Wisconsin: Debunking Election Claims: How Misinformation Is Slowing Wisconsin’s Recount | Joy Powers and Jack Hurbanis/WUWM

The Wisconsin election recount is continuing in Milwaukee and Dane counties, but officials say uninformed observers are obstructing the process. It’s also slow moving because President Donald Trump’s attorneys have been making unsubstantiated claims of fraud. In part, these issues may stem from a bigger issue facing the recount process — rampant misinformation. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Eric Litke keeps track of these claims for PolitiFact Wisconsin and he says many of the claims being made about ballots go back to election night and how ballots were reported. “The biggest stuff all really ties down to how votes were reported, we have this tendency to see the vote returns on election night as this kind of a horse race or something but in reality, those votes all exist, it’s just a matter of which pile we get to first,” says Litke. With large cities like Milwaukee, it was known before the election that a record number of people would vote absentee and those ballots would skew towards Democrats. When those votes were announced, many then tried to paint it as something nefarious or wrong. Amongst a few of the specific claims Litke has been following, one honed in on the Milwaukee Election Commission and a flash drive. Because the city of Milwaukee’s voting machines are not connected to the internet, the central count of absentee ballots had to be placed on flash drives. The total count took twelve flash drives but when the head of the Milwaukee Election Commission arrived at the reporting facility, she only had eleven flash drives.

Full Article: Debunking Election Claims: How Misinformation Is Slowing Wisconsin’s Recount | WUWM

Trump Administration Approves Start of Formal Transition to Biden | Michael D. Shear, Maggie Haberman, Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

President Trump’s government on Monday authorized President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified Mr. Biden as its winner, a strong sign that the president’s last-ditch bid to overturn the results of the election was coming to an end. Mr. Trump did not concede, and vowed to persist with efforts to change the vote, which have so far proved fruitless. But the president said on Twitter on Monday night that he accepted the decision by Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to allow a transition to proceed. In his tweet, Mr. Trump said that he had told his officials to begin “initial protocols” involving the handoff to Mr. Biden “in the best interest of our country,” even though he had spent weeks of trying to subvert a free and fair election with false claims of fraud. Hours later, he tried to play down the significance of Ms. Murphy’s action, tweeting that it was simply “preliminarily work with the Dems” that would not stop efforts to change the election results. Still, Ms. Murphy’s designation of Mr. Biden as the apparent victor provides the incoming administration with federal funds and resources and clears the way for the president-elect’s advisers to coordinate with Trump administration officials. The decision from Ms. Murphy came after several additional senior Republican lawmakers, as well as leading figures from business and world affairs, denounced the delay in allowing the peaceful transfer of power to begin, a holdup that Mr. Biden and his top aides said was threatening national security and the ability of the incoming administration to effectively plan for combating the coronavirus pandemic. And it followed a key court decision in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Supreme Court on Monday ruled against the Trump campaign and the president’s Republican allies, stating that roughly 8,000 ballots with signature or date irregularities must be counted.

Full Article: Trump Administration Approves Start of Formal Transition to Biden – The New York Times

Georgia presidential recount begins today | David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Election officials across Georgia will begin another count of votes in the presidential election Tuesday. The recount can begin at 9 a.m. Tuesday and must be completed by midnight Dec. 2, the secretary of state’s office announced. It will be the third tally of votes in a race decided by the narrowest of margins — Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump by just 12,670 votes out of some 5 million ballots cast in Georgia. But election officials do not expect the third count to change the outcome of the race. Nor is it likely to dampen calls to revisit that outcome. Trump’s campaign has demanded what state election officials say is impossible — a recount that includes rechecking voter signatures to uncover potential fraud. On Monday, a top election official also poured cold water on calls by Georgia Republicans for an audit to double-check the signature matching efforts of local election workers. Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system manager, said such an audit would be technically feasible. But he said there is no specific evidence of wrongdoing to warrant more scrutiny of voter signatures, barring a court order. “We can’t open investigations based on generalized, `we’re not happy with the outcome’ ” of the election, Sterling said. “If somebody comes to us with specific evidence, we investigate that.” Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger certified the election Friday. The move came after a hand recount of every ballot confirmed the outcome of the presidential race.

