National: As Election Day nears, emergency officials prep for possible violence | Sarah D. Wire/USA Today

The bushes in front of city hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, have been removed. On election night, the street out front will be blocked off. These “hardening” measures were suggested by the city police chief to protect the ballots being counted inside, said Celestine Jeffreys, Green Bay’s city clerk. As threats against election workers have grown more violent, election officials across the country have spent months coordinating to protect voters, ballots and poll workers at an unprecedented level with emergency management agencies. Amid that coordination, the centralized locations where ballots are counted on election night have emerged as a key place needing protection. More than a dozen county and city election officials spoke with USA TODAY about what they are doing to make sure they can count ballots at central ballot counting locations once polls close, no matter what happens outside. Read Article

National: Ballot drop boxes, long a target of misinformation, face physical threats | Layla Ferris/CBS News

With Election Day nearing, authorities in Oregon and Washington have opened investigations and stepped up security measures after two ballot drop boxes were set ablaze on Monday. Three ballots were damaged after an incendiary device was found inside a ballot box in Portland, Oregon, on Monday. And on the same day, officials feared hundreds of ballots were damaged by a fire in a ballot box in nearby Vancouver, Washington. Police said a “suspicious device” was found next to the box. Ballot drop boxes have historically been targets of misinformation, according to experts, who say the false claims surged in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump raised doubts about the security of mail-in ballots. Drop boxes are now facing growing physical threats, according to election officials and internal U.S. government warnings. Read Article

National: Republican lawsuits over overseas and military voting hit setbacks in 3 swing states | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

Three Republican legal challenges to the legitimacy of ballots cast by U.S. citizens living abroad, including U.S. military members, have hit setbacks this month.On Tuesday, a federal judge tossed one of three lawsuits that GOP groups filed in swing states in recent weeks. That case was brought by six Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. A Michigan state judge dismissed a similar case last week, when a North Carolina judge also rejected the Republican National Committee’s request for the court to order that returned ballots of some overseas voters be set aside and not counted until the voters’ eligibility can be confirmed. Read Article

Arizona: Maricopa County is prepared for safe presidential election, sheriff says | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Concrete barriers sit along the sidewalks outside Maricopa County’s election center in downtown Phoenix. A chain-link fence with privacy covers encloses the parking lot. Surrounding the building itself is another black steel security fence, this one permanent. And inside the building, there are locked doors behind locked doors. Outside on Tuesday, the gate on the security fence buzzed, followed by latches opening, then slamming shut again, as workers walked in and out. With seven days to go, this is what it looked like at the site where ballots will be counted for the Nov. 5 presidential election, in the most populous swing county in the nation. Read Article

Colorado voting system passwords were posted to secretary of state’s website | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Passwords to certain components of Colorado’s voting system were posted publicly on the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office website under a hidden tab of a spreadsheet, according to a discovery made Tuesday. Discovery of the posted passwords was shared on Tuesday in a mass email from Colorado Republican Party Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman. The mass email, Denver’s 9NEWS reported, included an affidavit from a person, whose name was redacted, who claimed they’d downloaded the spreadsheet file from the website and discovered the hidden tab by simply clicking “unhide.” The passwords included in the hidden tab were used to configure voting machine system settings, 9NEWS reported, and make up one part of the security process for Colorado’s voting machines. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told 9NEWS on Tuesday that the spreadsheet containing the passwords had been on the office’s website for several months, and that she was only made aware of the error this week before taking it down. Read Article

Georgia’s investigations into the election breach in Coffee County have stalled | Katherine Landergan/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Nearly four years ago, security cameras captured the moment that allies of former President Donald Trump walked into a South Georgia office where authorities say they copied confidential software and files that could be used to undermine the legitimacy of an election. Today, as Georgia approaches the eve of another presidential election, the fate of the Coffee County breach is still frozen in a state of limbo. So far, the only criminal charges in connection with the activities in the rural Georgia community have been filed in Fulton County, some 200 miles away. But that case, which also involves other allegations of election interference, has stalled. And although the state Attorney General’s office received a nearly 400-page report from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation more than a year ago, they have pressed pause. Election integrity advocates warned that the inaction sends a dangerous message to other bad actors who may want to tamper with Georgia’s voting system and undercut democracy. Read Article

