Illinois Voter Data Exposed by Contractor’s Unsecured Databases | Lily Hay Newman/WIRED

Databases containing sensitive voter information from multiple counties in Illinois were openly accessible on the internet, revealing 4.6 million records that included driver’s license numbers as well as full and partial Social Security Numbers and documents like death certificates. Longtime security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon one of the databases that appeared to contain information from DeKalb County, Illinois, and subsequently discovered another 12 exposed databases. None were password protected nor required any type of authentication to access. As criminal and state-backed hacking becomes ever more sophisticated and aggressive, threats to critical infrastructure loom. But often, the biggest vulnerabilities come not from esoteric software issues, but from gaping errors that leave the safe door open and the crown jewels exposed. After years of efforts to shore up election security across the United States, state and local awareness about cybersecurity issues has improved significantly. But as this year’s US election quickly approaches, the findings reflect the reality that there are always more oversights to catch. Read Article

Michigan: Power outages and humid ink barely mar a smooth day of voting in low turnout primary | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Even after nine days of early voting and 40 days to return absentee ballots, Michigan’s August primary appeared to be a relatively low turnout election. Officials said the majority of voters had already cast their ballots before election day on Tuesday. As of Monday, more than 1 million people across the state had voted, the vast majority of them doing so absentee. Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Tuesday night that she expected totals to be near 2 million, which would be less than a quarter of the state’s total registered voters. In 2022, there were more than 2.1 million votes cast in Michigan’s August primary. Four years ago, there were more than 2.5 million votes cast. Read Article

Nevada county won’t hand-count in 2024, but some officials support doing so in the future | Gabe Stern/Associated Press

County commissioners in rural northeastern Nevada decided Wednesday not to submit a plan to hand-count votes in November, but some officials said they support implementing it in future election cycles in the latest debate over voting machines across the Western swing state. Elko County commissioners said it was far too close to the election to implement such a plan — parts of which they acknowledged did not meet state guidelines for hand-counting. Instead organizers and some officials said they supported lobbying state officials to allow more methods of hand-counting than what are currently outlined in those guidelines, which they say are too arduous, in the future. Resad Article

A North Carolina county is losing its 2 top election officials weeks before balloting begins | Associated Press

A North Carolina county will soon lose its top two election administrators mere weeks before the first general election ballots go out to voters. The elections board in Pasquotank County, along the Virginia border about 170 miles (274 kilometers) northeast of Raleigh, this week accepted the resignation of Deputy Director Troy White, The Daily Advance of Elizabeth City reported. White’s departure is effective Aug. 16, the same day that the resignation of Director Emma Tate takes effect. Staffing has long been a challenge for election offices nationally, but 2020 was a tipping point with the pandemic-related challenges before the presidential vote and the hostility afterward driven by false claims of a rigged election. Other politically important states have also seen considerable turnover. For instance, 11 of Nevada’s 17 counties have had turnover in top county election positions since the 2020 election. Read Article

Pennsylvania’s Department of State guidance was a 2020 lightning rod. This is how it works. | Carter Walker/Spotlight PA

When legislative Republicans urged Congress to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Joe Biden in 2020, they didn’t cite voter fraud or illegal activity. Instead, they pointed to something seemingly innocuous: guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State. State Republicans including then-state House Speaker Bryan Cutler accused the agency of undermining Pennsylvania’s new mail voting law. Jake Corman, then the state Senate’s majority leader, called on former Secretary Kathy Boockvar to step down, saying, “To have this sort of stuff going on at the 11th hour is unconscionable.” Corman was referencing guidance issued by Boockvar the day before the November 2020 election that advised counties to notify voters of fatal defects with their mail ballots and have them vote provisionally at a polling place. Some counties followed the guidance, and some didn’t. Read Article

Texas activist frustrates election officials with lawsuit about threat to ballot secrecy | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Laura Pressley claims to hold the key to what should be a closely guarded secret: how every voter in Williamson County has voted. Her story about how she got hold of this information goes something like this: She had gathered clues through scores of public-records requests she had made over the years to the Williamson County elections department, looking for a breakthrough in her quest to find flaws with the electronic voting machines that Texans use to cast their ballots. One day, she fell to her knees, weeping, and asked God to reveal to her the vulnerabilities she was certain existed, she told attendees at an April social media event on ballot secrecy issues organized by the right-wing organization Cause of America, according to an audio recording reviewed by Votebeat. “I said, ‘Dear Lord, show me the pattern, because I know it’s here.’” Around 20 minutes later, by her account, “the Lord showed me the pattern, and I found it. I was literally in shock — emotional shock — to actually have the knowledge of how every voter in Williamson County votes.” Read Article

