Warren Stewart – Page 30 – The Voting News

With voter confidence reportedly on the rise, it might be tempting to think that the battles over election integrity are over. But there’s one contest from the November 2024 general election that isn’t settled yet, even though it’s now March. And what’s happening in the North Carolina Supreme Court race is sending a clear signal that losing candidates will continue to contest the rules under which elections are conducted. Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, lost his bid for election to the court by just 734 votes to incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat who was appointed to a vacant seat in 2023 and then ran for a full term. Read Article

Opinion: North Carolina elections will be in chaos if Griffin wins case | Cherie Poucher, Kathy Holland, Larry Hammond and Meloni Wray/Raleigh News & Observer

We are among a group of 42 former county directors of elections who recently provided state judges with our perspective about Jefferson Griffin’s request to disqualify more than 65,000 voters in the 2024 N.C. Supreme Court contest. Members of our group come from every part of the state and have more than 750 years of combined experience in managing elections. Though normally behind-the-scenes administrators, we are speaking out now because of the significant impact this case could have on the integrity of our state’s election system. First, the election laws that voters relied on to cast their ballots in 2024 have been in place for years. Election directors relied on those rules to conduct the election in a uniform manner across the state, without favoritism or bias. Changing these laws and rules in the middle of an election is disruptive. Changing them after an election to apply to the election already held is chaos. How can the public trust our election system if the rules can be changed after the results are known in order to produce a different outcome? Read Article

Texas: In Guadalupe County, an elections academy aims to strengthen residents’ trust in voting | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Guadalupe County’s Citizens Elections Academy is the brainchild of Lisa Hayes, the county’s elections administrator, who modeled the idea after a similar initiative by local law enforcement. Across the state, counties and cities offer local government citizens’ academies and local law enforcement agencies run police department academies, but Guadalupe County’s academy — launched in the fall of 2023 — is the first to focus solely on elections. The goal, Hayes said, is to increase confidence and trust in the election process. It’s part of a broader effort by Texas election officials to address rampant spread of misinformation following the November 2020 election. Across the state, election officials have hosted open houses, workshops, and additional public testing of voting equipment beyond what’s required by law to try to regain voters’ trust. Read Article

Utah Was a Rare Red State to Champion Mail Voting. That Era Is Likely Ending. | Alex Burness/Bolts

House Bill 300, which passed the Republican-controlled legislature March 6, would end universal vote-by-mail in Utah. It’s a landmark reform that would close an era in which Utah occupied a unique place in the national patchwork of election rules: Since 2019, it’s been the only reliably red state in the country to automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter. HB 300 would instead require any Utah voter to proactively request a mail ballot. It would also impose additional restrictions on how they must return these ballots, for instance by ending the grace period for when they must be delivered to election offices by postal workers. Read Article

Wisconsin appeals court tosses improper temporary injunction for emailed absentee ballots | Destiny DeVooght/Courthouse News Service

A Wisconsin appeals court reversed on Wednesday a temporary injunction by the circuit court that would allow visually impaired voters to request emailed absentee ballots to be digitally marked and returned in person. In 2024, Disability Rights Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin filed suit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, alleging the present absentee voting scheme is unlawful to print-disabled absentee voters because they cannot cast their ballot privately and without assistance. Specifically, they argued that this violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and Article III of the Wisconsin Constitution, which states that “all votes shall be by secret ballot,” according to the appellate brief. Read Article

Pennsylvania signs new contract to upgrade SURE voter registration system | Carter Walker/Votebeat

The Pennsylvania Department of State said Wednesday that it signed a new $10.6 million contract with Louisiana-based technology company Civix to upgrade the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, and integrate it with other state-run election systems. The SURE system is a statewide database used by counties to register voters and maintain their records, print poll books, process mail ballot applications, and carry out many of the functions necessary to run elections. The contract calls for Civix to integrate the functions of the SURE system with the state’s election night reporting, campaign finance, and lobbying disclosure systems, creating a system that the department called a “one-stop-shop elections administration experience.” Read Article

National: “We Are Effectively Flying Blind:” Election Officials Say Cuts to CISA Are Affecting Operations | Matt Cohen/Democracy Docket