Iowa: Voters were removed from rolls improperly, an election official says | Hannah Fingerhut/Associated Press

Some Iowa voters were improperly removed from registration rolls by county election officials after challenges to their registration status were filed too close to the election, Iowa’s top election official confirmed Wednesday. County auditors may have processed removals stemming from challenges that were filed within 90 days of the election — a designated “quiet period’’ during which only limited changes can be made to voter rolls, said Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate. The secretary of state said his office directed county auditors to contact their attorneys and get the voters put back on the rolls. He said “most, if not all those counties” have done that. Read Article

Michigan Clerks Removed From Election Duty Over Plans for a Hand Count | Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

Two local election officials in Michigan have been removed from overseeing the vote, state officials said on Tuesday, in a forceful move to keep Trump-aligned officials from trying to subvert election rules. Tom Schierkolk, the clerk of Rock River Township in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and his deputy, David LaMere, were removed after telling state officials that they intended to hand count ballots before sending their tally on for the county canvass, according to a letter that Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s elections director, sent to Mr. Schierkolk on Monday informing him of the decision. Mr. Schierkolk is tied to a network of activists who have pushed several baseless theories about corruption in elections and, at times, advocated the hand-counting of ballots, apparently believing that electronic voting machines are insecure. Donald J. Trump and his allies spread the idea widely after his defeat in 2020, claiming, falsely, that the machines had changed the votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Reead Article

Nevada Supreme Court rules non-postmarked ballots can be counted within 3 days of election | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

The Nevada Supreme Court has ruled that election officials can count mail ballots with no postmark received as many as three days after Election Day. In a decision Monday, five of the high court’s seven justices disagreed with the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) interpretation of the law at the center of the lawsuit and determined it would not be in the public interest to change election procedures this late in the cycle. Justices Douglas Herndon and Kristina Pickering agreed with the ruling but disagreed with the majority’s interpretation of the law in question. The ruling upholds a Carson City judge’s denial of the Republicans’ request in August to stop the counting of these ballots. It is the latest defeat in the barrage of lawsuits filed by state and local Republicans related to Nevada’s mail ballot laws and voter roll maintenance, none of which have resulted in GOP victories, though one is pending a ruling and the others are in various stages of appeal. Read Article

North Carolina appeals court rejects RNC request to set aside ballots from overseas voters who never lived in state | Devan Cole/CNN

The North Carolina Court of Appeals on Tuesday unanimously rejected a Republican bid to have election officials segregate overseas ballots cast by people who have never resided in the state for additional checks of the voters’ eligibility. The court’s decision is the latest blow to Republican efforts to attack overseas ballots in critical battleground states. Earlier Tuesday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a challenge to the vetting procedures for overseas ballots in that state. And last week, a state judge in Michigan sided against the GOP in a case targeting ballots cast by people who had never lived there but were eligible to vote in the state because of familial ties to it. Read Article

What Ohio voters need to know about what happens before and after casting your ballot | Megan Henry/Ohio Capital Journal

Election Day is one week away and the League of Women Voters of Ohio recently hosted a webinar that went over the state’s post-election procedures to highlight the security of elections and the safety mechanisms in place when handling ballots and verifying results. The results of the election are unofficial until Secretary of State Frank LaRose certifies the election results after they are officially submitted by county boards of elections. “Election night is not results night, and that’s okay,” said Jessica King, Verified Voting’s senior policy associate. “Election officials have their processes and procedures that they’re going to follow, and again, we need to give them that space and time to do that.” Read Article

Pennsylvania: Activists are challenging the eligibility of hundreds of voters in Philadelphia’s suburbs. Experts say the effort is legally baseless. | Jeremy Roebuck and Katie Bernard/The Philadelphia Inquirer

