Michigan charts ‘proactive, preemptive’ plan to curb election challenges in 2024 | Sam Brodey/Boston Globe
Four years ago in Detroit, two Republican members of the normally low-profile Wayne County Board of Canvassers did something unprecedented: They declined to certify the results of the 2020 general election. Citing unfounded claims of voter fraud, the officials on the board disregarded their longstanding role to validate election results, as required by law, after recording the vote tally. In one swoop, they threw the entire state’s result into question, garnering national coverage and public outcry in the process. While the chaos they caused was brief — despite pressure from then-president Trump, the officials relented after two hours and voted to certify Wayne County’s results — the impact of the episode reverberated long afterward Anticipating fresh challenges this November, election officials in Michigan have undertaken the most aggressive effort among battleground states to ensure that the vulnerability exposed in Wayne County in 2020 will be difficult to exploit in 2024. Read ArticleNevada unveils new top-down voter registration and election management system | Tabitha Mueller/The Nevada Independent
Nevada election officials announced the implementation of a new voter-registration and election management system last week that they said will speed up the state’s release of election results and reduce voter registration errors. Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, and Washoe County Registrar of Voters Cari Ann Burgess showed reporters the new system and its processes Wednesday. Every county will use the program in the 2024 November general election, though Clark County, which implemented the program before the 2024 election cycle, will merge its voter registration database with the state in 2025. “Nevada runs some of the most safe, secure and accessible elections in the country,” Aguilar said. “[This system] only enhances those safeguards and increases our transparency.” Read ArticleNew Jersey: Two settlements approved in the historic dismantling of ‘county line’ ballot method | Amy S. Rosenberg/Philadelphia Inquirer
A federal judge on Thursday approved the first two county settlements in a lawsuit filed by U.S. Senate candidate Andy Kim that successfully challenged New Jersey’s Democratic Party primary ballot system that allowed preferential ballot position to party-endorsed candidates. The agreements were filed by Burlington County, Kim’s home county, and Middlesex County and approved by U.S. District Judge Zahid N. Quraishi. Kim, the Democratic candidate in the general election, called the settlements “the start of a new era of politics.” “The court judge approved our first settlement agreements — making Burlington & Middlesex counties the first to permanently stop the ‘county line’ ballot. Let’s build momentum across all counties to get NJ the fair ballot it deserves.” Read ArticleNorth Carolina: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Sabotaged Early Voting in a Critical Swing State | Mark Joseph Stern/Slate
The North Carolina Supreme Court tossed a grenade into the state’s election on Monday, violating both state and federal law to grant Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cynical, last-minute removal from the ballot. Its 4–3 decision will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will, in turn, unlawfully abridge early voting for everyone while jeopardizing the voting rights of service members overseas in clear contradiction of federal statute. It’s a nightmare for local election officials, who must now disregard the laws they’re sworn to uphold. And it’s an affront to North Carolinians at large, whose right to a fair, orderly election has been sabotaged by a lawless court and the candidate it so obviously favors. Read ArticlePennsylvania polling place lookup tool has errors that could stymie voters | Carter Walker/Votebeat
An official government online tool designed to help Pennsylvanians find their polling places is riddled with misspellings and other quirks that make it difficult for some voters to use. The errors — which users encounter when they search for their municipality and street name — affect as many as 85,000 of the state’s 8.9 million voters, a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis found. The Pennsylvania Department of State said counties enter their own address information into a centralized voter management system that powers the lookup tool, and it’s their responsibility to fix the problems. Read Article
Texas sees high turnover of election administrators since 2020 election | Jack Fink/CBS Texas
A CBS News investigation has found since the 2020 election, Texas has seen a high turnover rate of people who oversee the elections in the state's 254 counties. More than one-third of the election administrators and county clerks are new as the 2024 election approaches. "I think it's going to be an intense season coming after the 2020 election," said Dallas County Election Administrator Heider Garcia. "There's been a lot of pressure, and the tone and social media can be very difficult." For Garcia and others who run elections in counties across Texas, the political pressure has been a challenge. Read ArticleWisconsin town faces new complaint over barriers to accessible voting | Tamia Fowlkes/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Disability Rights Wisconsin and the firm Law Forward have filed a complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission in response to the northern Wisconsin Town of Thornapple's decision to eliminate electronic voting machines in this year's April and August elections. The complaint comes a week after the U.S. Department of Justice threatened a lawsuit for the Rusk County towns of Lawrence and Thornapple for failing to offer voting equipment for people with disabilities. The complaint alleges that Suzanne Pinnow, Thornapple town clerk, violated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by halting the usage of electronic voting machines for the April presidential primary. The suit argues that without an electronic voting machine, voters with disabilities have more limited options to cast a ballot privately and independently. Read ArticleNational: Hacking blind spot: States struggle to vet coders of election software | John Sakellariadis/Politico
When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists. So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software. But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November. The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain. Read ArticleNational: No, local election officials can’t block certification of results – there are plenty of legal safeguards | Derek T. Muller/The Conversation
Some local election officials have refused to certify election results in the past few years. Georgia has new administrative rules that invite election officials to investigate results before certifying. And worries abound that election officials might subvert the results of the 2024 presidential election by refusing to certify the results. While states may have different names or processes, certifying an election typically looks something like this: On election night, the local precincts close, and local election workers tabulate the vote; they affirm or attest that the precinct results are the proper tabulation and send those results to the county. In a matter of days, the county election board assembles the results across all the county’s precincts, tabulates them and certifies the county’s result. Those results are sent to the state election board, which adds up the results from all the counties and certifies the state’s winners. The governor then signs certificates of elections for the winning candidates. There isn’t one weird trick to steal a presidential election. And there are ample safeguards to ensure ballots are tabulated accurately and election results are certified in a timely manner. Read ArticleNational: Justice Department accuses Russia’s RT network in $10 million election plot | Bart Jansen/USA Today
