National: Local elected officials in US faced uptick in hostility in lead-up to 2024 election | Jason Wilson/The Guardian

Local elected officials in the US faced escalating insults and harassment in the immediate lead-up to the 2024 election, with women and minorities experiencing disproportionately high levels of hostility, according to new research. The latest survey from Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) and governance non-profit CivicPulse found that 53% of local elected officials reported receiving insults and 39% reported harassment between July and October, marking a significant increase from the previous quarter. Read Article

National: Fox News loses bid for Smartmatic voting-tech company’s records about Philippines bribery case | Jennifer Peltz/Associated Press

Smartmatic won’t be required to give Fox News a trove of information about U.S. federal charges against the voting machine company’s co-founder over alleged bribery in the Philippines, a judge ruled Thursday. Fox News and parent Fox Corp. sought the information to help fight Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation suit over broadcasts about the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Smartmatic says its business was gutted when Fox aired false claims that the election-tech company helped rig the voting. Read Article

National: With the Voting Rights Act facing more threats, advocates renew a push for state laws | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

With Republicans set to control Congress and the White House starting next year, some voting rights advocates are renewing their focus on protections against racial discrimination in elections that don’t rely on the federal government. Several states have enacted state-level voting rights acts over the past two decades, and Democratic-led Michigan may be next. This week a state House committee voted to refer a set of state Senate-approved bills to the House floor. Supporters of this emerging type of law see it as a bulwark at a time when Democratic-led efforts to bolster the federal Voting Rights Act are likely to remain stalled under a GOP trifecta of power in Washington, D.C. Read Article

Arizona: With new leaders, Maricopa County’s well-guarded elections may see shake-up | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

A new crew of Republican politicians will soon take control of Maricopa County’s high-profile elections, a major change for a key swing county that has for years contended with unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. The outgoing Republican officials built national profiles for fiercely defending the county’s elections against critics within their party. But the newcomers — also all Republicans — have signaled a different approach, saying they will be looking for ways to improve the system. The incoming recorder, Justin Heap, in particular, has been a consistent critic of the county’s elections, and is pushing for major changes. Heap, currently a Republican state representative, defeated incumbent Recorder Stephen Richer in the primary and went on to win the general election in a race that drew national attention. Read Article

A California Republican won a seat he didn’t want. Now taxpayers are paying for a new election | Ryan Sabalow/CalMatters

San Joaquin Valley Republican Vince Fong was on the ballot this fall for an Assembly race, but he didn’t want to win it. After all, he left that job for Congress earlier this year, and he planned to stay in the nation’s capital.He even went so far as to endorse the Bakersfield city councilmember who was listed as running against him on the November ballot. But voters chose Fong anyway for the Assembly. They chose him again for Congress, too, since he was listed on the same ballot twice. Now, since Fong “won” his Assembly race, Kern and Tulare County taxpayers in Assembly District 32 will end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a special election to fill the seat that Fong doesn’t want any more. Read Article

Colorado’s election equipment password breach explained | Bente Birkeland and Kiara DeMare/Colorado Public Radio

The revelation that BIOS passwords for ballot tabulation machines in 32 of Colorado’s 64 counties were posted for months in a hidden tab on a spreadsheet on the Secretary of State’s website set off statewide shockwaves in the days before the November election. The Secretary of State’s office was originally notified by an election equipment vendor who had spotted the tab. The passwords were removed on Oct. 24, after being online since June. Shawn Smith, a retired Air Force Colonel and conservative activist, wrote in an affidavit that he discovered the hidden tab much earlier, on Aug. 8, and checked twice in October that it was still there, without informing the state. The public became aware through an email the Colorado Republican Party sent to its supporters on Oct. 29. Read Article

Georgia: Trump’s lawyers move to dismiss election interference case | Dareh Gregorian and Charlie Gile/NBC