Full Article: Georgia presidential recount begins Tuesday

National: What you need to know about Dominion, the company that Trump and his lawyers baselessly claim ‘stole’ the election | Neena Satija/The Washington Post

President Trump and his allies have sought to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election by challenging everything from poll-watching procedures to the dates on absentee ballots to the addresses on file for voters. In recent days, Trump and his legal advisers have found a new target: Dominion Voting Systems, a company that supplies voting technology for election jurisdictions across the United States. Egged on by Trump-friendly One America News and lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the president has accused Dominion of deleting votes for him with a system that is “horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure.” Trump’s advisers also claim Dominion’s software was created at the behest of former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to win that country’s elections. While there’s no evidence for any of those accusations — The Post’s Fact Checker debunks the alleged ties to Venezuela in detail — they’re bringing fresh attention to the way U.S. elections are run and to private companies like Dominion that have long played a starring role in the process. They’ve also deeply unsettled cybersecurity and election administration experts, who worry that valid concerns about election integrity are now being overshadowed by claims that have no basis in reality. The bottom line is that private companies do play a huge role in running elections in the United States, and observers across the political spectrum have complained about it for years. But that doesn’t mean that any votes have been stolen. Here’s what you need to know.

Full Article: Dominion: What you need to know about the voting company Trump claims “stole” the election – The Washington Post

National security experts call on GOP leaders to rebuke Trump?s election claims | Tom Hamburger and Ellen Nakashima/The Washington Post

A group of leading GOP national security experts — including former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge — urged congressional Republicans on Monday to demand President Trump concede the election and immediately begin the transition to the incoming Biden administration. “President Trump’s refusal to permit the presidential transition poses significant risks to our national security, at a time when the U.S. confronts a global pandemic and faces serious threats from global adversaries, terrorist groups, and other forces,” said a statement signed by more than 100 GOP luminaries. The signers included Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who served as homeland security secretary under President George W. Bush, former CIA director Michael Hayden and John D. Negroponte, who served as director of national intelligence. The message called on “Republican leaders — especially those in Congress — to publicly demand that President Trump cease his anti-democratic assault on the integrity of the presidential election.” Trump has refused to acknowledge his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden and continues to wage a clamorous, unsuccessful bid to overturn the election’s outcome in several key states that turned the race in Biden’s favor. In the popular vote, Biden is projected to best Trump by a margin of approximately 6 million. In a nod to these developments, the statement’s signers urged Republican leaders to “strongly oppose” Trump’s “dangerous and extra-legal efforts to threaten and intimidate state officials in order to prevent a vote by the Electoral College.”

Full Article: National security experts call on GOP leaders to rebuke Trump?s election claims – The Washington Post

National: Trump relents on transition as Republicans join mounting calls for him to acknowledge Biden’s win | Josh Dewsey, Tom Hamburger, Beth Reinhard and Kayla Ruble/The Washington Post

The Michigan Board of Canvassers voted Monday to certify the state’s election results, effectively awarding the state’s 16 electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden, who defeated President Trump with a margin of more than 155,000 votes. The decision dealt another blow to Trump’s unprecedented effort to undo Biden’s win by attempting to delay the certification of the election results in key states. Three out the four board members — including one Republican — voted for certification, capping a dramatic political dispute that had roiled the state. The Michigan canvassing board had never before refused to certify a statewide vote, but pressure on the once-obscure panel had built over the past week. In the run-up to Monday’s meeting, Trump made an extraordinary personal intervention into Michigan, reaching out personally to state and local officials. His supporters called on the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint their own set of electors before the electoral college meets on Dec. 14.

Full Article: Michigan board votes to certify the state’s election results, dealing Trump another blow – The Washington Post

National: How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories | Sheera Frenkel/The New York Times

On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times. Over the next week, the phrase “Stop the Steal” was used to promote dozens of rallies that spread false voter fraud claims about the U.S. presidential elections. New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies. That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted. “Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”

Full Article: How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories – The New York Times

Editorial: How Trump placed a ticking time bomb at the center of our system | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post