Under Wisconsin’s ‘drawdown’ election law, one person’s error can cost another person their vote | Alexander Shur/Votebeat

Consider this scenario: An absentee ballot in Wisconsin gets returned with an error, like the voter failing to sign the envelope, but it mistakenly gets counted anyway, because a municipal election worker initially didn’t catch the error when taking the ballot out of the envelope. Later, perhaps during a recount, a worker catches the error and has to mark that voter as invalid. And now the number of ballots in the counting pile is one greater than the number of valid voters. The solution? Just pull one random ballot out of the pile and set it aside to not be counted. Now the numbers match up. But someone — it’s impossible to know who — got their valid vote tossed. It may not seem fair, but it actually happens from time to time in Wisconsin — and almost nowhere else — because of an election law that’s nearly as old as the state. Election officials aren’t crazy about the practice, called a ballot drawdown, and say it is reserved only for extraordinary cases. Read Article

National: Like Election Systems, Voter Registration Must Be Cyber Secure | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

Cyber and elections experts turned their attention during a recent webinar to the possibility of hackers trying to compromise digital jurisdictions’ voter registration systems — and what defenders can do about it. “If [advanced persistent threat actors] are trying to come after us, or our election, and they know that it’s near impossible to get into our voting systems and get out of it without detection, then the next easiest target is to mess with our registration system[s],” Craig Bowman, vice president of government, education and healthcare at cybersecurity company Trellix, said in the FedInsider webinar. Adversary nations want to tamper with U.S. elections to promote candidates whose policy stances they prefer or to foment chaos that undermines the credibility of American democracy, Bowman said. Read Article

National: ‘Wild west of election work’: How certification fights are already cropping up in battleground states | Sara Murray/CNN

Georgia conservative Julie Adams spread conspiracies about election workers, concocted a baseless story about ballot couriers drinking beer and doing drugs while hoarding ballots, and boasted of her contentious relationship with local election officials. Then, in February, Adams was sworn in as a member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections in Georgia. In one of her first acts, she sued the rest of the board and the elections director, claiming she should not be forced to certify election results “without access to all elements of the election materials”. The dustup in Fulton County is just one example of the election certification fights already cropping up in battleground states, from Georgia to Michigan to Nevada this year. The election officials who have refused to certify have said they’re guarding against election fraud or seeking information they believe is necessary to certify the results. But voting rights activists see the challenges as an effort to undermine faith in the election process and test out ways to contest the election results in November. Read Article

National: The Voting Machine Conspiracy Theorists Are Still at It | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Nearly four years later, zealous supporters of former President Donald J. Trump who promoted the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged its machines to rob him of the 2020 election are still at it. Even though Dominion has aggressively defended itself in court, a network of pro-Trump activists has continued to push false claims against the company, often by seeking to use information gleaned from the very defamation lawsuits the firm has filed against them. The network includes wealthy business executives like Patrick Byrne, who once ran Overstock.com, and Mike Lindell, the founder of the bedding company MyPillow. Both have sought without credible evidence to put Dominion at the heart of a vast conspiracy to deny Mr. Trump a victory. It also includes a pro-Trump sheriff from southwest Michigan, a former election official from Colorado and Mr. Byrne’s own lawyer, who is facing charges of tampering with Dominion machines and who once worked alongside Mr. Trump’s legal team in claiming that the company was part of a plot to subvert the last election. Read Article

National: Election officials continue to face threats, harassment ahead of November | Laura Romero/ABC

In early July, a man wearing a gator face mask, sunglasses, and camera equipment attached to a vest walked into the elections building in King County, Washington, and began to take videos and photos of the employees and their surroundings. The man, according to a video obtained by ABC News, approached a counter and began harassing the election workers as he recorded them with his equipment. After he left, the man posted a video of the interaction on YouTube and published some of the staff’s names, emails, and phone numbers, which officials said resulted in “dozens of calls and emails” to election workers. Read Article

National: A Senate Bill Would Radically Improve Voting Machine Security | Eric Geller/Wired

