Missouri’s top election official dinged over his push for hand-counting ballots | Kurt Erickson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

During his successful campaign for secretary of state, Republican Denny Hoskins trumpeted a debunked claim that counting ballots by hand is the best way to determine the outcome of elections. But, in his proposed $68 million budget for the fiscal year beginning in June, the state’s top election official made no move to hire additional employees to undertake a process that is currently handled electronically. The absence raised the eyebrows of the top budget writer in the state Senate Wednesday, who said he was expecting Hoskins to make good on his campaign promises. Read Article

New Jersey ballots will look different this year. Here’s what’s being considered.  | Aliya Schneider/The Philadelphia Inquirer

After a federal judge ruled that New Jersey’s ballot design was likely unconstitutional, state lawmakers found themselves recreating the rules of the ballot in what one expert called the most drastic ballot redesign happening in this political moment. State lawmakers have been navigating a hefty question: What makes a fair ballot? And, those watching have asked, how far from tradition are elected officials willing to stray when their own political future is in play? The stakes are high. With the old system gone, candidates with establishment support lose the advantage the old county line system gave them, incentivizing more candidates to throw their hat into the ring. Read Article

North Carolina: America’s last undecided election threatens our core democratic principles | Edward B. Foley/Salon

One of the most important premises of America’s election system in the 21st century is that the federal judiciary demands that the states must treat all cast ballots equally. Federal courts require states to uphold the constitutional principle of equal protection if the government of a state has determined that certain offices are to be decided by popular vote. Furthermore, states must adhere to the right to due process. After an election has been completed, federal law prohibits states from throwing out ballots that were cast in accordance with the prevailing understanding of established election practices in that state at the time of the election. These two bedrock principles of free and fair elections currently risk being weakened by a highly unusual election dispute playing out in North Carolina — and I am astounded that there’s any chance the courts would throw out the votes of North Carolinians who properly cast their ballots in last November’s election. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Less secure elections, higher costs for counties: How Donald Trump’s cuts to security agencies would affect Pennsylvanians | Jordan Wilkie/WITF

Pennsylvania’s top elections agency hopes the Trump administration will see how valuable CISA’s elections work is to local jurisdictions and will continue to fund it, Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary for elections and commissions under Schmidt, told the senators on Thursday. “CISA were very valuable to our state and to other states,” Secretary of State Al Schmidt told Pennsylvania senators during an appropriations hearing Thursday. “They have a national and global perspective when it comes to cyber security risks and all the rest that each individual state can’t do on its own.” Now, Schmidt is waiting to learn whether the federal agency will be shuttered. The work of CISA’s Elections Security and Resilience Division has been paused by the Trump administration at least until early March pending a review of the agency’s work. Read Article

Pennsylvania needs a new voter registration system before 2028, secretary of state says | Chris Comisac/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania has wanted to upgrade its aging voter registration system for several years, but there have been stumbles. Legislators were told earlier this week that an updated system is needed before the next presidential election in 2028. The process to update Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, known as SURE, was started in 2019 after it was determined the system, created in 2003, was substantially outdated. The system is used by election officials to add, remove or update the status of every voter in the commonwealth. The data in the system is constantly updated at the county level to ensure the voter rolls are accurate. Read Article

Utah Republicans move to overhaul election operations, starting with universal mail-in voting | Hannah Schoenbaum/Associated Press

Utah’s universal mail-in voting system could be the first casualty of a Republican overhaul of the state’s election operations as lawmakers look to improve efficiency and trust in the system. The state’s Republican-controlled House passed a bill in a 57-15 vote Tuesday that would require Utah voters to opt in to receive their ballots in the mail, meaning they would no longer get them automatically. Starting next year, voters who want to return their ballots by mail or to a drop box would need to include the last four digits of their drivers license or state ID number. The proposal would dramatically change the voting system in one of just eight states — and the only led by Republicans — that allows all elections to be conducted by mail without a need to opt in. Read Article

Wisconsin’s inconsistent ballot instructions put voters at risk | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

In some states, a lack of required uniform instructions on how to cast and return absentee ballots is leading to voter confusion and sometimes disenfranchisement, disability and voting advocates say. States that provide less specific instructions or conflicting information put their voters at risk, said Barbara Smith Warner, executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute. “If the idea is that everybody has the same right to vote, then everyone should have the same information about how to do it,” she said. “Anything less than that just feels like a setup for voter disenfranchisement.” Wisconsin’s rules create just that sort of risk. State law requires the Wisconsin Elections Commission to develop uniform instructions for absentee ballots, but it doesn’t specify what those instructions should cover. Moreover, the law doesn’t explicitly require municipalities to actually use the WEC instructions. Read Article