Attorneys for President-elect Donald Trump asked a Georgia appeals court Wednesday to dismiss the Fulton County racketeering case against him because a “sitting president is completely immune from indictment or any criminal process, state or federal.” In papers filed with the Georgia Court of Appeals, Trump’s attorneys argued the 2020 election interference charges should be tossed because of “the unconstitutionality of his continued indictment and prosecution by the State of Georgia” now that “he is President-Elect and will soon become the 47th President of the United States.” The case has been stalled for most of the year as Trump’s lawyers have challenged a ruling that denied their request to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from prosecuting the case on conflict-of-interest grounds. Read Article

An Idaho County Will Publish Everyone’s Ballots to Combat Mistrust | Mike Baker/The New York Times

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, as supporters of Donald J. Trump scoured the nation for any malfeasance that might explain his defeat, the county clerk’s office in Boise, Idaho, was inundated with queries. Voters wanted to know who had built the county’s voting machines. What software were they using? Did any parts come from China? Were the machines vulnerable to hacking? Outlandish claims were spreading in conservative circles across the country that votes had been discarded or altered in a coordinated effort to rig the election. Trent Tripple, a Republican who had worked in the Ada County clerk’s office and was elected to lead it starting last year, said he was convinced there was a solution that could help people gain confidence in their elections once more: It was time to publish the ballots for everyone to see. Read Article

Michigan Voting Rights Act moves forward despite concerns from local clerks | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

A set of bills that would expand voting rights for non-English speakers and voters with disabilities is moving closer to becoming state law after the House elections committee voted Tuesday to advance the bills championed by Democrats and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. In a vote along party lines, the committee passed four bills that make up the proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act. Next, the bills will go before the entire House for a vote. They were approved by the Senate back in September after spending nearly a year in that chamber’s committee. The bills aim to expand ballot access by providing ballots in more languages, create a voting data clearinghouse, codify protections for voters who may need help casting their ballot, and broadly aim to prevent voting suppression. Read Article

Minnesota Republicans sue to force election rerun in tight House race where 20 ballots are missing | Steve Karnowski/Associated Press

Minnesota Republicans filed a lawsuit Monday to try to force a rerun of a state House race where the incumbent Democrat won by 14 votes — but in which investigators concluded that election workers probably destroyed 20 valid absentee ballots after failing to count them. It’s a race that could determine the balance of power in the Minnesota House, where leaders from both parties are working out the details of a power-sharing agreement that currently presumes a 67-67 tie when the Legislature convenes next month. A Republican victory in a special election could shift that balance to a two-vote, 68-66 GOP majority. Democrats have a one-vote majority in the state Senate. So regardless of the outcome in the disputed race, Minnesota will be returning to some degree of divided government in 2025 after two years of full Democratic control. Read Article

North Carolina Supreme Court GOP Candidate Asks for Hand Recount as Party Pushes Controversial Bill | Courtney Cohn/Democracy Docket

North Carolina Supreme Court GOP candidate Jefferson Griffin requested a hand recount after he challenged thousands of ballots across the state in the tight race against his Democratic opponent Allison Riggs, who declared victory. “Recounts are a normal part of the process in a close race. What isn’t normal is the way my opponent is attempting to engineer a new outcome by challenging more than 60,000 votes across our state,” Riggs said in a post on X Monday. A couple of weeks ago, Griffin asked for a machine recount, which showed that Riggs won the election. In an email statement on Tuesday, Riggs said that the “results of the recount were identical to the original vote count” and that she won the race. Read Article

Pennsylvania investigations into suspicious voter registration forms yield no charges yet | Carter Walker/Votebeat

Investigations by five Pennsylvania counties into the submission of suspicious voter registration forms haven’t resulted in any charges yet, and three of the counties aren’t releasing details about the progress of their inquiries. Votebeat and Spotlight PA followed up with the five counties — Lancaster, Monroe, Lehigh, Berks, and York — that announced investigations before Election Day into what they described then as hundreds of potentially fraudulent voter registration forms dropped off near the Oct. 21 deadline. There is no evidence in any of the counties that the forms under scrutiny resulted in any ineligible voters casting a ballot. Officials emphasized that the suspicious applications were not processed. Read Article