So is this really how it’s going to be? Will it now become a fact of our political life that Democrats will be required to win future presidential elections by steal-proof margins in order to prevail? With President Trump’s attempts to overturn the election continuing in Michigan and Wisconsin, more Republicans are distancing themselves. They are “subtly urging” Trump to accept reality and are “losing patience” with his antics, we are told. But in the very formulation that some of these Republicans have adopted — and in the sheer numbers who have refrained from going even this far — there is grounds for serious pessimism about what all this portends. What happens if the last-ditch tactic Trump’s team has adopted — trying to get rogue GOP-controlled state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors to the electoral college in defiance of their state’s voters — becomes seen as a conventional tool of political warfare, akin to more typical voter suppression efforts? nThe responses from Republicans hint at ways this could become a ticking electoral time bomb. Many of them are merely suggesting that Trump should allow the transition to proceed. But they are also carefully stressing that he is absolutely within his rights to continue legal challenges. And, tellingly, far fewer Republicans are denouncing the endgame that those legal challenges are all converging toward.

Full Article: Opinion | How Trump placed a ticking time bomb at the center of our system – The Washington Post

Editorial: Trump’s Legal Farce Is Having Tragic Results | Richard L. Hasen/The New York Times

Even as the campaign lawsuits brought by President Trump over the 2020 election enter their death throes, many people continue to worry that Mr. Trump will find three Republican legislatures to magically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They are concerned that he will pull off an antidemocratic hat trick through maneuvers like delaying recounts in Wisconsin and blocking certification in Michigan to allow these legislatures to submit competing slates of electors to Congress. The goal is to prevent Joe Biden from securing the Electoral College votes he needs on Jan. 6 for Congress to declare him president. The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles. Let’s start on the positive side. A federal district court opinion issued in Pennsylvania Saturday laid bare both the dangerousness and vacuousness of Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy. Rudy Giuliani, acting as one of the president’s lawyers, failed to persuade Judge Matthew Brann — an Obama-appointed Federalist Society member and former Republican official — to disenfranchise nearly seven million Pennsylvania voters and to let the state legislature name a slate of presidential electors. The court held that the Trump campaign offered a “Frankenstein’s monster” of a legal theory and that the complaint was full of nothing more than “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”

Full Article: Opinion | Trump’s Legal Farce Is Having Tragic Results – The New York Times

Editorial: Trump’s Post-Election Defiance Is How a Constitution Dies | Micah Zenko/Foreign Policy

Before U.S. elected officials (including presidents), judges, government employees, and military personnel assume their positions, they make a pledge. This shared promise is not to protect the United States’ way of life, secure its national interests, defend its sovereign territory, or even to “keep the American people safe,” as former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama often inaccurately claimed. Rather, each person undertakes a solemn oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Preserving the Constitution is the overriding obligation of all government employees, because the document serves as the supreme law of the land. The evolving text enshrines the basic rights of Americans, and the limits and expectations of the states and branches of federal government. It was designed by the Founding Fathers to supersede and endure beyond the current whims of any elected leaders, judges, or other sources of power. National security and military personnel commit to protecting the Constitution above all else, because without its preservation none of their other missions or objectives truly matter. The shared pledge to protect and defend the Constitution is worth highlighting to mark and appreciate this current national crisis for what it is: an effort led by the president to overturn the outcome of an election in which the president was a candidate. This overt undertaking is completely in character with President Donald Trump, totally unprecedented in U.S. history, and far more insidious than all the recent efforts of foreign electoral interference.

Full Article: Trump’s Post-Election Defiance Is How a Constitution Dies

Georgia Republicans want ‘signature audit’ of absentee ballots. Why it likely won’t happen | Nick Wooten/Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

It’s unlikely the Georgia Secretary of State’s office will further examine absentee voter signatures despite calls from top Republicans ahead of the state’s recount, a top election official told reporters Monday. Top Republicans, including President Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, have requested signature audits tied to Georgia’s absentee voting. Under state law, the identification or signature of voters is checked twice during the absentee voting process, and an accepted ballot can’t be traced back to a signed envelope once the two are separated. The process protects ballot secrecy. But county election officials keep the signed envelopes for two years. Currently, there’s no state law requiring or outlining the process for rechecking envelope signatures against the state database after those signatures were already confirmed, said Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager. “If a court orders it or if we have specific investigatory reasons, you do it,” he said of auditing the signatures. “If we make a precedent of ‘I don’t like the outcome. Therefore, we should start investigating random parts of the process.’ …It’s a bad precedent.”