In what appears to be an organized effort, right-leaning activists have challenged the mail ballot applications of hundreds of voters in the Philadelphia suburbs in recent days, claiming their targets no longer live at the addresses where they are registered to vote. But voting rights advocates broadly dismiss the effort as baseless, legally invalid, and born of a misunderstanding of government data. While they predict most of the challenges will be swiftly rejected, they say the campaign is yet another instance of a loose network of right-wing organizers billing themselves as “election integrity” advocates sowing confusion about state voting laws and creating headaches for elections administrators already bombarded by misinformation surrounding the voting process. Read Article

As Texas refuses online voter registration, paper applications get lost | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Last year, Hannah Murry remembers, she filled out every line of her paper voter registration. She then gave it to a volunteer deputy registrar at a registration drive at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where she’s a student. “I thought that was handled, so I just went on with my life,” said Murry. It wasn’t handled. Murry, 21, found that out when she went to an early voting location in Nueces County last fall to cast her first ballot, in the constitutional amendment election. She handed her ID to an election worker — who told her she wasn’t on the rolls. At that point, it was too late to fix it. Poll workers let her update her registration on site for the next election, which she did. She left confused and frustrated. Read Article

Virginia: US Supreme Court allows purge of suspected noncitizen voters | Ann E. Marimow, Justin Jouvenal and Gregory S. Schneider/The Washington Post

A divided Supreme Court cleared the way Wednesday for Virginia officials to remove about 1,600 people from the state’s voter registration rolls less than one week before the presidential election. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) asked the justices to intervene after two lower courts blocked his efforts to cancel the registrations of voters who could be noncitizens — an issue Republican officials have seized on nationally even though noncitizen voting is extremely rare. Youngkin signed an order in August to expedite the removal of registered voters whose driver’s license applications indicated or suggested that they were not U.S. citizens. The effort was opposed by the Justice Department and civil rights groups, which said many being kicked off the rolls were actually eligible and were targeted because of outdated or erroneous information. Read Article

Washington: Hundreds of damaged ballots saved following fire at drop box | Dani Anguiano/The Guardian

Officials in south-west Washington were able to salvage almost 500 damaged ballots from a ballot box that was set on fire on Monday in what officials have called an attack on democracy ahead of a contentious US election. An unknown number of ballots were destroyed when someone placed incendiary devices in a drop box in Vancouver, Washington, while three ballots were damaged in a fire at a box in nearby Portland, Oregon. Those fires and one other are linked, officials have said. Workers in Washington will begin searching through the damaged ballots for voter information in order to contact people about getting a new ballot, said Greg Kimsey, the Clark county auditor. Workers should be able to collect information from the ballots despite the damage, he said. The attacks are under investigation by the FBI as well as state and local officials. Read Article

National: ‘Firehose’ of election conspiracy theories floods final days of the campaign | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

In the final days of the presidential election, lies about noncitizens voting, the vulnerability of mail-in ballots and the security of voting machines are spreading widely over social media. Fanned by former President Donald Trump and notable allies such as tech tycoon Elon Musk, election disinformation is warping voters’ faith in the integrity of the democratic process, polls show, and setting the stage once again for potential public unrest if the Republican nominee fails to win the presidency. At the same time, federal officials are investigating ongoing Russian interference through social media and shadow disinformation campaigns. The “firehose” of disinformation is working as intended, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that advocates for responsible use of technology in elections. “This issue is designed to sow general distrust,” she said. “Your best trusted source is not your friend’s cousin’s uncle that you saw on Twitter. It’s your local election official. Don’t repeat it. Check it instead.” Read Article

‘Is it going to be safe?’: Suspicions and fear dominate a crucial Michigan county in lead-up to US election | Chris McGreal/The Guardian

Vanessa Guerra is resigned to questions from Donald Trump’s supporters about the many ways in which American voters imagine next month’s presidential election might be rigged against him. But more recently the Saginaw county clerk, who is overseeing the ballot in a highly contested patch of central Michigan, has faced a new line of questioning at meetings called to reassure distrustful voters. “I did a presentation last week and, as usual, we had a lot of questions about the validity of election results. But now they’re also asking: Is it going to be safe to go to the polls on election day? Is something going to happen? That’s something new,” said Guerra. Read Article

