Pennsylvania Judge Rules Butler County Voters Cannot Cure ‘Naked’ Mail-in Ballots | Rachel Selzer/Democracy Docket
As a result of a ruling issued last Friday by a Pennsylvania judge, Butler County voters will not be able to cure defective mail-in ballots that are missing inner secrecy envelopes — also known as “naked ballots.” The ruling, which is expected to be appealed, upholds a prior decision from the Butler County Board of Elections refusing to allow two voters to cure their “naked” mail-in ballots cast in the state’s 2024 primary election. “It is the voter’s burden to ensure they have completed the steps necessary for their mail-in ballot to be included in the tabulation,” last week’s order reads. The judge added that it is the task of the Pennsylvania Legislature, not the court, to implement a new set of curing procedures to remedy defective mail-in ballots. Read ArticleFive of Pennsylvania’s ‘fake electors’ from 2020 are back on Trump’s 2024 slate | Carter Walker/Votebeat
Five Pennsylvania Republicans who joined an alternate slate of electors for Donald Trump in 2020 will again serve as presidential electors in this year’s contest. William “Bill” Bachenberg, Bernadette Comfort, Ash Khare, Patricia Poprik, and Andrew Reilly are included on a list of electors submitted to the Pennsylvania Department of State by the GOP. Those electors, along with 15 others, drew criticism after submitting their names as electors for Pennsylvania in December 2020 and casting votes for then-President Trump, even though Joe Biden won the state’s popular vote. But unlike similar groups of alternate or “fake” electors in other swing states in 2020, the Pennsylvania slate avoided legal repercussions because of a caveat they included in the certificate documenting their vote. Read ArticleVermont: Software glitch leads Secretary of State’s Office to postpone certifying primary elections results | Sarah Mearhoff/VTDigger
For the second primary election cycle in a row, the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office has delayed the certification of statewide election results due to a software glitch. Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas had been scheduled to join political party leaders Tuesday morning to certify statewide election results after last week’s primary election — generally a formality which takes place after every statewide election, and is typically a sleepy affair. But after a delayed start, Vermont’s chief elections operator announced that the certification process would have to wait another day. According to the Secretary of State’s Office, the issue is limited to the office’s software, which generates summary reports on election results. In a Tuesday afternoon press release, the office clarified that generating election results reports “is separate and distinct from the official counting of ballots and the local certification of results by town and city clerks” — a process in which Copeland Hanzas is fully confident. Read ArticleWisconsin towns pass poll worker protections after state kills bill | Andrew Bahl/The Cap Times
In the small towns of Armstrong Creek and Caswell in rural Forest County, municipal clerk Tamaney "Sam" Augustin has only a small group of poll workers — and the ones she does have, she wants to keep safe. That’s why she insisted on making changes at one of the polling places in the two towns, which combined have fewer than 500 residents. When she took over as clerk in 2019, she told workers to move things around to position themselves near a door, fearing they would otherwise be unable to escape if an armed person came into the room. “You don't want to think that something like that's going to happen, but you have to be prepared,” Augustin said. “And what better way to disrupt elections and everything than to go into a small, rural area and do it, because that could put a whole new wrinkle into everything.” Read ArticleThe Wyoming GOP alleges the state’s voting equipment is not accurate. How so and is it fixable? | Kamila Kudelska/Wyoming Public Media
It’s standard practice for voting equipment to be tested before an election. This year was no different. About two weeks before the primary all 23 county clerks in the state went ahead and tested their voting equipment. But this time at least three counties' results were not in accordance with a line in the Wyoming Election Code, according to the Wyoming GOP. They provided evidence for Goshen, Laramie and Albany Counties, but claim other counties also were in violation. To understand why this line is so important, I called Pamela Smith,the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that promotes responsible use of technology in elections. Smith is aware of this law and said it's actually really important. “The important thing is that when you're testing [voting equipment], you need to be sure that it's correctly capturing votes. So when you prepare to test it, having different numbers of votes for a particular candidate that you insert and then expect to find in the results will tell you that,” Smith explained. Smith pointed to an incident in Pennsylvania last year as an example. It was a judicial retention question whether voters wanted to keep multiple judges. “The way the question was worded, you could say yes to the first one, yes to the second one. You could say no to the first one, no to the second one,” she said. “ [Election officials] tested for those kinds of answers, but they failed to test for what would happen if someone said yes to one and no to the other. As a consequence, there was a mis-programming that wasn't caught.” Read ArticleNational: Elections Officials Battle a Deluge of Disinformation | Tiffany Hsu/The New York Times
Tate Fall is overwhelmed. When she signed on to be director of elections in Cobb County, Ga., last year, she knew she’d be registering voters and recruiting poll workers, maybe fixing up voting machines. She didn’t expect the unending flood of disinformation — or at least, she wasn’t prepared for how much it would overtake her job. She has had election deniers shout at her at public meetings, fielded weekend calls from politicians panicked about a newly circulating falsehood, and even reviewed conspiracy theories circulating on Nextdoor forums that might worsen skepticism among distrustful constituents already doubtful that the democratic system is reliable and secure. And that was before the election went sideways. Read Article