Full Article: How does Georgia verify signature on absentee ballots? | Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

Georgia counties set to start recount requested by Trump | Kate Brumback/Associated Press

After the Trump campaign requested a recount of the presidential ballots in Georgia, county election workers have just over a week to complete the new tally, a top elections official said Monday. The election results certified last week by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger showed Democrat Joe Biden beating Republican President Donald Trump by 12,670 votes out of about 5 million cast, or about 0.25%. Under state law, a candidate can request a recount when the margin is less than 0.5%. The Trump campaign on Saturday sent a formal request for a recount to the secretary of state’s office. The counties can begin the recount at 9 a.m. Tuesday and must finish by 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 2, Gabriel Sterling, who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system for the secretary of state’s office, said during a video news conference Monday. The counties are to give public notice of when during that period they will be counting so monitors from political parties and any interested members of the public can be there to observe, Sterling said. This will be the third time the votes in the presidential race have been counted in Georgia. After the initial count following Election Day, Raffensperger selected the presidential race for an audit required by state law. Because of the tight margin, he said, the audit required every vote in that contest to be recounted by hand. County election workers completed that hand tally last week. Because some previously uncounted ballots were discovered during the audit, several counties had to recertify their totals. Then the secretary of state certified the results and Gov. Brian Kemp certified the state’s slate of 16 presidential electors.

Full Article: Georgia counties set to start recount requested by Trump

Iowa: Three counties use voting machines to assist hand recount, defying Secretary of State opinion | Zachary Oren Smith/Iowa City Press-Citizen

Three county recount boards are defying a recent legal opinion from the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office and using a machine to aid the recount of ballots in the ultra-close 2nd District congressional race. Recount boards in Scott, Johnson and Clinton counties — the three most populous in the district — justified the move, saying it is necessary to ensure that the recount board’s three members have time to examine ballots the machines couldn’t read for voter intent to see if any were filed for Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks or Democrat Rita Hart but were not tallied accordingly. Assistant Scott County Attorney Robert Cusack offered a legal opinion for his board writing that using a machine to assist the hand count is consistent with the recount board’s charge from Iowa Code to “tabulate all votes” and that a hand recount of all 60,000 votes is not required in light of the confidence in voting machines and the code’s own time constraint. “If the recount board can determine the intent of the voter, then that vote should be counted,” he said.

Full Article: Scott County defies Secretary of State with machine-assisted hand recount

Michigan: Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won the state by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then. | Kayla Ruble/The Washington Post

Republican Party leaders who urged Michigan’s state canvassing board to hold off certifying the Nov. 3 election results before it met Monday cited what they described as “significant problems and irregularities” in Wayne County, home of Detroit. The GOP officials pointed to the number of “unbalanced” precincts, where there were small discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters logged by election workers in the poll books. Party officials unsuccessfully called on the board to conduct an audit before it certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state with a 3-to-1 vote. “To simply gloss over those irregularities now without a thorough audit would only foster feelings of distrust among Michigan’s electorate,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and state GOP Chair Laura Cox wrote in a letter Saturday. But state and county election data shows that four years ago — when Donald Trump carried the state by a much narrower margin — twice as many Detroit precincts were out of balance. At the time, the problems were widely condemned by Democratic leaders, including Garlin Gilchrist, now the state’s lieutenant governor, who called the city’s handling of the election “a complete catastrophe.”

Full Article: Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then. – The Washington Post

Michigan Supreme Court rejects appeal, but 2 justices urge looking into election fraud claims | Clara Hendrickson/Detroit Free Press