Texas ballot secrecy draws attention in Legislature, courts | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Texas officials had to issue emergency guidance this year to patch holes in new election transparency laws that threatened to expose the choices people made on their ballots. Now that the 2024 election is over, the issue of protecting ballot secrecy is receiving renewed attention in both the courts and the legislature. A national conservative nonprofit last week filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County, alleging the county isn’t taking steps to protect voters’ right to a secret ballot. Another case involving an activist who claims to have uncovered the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters is ongoing. Read Article

Washington legislation would put security cameras near ballot drop boxes | Tim Clouser/The Center Square

After an individual set fire to two Clark County ballot boxes in October, a Republican state lawmaker filed legislation Tuesday that would create a new security camera grant program. Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, filed two bills on Tuesday: Senate Bill 5010 to create the grant program and Senate Bill 5011 to update what’s written on ballot boxes. While seemingly minor, the proposal follows ballot tampering leading up to the Nov. 5 general election that destroyed hundreds of ballots. The first incident happened on Oct. 8 when someone put an “improvised incendiary device” on a Clark County ballot box, setting fire to the ballots inside. Then, on Oct. 28, just over a week from the election, someone did the same to another Clark County box and one in Portland, Oregon. Read Article

National: Election denialism emerges on the left after Trump’s win | Kat Tenbarge and Bruna Horvath/NBC

In the days following the presidential election, a familiar strain of denialism and conspiracy thinking began to emerge in the corners of some social media platforms. On the right, familiar conspiracy theories about voting popularized by President-elect Donald Trump continued to circulate. But similar ideas also took hold among some supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and have continued to spread. Max Read, a senior research manager for elections at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank studying extremism, hate and disinformation, said the post-election denialism popping up on the left is “the most significant” effort to dispute or undermine elections he has observed from that side of the aisle. Read Article

Voting is harder than ever for Native Americans, study shows | Graham Lee Brewer/Associated Press

A new study has found that systemic barriers to voting on tribal lands contribute to substantial disparities in Native American turnout, particularly for presidential elections. The study, released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice, looked at 21 states with federally recognized tribal lands that have a population of at least 5,000 and where more than 20% of residents identify as American Indian or Alaska Native. Researchers found that between 2012 and 2022, voter participation in federal elections was 7 percentage points lower in midterms and 15 percentage points lower in presidential elections than among those living off tribal lands in the same states. Earlier studies show voter turnout for communities of color is higher in areas where their ethnic group is the majority, but the latest research found that turnout was the lowest on tribal lands that have a high concentration of Native Americans, the Brennan Center said. Read Article

National: Post-election lesson: The era of conspiracy theories and misinformation won’t end quickly | Jessica Huseman/Votebeat

The past few elections have shown that American voters can be sore losers when the election doesn’t go their way, and sometimes the winners turn out to be disingenuous when it does. On one hand, after years of making spurious allegations, those promoting election conspiracy theories on the right have been notably silent about Donald Trump’s clear win in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. On the other hand, certain people on the left — who have been raging about their faith in democracy for the past eight years — are grumbling about the possibility that something went wrong on Election Day. Read Article

National: Multiple election offices report receiving mailed ballots misdirected from other states | Christina A. Cassidy, John Hanna and Amy Beth Hanson/Associated Press

Terry Thompson had an election to run for voters in Cascade County, Montana. Why then, she thought, was her office in Great Falls being sent mailed ballots completed by voters in places such as Wasilla, Alaska; Vancouver, Washington; and Tampa, Florida? It was only about a dozen ballots total from voters in other states. But she said it still raised concerns about the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver election mail and whether the errant ballots would ever be counted. While a stray ballot ending up in the wrong place can happen during election season, the number of ballots destined for other states and counties that ended up at Thompson’s office is unusual. The Associated Press found it wasn’t an anomaly. Election offices in California, Louisiana, New Mexico and elsewhere also reported receiving completed ballots in the mail that should have gone to other states. Read Article