Congress is moving closer to putting US election technology under a stricter cybersecurity microscope. Embedded inside this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act, which funds intelligence agencies like the CIA, is the Strengthening Election Cybersecurity to Uphold Respect for Elections through Independent Testing (SECURE IT) Act, which would require penetration testing of federally certified voting machines and ballot scanners, and create a pilot program exploring the feasibility of letting independent researchers probe all manner of election systems for flaws. The SECURE IT Act—originally introduced by US senators Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican—could significantly improve the security of key election technology in an era when foreign adversaries remain intent on undermining US democracy. Read Article

National: Election offices are slowly adopting .gov domains, report finds | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

A growing number of election offices are adopting verified, top-level .gov domains to safeguard against impersonation, phishing attacks and the spread of misinformation, according to a report published by the Washington think tank Bipartisan Policy Center. The report includes analysis of a dataset maintained by the Center for Tech and Civic Life consisting of websites and contact information for all local election offices in the United States. The center found that since 2022, nearly a third of the nation’s 7,000-plus election office websites have adopted .gov domains. William Adler, associate director of the center’s Elections Project and one of the report’s authors, said he’s encouraged by the trend, but that it’s still moving slowly. Read Article

National: Russia is relying on Americans to spread election disinformation, officials say | David Klepper/Associated Press

The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election. The warning comes after a tumultuous few in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election. “The American public should know that content that they read online — especially on social media — could be foreign propaganda, even if it appears to be coming from fellow Americans or originating in the United States,” said an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the office of the director. Read Article

National: State election directors fear the Postal Service can’t handle expected crush of mail-in ballots | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

State election directors from across the country voiced serious concerns to a top U.S. Postal Service official Tuesday that the system won’t be able to handle an expected crush of mail-in ballots in the November election. Steven Carter, manager of election and government programs for the postal service, attempted to reassure the directors at a meeting in Minneapolis that the system’s Office of Inspector General will publish an election mail report containing “encouraging” performance numbers for this year so far. “The data that that we’re seeing showing improvements in the right direction,” Carter told a conference of the National Association of State Election Directors. “And I think the OIG report is especially complimentary of how we’re handling the election now.” Read Article

Arizona Republicans who defended election system ousted in primaries | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Many Republican state and county officials in Arizona who have defended the fairness of the state’s elections appeared to have lost primary races Tuesday to challengers who campaigned at least in part on the idea of stolen or broken elections. The apparent defeats came in key places in the state, such as Maricopa and Mohave counties, and in a race for the state Legislature, where there has been immense pressure to change how elections are run, or to even overturn election results. The initial results suggest that unproven claims of widespread election fraud continue to have a strong hold on Republican voters in the state. Read Article

California: Orange County and state say digital poll books are legal in response to lawsuit that challenges them | Hanna Kang/Orange County Register

Digital voter records are completely separate from the equipment used to tally votes, so allegations in a lawsuit that conflate the two are unfounded, lawyers for the county and state argue in a response recently filed in court. Earlier this month, lawyers representing the state and the county filed their response to a lawsuit alleging that the digital voter records, which are connected to the internet, are a part of the voting system and thus in violation of California law. The lawyers argued the lawsuit has no grounds and asked an Orange County Superior Court judge to dismiss it. Three registered Republican voters in Orange County filed the lawsuit in March against OC Registrar of Voters Bob Page, the OC Board of Supervisors, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Gov. Gavin Newsom, alleging that the California Voter’s Choice Act goes against the state election code. Read Article

Colorado elections manager in voting machine tampering trial felt ‘sick’ seeing passwords online | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News

Before a jury on Thursday, Colorado’s voting systems manager recalled feeling sick when he first saw Mesa County’s voting machine passwords posted online in August 2021. Prosecutors called Jessi Romero, voting systems manager for the Colorado secretary of state, as a witness in their case against Tina Peters, Mesa County’s former clerk and recorder now on trial for charges related to helping leak voting machine data in 2021. Prosecutors say that in May 2021, Peters instructed her deputy clerk to turn off security cameras and arranged for an associate to observe and photograph the voting machine trusted build, an update process conducted in person since the machines can’t connect to the Internet. Peters then reportedly sent data and passwords to a Florida-based company for analysis and allowed them to be posted on the social media site Telegram by Ron Watkins, a key player in the QAnon conspiracy movement. Read Article

