet and require election challengers to receive training. The legislation sent to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was supported by majority Republicans and opposed by all but one Senate Democrat and many House Democrats. The bills blocking outside groups’ access to the voter database and prohibiting the connection of electronic pollbooks or voting systems to the internet would codify existing practice. “It’s a good idea to take this bill and take the best practices and put them into law so they can’t be changed,” Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Holly Republican and former secretary of state, said of the internet-connection legislation.

Full Article: Split Michigan Legislature Approves Election-Related Bills | Michigan News | US News

Ohio’s top elections official rejects fraud claims | Marty Schladen/Ohio Capital Journal

October 1, 2021

A spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said the office didn’t want to get dragged in last week when a fellow Republican echoed former President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims and called for an audit of Ohio’s 2020 election. But the state’s top election official won’t condemn Trump or say whether he’ll support the former president if he runs again in 2024. And despite his assertion that “it’s easy to vote and hard to cheat in Ohio,” LaRose wouldn’t comment on restrictions that forced large-county voters to wait hours to cast early ballots last year. Former state Treasurer Josh Mandel is one of many Republicans eagerly trying to take up the Trump mantle in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, who is also a Republican. Trump has lied relentlessly about his 7 million-vote loss in the 2020 election. His challenges have failed in more than 60 court proceedings and repeated reviews of the vote in states where the contest was close have upheld the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s win. Even a highly partisan “audit” of Arizona’s results last week confirmed Biden’s victory there. But that didn’t stop Trump from lying about it, too.

Full Article: Ohio’s top elections official rejects fraud claims – Ohio Capital Journal

Tennessee: Chancellor Rules Against Shelby County Election Commission in Round One of Voting-Machine Dispute | Jackson Baker/Memphis Flyer

October 1, 2021

A Shelby County court has denied the request of the Shelby County Election Commission to force the Shelby County Commission to fund its call for the purchase of ES&S electronic voting machines to replace the county’s existing election machinery. Both bodies agree that the old voting machines must be replaced, but have disagreed on what should replace them, with the county commission maintaining that, as the entity empowered to pay for and to “adopt” the replacement devices, its twice-expressed official preference for devices employing paper ballots should prevail over the Election Commission’s choice of the $5.4 million ES&S ballot-marking devices, as recommended by Election Administrator Linda Phillips. After a hearing Thursday afternoon, Chancellor Gadson W. Perry denied the Election Commission’s petition for a writ of mandamus, which would have forced the issue in the EC’s favor. The judge cited contradictions in specific Tennessee statutes, with one of the several laws discussed in the hearing concretely giving the EC the right to select election machinery, while another, just as firmly, supported the county commission’s contention that its control of funding precluded a “duty” to rubber-stamp the EC’s choice.

Full Article: Memphis Flyer | Chancellor Rules Against EC in Round One of Voting-Machine Dispute

Texas secretary of state releases guidance on so-called election audits | Alexa Ura/The Texas Tribune

October 1, 2021

In the five days since the Texas secretary of state’s office announced it is auditing the 2020 general election in four counties, local officials indicated they were in the dark about what the reviews would entail. Now, they’ve learned they cover some of the standard post-election procedures local officials are already required to undertake. On Tuesday night, the state agency that oversees elections offered the first glimpse of what it has dubbed a “full forensic audit” of the election in Harris, Dallas, Tarrant and Collin counties, but it appears the scope of the effort may be more limited than what the term may suggest. The secretary of state’s documentation explaining the parameters of the reviews notes the first phase includes partial manual counts of ballots and security assessments, which all counties are already required to undergo. The second phase, which is slated for “spring 2022,” will be an examination of election records “to ensure election administration procedures were properly followed.” That includes reviews of records of voting machine accuracy tests, rosters for early voting, forms detailing chain of custody for sealed ballot boxes and other election materials maintained by the counties. But the secretary of state also indicates it will review records that counties already provide to the office, including the “reasonable impediment declarations” filled out by voters who indicate they lack one of the photo IDs the state requires voters to present to cast a ballot.

Source: Texas secretary of state releases guidance on so-called election audits | The Texas Tribune

Wisconsin Governor says election officials should be ‘lawyered up’ as partisan review of 2020 ramps up | Patrick Marley Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

October 1, 2021

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said Tuesday that municipal and county clerks should get “lawyered up” as the attorney overseeing the effort sought to meet with Milwaukee County’s clerk during a partisan review of the 2020 election. “All’s I can say is if I were a clerk I’d be lawyered up,” Evers told reporters at the World Dairy Expo in Madison. “I hate to see them in this position when they’re being told they have to prove this was a good election. Everybody knows it was a good election.” Evers made his comments as Assembly Republicans seek to comb through how the 2020 election was conducted. Recounts and court rulings have repeatedly found Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin by 0.6 percentage points. Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is overseeing the review at a cost of about $680,000 to taxpayers. Gableman last year told a pro-Trump crowd without evidence that the election had been stolen. Gableman last week asked Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson to meet with him, in part because Christenson has criticized Gableman’s review, according to records released this week.