National: DARPA-backed voting system for soldiers abroad savaged | Thomas Claburn/The Register

In February, VotingWorks, a non-profit election technology developer, showed off a prototype of an encrypted voting system. With funding support from DARPA, the project aims to make it easier for service personnel to vote in US elections when stationed outside of the United States. Their proposed system – dubbed CACvote in reference to military smart ID cards called “Common Access Cards” – consists of four elements: voting kiosks at military bases for military personnel; a computer system that receives ballots from those kiosks; a cryptographic protocol for encoding and transmitting ballots, which also get printed and mailed; and a risk-limiting audit (RLA) protocol intended to detect integrity violations (eg, hacking) that alter an election outcome, and to correct the outcome. The latter two elements – the cryptographic protocol and the RLA – collectively are known as MERGE, which stands for Matching Electronic Results with Genuine Evidence. Paper ballots represent said evidence. According to an analysis paper from Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, and Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, MERGE “contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound” but isn’t realistic given the legal, institutional, and practical changes necessary to make it work. Read Article

National: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the 2024 Election | Julia Edinger/Government Technology

During a Congressional Internet Caucus Academy briefing this week, experts argued the impact of artificial intelligence on the 2024 election was less extreme than predicted — but deepfakes and misinformation still played a role. There were major concerns leading up to the 2024 election that AI would disrupt elections through false information; overall, the impact was less extreme than experts had warned it could be. However, AI still had an effect, as seen by way of deepfakes, like the Biden robocall and misinformation from AI-powered chatbots. Read Article

Arizona: As Cochise County certifies election, Peggy Judd looks back at the vote that upended her life | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Peggy Judd knew exactly what she needed to do. Judd, a Republican on the board of supervisors in Cochise County, Arizona, had to vote yes Wednesday on whether to certify the county’s presidential election results. If she didn’t, she would be not only breaking the law, but also violating the terms of her plea agreement. That’s because, two years ago, after the 2022 midterms, she made a different choice. She and another Republican supervisor voted to delay the certification of that election past the legal deadline. That decision made her one of a handful of local Republican officials around the country who unsuccessfully tried to halt or delay certification of an election. It also upended Judd’s life. Read Article

Georgia: Hand-count election audit verifies Trump’s victory | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A hand-count audit of Georgia’s presidential election reported miniscule discrepancies from the machine count, confirming President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris. The results of the manual review released Wednesday showed 11 more votes for Trump and six fewer for Harris out of nearly 750,000 ballots reviewed by election officials across the state. “This audit shows that our system works and that our county election officials conducted a secure, accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “they are the cream of the crop.” Read Article

Massachusetts: Post-election report shows accessibility, ballot and registration issues | Willoughby Mariano/WBUR News

There were 50 incidents on Election Day that hampered the ability of people with disabilities to vote in Massachusetts, according to a report issued Wednesday by a commission of several voting rights groups. Voting assistance machines for those with disabilities broke down, while main entrances and exits to some precincts could only be accessed by stairs, according to the report issued by the Massachusetts Election Protection Coalition. Four polling places in Boston had a shortage of ballots. “Democracy shouldn’t be available on a first-come, first-served basis,” said Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, which is part of the coalition. Read Article

Michigan managed to speed up election results, but some things just take time | Hayley Harding/Votebeat

Michigan set itself up to blaze through its 2024 ballot counts. New policies were in the state’s favor, including pre-processing of absentee ballots as well as early in-person voting, and voters and election officials took full advantage. But elections are ultimately a human process, from who participates in them to who runs them. And it was mostly a set of human factors that prevented the state from releasing unofficial results until the middle of the day on Wednesday. Getting results any faster in future elections is likely to prove difficult, officials say. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to try. Read Article

Nevada’s top election official eyes changes to speed up ballot counting | Eric Neugeboren/The Nevada Independent

