Texas ballot secrecy draws attention in Legislature, courts | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas officials had to issue emergency guidance this year to patch holes in new election transparency laws that threatened to expose the choices people made on their ballots. Now that the 2024 election is over, the issue of protecting ballot secrecy is receiving renewed attention in both the courts and the legislature. A national conservative nonprofit last week filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County, alleging the county isn’t taking steps to protect voters’ right to a secret ballot. Another case involving an activist who claims to have uncovered the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters is ongoing. Read Article

Washington legislation would put security cameras near ballot drop boxes | Tim Clouser/The Center Square

After an individual set fire to two Clark County ballot boxes in October, a Republican state lawmaker filed legislation Tuesday that would create a new security camera grant program. Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, filed two bills on Tuesday: Senate Bill 5010 to create the grant program and Senate Bill 5011 to update what’s written on ballot boxes. While seemingly minor, the proposal follows ballot tampering leading up to the Nov. 5 general election that destroyed hundreds of ballots. The first incident happened on Oct. 8 when someone put an “improvised incendiary device” on a Clark County ballot box, setting fire to the ballots inside. Then, on Oct. 28, just over a week from the election, someone did the same to another Clark County box and one in Portland, Oregon. Read Article

National: Election denialism emerges on the left after Trump’s win | Kat Tenbarge and Bruna Horvath/NBC

In the days following the presidential election, a familiar strain of denialism and conspiracy thinking began to emerge in the corners of some social media platforms. On the right, familiar conspiracy theories about voting popularized by President-elect Donald Trump continued to circulate. But similar ideas also took hold among some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and have continued to spread. Max Read, a senior research manager for elections at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank studying extremism, hate and disinformation, said the post-election denialism popping up on the left is “the most significant” effort to dispute or undermine elections he has observed from that side of the aisle. Read Article

Voting is harder than ever for Native Americans, study shows | Graham Lee Brewer/Associated Press

A new study has found that systemic barriers to voting on tribal lands contribute to substantial disparities in Native American turnout, particularly for presidential elections. The study, released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice, looked at 21 states with federally recognized tribal lands that have a population of at least 5,000 and where more than 20% of residents identify as American Indian or Alaska Native. Researchers found that between 2012 and 2022, voter participation in federal elections was 7 percentage points lower in midterms and 15 percentage points lower in presidential elections than among those living off tribal lands in the same states. Earlier studies show voter turnout for communities of color is higher in areas where their ethnic group is the majority, but the latest research found that turnout was the lowest on tribal lands that have a high concentration of Native Americans, the Brennan Center said. Read Article

National: Post-election lesson: The era of conspiracy theories and misinformation won’t end quickly | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The past few elections have shown that American voters can be sore losers when the election doesn’t go their way, and sometimes the winners turn out to be disingenuous when it does. On one hand, after years of making spurious allegations, those promoting election conspiracy theories on the right have been notably silent about Donald Trump’s clear win in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. On the other hand, certain people on the left — who have been raging about their faith in democracy for the past eight years — are grumbling about the possibility that something went wrong on Election Day. Read Article

National: Multiple election offices report receiving mailed ballots misdirected from other states | Christina A. Cassidy, John Hanna and Amy Beth Hanson/Associated Press

Terry Thompson had an election to run for voters in Cascade County, Montana. Why then, she thought, was her office in Great Falls being sent mailed ballots completed by voters in places such as Wasilla, Alaska; Vancouver, Washington; and Tampa, Florida? It was only about a dozen ballots total from voters in other states. But she said it still raised concerns about the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver election mail and whether the errant ballots would ever be counted. While a stray ballot ending up in the wrong place can happen during election season, the number of ballots destined for other states and counties that ended up at Thompson’s office is unusual. The Associated Press found it wasn’t an anomaly. Election offices in California, Louisiana, New Mexico and elsewhere also reported receiving completed ballots in the mail that should have gone to other states. Read Article