In what is likely a final blow to the effort to delay the certification of election results in Michigan, the Michigan Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal in a lawsuit filed against Detroit and Wayne County election officials. With all but Justice David Viviano agreeing, the court denied the request to stop the certification of Wayne County’s election results, writing in its order  “we are not persuaded that the question presented should be reviewed by this Court.” The Wayne County Board of Canvassers certified the county’s results Nov. 17. But in a concurring statement to the court’s order, Justice Brian Zahra, joined by Justice Stephen Markman, urged the Wayne County Circuit Court to move quickly and “meaningfully assess” the plaintiffs’ allegations of electoral fraud. “I am cognizant that many Americans believe that plaintiffs’ claims of electoral fraud and misconduct are frivolous and obstructive, but I am equally cognizant that many Americans are of the view that the 2020 election was not fully free and fair,” Zahra wrote. “Federal law imposes tight time restrictions on Michigan’s certification of our electors. Plaintiffs should not have to file appeals following our standard processes and procedures to obtain a final answer from this Court on such weighty issues.” The concurring statement called on the Wayne County Circuit Court to hold an evidentiary hearing to assess the credibility of the plaintiffs’ allegations of fraud based mostly on affidavits filed by Republican challengers present at TCF Center.

Full Article: 2 Mich. Supreme Court justices urge looking into election fraud claims

Nevada: Trump Campaign Takes Aim At Native Vote Project | Bert Johnson/Nevada Public Radio

The Trump campaign is suing to overturn Nevada’s election results yet again. President-elect Joe Biden won the state by a margin of more than 33,000 votes. But lawyers for Trump and the state Republican party are asking the judge to either give Nevada’s six electoral college votes to Trump – or nullify the election. They’re also taking aim at get-out-the-vote efforts in Native American communities. In the lawsuit, Trump’s lawyers say the Nevada Native Vote Project acted improperly on Election Day, when it hosted get-out-the-vote events at polling places. “I think that this lawsuit is a little bit reckless,” said Jacqueline De León, staff attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, “It’s sort of just casting a wide net of disparagement on the Nevada Native Vote Project. And it turns out a lot of their claims are unsubstantiated.” The campaign is accusing the project of buying votes by handing out food and T-shirts outside a polling site on Election Day. However, De Leon said the laws they’re basing that accusation on is from the Tammany Hall days when people were actually paid to vote. Because of that, the law is rarely enforced.

Full Article: Trump Campaign Takes Aim At Nevada Native Vote Project | Nevada Public Radio

New Jersey Lawmakers Push For In-Person Early Voting by 2021. County Election Officials Fear It’s Not Doable | Jeff Pillets/TAPinto

Fresh off a record-setting election that upended traditional voting habits, New Jersey lawmakers are pushing ahead on another big change in time for next year’s governor’s race: in-person early voting. But exhausted election workers, still wrapping up this year’s mostly mail-in general election, worry they may be unable to meet another major voting mandate from Trenton. “We all want more people to vote, but we’re going to need more staffing, more time, more cooperation with the state and a better system overall,” said Lynn Caterson, a member of the Atlantic County Board of Elections. “And what about the money?” Senate President Steve Sweeney, in an interview Thursday with NJ Spotlight News, said a new law that would open polling places two weeks early could be passed by year’s end or early in 2021 — in time for the June 8 primary election, when voters will choose candidates for governor. “The point is we want early voting to happen,” said Sweeney (D-Gloucester). “We’ve just got to figure out how to fund it.”

Full Article: NJ Lawmakers Push For In-Person Early Voting by 2021. County Election Officials Fear It’s Not Doable – TAPinto

Pennsylvania counties start to certify election results, despite disinformation and baseless fraud claims from Trump allies | Jonathan Lai and Jeremy Roebuck/Philadelphia Inquirer

Pennsylvania counties rushed Monday to certify their results from the Nov. 3 election, even as President Donald Trump and his Republican allies continued their increasingly long-shot legal effort to disrupt the cementing of the state’s final vote tally. But as county boards of elections convened for what is normally little more than a sleepy formality, the impact of the president’s campaign to undermine trust in the integrity of the vote repeatedly reared its head.In at least three of the state’s most populous counties, the boards split their votes along party lines. And small groups of voters speaking at public meetings urged elections administrators to reject vote tallies in several others. Many speakers cited unsupported allegations of widespread fraud, malfunctioning voting machines and claims about mail-in ballots that Trump and his supporters have spread without evidence in recent weeks. Joe Gale, the Republican vice chair of the Montgomery County Election Board and only member to vote against certification, decried the widespread use of mail voting and called for the U.S. Supreme Court to review of the state’s results, echoing requests made by the president’s lawyers in recent days. “There is no way to certify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said Monday. “All 67 counties across the Commonwealth are experiencing electoral uncertainty.” Board votes in Allegheny and Luzerne — which Trump carried by 14 points — also split along partisan divides. But in all three counties, the dissenters were among the minority and the certifications were ultimately approved.