Source: Wisconsin clerks need lawyers during 2020 election review, Evers says

Arizona audit debunks Trump’s false claims, but the poison of misinformation still threatens the electoral process | Dan Balz/The Washington Post

September 27, 2021

Another door slammed shut Friday on the ceaseless and fraudulent campaign by Donald Trump to claim fraud about the 2020 election. The fact that the door closed will not stop Trump from continuing to make his baseless claims about last year’s vote. It should but probably won’t chasten Republican leaders who have refused to fully face up to the consequences of what Trump is doing. The consequences are the threat to future elections. The consequences are the danger that future close elections will be subjected to similar false claims that inspire more doubts about the integrity of the vote and more disputed outcomes. The consequences are the distinct risk that partisanship will be routinely injected into the counting of votes. The idea that it can’t happen here should be tossed aside if Trump and his acolytes maintain their current course, which they will. The door that closed Friday was the biggest one out there, the convoluted and contentious review of the vote in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The review, described by some as an audit, was ordered by the Republican-controlled state Senate and handed to a firm known as Cyber Ninjas, which had no real experience with election reviews. The outfit spent months reviewing 2.1 million ballots that had been cast in Arizona’s most populous county. They pursued all manner of conspiracy theories, including an examination of the ballots to see if any contained traces of bamboo, based on the wild claim that there were counterfeit ballots printed in Asia and that were somehow sneaked into Arizona. The auditors far exceeded their expected timeline. They moved ballots from one location to another. Their work forced the county to decide it should replace its election machinery, fearing that the existing machines had been tainted. Along the way, the Cyber Ninjas team drew constant criticism, from both Democrats and some Republican officials in Maricopa County, who blistered the effort as needless and the examiners as ill-equipped for the job. In the end, what the review found was that Biden not only won the county, just as the initial vote tallies and certified final results had said, but also that he gained a net of 360 votes. Whatever else the lengthy report said about the ballots, the bottom line was that Trump’s claims were found to be bogus, which frankly was predictable.

Source: Arizona audit debunks Trump’s false claims, but the poison of misinformation still threatens the electoral process – The Washington Post

All eyes turn to Pennsylvania after Arizona’s ‘audit’ affirmed Biden’s presidential victory | Andrew Seidman and Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

September 27, 2021

Pennsylvania now stands to become ground zero in the movement to “audit” the election after former President Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 election results failed in Arizona. A monthslong partisan review in Arizona affirmed President Joe Biden’s victory there, according to findings made public Friday of the so-called “forensic audit” of the election results in Maricopa County, a linchpin county. That review had been widely criticized by experts for failing to follow best practices and was led by a company called Cyber Ninjas that had no previous experience with elections. Lawmakers in Harrisburg have insisted their “forensic investigation” is different from Arizona’s. Asked about the results there, State Sen. Cris Dush — the Jefferson County Republican leading the Pennsylvania probe who traveled to Phoenix in June to tour the facility where the Cyber Ninjas team counted ballots and inspected machines — issued a brief statement Friday night that said: “Protecting the integrity of Pennsylvanians’ election system is not only critical to the overall function of our country, but also secures Pennsylvania’s unique role as a state within the fabric of our nation by allowing Pennsylvanians to express our state’s culture, demographic, and geographic diversity through our voting process. It is for these reasons, that Pennsylvania and other states must have certainty in the oversight and integrity of their state’s voting system.” … Best practices for post-election audits include that they are routine and happen shortly after elections, using specified procedures, said Mark Lindeman, a director at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that focuses on the role of technology in election administration. “What’s extraordinary about what’s increasingly happening around the country — and the sort of bandwagon that Pennsylvania seems to be climbing on — is it’s not routine, there are no defined procedures, and even the objectives, beyond airing grievances and paranoid fantasies about the 2020 election, are radically unclear,” he said.