National: DARPA-backed voting system for soldiers abroad savaged | Thomas Claburn/The Register

In February, VotingWorks, a non-profit election technology developer, showed off a prototype of an encrypted voting system. With funding support from DARPA, the project aims to make it easier for service personnel to vote in US elections when stationed outside of the United States. Their proposed system – dubbed CACvote in reference to military smart ID cards called “Common Access Cards” – consists of four elements: voting kiosks at military bases for military personnel; a computer system that receives ballots from those kiosks; a cryptographic protocol for encoding and transmitting ballots, which also get printed and mailed; and a risk-limiting audit (RLA) protocol intended to detect integrity violations (eg, hacking) that alter an election outcome, and to correct the outcome. The latter two elements – the cryptographic protocol and the RLA – collectively are known as MERGE, which stands for Matching Electronic Results with Genuine Evidence. Paper ballots represent said evidence. According to an analysis paper from Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, and Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, MERGE “contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound” but isn’t realistic given the legal, institutional, and practical changes necessary to make it work. Read Article

National: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the 2024 Election | Julia Edinger/Government Technology

During a Congressional Internet Caucus Academy briefing this week, experts argued the impact of artificial intelligence on the 2024 election was less extreme than predicted — but deepfakes and misinformation still played a role. There were major concerns leading up to the 2024 election that AI would disrupt elections through false information; overall, the impact was less extreme than experts had warned it could be. However, AI still had an effect, as seen by way of deepfakes, like the Biden robocall and misinformation from AI-powered chatbots. Read Article

Arizona: As Cochise County certifies election, Peggy Judd looks back at the vote that upended her life | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Peggy Judd knew exactly what she needed to do. Judd, a Republican on the board of supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona, had to vote yes Wednesday on whether to certify the county’s presidential election results. If she didn’t, she would be not only breaking the law, but also violating the terms of her plea agreement. That’s because, two years ago, after the 2022 midterms, she made a different choice. She and another Republican supervisor voted to delay the certification of that election past the legal deadline. That decision made her one of a handful of local Republican officials around the country who unsuccessfully tried to halt or delay certification of an election. It also upended Judd’s life. Read Article

Georgia: Hand-count election audit verifies Trump’s victory | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A hand-count audit of Georgia’s presidential election reported miniscule discrepancies from the machine count, confirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The results of the manual review released Wednesday showed 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris out of nearly 750,000 ballots reviewed by election officials across the state. “This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “they are the cream of the crop.” Read Article

Massachusetts: Post-election report shows accessibility, ballot and registration issues | Willoughby Mariano/WBUR News

There were 50 incidents on Election Day that hampered the ability of people with disabilities to vote in Massachusetts, according to a report issued Wednesday by a commission of several voting rights groups. Voting assistance machines for those with disabilities broke down, while main entrances and exits to some precincts could only be accessed by stairs, according to the report issued by the Massachusetts Election Protection Coalition. Four polling places in Boston had a shortage of ballots. “Democracy shouldn’t be available on a first-come, first-served basis,” said Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, which is part of the coalition. Read Article

Michigan managed to speed up election results, but some things just take time | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan set itself up to blaze through its 2024 ballot counts. New policies were in the state’s favor, including pre-processing of absentee ballots as well as early in-person voting, and voters and election officials took full advantage. But elections are ultimately a human process, from who participates in them to who runs them. And it was mostly a set of human factors that prevented the state from releasing unofficial results until the middle of the day on Wednesday. Getting results any faster in future elections is likely to prove difficult, officials say. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to try. Read Article

Nevada’s top election official eyes changes to speed up ballot counting | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar on Thursday admitted that he was frustrated by the pace of election results this year, and that he would be working with legislators to determine ways to speed up the counting of ballots. Aguilar said many of the ballot counting difficulties likely stemmed from staffing levels in Clark and Washoe counties, despite efforts by both counties this year to accelerate ballot processing. Aguilar has been complimentary of how the state’s elections ran this year — and he reasserted Thursday that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud — but he acknowledged there is room for improvement. Read Article