Election officials blast Trump’s ‘retreat’ from protecting voting against foreign threats | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

The Trump administration has begun dismantling the nation’s defenses against foreign interference in voting, a sweeping retreat that has alarmed state and local election officials. Local election officials are nervous and uncertain about the federal election security cuts, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that works with state and local election officials to keep voting systems secure. The threat landscape for elections is “extreme,” she said. And even though it’s not a major election year, quieter times are when election offices can prepare and perfect their practices, she said. “It is a retreat and it’s a really ill-advised one,” she said. “It’s a little bit like saying the bank has a slow day on Tuesday, we’re going to let our security guards go home.” Read Article

US propagandist paid by Kremlin targets German election with network of fake news sites | AFP

From a fabricated sex scandal to a fake museum heist, disinformation aimed at influencing Germany’s high-stakes election is originating from dozens of AI-generated German sites apparently linked to a US fugitive turned Kremlin propagandist, researchers say. John Dougan runs a network of more than 100 such fake sites, which mimic German media outlets, mirroring a disinformation tactic used during the American election last year, according to researchers at the German nonprofit Correctiv and the US watchdog NewsGuard. The sites by the former Florida deputy sheriff, who fled to Russia while facing a slew of charges including extortion, are flooding the internet with content favourable to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Read Article

National: Dismantling of federal efforts to monitor election interference creates opening for foreign meddling | Ali Swenson and Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

When a suspicious video of ballots being ripped up in Pennsylvania gained attention on social media last October, federal agencies responded quickly and called it out as Russian disinformation. On Election Day in November, bomb threats to polling places in numerous states caused relatively few disruptions to voting. It’s one of the many scenarios covered by the nation’s cybersecurity agency in its outreach to state and local officials. The future of that assistance is now uncertain. The Trump administration’s downsizing and disbanding of federal agencies has hit efforts that improve election security and monitor foreign influence. That could create gaps for America’s enemies to exploit the next time the country holds a major election. Read Article

National: Trump Justice Department signals retreat from voting rights cases | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

The government’s approach to voting rights is changing fast under the new administration, and a complex, closely watched redistricting case out of Louisiana shows just how fast. On Jan. 16, the U.S. solicitor general, who represents the government in court, asked the Supreme Court to allow the federal government to participate in upcoming oral arguments in the Louisiana case. But on Jan. 24, four days after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, the acting solicitor general withdrew that request. Her filing said the government no longer supported its earlier argument that the district court had erred in its ruling. Read Article

National: Trump keeps cutting election security jobs. Here’s what’s at risk | Jocelyn Mintz/Fast Company

As the Trump administration continues to dismantle federal agencies, one that plays a critical role in U.S. infrastructure and election security faces an uncertain future. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), housed in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and tasked with enforcing cybersecurity and protecting American infrastructure across all levels of government, placed multiple members of its election security team on administrative leave over the last few weeks, according to reports by the Associated Press and TechCrunch. The 17 reported election security team members, part of the agency’s foreign influence and disinformation teams, were placed on administrative leave as part of an overall review of the team, with a particular focus on those two operations. A DHS spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied that number. On Friday, the Trump administration separately fired more than 130 members of CISA, the DHS confirmed. Read Article

National: Trump Dismantles Government Fight Against Foreign Influence Operations | Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes and Sheera Frenkel/The New York Times

The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite ongoing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said. The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said. The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year’s election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters. Read Article

National: The Trump Administration Is Going After Our Elections Too | Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler/Slate

In its crusade against federal agencies, the Trump administration is targeting our election system, making potentially dangerous reductions to protections that help keep elections free, fair, and secure. On Friday, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent a memo to all agency staff notifying them that “all election security activities” would be paused pending the results of an internal investigation. The memo also stated that the administration was cutting off all funds to the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center—a Department of Homeland Security–funded organization that helps state and local officials monitor, analyze, and respond to cyberattacks targeting the nation’s election hardware and software. Read Article

Arizona: Critics of new ballot security bill zero in on sponsor’s links to key vendor | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona Republican lawmakers are again proposing to require security features on the state’s ballot paper, but Democratic skeptics are responding by pointing to a potential conflict of interest involving the proposal’s leading advocate. State Sen. Mark Finchem’s bill, SB1123, would require the state to use ballot paper with specific security features — such as a hologram, barcode and watermark — that he says would ensure only “legitimate” ballots are cast in the state’s elections. Finchem, a Republican, attempted to get the requirements into law a few years ago, and they were written into the rules for a pilot program that the state approved funding for in 2022. But that pilot program was scrapped, amid concerns about the potential conflicts involved. Read Article