Full Article: All eyes turn to Pennsylvania after Arizona’s ‘audit’ affirmed Biden’s presidential victory

National: Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections | Tim Reid, Nathan Layne and Jason Lange/Reuters

September 27, 2021

One leading candidate seeking to become Georgia’s chief elections official, Republican Jody Hice, is a Congressman who voted to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win in the hours after the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Hice had posted on social media earlier that day: “This is our 1776 moment,” referencing the American Revolution. In Arizona, the contenders for the elections-chief office, secretary of state, include Republican state lawmaker Mark Finchem, who attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally before the deadly insurrection and spoke at a similar gathering the previous day. In Nevada, one strong Republican candidate for elections chief is Jim Marchant, who unsuccessfully sued to have his own defeat in a 2020 congressional race reversed based on unfounded voter-fraud claims. The three candidates are part of a wider group of Republican secretary-of-state contenders in America’s swing states who have embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he lost a “rigged” election. Their candidacies have alarmed Democrats and voting-rights groups, who fear that the politicians who tried hardest to undermine Americans’ faith in elections last year may soon be the ones running them – or deciding them, in future contested votes. Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and Colorado’s top elections official, said the secretary-of-state races reflect a much broader exploitation of phony voter-fraud claims by Republicans seeking all levels of elected office. “That is ‘code red’ for democracy,” she said in an interview.

Full Article: Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections | Reuters

National: Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

September 27, 2021

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump. But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue. The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless. The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

Full Article: Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows – The New York Times

National: Disinformation May Be the New Normal, Election Officials Fear | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

September 27, 2021

As voting wound down last week during the California recall election, Natalie Adona, the assistant registrar of voters in Nevada County, got an irate phone call. A voter, driven by disinformation that Republican politicians had pushed for weeks, berated Adona over the state’s lack of a photo ID law, saying election officials exposed the voting system to fraud. Adona explained that election officials follow state law and verify signatures on mail-in ballots. After a tense back-and-forth, the voter called her a Nazi. Election officials across the country say such attacks have become commonplace. “It’s escalated to an unhealthy and dangerous level,” Adona said in an interview. “We are trying to talk over others who have a further reach, more money, more power and basically are more interested in winning elections than American democracy, even though they know what they’re saying is not true.” The lies about election fraud, which range from false claims about the winner of the 2020 presidential race to accusations about this month’s California recall process, have state and local election officials worried about the future. As gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia approach this fall, and next year’s national midterms near, election officials are struggling to combat disinformation and assure voters their ballots are secure.

Full Article: Disinformation May Be the New Normal, Election Officials Fear | The Pew Charitable Trusts

Alabama Secretary of State disputes MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s claims state had 100,000 ‘flipped’ votes | Leada Gore/AL.com

September 27, 2021

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill is disputing claims cybercriminals “flipped” 100,000 votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. The claims came from Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and an adviser to former president Trump. Lindell has been touring states in an effort to prove the election was stolen from Trump via computer manipulation. He visited Merrill and Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey last week, saying he planned to run “tests” on the state’s voter rolls. In a video posted online Sunday, Lindell said while Alabama is a “role model as to how elections should go,” its voting system was “hacked…just like every other state,” possibly by accessing machines remotely through Bluetooth technology. Lindell did not offer any evidence of his claims in the video or provide details on who he thought was involved. “This was the one time we’re going to have to do a little bit of a deeper dive here. On the surface you can’t see where it happened,” Lindsell said. “What I guarantee they’ve had to do in Alabama is the bad people…went deeper into the well. Very deep into the well of how they did the flips.” Lindell’s data said 100,000 votes were changed in the state and “every single county was affected.” Merrill said that’s not possible. “All our (voting) machines are custom-built. There’s no modem component. You can’t influence them through a cell phone or a landline. There’s no way they can be probed or numbers manipulated,” Merrill told AL.com.

Full Article: Secretary of State disputes MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s claims Alabama had 100,000 ‘flipped’ votes – al.com

Arizona Senate leaders confirm Biden win but call for further review of election procedures | Mary Jo Pitzl and Jen Fifield/Arizona Republic

September 27, 2021

The Maricopa County election review hit a crescendo Friday when its results were presented to the Arizona Senate Republicans who ordered it in the heated aftermath of last year’s presidential election. It was a major milestone — if not the end — of the nearly 10-month odyssey pushed largely by election conspiracists loyal to former President Donald Trump, who believed a thorough review would show county elections officials didn’t get it right. But any hopes for such a conclusion were dashed early by Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott, who confirmed in her opening remarks what draft versions of the reports leaked to journalists the day before said: The hand recount of ballots showed Joe Biden won the election in Maricopa County, cementing his win in Arizona. “That is a true statement. Truth is truth, numbers are numbers,” Fann said as a packed audience in the Senate gallery listened quietly. She added, though, that she believed there were “broken statutes” and flawed election procedures — issues that she would turn over to Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate.