National: Bulletproof vests, snipers and drones: Election officials beef up security at the polls | Jane C. Timm/NBC

Election officials across the country are ramping up their security measures at polling places with voting underway in the presidential race, from beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment. The once-routine business of running elections in America has become much more fraught with risk in the wake of the 2020 campaign, with poll workers facing harassment, violent threats and chaotic protests. It’s a dynamic that has forced many election officials out of the industry, while those who remain have taken in some cases dramatic steps to protect poll workers and voters ahead of Election Day. Read Article

National: Trump’s Allies Revive Debunked Voting Machine Theories |  Danny HakimNick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon/The New York Times

It has been nearly four years since a parade of judges dismissed wild claims from Donald J. Trump and his associates about hacked election machines and a year and a half since a leading machine company obtained a $787.5 million settlement from Fox News over the debunked conspiracy theories. But Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and his closest allies are again trotting out the theories as part of a late-campaign strategy to assert that this year’s election is rigged — although this time Mr. Trump’s campaign appears to be largely acting behind the scenes. The theories are rampant on social media and widely embraced by activists. Read Article

National: What to Know About the Looming Election Certification Crisis | Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

The false narrative of a stolen election that inspired hundreds of Americans to storm the U.S. Capitol in 2021 is now fueling a far more sophisticated movement, one that involves local and state election boards across the country. What was once the Stop the Steal movement is now the “voter integrity” movement. Its aim is to persuade the people who are responsible for certifying local elections of the false notions that widespread fraud is a threat to democracy and that they have the authority and legal duty to do something about it: Deny certification of their local elections. Read Article

National: Election officials fight a tsunami of voting conspiracy theories | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting. With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5. “Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.” Read Article

National: Intelligence officials warn foreign disinformation from Russia may flood post-election period | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

The U.S. intelligence community is anticipating a potentially tumultuous post-election period this year, where foreign governments will seek to amplify domestic unrest to cast doubt about the legitimacy of the winner while undermining confidence in democracy. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out Russia, using some of their strongest language to date to warn that leaders in Moscow are preparing a full-court press in the final weeks of the election and beyond. “The intelligence community is increasingly confident that Russian actors are considering — and in some cases implementing — a broad range of influence efforts timed to the election,” an ODNI official told reporters Tuesday. Read Article

National: American creating deep fakes targeting Harris works with Russian intel, documents show | /Catherine BeltonThe Washington Post

A former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff who fled to Moscow and became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to Russian documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents show that John Mark Dougan, who also served in the U.S. Marines and has long claimed to be working independently of the Russian government, was provided funding by an officer from the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Some of the payments were made after fake news sites he created began to have difficulty accessing Western artificial intelligence systems this spring and he needed an AI generator — a tool that can be prompted to create text, photos and video. Read Article

National: Election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing states | Helen Coster, Alexandra Ulmer and Tim Reid/Reuters

Be aggressive,” Jim Womack, a local Republican Party chair in North Carolina, told the grid of faces who joined the Zoom training session for volunteers to monitor voting on Nov. 5. “The more assertive and aggressive you are in watching and reporting, the better the quality of the election.” During the two-hour session, conducted from a Republican Party office featuring a placard of an AR-15 rifle and photos of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Womack, 69, an army veteran and a retired information systems engineer, instructed 40 volunteers on how to spot “nefarious activity.” He mentioned a local clergyman who accompanied dozens of Latino parishioners to a voting site “like a shepherd leading a sheep.” Voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States – despite Trump’s false claim, supported by a majority of Republicans in Congress, that the 2020 election was stolen. US election experts worry about Republican poll watchers in swing statRead Article