The Justice Department charged two Russian citizens with directing a $10 million campaign to influence the 2024 election through online platforms that flooded millions of Americans with disinformation, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday. The complaint focused on RT, the Russian state media network dropped by American distributors after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The company bankrolled a $10 million campaign through a Tennessee company to distribute Russian misinformation to U.S. social media influencers and encourage divisions in U.S. politics, Garland said. The department also seized 32 internet domains that Russians used to distribute misinformation about the election under a program called "Doppelganger," Garland said. The domains were built to look like legitimate U.S. news organizations, but were instead filled with Russian propaganda that could be picked up and relayed through U.S. influencers. Read ArticleNational: State Republican parties renominate electors who were on fake slate in 2020 | Alice Herman/The Guardian
State Republican parties have nominated 14 of the 84 fake electors from the 2020 presidential election to serve again as Republican party presidential electors, an indication of the legitimacy that election deniers continue to hold in some quarters of the GOP. The Republican parties of Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada have each nominated one or more electors who attempted to submit themselves as electors for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2020 despite the former president losing in their states. Presidential electors typically perform a rote but critical behind-the-scenes role in elections. Read ArticleNational: Swing states prepare for a showdown over certifying votes in November | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline
Stateline crisscrossed Michigan and Wisconsin — two states critical in the race for the presidency — to interview dozens of voters, local election officials and activists to understand how the voting, tabulation and certification processes could be disrupted in November. There is broad concern that despite the checks and balances built into the voting system, Republican members of state and county boards tasked with certifying elections will be driven by conspiracy theories and refuse to fulfill their roles if former President Donald Trump loses again. Last month, the Georgia State Election Board passed new rules that would allow county canvassing boards to conduct their own investigations before certifying election results. State and national Democrats have sued the state board over the rules. The fear that these efforts could sow chaos and delay results is not unfounded: Over the past four years, county officials in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania have refused to certify certain elections. After immense pressure, county officials either changed their minds, or courts or state officials had to step in. Read ArticleNational: GOP lawsuits set the stage for state challenges if Trump loses the election | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press
Before voters even begin casting ballots, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a sprawling legal fight over the 2024 election through a series of court disputes that could even run past Nov. 5 if results are close. Republicans filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied. After Donald Trump made " election integrity " a key part of his party’s platform following his false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, the Republican National Committee says it has more than 165,000 volunteers ready to watch the polls. Read ArticleNational: Christian group recruits ‘Trojan horse’ election skeptics as US poll workers | Alice Herman/The Guardian
A Christian political operative has teamed up with charismatic preachers to enroll election skeptics as poll workers across the country, using a Donald Trump-aligned swing state tour to enlist support in the effort. Joshua Standifer, who leads the group called Lion of Judah, describes the effort as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers”, which will help them identify alleged voter fraud and serve as “the first step on the path to victory this Fall”, according to his website. Standifer has been on the road with a traveling pro-Trump tent revival featuring self-styled prophets and Christian nationalist preachers that has made stops in key swing states including Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Read Article
National: Iran Emerges as a Top Disinformation Threat in U.S. Presidential Race | Steven Lee MyersTiffany Hsu and Farnaz Fassihi/The New York Times
A website called Savannah Time describes itself as “your trusted source for conservative news and perspectives in the vibrant city of Savannah.” Another site, NioThinker, wants to be “your go-to destination for insightful, progressive news.” The online outlet Westland Sun appears to cater to Muslims in suburban Detroit. None are what they appear to be. Instead, they are part of what American officials and tech company analysts say is an intensifying campaign by Iran to sway this year’s American presidential election. Iran has long carried out clandestine information operations against its adversaries, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States, but until now most of its activities were conducted under the shadow of similar campaigns by Russia and China. Its latest propaganda and disinformation efforts have grown more brazen, more varied and more ambitious, according to the U.S. government, company officials and Iran experts. Read ArticleNational: Justice Department accuses Russia of spreading disinformation before November election | Eric Tucker, Matthew Lee, David Klepper/Associated Press
The Biden administration announced wide-ranging actions Wednesday meant to call out Russian influence in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, unsealing criminal charges against two employees of a Russian state-run media company and seizing internet domains used by the Kremlin to spread disinformation. The measures represented a U.S. government effort at disrupting a persistent threat from Russia that American officials have long warned has the potential to sow discord and create confusion among voters. Washington has said that Russia remains the primary threat to elections even as the FBI investigates a hack by Iran of Donald Trump’s campaign and an attempt breach of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign. Read ArticleArizona: Conservative groups sue to force more citizenship checks on voters | Jen Fifield/Votebeat
Conservative groups want a federal judge to force Arizona counties to further investigate the status of voters who have not provided documented proof of citizenship. A lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Arizona claims that counties haven’t been checking the citizenship status of these voters using specific methods required under federal and state law, including two new state laws enacted in 2022. It’s the latest in a slew of Republican-backed challenges to voters’ citizenship status across the country just before the November election, based on the premise that voting by noncitizens is a pressing problem in the U.S. — even though the practice is illegal and, according to experts, rare. Read Article