Georgia Republicans advance a plan to leave a bipartisan voter data group, despite warnings | Charlotte Kramon/Associated Press

For years, Republicans echoing President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was ridden with voter fraud have pushed for states to leave a bipartisan group that lets officials share data to keep voter rolls accurate. Nine have, but none since October 2023. A new bill advanced Tuesday by House Republicans in a Georgia committee could make Georgia the 10th. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C., are currently members of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which Republicans have questioned over its funding and motives. Officials use state and federal data from the group to identify and remove from voting rolls people who have died, moved to other states or registered somewhere else. Read Article

Maine: Swatting of Secretary of State was part of broader attack on U.S. officials | Rachel Ohm/Portland Press Herald

Two European men have been charged with making the fake 911 call that prompted police to rush to the home of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in December 2023 as part of a wave of threats and false “swatting” reports targeting government officials across the country. Bellows, a Democrat who serves as Maine’s top elections official, reported Dec. 29, 2023, that her home had been swatted in an apparent attempt to intimidate her. The incident came as Bellows was in the national news and facing intense backlash for ruling that Donald Trump was not qualified to appear on the 2024 primary ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. While it appeared at the time that partisan anger over her ruling could have prompted the swatting attack, court records show the defendants, who are citizens of Serbia and Romania, were mostly interested in disrupting the U.S. political system and creating discord for officials from both parties. Read Article

Nevada: Proposed legislation sparks debate over accountability by election workers | Haajrah Gilani/Las Vegas Sun News

A proposal being considered in the Nevada Legislature that calls for election workers to be charged with a felony for failing to perform tasks in a timely manner has received pushback from those staffers tasked with running elections. Senate Bill 100 comes from state Sen. Skip Daly, a Washoe County Democrat, who told the Sun he was working with counties and city clerks to answer concerns they expressed during a hearing late Tuesday for the proposal. Nevada law mandates that any officer or other person tasked with election responsibilities who “willfully neglects” their duty or “willfully performs” it in a way that works against state laws is guilty of a category E felony and eligible for one to four years in prison. Daly’s legislation would expand that definition and make it so that a person with election responsibilities who fails to perform their tasks “in a timely manner by the applicable deadline” is also eligible for a felony charge. Read Article

New Jersey: Strong criticism as ballot redesign bill advances | Colleen O’Dea/NJ Spotlight News

New design rules for New Jersey’s primary ballots got a step closer to enactment after the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that some warn seeks to give some candidates an edge and could make the ballot more difficult for voters to read. Some of those who spoke during Thursday’s committee hearing complained that the bill (S-4142) could make it harder for voters to read ballots by removing the requirement that all ballots use a uniform font. That requirement is included in a version of the bill that passed the Assembly and was something ballot design experts argued for during a series of hearings by a special bipartisan Assembly committee. Read Article

North Carolina: Ghost in the machine: ‘Signature verification’ program for voters has reliability issues, report says | Sarah Michels/Carolina Public Press

It was an experiment that cost over $450,000, mostly to pay for verification equipment for 10 counties. County boards incurred an additional $8,000. The time commitment varied from county to county. In Durham County, the most populous participant, the program took 80 staff hours. In smaller areas like Bertie and Cherokee counties, the job only took an hour or two. And the results are mixed. In Rowan County, for instance, the signature verification software reviewed 308 absentee ballots during the primary election. It spit out 24 as potential mismatched signatures. Read Article

North Carolina Supreme Court won’t fast-track lawsuit challenging 60K ballots in race for one of its own seats | Will Doran/WRAL

The North Carolina Supreme Court ruled Thursday that it won’t fast-track the lawsuit by the Republican candidate for a Supreme Court seat who’s trying to throw out the ballots of more than 60,000 voters in an attempt to reverse the 2024 election results. The decision could play a major role in who ultimately wins the seat. Republican Jefferson Griffin received 734 fewer votes than Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, recounts show. But the race hasn’t been certified as Griffin challenges the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters whom he says shouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the first place. Read Article

North Dakota lawmakers reject voter registration bill | Grant Coursey/The Bismarck Tribune

North Dakota lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to reinstate voter registration on Monday, Feb. 17, keeping the state the only one in the country without it — a distinction some said residents are proud of. House Bill 1287 would have brought statewide voter registration back to North Dakota for the first time since 1951, requiring voters to register with their local election precinct online or in person to be eligible to vote in all statewide special, primary or general elections. The bill received a 7-3 do-not-pass recommendation from the Government and Veterans Affairs Committee with four lawmakers absent/not voting and was defeated in the House with a vote of 75-15 with four lawmakers absent/not voting. Read Article