Georgia: Presidential election audit based on ballot images on hold amid company’s protest | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The idea was to triple-check this year’s presidential election results by uploading images of every ballot cast in Georgia, scanning them with text-recognition software and creating an independent vote count. Lawmakers budgeted $5 million for the concept that would verify the results generated by the state’s Dominion Voting Systems equipment, an extra step beyond an existing hand-count audit of a statistical sample of ballots. But the recount-by-software plan is now stalled because of a protest by a company that wasn’t chosen to receive the state’s contract. It’s unclear whether the dispute will be resolved in time for November’s election. Read Article

Idaho: Will a Transparency Tool Diffuse Election Skepticism? | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

An Idaho county has built a new tool that allows the public to see cast vote records online. Ada County, Idaho, partnered with civic software company Civera on the tool, which it used for the first time during its May elections, publishing ballot images alongside corresponding cast vote records to show how the tabulator machine electronically recorded the selections. The county has so far used the tool to publish information from prior elections going back to 2022, the earliest for which it still has the data. Now, with the tool up and running, other counties around the country are reportedly in talks to adopt it, too. The tool, Ballot Verifier, allows anyone to access ballot images and cast vote record for free. It also offers infographics of election results, search functionality for specific races and the ability to download results. Read Article

Kansas stops enforcing a law against impersonating election officials | John Hanna/Associated Press

Kansas is no longer enforcing a 3-year-old law making it a felony to impersonate election officials as it faces a legal challenge from critics who argue that the law has hindered efforts to register new voters. Attorneys for the state and groups suing over the law agreed on stopping its enforcement, and District Judge Teresa Watson in Shawnee County, home to the state capital of Topeka, issued an order earlier this week ratifying their agreement. Her order will remain in effect at least until another court hearing after the November election. The law made “falsely representing” an elections official punishable by up to 13 months in prison for a first-time offender, though two years’ probation would have been the most likely sentence. The crime includes causing someone to believe another person is an election official. The Republican-controlled Legislature enacted the law in 2021 by overriding a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. Read Article

Michigan faces a shortage of local clerk candidates, raising alarms about how elections will be run | Jon King/Michigan Advance

They are the administrators of democracy, making sure that elections are free, fair and efficient. They maintain the records of local government and are responsible for public access to those records, including births, deaths and the marriages in between.  And yet, nearly 10% of the 1,240 township clerk positions that are up for election this year in Michigan have no candidates willing to step up and fill them. That’s according to Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist, who also serves as second vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks (MAMC). In a social media post this month, Siegrist pointed to the situation as one that’s not been experienced before. “What if I told you that 118 townships have nobody running for Clerk this year. We’ve never seen anything like this in history. 9.5% of all clerk races this year will have NOBODY elected,” he said, before posing a series of questions. “Why doesn’t anyone want to do this job? How does a state deal with such a massive labor shortage? Who will run elections in these communities?” Read Article

Michigan has fix in place after brief outage in early-voter check-in system | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

An overloaded server briefly brought Michigan’s voter check-in system to a crawl Saturday morning, a hiccup on the first day of early in-person voting in the state primary that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says she is “confident” won’t happen again. The error was the result of other applications running on the same server that also hosted the state’s electronic poll books, Benson said during a news conference Monday. When voting started, those hundreds of poll book connections plus those other applications “caused a spike in activity” that tied up the servers and forced clerks around the state to temporarily switch to paper voter records. The Secretary of State’s Office worked with the Department of Technology, Management and Budget to discuss a solution that prioritizes early voting over other applications and protects access to the servers, Benson said. Read Article

Ohio law violates rights of voters with disabilities, judge says | Haley BeMiller/Columbus Dispatch

Ohio’s election law violates the rights of people with disabilities who rely on caregivers or family members to return their absentee ballots, a federal judge ruled Monday. The decision came down in a lawsuit that challenged a rule allowing only certain family members to help relatives who are hospitalized or homebound because of an illness or disability. While the list includes spouses, parents, siblings and grandparents, the state does not allow grandchildren or caretakers to handle another person’s absentee ballot. U.S. District Judge Bridget Meehan Brennan said that violates the federal Voting Rights Act, which allows voters with disabilities to get help from anyone except their employer or union representative. Her decision means Ohio’s law can no longer be enforced. Read Article

Pennsylvania’s long-running dispute over dates on mail-in voting ballots is back in the courts | Mark Scolforo/Associated Press