Arizona GOP county recorder candidates campaign on election distrust | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Arizona’s election system has been thrown into turmoil over the past four years by false claims of widespread fraud and some real instances of mistakes in running elections. Now, Republican candidates for county recorder across the state are playing up those false claims and errors as they try to get elected. Their opponents acknowledge that Arizona elections can be improved, but warn voters to be wary of turning over crucial decisions about voting to candidates who seek to leverage distrust in the system. The most closely watched race is in Maricopa County, where Republican state Rep. Justin Heap is running for recorder against Democrat Tim Stringham on a pledge to “secure our elections.” Heap defeated the current recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, in the August primary after claiming that Richer ran “the worst election in history” in 2022. Read Article

Colorado: Scheme to cast votes on stolen mail ballots thwarted by election officials | Jesse Paul/Colorado Sun

Colorado election officials say they have thwarted an effort to fraudulently cast votes on batch of stolen mail ballots in Mesa County. The scheme was blocked through the state’s voter signature verification process, which checks the signatures on mail ballots against the signatures the state has on file for each voter. If the signatures don’t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as “curing.” When election officials recently reached out to a group of voters to help them cure the signature problems with their ballots, the voters informed the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office that they hadn’t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots. Read Article

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office stops election website cyber attack | Caleb Groves/The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The Georgia secretary of state’s office stopped a cyberattack this month targeted at the state’s absentee voting website. A state cyberdefense team, along with the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, prevented what is believed to be foreign hackers from shutting off the secretary of state’s absentee ballot website on the afternoon of Oct. 14, before the start of early voting. “We were able to put in an interface that says ‘I am a human,’ which immediately mitigated the issue and only slowed it down and didn’t crash the site at all,” said Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. “Our tools did everything right. This was a win.” At the peak of the incident over 420,000 different IP addresses were attempting to attack the absentee site at the same time, Sterling said. He said the state’s election process was not interrupted by the attack. Read Article

How One Georgia Voter’s Mistake Turned Into a Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theory | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

All it took was one mistake by a voter in Georgia to propel a conspiracy theory to nationwide attention and the upper echelons of Republican politics. Election officials in the state said that the voter, a woman whose name they did not disclose, visited a polling site in Whitfield County last week and used a touch-screen voting machine to cast her ballot. She mistakenly selected one candidate’s name when she had intended to choose another. The episode was over almost as soon as it began: The voter tried again, fixed the mistake and successfully cast her ballot. But online, the story quickly took on a life of its own, catapulted to prominence by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and transforming into an elaborate conspiracy theory involving voting machines that were somehow “flipping” votes between candidates en masse. Read Article

Michigan doesn’t have more active registered voters than residents | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A misleading claim promoted by right-wing activists has gained traction through X owner Elon Musk and other supporters of Donald Trump, feeding a false impression that there’s something wrong with Michigan’s voter rolls. The claim — that Michigan has more voters than people eligible to vote — has been debunked extensively by the state as well as independent experts. A federal court ruling this week weighed in on a similar GOP claim, finding flaws in the comparison of data points and no proof that the discrepancy amounts to a violation of law, just as previous courts have found. Musk and others cite the data points to argue that the discrepancy could enable fraudulent voting. The claim is based on a misunderstanding about the makeup of the state’s voter roll and what it means in relation to Census population data. It ignores the fact that the total number of registrations on the roll includes a large number of voters who are marked as inactive but who must be kept on the roll for several years under federal law. Most of those voters likely are no longer residents of the state. Read Article

Nevada GOP asks poll observers to ensure voting machines are operating accurately – critics say it invites harassment against workers and sows distrust | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

Republicans in Nevada are asking poll observers to complete a more than 15-item checklist on topics such as ensuring that voting machines are sufficiently secured and not connected to the internet, even though the poll watchers are not legally entitled to receive much of this information. State law does not explicitly give observers the right to seek much of the information on the checklists, such as inspecting the security of voting machines, receiving the serial numbers of the machines and accessing voting data at a polling location. Because election workers are not obligated to provide much of this information to observers and have many other responsibilities, critics worry that not doing so could increase harassment of election workers. “I am very concerned that this could happen, in terms of them following these individuals and harassing them and creating an unsafe environment based on this information,” said Sadmira Ramic, a voting rights attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada. Read Article