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar on Thursday admitted that he was frustrated by the pace of election results this year, and that he would be working with legislators to determine ways to speed up the counting of ballots. Aguilar said many of the ballot counting difficulties likely stemmed from staffing levels in Clark and Washoe counties, despite efforts by both counties this year to accelerate ballot processing. Aguilar has been complimentary of how the state’s elections ran this year — and he reasserted Thursday that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud — but he acknowledged there is room for improvement. Read Article

North Carolina Republicans pass sweeping changes to consolidate power | Patrick Marley/The Washington Post

Republicans in North Carolina rushed a bill through the legislature this week to boost their power before they lose their supermajority, approving a measure to give their party more control over elections, eliminate the jobs of judges who have ruled against them and limit the authority of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general. Republicans hold three-fifths majorities in the legislature and have used that power to override vetoes by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). In January, they’ll lose the ability to easily roll back vetoes by incoming Gov. Josh Stein (D) because they’ll no longer hold such a large majority in the North Carolina House. The GOP response has been to flex their power now, while they still have it. They loaded up a $227 million Hurricane Helene relief package with an array of provisions that weaken the hand of Stein and other Democrats in the battleground state. Hours after unveiling the proposals, the state House passed the bill Tuesday night, and the state Senate approved it Wednesday. Read Article

Oregon election officials clear up confusion about ballot counting | Aviva Bechky/The Oregonian

Oregon’s elections office reassured residents Thursday that this fall’s ballot counting is sound and accurate, after some Oregonians questioned the office’s ballot return reports. The confusion stemmed from two documents the office posted online that showed how many ballots county elections offices had received each day, including on Election Day and the day after. The inconsistency that social media users noticed is that an initial state report, released Nov. 6, said about 2,140,000 ballots had been returned by end of day Nov. 5, Election Day. A second report generated on Nov. 14 said that Oregon voters turned in nearly 5,000 more ballots on Nov. 6 — but that the state somehow surpassed 2,300,000 ballots cast in total that day. Read Article

South Carolina: Aiken County election’s office fails first effort to certify | Anna Wilder/Hilton Head Island Packet

Despite initially certifying the wrong election results and failing its audit, all votes in Aiken County have been accurately counted and certified, despite a software glitch, state and county election officials said. South Carolina Election Commission spokesperson John Michael Catalano said some of the vote totals in Aiken were incorrectly counted in the wrong voting-method category, but the total votes for each candidate were correct. “It was the makeup of the vote, and it was basically absentee votes were showing up in election day totals,” Catalano said. Catalano said no other county has failed an audit since 2020 when South Carolina changed the voting system process to include paper ballots. Read Article

Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey concedes race against Dave McCormick amid recount | Julia Terruso and Katie Bernard/The Philadelphia Inquirer

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) conceded to Republican Dave McCormick on Thursday, formally ending his reelection bid and acknowledging defeat two weeks after the Associated Press declared McCormick’s victory and after a statewide recount of the race had been triggered. Casey had resisted conceding, citing thousands of votes that still needed to be counted and entering court fights to maximize the number of ballots included. But as final ballots were adjudicated Thursday, Casey’s roughly 16,500-vote deficit was too large to overcome and so large that a recount would not affect it. “I want to thank the people of Pennsylvania for granting me the privilege of serving them for 28 consecutive years in public office as auditor general, state treasurer, and United States senator,” Casey said. “Every day I served in public office, I’ve fought for Pennsylvania workers, children, seniors, people with disabilities, and our veterans. … It has been the honor of my lifetime.” Read Article

A Texas election official feels the strain of unrelenting scrutiny | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat

At election time, Trudy Hancock spends a lot of time in her car, delivering equipment to polling sites scattered around Brazos County and visiting poll workers who need her help in the field. She keeps the car radio on, and always tuned to Christian music. Recovering from a tiring Election Day last week, the longtime county election administrator recalled hearing one song that resonated with her. It’s called “The Truth,” and opens with the lyrics:

How many times can you hear the same lie
Before you start to believe it?

At her desk that morning, she recited a version of those lyrics as best as she could remember them, softly, haltingly. “But I know the truth,” she added, as she tried to hold back tears. “It gets hard Read Article