Full Article: Pennsylvania counties start to certify election results, despite disinformation and baseless fraud claims from Trump allies

Pennsylvania: In rare move, bipartisan panel rejects House request to audit 2020 election | Marie Albiges and Cynthia Fernandez/Philadelphia Inquirer

An attempt by Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature to audit the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election failed Monday when a bipartisan panel rejected it, citing its redundancy. The Legislative Budget and Finance Committee voted 2-1 against the audit, which was requested by the House last week. The two Democrats on the panel voted against the measure, with one Republican in favor and another absent from the meeting. In rejecting the request, the panel’s two Democratic members — Sen. James Brewster (D., Allegheny) and Rep. Jake Wheatley (D., Allegheny) — said it would duplicate the efforts of an ongoing Department of State audit, which is mandated by law. “There are other ways of validating our election results, making sure we had a fair return in our election process. And I would encourage us to not prolong this wasted effort,” said Wheatley, who is treasurer of the committee. “I would just really suggest that we put this to bed now and move forward with some of our other prioritized reports and audits.”

Full Article: In rare move, bipartisan panel rejects Pa. House request to audit 2020 election

Rhode Island Board of Elections audits election results | Connor Cyrus/WJAR

The Rhode Island Board of Elections conducted an audit Monday of the results of the Nov. 3 general election. “They look at a sample of the total number of ballots cast and compare it to the outcome of the election,” said John Marion of Common Cause. The so-called risk-limiting audit happens after every election in Rhode Island and is mandated by state law. It stems from people being worried during the 2016 election about cyberattacks. That same year, there was a problem at a Pawtucket polling place where one machine reported the wrong results. “It made election administrators and ultimately the General Assembly realize they needed to do something to check the results every time in a systematic way,” Marion said. The process is very organized and starts with blue boxes of ballots. The process counts roughly 10% of all of Rhode Island’s ballots by municipality. Monday, they were focusing on the presidential election.

Full Article: Rhode Island Board of Elections audits election results

Wisconsin: With deadline a week away, partial presidential recount continues | Briana Reilly/The Capital Times

Elections officials in two Wisconsin counties are continuing their work to re-tally ballots cast in the November presidential contest as they near the Dec. 1 deadline to complete the recount. The long-shot push to flip the state for President Donald Trump, which is surely headed to the courts after the recount ends, has sought to invalidate thousands of absentee ballots from voters who had followed guidance provided to them by their local clerks and others. The process kicked-off in the state’s two biggest and bluest counties, Dane and Milwaukee, on Friday, though it took a while for the counting to officially begin. As of Monday morning, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said nearly one-quarter of ballots cast have been tabulated by the start of the fourth day of the recount requested and paid for by Trump’s campaign. “We are slightly behind schedule but catching up,” he wrote on Twitter, noting 55 of the 253 reporting units have been completed thus far. “So grateful for all who are pitching in for democracy.” This week will include the Madison portion of the recount, where voters’ ballots in the city make up just under half of Dane’s total votes (according to the recent canvassed results from the state’s counties) and are spread across more than 150 reporting units. The clerk’s office will be closed this week as officials prepare to answer questions for the three-member Board of Canvassers, which is controlled 2-1 by Democrats.

Full Article: With deadline a week away, Wisconsin’s partial presidential recount continues | Local Government | madison.com

Trump administration informs Biden it is ready to begin transition | Felicia Sonmez, John Wagner and Paulina Firozi/ The Washington Post

The head of the General Services Administration said in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden on Monday that her office is ready to begin the formal presidential transition, after weeks of pressure from Democrats to allow the process to go ahead. “I take this role seriously and, because of recent developments involving legal challenges and certifications of election results, am transmitting this letter today to make those resources and services available to you,” GSA head Emily Murphy said in the letter. The letter came after a four-member canvassing board in Michigan certified that state’s election results, effectively awarding Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Biden, who defeated President Trump with a margin of more than 155,000 votes. Earlier Monday, Biden announced several picks for top jobs in national security and foreign relations, and is also expected to name Janet L. Yellen as treasury secretary, according to three people in close communication with aides to the president-elect. The nominations are: Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security, the first immigrant in that position; Avril D. Haines as director of national intelligence, the first woman in that position; and former secretary of state John F. Kerry as special presidential envoy for climate.