Pennsylvania Secretary of State says Pa. should replace its system for ‘early voting’ | Ford Turner/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The state’s top elections official on Thursday revisited one of the few headaches Pennsylvania had running the 2024 election — lots of people showing up before Election Day to do mail ballots in person — and said the system should be changed. Secretary of State Al Schmidt said it wasn’t true “early voting,” even though some people may have called it that. During a Senate budget hearing, Mr. Schmidt said other states carry out genuine early voting in less clunky fashion. “It really has put an incredible strain on our system at the county level,” Mr. Schmidt told lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee. County-level election staffers “spend the entire day processing in-person applications” and their other duties are neglected, he said. Read Article

Wisconsin Supreme Court Preserves Municipal Control Over Early Absentee Voting Sites | Rachel Selzer/Democracy Docket

In a 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed a right-wing legal challenge that sought to limit the authority of municipalities to designate early absentee voting locations and prevent future use of a mobile voting van deployed by the city of Racine during the 2022 election cycle. The majority opinion — from which all of the court’s conservative justices dissented — did not address the merits of the case, instead concluding that the individual plaintiff who sought judicial review lacked standing. Read Article

The elephant not in the room: Key cybersecurity agency is a no-show at gathering of election officials | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Secretaries of state and election officials from across the nation gathered at separate conferences this past week in Washington, where the new administration has been moving quickly to slash the federal workforce and dismantle certain agencies. One pressing question at the gatherings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors was how the shift in power will affect collaborations with federal agencies that help safeguard elections, including the FBI, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. So far, it’s hard to tell. Read Article

National: SAVE Act Would Undermine Voter Registration for All Americans | Wendy R. Weiser and Andrew Garber/Brennan Center for Justice

Last month, congressional Republicans pledged to fast-track the SAVE Act, a bill that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote. If enacted, it would devastate voter registration while disenfranchising tens of millions of eligible American citizens. More than 21 million American citizens don’t have these documents readily available, according to survey data. But the SAVE Act would likely adversely affect far more Americans than the data suggests. Many might not have noticed how broadly the bill could apply — its show-your-papers requirement is not just limited to new registrations but rather applies to every “application to register to vote,” which in many jurisdictions includes re-registrations and changes of address. And tens of millions of Americans register or re-register between every federal election. Read Article

National: CISA election, disinformation officials placed on administrative leave, sources say | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed several members of its election security group on administrative leave last week. According to one source, the moves happened Thursday and Friday of last week and were targeted at employees focused on CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation teams. The moves include four employees currently working on or assigned to the team, two more that left the team in the past four years but still hold positions at the Department of Homeland Security, and another two that work on elections misinformation or disinformation at DHS. A second source confirmed that some, but not all members of CISA’s election security team, were placed on leave last week. Read Article

National: Efforts to fight foreign influence and protect elections in question under Trump | Jenna McLaughlin/NPR

The new Trump administration is moving quickly to roll back long-standing work to counter foreign influence in U.S. elections, work that began in the first Trump term after revelations about the extent and ambition of Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election. Staffers working on countering foreign mis- and disinformation as well as a team of 10 regional election security advisers at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been put on administrative leave, according to two sources directly familiar with the matter who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. In addition to the disruption to CISA’s work, Attorney General Pam Bondi also ordered an end to an FBI task force to combat foreign influence campaigns in American politics by Russia, China and other countries. Read Article

National: Ed Martin, Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters, Now Runs Office That Investigated Them | Eileen Sullivan, Alan Feuer and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Ed Martin was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posting on social media that the violent riot that day was marked by “faith and joy.” He has often echoed President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, declaring on the night before the Capitol was stormed that “true Americans” should work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.” He has spent the past four years raising money for — and in some cases defending — people charged with joining the mob. And when the House committee that investigated Jan. 6 sent him a subpoena, he never complied, risking criminal charges. Now, Mr. Martin, 54, has been tapped by Mr. Trump to oversee the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington where he has been put in charge of dismantling the office’s signature project: the sprawling investigation of Jan. 6 that he has energetically opposed. Read Article

National: GOP laws aimed at very rare noncitizen voting could hit eligible voters | Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

Republicans in Congress and state legislatures are charging forward with plans to require Americans to prove they are citizens as they say they seek to crack down on noncitizen voting — an almost nonexistent problem. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal in all state and federal elections, and requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship could make it harder for millions of legitimate voters to cast ballots. Driver’s licenses and other state IDs can be used only for people who provided proof of citizenship to get those IDs, so some people will need to track down other documents. Many people do not have ready access to birth certificates or passports, including women who changed their names when they got married, rural residents who live far from government offices where birth records are kept, and people who lost documents in fires or floods. Read Article