Warren Stewart – Page 138 – The Voting News

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georgia: Trump Committed ‘Multiple Crimes’ With Election Interference, Analysis Suggests | Jason Lemon/CNN

Former President Donald Trump appears to have committed “multiple crimes” in his effort to overturn the 2020 Georgia elections results, a new legal analysis suggests. In early January, The Washington Post reported leaked audio of a call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the former president urged the Republican official to “to find 11,780 votes” in his favor to overturn President Joe Biden‘s victory in the southern state. Trump made a similar effort to pressure Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp to illegally block Biden’s win. “We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes,” said the report released Friday by the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “These charges potentially include criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations,” the legal analysis explained.

Full Article: Trump Committed ‘Multiple Crimes’ With Georgia Election Interference, Analysis Suggests

Michigan: GOP to massively step up 2022 poll watching, Mackinac conference told | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

The GOP will massively increase its poll watching and election litigation efforts in 2022 and beyond after so far failing to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election through a series of lawsuits and audits, a top Republican National Committee official said Friday. Josh Findlay, election integrity director for the RNC, said one problem with GOP operations in 2020 was that attorneys for former President Donald Trump and other conservative groups went to court too late. Going to court on Election Day is “not going to be effective,” Findlay told attendees at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, held every other year on the northern Michigan island that can only be reached by ferry or private plane, and where motorized vehicles are generally banned. Findlay acknowledged another problem — one that both nonpartisan judges and Democrats said in response to allegations of voter fraud and irregularities put forward by Republican poll watchers in Detroit. There, large numbers of volunteers were recruited by the GOP, in many cases at the last minute, to go to the TCF Center in Detroit while absentee ballots were being counted after the Nov. 3 vote.

Full Article: GOP to massively step up 2022 poll watching, Mackinac conference told

New Hampshire Attorney General and Secretary of State Offer Mixed Response to Windham Auditors’ Proposed Election Reforms | Casey McDermott/New Hampshire Public Radio

The team running the closely-watched audit of election irregularities in Windham’s 2020 state representative race put forward a series of proposed reforms to help avoid the same problems in future elections. But the New Hampshire Attorney General and Secretary of State aren’t on board with all of those changes. Top state election officials say some of the auditors’ suggestions would be too burdensome to implement and others might violate voters’ privacy. They outlined their responses to the audit in this report. One major disagreement revolves around flagging ballots that can’t be properly read by the machines. New Hampshire doesn’t have a system to let voters know if their ballot appears to have too many marks on it when it’s fed into a ballot counting machine at the polls on Election Day. Auditors say enabling this kind of “overvote notification” wouldn’t have prevented the issues in Windham, but it would have identified the problem much sooner. Through their investigation, auditors determined that Windham’s ballot counting devices miscalculated the vote totals in its state representative race by misinterpreting creases in folded absentee ballots as valid votes.

Full Article: N.H. Attorney General and Secretary of State Offer Mixed Response to Windham Auditors’ Proposed Election Reforms | New Hampshire Public Radio

Ohio: Judge dismisses key defendants in Stark County Dominion voting machine lawsuit | Robert Wang/The Canton Repository

A lawsuit by a Washington, D.C.-based group won’t prevent Stark County from using Dominion voting machines for the Nov. 2 general election. Look Ahead America opted Wednesday not to appeal a key decision by Stark County Common Pleas Judge Taryn Heath. Her Aug. 20 ruling dismissed the county commissioners and Dominion Voting Systems as defendants from the case and killed any chance of immediately reversing the county’s purchase of the voting machines. Originally in May, the group filed suit against the Stark County Board of Elections, alleging the board had met in illegal executive sessions to discuss the machine purchase. However, the Board of Elections is not the governing entity that authorized the purchase of the machines. That was the Stark County commissioners. With the commissioners and Dominion no longer parties to the suit, it was not legally possible for Look Ahead America to get a preliminary injunction to pause or reverse the purchase, said Assistant Stark County Prosecutor Lisa Nemes. Heath’s magistrate, Kristen Moore, canceled a preliminary injunction hearing scheduled for Wednesday. She has set a phone conference for Monday for the parties to discuss what happens next.