North Carolina Republicans pass sweeping changes to consolidate power | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measure to give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. Republicans hold three-fifths majorities in the legislature and have used that power to override vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). In January, they’ll lose the ability to easily roll back vetoes by incoming Gov. Josh Stein (D) because they’ll no longer hold such a large majority in the North Carolina House. The GOP response has been to flex their power now, while they still have it. They loaded up a $227 million Hurricane Helene relief package with an array of provisions that weaken the hand of Stein and other Democrats in the battleground state. Hours after unveiling the proposals, the state House passed the bill Tuesday night, and the state Senate approved it Wednesday. Read Article

Oregon election officials clear up confusion about ballot counting | Aviva Bechky/The Oregonian

Oregon’s elections office reassured residents Thursday that this fall’s ballot counting is sound and accurate, after some Oregonians questioned the office’s ballot return reports. The confusion stemmed from two documents the office posted online that showed how many ballots county elections offices had received each day, including on Election Day and the day after. The inconsistency that social media users noticed is that an initial state report, released Nov. 6, said about 2,140,000 ballots had been returned by end of day Nov. 5, Election Day. A second report generated on Nov. 14 said that Oregon voters turned in nearly 5,000 more ballots on Nov. 6 — but that the state somehow surpassed 2,300,000 ballots cast in total that day. Read Article

South Carolina: Aiken County election’s office fails first effort to certify | Anna Wilder/Hilton Head Island Packet

Despite initially certifying the wrong election results and failing its audit, all votes in Aiken County have been accurately counted and certified, despite a software glitch, state and county election officials said. South Carolina Election Commission spokesperson John Michael Catalano said some of the vote totals in Aiken were incorrectly counted in the wrong voting-method category, but the total votes for each candidate were correct. “It was the makeup of the vote, and it was basically absentee votes were showing up in election day totals,” Catalano said. Catalano said no other county has failed an audit since 2020 when South Carolina changed the voting system process to include paper ballots. Read Article

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey concedes race against Dave McCormick amid recount | Julia Terruso and Katie Bernard/The Philadelphia Inquirer

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) conceded to Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday, formally ending his reelection bid and acknowledging defeat two weeks after the Associated Press declared McCormick’s victory and after a statewide recount of the race had been triggered. Casey had resisted conceding, citing thousands of votes that still needed to be counted and entering court fights to maximize the number of ballots included. But as final ballots were adjudicated Thursday, Casey’s roughly 16,500-vote deficit was too large to overcome and so large that a recount would not affect it. “I want to thank the people of Pennsylvania for granting me the privilege of serving them for 28 consecutive years in public office as auditor general, state treasurer, and United States senator,” Casey said. “Every day I served in public office, I’ve fought for Pennsylvania workers, children, seniors, people with disabilities, and our veterans. … It has been the honor of my lifetime.” Read Article

A Texas election official feels the strain of unrelenting scrutiny | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field. She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music. Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

How many times can you hear the same lie
Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly. “But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard Read Article

Wisconsin: Conspiracy theorists again seize on Milwaukee election error | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

In the early morning following Election Day in 2020, Claire Woodall, then Milwaukee’s elections chief, mistakenly left behind a USB stick carrying vote totals at the city’s central absentee ballot counting facility. Election conspiracy theorists quickly seized on the mistake, accusing Woodall of rigging the election. Their claims were baseless, but the mistake increased scrutiny on the city’s election staff and led Woodall to create a checklist to make sure workers at central count didn’t overlook any critical steps in the future. This year, despite the checklist, Milwaukee election staff at central count made another procedural mistake — and once again left the door open to conspiracy theorists. Somebody — city officials haven’t said who — overlooked the second step outlined on the checklist and failed to lock and seal the hatch covers on the facility’s 13 tabulators before workers began tabulating ballots. For hours, while counting proceeded, the machines’ on-off switches and USB ports were left exposed. Read Article