Full Article: Biden transition live updates: Biden set to name Avril Haines as DNI, Janet Yellen as treasury secretary – The Washington Post

Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History | David E. Sanger/The New York Times

President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction. Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp. “I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.” Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6. Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will. The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.

Full Article: Why Trump’s Attempts to Overturn 2020 Election Are Unparalleled in US History – The New York Times

Wisconsin: In last-gasp maneuver, Trump campaign tries to invalidate thousands of votes as recount gets underway | Rosalind S. Helderman and Dan Simmons/The Washington Post

President Trump’s campaign is seeking to use a recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin to attempt to invalidate tens of thousands of votes in the state, making sweeping challenges to whole categories of ballots cast in the state’s two Democratic-leaning counties in his last-gasp effort to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s win. As a recount began on Friday in Dane and Milwaukee counties — home to the cities of Madison and Milwaukee — Trump lawyers argued that officials should not merely retabulate all the votes cast in the Nov. 3 election to reconfirm they’d been counted properly. Instead, they argued that large batches of ballots had been improperly accepted and counted in the first place. In both Dane and Milwaukee, they sought to disqualify all absentee ballots that had been cast before Election Day in person, rather than by mail. So far, their efforts have been rejected by the Democratic-majority boards of canvassers in both counties, which have denied attempts to set aside large categories of ballots and instead proceeded to a slow-moving process to retabulate all the votes. The recount must conclude no later than Dec. 1, when the election is scheduled to be certified. At that point, the president’s campaign could file a lawsuit over its rejected challenges — potentially delaying certification.

Full Article: In last-gasp maneuver, Trump campaign tries to invalidate thousands of votes as Wisconsin recount gets underway – The Washington Post

National: Leadership changes at top cyber agency raise national security concerns | Maggie Miller/The Hill

The departure of the three of the Department of Homeland Security’s top cybersecurity officials over the past week is leading experts and officials to voice concerns that the United States has been left vulnerable to attacks in cyberspace, with national security potentially compromised. The concerns come after President Trump fired Christopher Krebs, the director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and after both CISA Deputy Director Matthew Travis and top cybersecurity official Bryan Ware resigned following pressure from the White House. These changes left the nation’s key cybersecurity agency without Senate-confirmed leadership in the last months of Trump’s presidency, amid a shakeup of major government officials following a contentious election.“Today, cybersecurity and disinformation threats are among the most significant risks our nation confronts,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Hill in a statement Friday. “For that reason, it’s enormously disturbing that the president has paired an unwillingness to begin an orderly transition with a zeal to gut key national security agencies of their senior-most leadership.”

Full Article: Leadership changes at top cyber agency raise national security concerns | TheHill

National: Trump uses power of presidency to try to overturn the election and stay in office | Philip Rucker, Amy Gardner and Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post

President Trump is using the power of his office to try to reverse the results of the election, orchestrating a far-reaching pressure campaign to persuade Republican officials in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere to overturn the will of voters in what critics decried Thursday as an unprecedented subversion of democracy. After courts rejected the Trump campaign’s baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, the president is now trying to remain in power with a wholesale assault on the integrity of the vote by spreading misinformation and trying to persuade loyal Republicans to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf. In an extraordinary news conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee headquarters, Trump’s attorneys claimed without evidence there was a centralized conspiracy with roots in Venezuela to rig the U.S. presidential election. They alleged voter fraud in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other cities whose municipal governments are controlled by Democrats and where President-elect Joe Biden won by large margins. “We cannot allow these crooks — ’cause that’s what they are — to steal an election from the American people,” said one of the attorneys, Rudolph W. Giuliani. “They elected Donald Trump; they didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots that were produced and that were allowed to be used after the election was over. Give us an opportunity to prove it in court and we will.” Neither Giuliani nor other Trump attorneys have furnished evidence to support that or any other claim of widespread fraud.