Full Article: Arizona audit: Senate confirms Biden win, but more review to come

Arizona Republican Review of Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election | Jack Healy, Michael Wines and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

September 27, 2021

After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report. In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix. The full review is set to be released on Friday, but draft versions circulating through Arizona political circles were obtained by The New York Times from a Republican and a Democrat. Late on Thursday night, Maricopa County, whose Republican leaders have derided the review, got a jump on the official release by tweeting out its conclusions. “The county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the county said on Twitter. It then criticized the review as “littered with errors and faulty conclusions.”

Full Article: Republican Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election – The New York Times

Arizona ballot review undermined election security, new Center for Internet Security leaders say | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

September 27, 2021

Two of the former statewide election officials recently hired to lead the Center for Internet Security’s election security efforts said Friday that the partisan ballot review in Maricopa County, Arizona, undermined the work that election officials have done to secure elections over the past few years. “It’s the very opposite of what election officials around the country have been working to do,” said former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who started earlier this month as CIS’s new vice president of election operations and support. “There’s no need to make up stuff because we have practices that exist that dedicated officials at the state and local level have been carrying out.” Boockvar’s comments came the same day the Arizona Senate is due to hold a hearing on the results of a five-month inspection of more than 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County, a process that was ordered up by supporters of former President Donald Trump who objected to his loss last year to Joe Biden. A draft of the report by Cyber Ninjas, the third-party company that was hired to conduct the ballot inspection — which was so fraught that Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs decertified the county’s entire inventory of voting equipment — once again confirmed President Biden’s win, though it continued to push claims about election officials’ conduct that Maricopa County officials have said are false.

Full Article: Arizona ballot review undermined election security, new EI-ISAC leaders say

California: Is San Francisco’s elections director impeding voting machine progress? | Jeff Elder/The San Francisco Examiner

September 27, 2021

San Francisco has been locked into a monopolistic relationship with its voting machine vendor for years, preventing both competition and innovation, a grand jury and other experts have found. Yet this week The City’s top elections official pushed back on an offer of free help from a San Francisco nonprofit to explore new technology and bring much-needed competition. Longtime Elections Director John Arntz rebuffed the nonprofit, VotingWorks, at Wednesday’s Elections Commission meeting, saying, “We’re not looking to do a pilot program.” VotingWorks, a nonprofit that was developed in San Francisco’s Y Combinator startup incubator, has worked with the federal government’s main cybersecurity agency on election security projects, and is being used for elections in Mississippi, where the nonprofit journalism news agency ProPublica noted its “seamless performance.” Despite Arntz’s comments, records show that leaders including mayors and the president of the Board of Supervisors have called for voting machine pilot programs like this for a decade. In 2011, a city task force report on voting technology compiled for Mayor Ed Lee recommended a “policy of San Francisco to conduct pilot projects of alternative election technologies … such as using open source systems.”

Full Article: Is San Francisco’s elections director impeding voting machine progress? – The San Francisco Examiner

Colorado elections supervisor embraced conspiracy theories. Officials say she has become an insider threat. | Emma Brown/The Washington Post

September 27, 2021

In April, employees in the office that runs elections in western Colorado’s Mesa County received an unusual calendar invitation for an after-hours work event, a gathering at a hotel in Grand Junction. “Expectations are that all will be at the Doubletree by 5:30,” said the invite sent by a deputy to Tina Peters, the county’s chief elections official. Speaking at the DoubleTree was Douglas Frank, a physics teacher and scientist who was rapidly becoming famous among election deniers for claiming to have discovered secret algorithms used to rig the 2020 contest against Donald Trump. Frank led the crowd in a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and spent the next 90 minutes alleging an elaborate conspiracy involving inflated voter rolls, fraudulent ballots and a “sixth-order polynomial,” video of the event shows. He was working for MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, he said, and their efforts could overturn President Biden’s victory. Being told to sit through a presentation of wild, debunked claims was “a huge slap in the face,” one Mesa County elections-division employee said of the previously unreported episode. “We put so much time and effort into making sure that everything’s done accurately,” the employee told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Peters, the elected county clerk, had expressed sympathy for such theories in the past, the employee said. Over the course of the past month, in a lawsuit filed by the state’s top elections official, Peters and her deputy have been accused of sneaking someone into the county elections offices to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines. Those copies later surfaced online and in the hands of election deniers. The local district attorney, state prosecutors and the FBI are investigating whether criminal charges are warranted.

Full Article: Tina Peters embraced conspiracy theories. Officials say she has become an insider threat. – The Washington Post

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