Wisconsin Supreme Court hears case over fate of elections chief Wolfe | Jessie Opoien/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The state Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a case that will determine whether Republican lawmakers can remove or replace Wisconsin’s top elections official as she remains in the post beyond the expiration of her term. Dane County Circuit Judge Ann Peacock ruled in January that Senate Republicans do not have the authority to remove or replace Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe — a decision legislative Republicans appealed and brought to the state’s high court. Peacock ruled Wolfe legally retains her position beyond an expired term because of a 2022 ruling that allowed Frederick Prehn, a holdover from Republican former Gov. Scott Walker’s administration, to remain on the state’s Natural Resources Board nearly two years after his term ended. Read Article

National: Certifying this year’s presidential results begins quietly, in contrast to the 2020 election | Christina A. Cassidy and Ali Swenson/Associated Press

Local officials are beginning to certify the results of this year’s presidential election in a process that, so far, has been playing out quietly, in stark contrast to the tumultuous certification period four years ago that followed then-President Donald Trump’s loss. Georgia was the first of the presidential battleground states to start certifying, with local election boards voting throughout the day Tuesday. As counties certified their results without controversy, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger hailed Georgia’s election as “free, fair and fast.” Trump won Georgia and the six other presidential battleground states, after losing six of them to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. County certification meetings are scheduled later in the week in several other swing states — Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Read Article

National: Election officials knock down Starlink vote rigging conspiracy theories | Melissa Goldin/Associated Press

“It is not possible that Starlink was used to hack or change the outcome of the US presidential election,” David Becker, founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, wrote in an email. “This, quite simply, did not happen, and could not happen, thanks to the security measures we have in place, and these conspiracy theories echo other disinformation we’ve heard over the past several years.” Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, agreed that the idea that Starlink was used to rig the election is absurd. “While Starlink provided connectivity in a number of jurisdictions for electronic poll books (EPBs) in this election, neither Starlink nor other types of communication networks play any role in counting votes,” she wrote in an email. “Our elections produce huge quantities of physical evidence. A satellite system like Starlink cannot steal that.” Read Article

National: As Trump Refers to Third Term, Democrat Wants to Leave No Constitutional Loophole | Annie Karni/The New York Times

When President-elect Donald J. Trump met with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, he suggested he might need their help to try to circumvent the Constitution and run for a third term in the future — a comment that was met with laughter by his friendly audience. “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out,’ ” Mr. Trump told Republicans, who appeared to take it as a joke. One Democrat is moving quickly to make sure that cannot happen. Representative Dan Goldman of New York plans on Thursday to introduce a resolution clarifying that the Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents applies even if the terms are not consecutive. It asserts that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a person who has been elected president twice cannot run again, “applies to two terms in the aggregate” and leaves no loophole. In other words, Mr. Trump — who served from 2017 to 2021 and is slated to assume the presidency again in January — could not seek another term in the future. Read Article

National: 2020’s debunked election fraud claims are coming back due to Trump’s 2024 victory | Shannon Bond/NPR

Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory is fueling claims of fraud on both sides of the political divide. His right-wing supporters claim the outcome vindicates their debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. To a smaller degree, those on the left are circulating their own baseless claims casting doubt on this year’s results. The narrative twist emerging in the wake of Election Day shows how the movement is continuing to sow doubt about the voting process even after their preferred candidate won. The new claims center on comparing popular vote totals in 2020 and 2024: Four years ago, Joe Biden received around 81 million votes; as of Friday afternoon Vice President Harris’ total stood at 69 million, according to the Associated Press. Election deniers have framed the difference as “missing” Democratic ballots that validate their suspicions about cheating in 2020. Read Article

National: Partnerships Helped Secure Election Day Against New Threats | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