Ever since President Donald Trump’s victory in November, election officials at every level and voting rights advocates have worried that he would gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — the little-known federal agency responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure from digital threats. And now that those cuts have come to fruition, election officials are already experiencing the loss of crucial CISA resources they said are integral to voting security. In the seven years since CISA’s creation, it’s become a crucial agency to help secure elections from foreign and domestic cybersecurity threats. Among the agency’s routine functions are sending cybersecurity experts to local election offices to recommend upgrades and best practices, training election officials to spot foreign interference and connecting offices with law enforcement agencies — a crucial practice as violence and threats to election officials significantly grew in the past decade. Read Article

Can VotingWorks’ publicly viewable software boost faith in voting machines? | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

At a recent gathering of election officials in Washington, D.C., a technology vendor called VotingWorks demonstrated the systems that it has submitted for federal certification this year. The group says its mission is to make voting equipment everyone can trust “through transparency, simplicity, and demonstrable security.” It’s the first technology company to seek federal certification for a voting system relying on publicly available code. “I think it’s a big deal,” said Pamela Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, who sees the election technology industry moving toward more transparency. “I think it’s a good step forward.” Read Article

National: Trump’s federal shake-up sparks concerns among election security experts | Julia Mueller and Caroline Vakil/The Hill

Election experts are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s wide-reaching changes to the federal bureaucracy, which is impacting the cybersecurity agency responsible for protecting the nation’s critical cyber and physical infrastructure. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has paused its election security work while it conducts a review of all election security related funding, products, activities, and personnel. “Faced with limited resources, state and local election officials across the country rely on CISA’s expertise,” nonpartisan election watchdog Verified Voting’s president and CEO Pamela Smith said in a statement calling on DHS to keep CISA’s “essential” election security work in place. “Any reduction in these critical resources could make our elections more vulnerable and leave officials with fewer tools to protect our democratic process. Election security is national security — something every American has a stake in.” Read Article

National: Election security aid on the chopping block, rattling local officials | Kevin Collier/NBC

State and local election officials who have grown to rely on the federal government’s cybersecurity assistance fear that the Trump administration may permanently block that aid by Thursday. Such funding, which began in President Donald Trump’s first term and is funnelled through the country’s top domestic security body, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), stopped in February. Those programs include free on-site and remote security testing of election machines and the websites that report election results, and ad hoc “situation rooms” where election officials can virtually gather and discuss security tactics in real time. Read Article

National: Trump Bid to Take Over Postal Service Could Threaten Mail Voting | Jacob Knutson/Democracy Docket

President Donald Trump may soon attempt to absorb the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), an independent agency, into his administration by issuing an executive order that reportedly would dissolve the service’s leadership. The order could allow the Trump administration to make mail voting — which was used by tens of millions of voters last year — more difficult. Trump has repeatedly said he’d like to end the practice, falsely claiming it allows for widespread fraud. “Taking over the Postal Service just kind of opens up a whole Pandora’s box of mischief,” said Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit which works to increase voters’ access to and confidence in mail voting. Read Article

National: Judge finds Mike Lindell in contempt for failing to turn over documents in Smartmatic defamation case | Laura Romero and Soo Rin Kim/ABC

A federal judge in Minnesota has found MyPillow CEO and Trump ally Mike Lindell in contempt of court for failing to provide discovery and financial documents in the defamation case brought by voting machine company Smartmatic. Smartmatic sued Lindell for defamation in 2022, alleging that he lied about the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election for his own financial gain. In a filing on Thursday, Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan said Lindell failed to produce analytics data for his company’s website and financial records to show Lindell’s financial condition for the years 2022 and 2023. Read Articles

National: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves | Elisabeth Bumiller/The New York Times

The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute. Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions. More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond. Read Article

Alabama House committee advances post-election audit bill | Craig Monger/1819 News

For the third year in a row, the House Ways and Mean General Fund Committee voted to advance a bill by State Rep. Debbie Wood (R-Valley) requiring probate judges in each county to conduct a post-election audit after every county and statewide general election. Despite receiving broad support from lawmakers and the state Republican Party, the bill has failed to pass in the previous two legislative sessions. This year’s version, House Bill 30 (HB30), requires the probate judge of each county to order a post-election audit after every county and statewide general election of all ballots in one precinct of a countywide or statewide race, selected by the canvassing board of each county, so long as that election is not subject to a recount. Read Article