Full Article: Look Ahead America lawsuit stymied in Stark voting machine lawsuit

Editorial: The survival of U.S. democracy may hinge on this decision by Pennsylvania’s next governor | Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer

To millions of Americans, what just happened in Arizona’s largest county was a laughingstock, a bad joke that blew up in the face of Donald Trump and his cultists like some exploding cigar from a 1940s cartoon. A GOP-approved hijacking of voting records and machines from the 2020 election — do not dare call it an “audit” — conducted by a scammy-is-too-good-a-word contractor called the Cyber Ninjas that dragged on through much of 2021 ultimately claimed that any miscounted votes actually expanded President Biden’s win in Maricopa County. The cackling on left-leaning Twitter and MSNBC Friday night could be heard from Key West to Kalamazoo. But one man — a Michigan carpetbagger turned Arizona politico named Mark Finchem — had a very different interpretation of what the conspiracy-minded voting sleuths had uncovered with official Republican support. “I call for decertification of the Arizona election, arrest of those involved in tampering with election systems, and an audit of Pima County (in northern Arizona) as a next step,” Finchem tweeted Friday. The crazy part is that Finchem’s minority viewpoints on Donald Trump and his invisible claims of election fraud may matter a heck of a lot more than yours or mine come the 2024 vote counting. Last week, the disgraced 45th president (and would-be 47th) officially endorsed Finchem, now a state lawmaker, in his 2022 GOP primary bid to become Arizona’s next secretary of state. Trump’s imprimatur makes Finchem the instant primary favorite, in a midterm election in which both history and newfangled voter suppression favors Republicans. That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years. Be very afraid.

Full Article: The survival of U.S. democracy may hinge on this decision by Pa.’s next governor | Will Bunch

Texas secretary of state’s office auditing four counties’ 2020 elections months after an official called the statewide process “smooth and secure” | Neelam Bohra/The Texas Tribune

The Texas secretary of state’s office announced late Thursday that it has begun a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 general election in four Texas counties: Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant. But the statement from that agency did not explain what prompted the move. There has been no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas in 2020. And earlier this year, an official for the agency called the 2020 election in Texas “smooth and secure.” Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the office, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The announcement came hours after Republican former President Donald Trump requested Gov. Greg Abbott add an election audit bill to this year’s third special session. While Trump lost his reelection bid, he did win in Texas. Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria characterized the audits as an attack on Texans’ trust in elections. “While other people continue the political posturing and petty fights of the past, we will continue preparing for this November’s elections,” she said in a statement. “We encourage Harris County residents to register to vote by the October 4 deadline.”

Full Article: Texas secretary of state’s office auditing elections in four counties | The Texas Tribune

Texas: Harris County leaders call state election audit a ‘sham’ and an assault on democracy to appease Trump | Zach Despart/Houston Chronicle

Harris County leaders on Friday blasted the Texas secretary of state’s decision to conduct a comprehensive “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in four counties, including Harris, as a political ploy to appease conspiracy theorists and former President Donald Trump. County Judge Lina Hidalgo accused Gov. Greg Abbott of trying to curry favor with the former president, who on Thursday called for an audit of the Texas results, despite comfortably carrying the state in his unsuccessful bid for re-election. She likened the effort to audits in Arizona and Pennsylvania, which have failed to find major errors in vote tallying. There is no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in Harris County’s 2020 election, where a record 1.7 million voters participated. “This does not deserve to be treated as a serious matter or serious audit,” Hidalgo said. “It is an irresponsible political trick. It is a sham. It is a cavalier and dangerous assault on voters and democracy.”

Full Article: Hidalgo calls state election audit a ‘sham’ and an assault on democracy to appease Trump

Wisconsin: Arizona review eyed by Republicans as a guide confirms Biden win | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Arizona election review some Wisconsin Republicans eyed as a guide to probe President Joe Biden’s win in the Badger State has confirmed the president’s victory, according to The Arizona Republic. Draft reports by The Cyber Ninjas, a group hired by the Arizona state Senate to recount votes and review the 2020 presidential election result in the state’s largest county, show former President Donald Trump lost by a wider margin than Maricopa County’s official election results. The Cyber Ninjas and their subcontractors were paid millions by nonprofits set up by prominent figures in the “Stop the Steal” movement and allies of Trump, but Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan had said that would not influence their work. According to The Arizona Republic, the draft reports minimize the ballot counts and election results and instead focus on issues that raise questions about the election process and voter integrity. Wisconsin taxpayers are paying former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman $680,000 to review the state’s 2020 election using an office created by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester.

Full Article: Arizona review eyed by Wisconsin Republicans as a guide confirms Biden win

Colorado: Mesa County Clerk Fights to Keep Her Job in New Court Filing | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who is embroiled in an election security scandal, has denied wrongdoing and requested to remain in her role overseeing elections this fall. Her attorney said Peters was well within her legal right to share information about the county’s Dominion Voting Systems equipment with a non-employee during an annual system upgrade. Data from the machines were featured in screenshots shared by QAnon supporters and released by the right wing website Gateway Pundit, by those eager to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election. A court filing in response to an effort to remove Peters from overseeing elections in Mesa, said the leak of information was not Peters’ intent, but rather she was trying to preserve records and to better analyze how the state conducted system updates. “Unfortunately, there was an unauthorized release of information on one or more publicly available web sites,” said a filing in District Court in Mesa County from attorney Scott Gessler. In the filing, Gessler, a Republican and former Colorado secretary of state, said the decision by current Secretary of State Jena Griswold to file a lawsuit to remove Peters from overseeing this fall’s election as a result was “wholly disproportionate” and violates Colorado law, “which vests local control over elections in a locally-elected official.” Mesa county’s district attorney and the FBI are investigating allegations that Peters gave an unauthorized person access to the Dominion election management software and passwords, but no criminal charges have been filed against Peters or anyone else in the dispute.