A technical requirement that Pennsylvania voters write accurate dates on the exterior envelope of mail-in ballots was again the subject of a court proceeding on Thursday as advocates argued the mandate unfairly leads to otherwise valid votes being thrown out. A five-judge Commonwealth Court panel heard about two hours of argument in a case that was filed in May, even though the date requirement has been upheld both by the state Supreme Court and the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The case was brought by the Black Political Empowerment Project, Common Cause and allied advocacy groups against the secretary of state and the elections boards in Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. They argued that enforcing the date requirement infringes upon voting rights and that none of the prior cases on the topic directly ruled whether it runs afoul of the state constitution’s Free and Equal Elections Clause. Read Article

Pennsylvania presidential election results could again take days to count | Colby Itkowitz and Derek Hawkins/The Washington Post

mail-in ballots, his lead shrunk and then disappeared. By Saturday, Joe Biden was the clear winner of Pennsylvania — and with it, the presidency. The protracted counting process left a days-long vacuum that Trump filled with demands to stop counting the ballots while he was still ahead, declaring victory in Pennsylvania and building the false narrative that the mail-in votes were fraudulent. It became a core part of the false narrative that helped propel Trump’s “Stop the Steal” crusade and spurred election denialism among his allies and supporters that has continued to this day. The delay was caused by a quirk of Pennsylvania’s election law, which forbids the opening of mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on the day of the election. Read Article

Wisconsin judge refuses GOP request to pause absentee voting ruling sought by disabled people | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

A judge refused Thursday to put on hold his ruling that allows disabled people in Wisconsin to be emailed absentee ballots at home in November’s presidential election in the closely watched battleground state. Republicans asked the judge to not enforce his ruling while their appeal is pending. But Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell on Thursday rejected their arguments, saying putting his ruling on hold “would inflict significant harm on both the disability rights advocates and the public interest.” It will now be up to the state appeals court to decide whether to pause the ruling that opens up a new way for an unknown number of disabled voters to cast their ballots in swing state Wisconsin before the Nov. 5 election. Read Article

Arizona ruling makes voter registration harder without proof of citizenship | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona residents who try to register to vote with the widely used state form will have their registration rejected unless they provide proof of U.S. citizenship, under a temporary ruling Thursday from a federal appeals court. Previously, residents without citizenship documents would have been allowed to use the state form, which almost all Arizonans use, to get registered, but they could vote only in federal elections — for U.S. House, Senate and president. That’s because Arizona law requires voters to provide proof of citizenship to register, whereas federal law requires only an attestation that a voter is a citizen, but not documentation proving it. Under a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the state must permit voters who registered without citizenship proof to cast ballots in federal elections, so Arizona has maintained separate rolls of so-called federal-only voters. Read Article

Colorado official faces trial following ‘Big Lie’ election conspiracies | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News Service

A faithful Republican living on Colorado’s conservative western slope, Tina Peters watched the 2020 presidential results with concern. Still, as the duly elected clerk and recorder for Mesa County, Peters was confident in the integrity of the election she had overseen. After all, nearly two-thirds of local voters backed then-President Donald Trump that November, also helping to lift Lauren Boebert into Congress. Fast forward five months later, to April 2021, and Grand Junction voters overwhelmingly rejected the most conservative city council candidates. Belief in the “Big Lie” about a stolen 2020 election had become a litmus test for Republican Party loyalty — and Peters began to question whether she could really trust the Dominion voting machines in her county. She voiced her concerns to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, but they went ignored. Read Article

National: Election workers prepare for violence with guns and PPE | Charlotte McDonald-Gibson/The Times

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has highlighted the growing danger faced by public figures across the United States and experts are warning that, unless politicians dial down the divisive rhetoric, more violence is likely. Politicians, state legislators, election workers, school board officials and local prosecutors are increasingly targeted with death threats, harassment and other abuse as the political atmosphere before the election on November 5 becomes more tense. This is forcing local officials to take extraordinary measures to keep themselves and their staff safe. At her office in Douglas County, Nevada, Amy Burgans, the county clerk treasurer, has stockpiled personal protective equipment to keep election workers safe from ballots spiked with drugs. She has nasal spray on her desk to reverse overdoses in case any fentanyl gets through, and has organised training on how to deal with active shooters. She also carries a personal firearm. Read Article