Colorado: Justice Department is reviewing prosecution of clerk who supported Trump’s election lies | Nicholas Riccardi and hristina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The Department of Justice is backing a former county election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in allowing supporters of President Donald Trump to access confidential data about the 2020 election, the latest move by the administration to use its power to reward allies who violated the law on the president’s behalf. Peters has become a celebrity in the world of those who embrace Trump’s lies that he lost the 2020 election due to fraud. Her supporters have been pushing the new Republican administration to pressure Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to pardon her. Read Article

Georgia: ‘Trump asked for paper ballots’: State Senator files bill to remove electronic voting machines | Sarah Dolgin/Chattanooga Times Free Press

Georgia Senator Colton Moore A Northwest Georgia senator has filed a bill that would require the state to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in elections. “I know many of you listen to everything that President Trump says, and you may have noticed a week or two ago, President Trump asked for paper ballots,” Moore said, “and I have a piece of legislation that accomplishes that very thing.” SB 303 would transfer the power to select and certify a statewide voting system from the secretary of state to the state election board. The legislation would require the use of hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots and require the absentee ballot scanning process to conform to the new system. It would also require the state to repeal any conflicting laws. Read Article

Michigan plans to remove 318,000 inactive voters | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office announced Tuesday morning it will remove more than 318,000 inactive registrations from the state’s voter rolls in April. The number represents about 4% of the total registered voters in Michigan, where debates over election law have been persistent amid close presidential elections in 2016, 2020 and 2024. “This is a milestone for Michigan’s secure and accessible election system,” Benson said in a statement. “State and local election officials are constantly working to maintain our voter rolls transparently, accurately and in accordance with state and federal law.” Read Article

New Jersey’s ballot design that gave party bosses big influence is officially dead | Ry Rivard/Politico

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Thursday signed into law a redesign of primary ballots, formally ending an entrenched system that gave unique influence to the state’s party bosses but faced an unexpected wave of opposition. It’s known as the county line and was an only-in-Jersey phenomenon that faced a reckoning following the 2023 indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez. But it became a strange vestige of Tammany Hall-era machine politics that then-Gov. Woodrow Wilson tried to snuff out over a century ago. The county line system gave political parties in all but two of the state’s 21 counties the power to help design primary ballots based on party endorsements. Party-backed candidates were grouped together while candidates without endorsements were displayed awkwardly or on obscure parts of the ballot. Getting the line could make or break a campaign. Read Article

North Carolina: Seeking to avoid repeat of Supreme Court election lawsuit, lawmakers eye changes for overseas voters | By Will Doran/WRAL

Democrats in the state legislature are planning to file a bill aimed directly at one of the legal tactics employed by Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin in his attempt to reverse the results of the 2024 election for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat. Griffin wants to throw out more than 60,000 voters’ ballots, including thousands of ballots cast by overseas voters. The state didn’t require overseas voters to show photo identification in 2024, even though most other voters did have to show ID. Griffin contends that’s wrong, and that their ballots shouldn’t count. No legislation would be able to shut down Griffin’s lawsuit as it plays out in the courts, but Democrats believe their proposal will at least stop future lawsuits from targeting overseas voters like deployed members of the military, by making it clear that they don’t have to show ID. Read Article

Pennsylvania to update SURE election and voter registration system | Jordan Wilkie/WITF

The Department of State has selected a contractor to update the state’s 22-year-old voter registration system. Over the next three years, a technology company called Civix will modernize Pennsylvania’s voter registration, election-night reporting, lobbying disclosure and campaign finance systems. SURE and systems like it are already doing far more than they were originally designed to do back in 2002, when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states to have unified voter registration systems. “When HAVA initially required voter registration databases, they really were just lists of registered voters,” said Megan Maier, deputy director of research and partnerships at the election technology nonprofit Verified Voting. The system was not designed to handle the over 1.8 million mail-in ballots Pennsylvania voters returned in the 2024 general election, for example. Read Article

Texas proposal would ease polling place requirements for countywide voting | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas state senators Thursday held a public hearing on legislation crafted to update a 2023 law requiring certain counties to drastically increase the number of polling locations if they use vote centers for countywide voting. Last year, Votebeat reported that election officials in several counties said they were struggling to comply with the law as written. “Most election administrators and county clerks will tell you they’re struggling to find workers on Election Day,” Bettencourt said during the hearing Thursday. He cited an example reported by Votebeat last year of election officials in Brazos County who said they were struggling to comply with the law. Read Article