Full Article: Mesa County Clerk Fights to Keep Her Job in New Court Filing | Colorado Public Radio

National: Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense | Michael Wines/The New York Times

It is perhaps a metaphor for the times that even the volunteer who checked you into the polls in November now has a legal defense committee. The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which made its public debut on Sept. 7, offers to represent more than just poll workers, of course. Formed to counter the waves of political pressure and public bullying that election workers have faced in the last year, the organization pledges free legal services to anyone involved in the voting process, from secretaries of state to local election officials and volunteers. The group already has received inquiries from several election officials, said David J. Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, which oversees the project. Without getting into details, Mr. Becker said their queries were “related to issues like harassment and intimidation.” The network is the creation of two powerhouses in Republican and Democratic legal circles, Benjamin L. Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. In a Washington Post opinion piece this month, the two — Mr. Ginsberg was a premier G.O.P. lawyer for 38 years and Mr. Bauer was both a Democratic Party lawyer and White House counsel in the Obama administration — wrote that such attacks on people “overseeing the counting and casting of ballots on an independent, nonpartisan basis are destructive to our democracy.”

Full Article: Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense – The New York Times

National: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms | David Siders and Zach Montellaro/Politico

It started as one big, false claim — that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. But nearly a year later, the Big Lie is metastasizing, with Republicans throughout the country raising the specter of rigged elections in their own campaigns ahead of the midterms. The preemptive spin is everywhere. Last week it was Larry Elder in California, who — before getting trounced in the GOP’s failed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — posted a “Stop Fraud” page on his campaign website. Before that, at a rally in Virginia, state Sen. Amanda Chase introduced herself as a surrogate for gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin and told the crowd, “Because the Democrats like to cheat, you have to cast your vote before they do.” In Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the former state attorney general running to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is already talking about filing lawsuits to “tighten up the election” — more than a year before votes are cast. And in Pennsylvania, former Rep. Lou Barletta, who is running for governor after losing a Senate race two years earlier, said he “had to consider” whether a Republican could ever win a race again in his state given the current administration of elections there. Trump may have started the election-truther movement. But what was once the province of an aggrieved former president has spread far beyond him, infecting elections at every level with vague, unspecified claims that future races are already rigged. It’s a fiction that’s poised to factor heavily in the midterm elections and in 2024 — providing Republican candidates with a rallying cry for the rank-and-file, and priming the electorate for future challenges to races the GOP may lose.

Full Article: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms – POLITICO

National: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | John Kruzel/The Hill

Democrats on Capitol Hill are renewing calls for legislation that would stiffen criminal penalties against those who threaten election administrators after unprecedented harassment aimed at workers during last year’s presidential contest. More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including from the key battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are pushing the proposals, with some lawmakers warning that violence could erupt during upcoming elections without enhanced protections. “I hope that it does not come to that,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) of the prospect of violence against election workers. “But unless we do something about it, that’s the trendline. We saw what happened at the United States Capitol when no one took the proper steps to prevent that.” Nearly 1 in 6 local 2020 election workers received threats of violence, and almost 1 in 3 said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. Some had their homes broken into, others fled with their families into hiding and some faced armed crowds outside their workplaces and homes. And now, more than 10 months after Election Day, threats persist.

Full Article: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | TheHill

National: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election | Daniel Dale/CNN

Swing state by swing state, former President Donald Trump is trying to get people who tried to overturn the 2020 election chosen to be in charge of the 2024 election. Trump’s Monday endorsement of state Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state is the latest in a series of announcements that has alarmed independent elections experts. Trump has now backed Republicans who supported his lies about the 2020 election for the job of top elections official in three crucial battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan and Georgia — where the current elections chiefs opposed his efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat. If people who have sought to undermine the 2020 election are running things in 2024, when Trump might be a candidate again, experts and many Democrats fear that attempts to subvert the will of the voters stand a much greater chance of success. “It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science and co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine. “Someone who claims falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump lacks credibility and cannot be trusted to run a fair election.” Finchem, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, has been an especially aggressive promoter of the lies that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and rife with “rampant” fraud. Finchem attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and was photographed outside the US Capitol that day (he denies any involvement in the riot there). And nearly eight months after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, he continues to urge Arizona legislators to somehow overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

Full Article: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election – CNNPolitics

National: Judge: Former EAC executive director Brian Newby violated law in voter form case | Roxana Hegeman/Associated Press