Full Article: Trump uses power of presidency to try to overturn the election and stay in office – The Washington Post

National: Trump calls on GOP state legislatures to overturn election results | Kyle Cheney/Politico

President Donald Trump made explicit Saturday the strategy his legal team has been hinting at for days: He wants Republican-led legislatures to overturn election results in states that Joe Biden won. “Why is Joe Biden so quickly forming a Cabinet when my investigators have found hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes, enough to “flip” at least four States, which in turn is more than enough to win the Election?” Trump said, despite refusing to produce any such evidence either publicly or in court cases filed by his attorneys. “Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself,” Trump said. Trump’s comment came after a string of legal defeats, including a rejection by a federal judge in Pennsylvania Saturday who said the Trump team presented no evidence of election fraud or misconduct, despite seeking to invalidate millions of votes. Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, Rudy Giuliani, said he intends to appeal the case to the Third Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. But with few cases pending in courts, Trump’s options have narrowed and he is becoming increasingly reliant on longshot scenarios where election results are not certified and Republican-controlled statehouses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia intervene to declare him the winner. GOP legislative leaders in those states have not endorsed this approach. Trump summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House on Friday, but they later issued a statement indicating they had not seen any reason to intervene on Trump’s behalf.

Full Article: Trump calls on GOP state legislatures to overturn election results – POLITICO

National: Justice Dept meets Trump, Giuliani election fraud claims with silent skepticism | Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky/The Washington Post

The Justice Department has met President Trump’s fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud with two weeks of skeptical silence, not taking any overt moves to investigate what Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims is a globe-spanning conspiracy to steal the election. Such deafening silence from one of the government’s main enforcers of election law indicates just how little evidence there is to support the wild, wide-ranging claims made by Trump and his supporters, most notably Giuliani in a Thursday news conference held inside the Republican National Committee headquarters. Privately, Justice Department officials have said they are willing to investigate legitimate claims of vote fraud; Attorney General William P. Barr even loosened some restrictions that might otherwise have discouraged prosecutors from doing so before results are certified. But current and former officials said they thought Giuliani’s accusations sounded “crazy,” and they have not seen or heard of any evidence suggesting large-scale fraud, let alone the kind of ­intercontinental conspiracy described by the president’s lawyer. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Full Article: Justice Dept meets Trump, Giuliani election fraud claims with silent skepticism – The Washington Post

National: Election Disinformation Fears Came True for State Officials | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

The disinformation scenario that local election officials feared months ago has come true: President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud have been picked up by many state and local Republican officials across the country, and polls now show that more than two-thirds of GOP voters believe the 2020 election was neither free nor fair. Last week, 10 state attorneys general signed an amicus brief supporting the president’s unsuccessful bid to block an extension for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. And state lawmakers from South Carolina wrote a letter in support of court challenges that had nothing to do with their own state. This week, the Republican members of a county election board in Michigan held up certification for hours, triggering national news stories and a flood of outcries with no clear resolution in sight. Arizona Republicans are trying to block the certification of Maricopa County’s results. And three statewide candidates, including one running for governor, have refused to acknowledge their losses and concede. It has been frustrating for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who said she has received death threats because of “extremely dangerous” and “broad and baseless conspiracy theories” being repeated by Republican officials in her state. That rhetoric, she said, could suppress turnout and participation in future elections. She and other election officials warned of this nightmare scenario for months. “It’s just unfortunate that we’re at this place where what we said would happen is actually happening,” she told Stateline. “It makes me sad for our country.”

Full Article: Election Disinformation Fears Came True for State Officials | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: The Founders didn’t prepare for a president who refuses to step down, historians say | Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post

President Trump continued Friday to deny the results of the election, pressuring state officials in Michigan and Georgia to overturn the will of voters and increasing fears that he might refuse to cede power to President-elect Joe Biden. But those looking to the nation’s Founders, or the Constitution they framed, for answers to such a crisis will come up empty-handed. There is nothing in the Constitution about what to do if a president refuses to step down when his term expires, according to three historians and a constitutional law professor. “No, the framers did not envisage a president refusing to step down or discuss what should be done in such a situation,” Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said. “There’s obviously nothing in the Constitution about it.” “This is a contingency that no one would have actively contemplated until this fall,” said historian Jack Rakove, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.

Full Article: The Founding Fathers and Trump’s refusal to concede: What historians say – The Washington Post