Washington Supreme Court rejects challenge to mail-in ballot signature verification process | Monique Merrill/Courthouse News Service

Washington state’s mail-in ballot process that requires election workers to verify ballot signatures will remain in place, the state’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. “The undisputed fact that signature verification results in tens of thousands of votes being disqualified every election raises significant constitutional concerns,” Washington Supreme Court Justice Steven Gonzalez wrote in the 32-page opinion. However, the high court determined that the law at issue does not itself require election workers to disqualify a single valid ballot, and the opportunities to cure rejected ballots don’t exclude or unduly burden voters. Read Article

Wisconsin voters give notice they’re suing over misplaced ballots in the November election | Scott Bauer/Associated Press

Four Wisconsin voters whose ballots were not counted in the November presidential election initiated a class-action lawsuit Thursday seeking $175,000 in damages each. The voters were among 193 in Madison whose ballots were misplaced by the city clerk and not discovered until weeks after the election. Not counting the ballots didn’t affect the result of any races. The Wisconsin Elections Commission investigated but did not determine whether Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl failed to comply with state law or abused her discretion. She didn’t notify the elections commission of the problem until December, almost a month and a half after the election and after the results were certified on Nov. 29. Read Article

Wyoming: Bills banning ballot drop boxes, touch screen voting machines fail in Senate | Hannah Shields/Wyoming Tribune Eagle

A majority of Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s election integrity bills died Friday night after failing to pass first reading in the Wyoming Senate, including two that threatened to “upend” Laramie County elections, according to County Clerk Debra Lee. A large number of election-related bills were filed this session, making up 8% of total proposed legislation, according to WyoFile.com. House Bill 245, “Pen and paper ballots,” would have removed touch-screen voting machines that have been used by Laramie County voters for decades. Lee previously told lawmakers this bill would “upend” elections in her county. 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. 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: Mac Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights | Ben Penn/Bloomberg Law

The Justice Department has inserted Mac Warner, who last year espoused false claims that the CIA stole Trump’s 2020 presidential victory with the FBI’s help, to run the civil rights division, replacing an ousted career official who’s started reporting to the new sanctuary cities office. Warner, West Virginia’s former secretary of state, embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election while running in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary. Warner told DOJ civil rights staff Monday that he’s assumed control of the division, according to an email obtained by Bloomberg Law. He’ll function as the top official until Harmeet Dhillon, another 2020 election denier who Trump selected to lead the anti-discrimination enforcement office, wins Senate confirmation. Read Article

National: Fact-check: Trump relies on falsehoods when pushing voting changes in speech to governors | Amy Sherman/PolitiFact

President Donald Trump told governors to change their election laws and repeated falsehoods and misleading statements to make his case for new voting policies. If states required “proof of citizenship, voter ID, paper ballots, one day voting,” Trump said, it would result in knowing “the results of your election by 10 p.m.” What Trump leaves out: The vast majority of U.S. voters already use paper ballots; a majority of states require voter ID at the polls; and only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Read Article

National: State Election Officials Seek to Avert Deeper Cuts | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Alarmed by cuts already made to federal agencies that help safeguard elections, and fearful that more could be coming, a bipartisan group of the nation’s top state election officials has appealed to Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, for help. In a rare move, the ordinarily restrained National Association of Secretaries of State wrote to Ms. Noem, the former South Dakota governor, on Friday asking that critical election programs and protections be spared during an upcoming agency review. Among the programs the group singled out for preservation were those aimed at assessing the physical security of voting locations and election offices, shoring up cybersecurity for election offices, sharing classified intelligence on foreign threats to elections and responding to attacks like ransomware. Read Article

National: Election systems feared to be vulnerable as Trump administration cuts workers tasked with security | Nicole Sganga/CBS

Over the last month, the U.S. government has worked quickly to pause, disband and dismantle the U.S. effort to fight foreign meddling in elections, raising concern among federal lawmakers and election officials across the country who rely on the federal cybersecurity agency and its counterparts to warn them about attacks on election systems. First came a flurry of notices forcing out Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency personnel who are tasked with stopping foreign interference in U.S. elections — at least a dozen have been put on leave or fired over the past month. Then, on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office on Feb. 5, she disbanded the FBI task force targeting foreign influence operations originating from places like Russia, China and Iran. Read Article

National: CISA layoffs do foreign disinformation peddlers a massive favor | Gintaras Radauskas/Cybernews