Election Day saw officials fend off threats that ranged from familiar cyber attacks to a new trend: fake bomb threats. But cybersecurity tools, long-running preparations and new collaborations helped thwart attempts to disrupt the vote. In the end, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly expressed confidence in how election processes ran, saying there was “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Indeed, there was a wide range of threats this year, everything from threats of physical violence against poll workers, to cyber attacks targeting election infrastructure, to foreign government-linked deepfakes, said John Cohen, executive director of the Center for Internet Security (CIS)’s Program for Countering Hybrid Threats. Read Article

National: Primary reform and ranked choice voting had a rough election | Ashley Lopez/NPR

Statewide efforts to adopt open and nonpartisan primaries, as well as ranked choice voting, failed in this year’s election, delivering a stinging setback to the election reform movement. The measures sought to reduce political polarization in U.S. politics. And while an overwhelming share of Americans say they are unhappy with the country’s democratic systems, these initiatives were voted down in states across the country this week. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota had ballot measures that would have replaced party primaries with nonpartisan contests and/or created a ranked choice voting system in their elections. A majority of those measures sought to implement both. Read Article

Arizona Supreme Court rejects request to extend ballot curing deadline | Coleby Phillips/Arizona Republic

As ballot results continued to trickle in after Election Day, concerns over vote count delays and ballot signature issues led voter rights groups to file an emergency petition to the Arizona Supreme Court. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Campaign Legal Center on Saturday requested a four-day extension for voters to “cure” their ballot beyond the original 5 p.m. Sunday deadline, arguing that “tens of thousands of Arizonans stand to be disenfranchised without any notice, let alone an opportunity to take action to ensure their ballots are counted.” In the petition, ACLU and CLC claimed that thousands of mail-in ballots in Arizona wouldn’t be processed until after the deadline, meaning some voters wouldn’t know if their ballot had an issue until it was too late to cure it. Read Article

Colorado: Denver DA investigates Secretary of State election system password breach | Sam Tabachnik/The Denver Post

The Denver district attorney has launched an investigation into how a spreadsheet of voting system passwords ended up on the Colorado secretary of state’s website earlier this year. The DA’s office on Monday would not divulge additional details of the probe beyond confirming an open investigation. On Oct. 29, Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced that a spreadsheet posted publicly on her office’s website for several months “improperly included” a hidden tab that displayed passwords protecting Colorado voting machines in many counties. The office categorized the breach as accidental. Griswold is not the focus or target of the DA’s investigation, according to an email obtained by The Denver Post that was sent by Beth McCann, the district attorney, to the office. Read Article

Georgia: Dice roll kicks off randomized ballot audit of presidential election | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A roll of the dice Thursday at the Georgia State Capitol started a statewide audit of the presidential election, a human review of paper ballots to check results counted by computers. One by one, election workers and volunteers tossed 10-sided dice onto a table to create a random 20-digit number. That random number was then fed into a computer to pick sample ballots to be reviewed in each of Georgia’s 159 counties over the next few days. The hand-reviewed count will be compared with the machine count to verify the outcome was correct. Read Article

Michigan: Here’s how initial unofficial election results got messed up for 5 counties | Paul Egan/Detroit Free Press

County clerks would like Michigan voters to know that unofficial election results are just that — unofficial and potentially subject to change. Errors in the initial results the state posted from Kent, Kalamazoo, Leelanau, Calhoun and Allegan counties threw off totals by close to 50,000 votes. That’s less than 1% of the more than 5.5 million ballots cast statewide, but the updated unofficial numbers will likely change the anticipated outcome of a statewide race for the MSU Board of Trustees and potentially impact one state House race and at least one local race. Clerks stress that in cases where initial posted results were incomplete, the actual results — and therefore the actual outcomes of races — never changed. The votes were in those cases correctly tabulated. Where mistakes happened, they say, is in how the initial results were reported, with some results from some precincts being initially omitted from what counties and/or the state posted online. Any such errors in unofficial numbers would have been caught in the canvassing of the results, which in many counties is still underway, but in fact were caught before the canvasses even began, clerks say. Read Article/a>