National: How America casts and counts its votes | Reuters

Misinformation online and false claims of election fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies have sharply eroded public trust in the integrity of U.S. elections. How Americans vote — and the equipment they use — varies widely, and some methods are more vulnerable to efforts to shake that trust. Heading into the 2022 midterms, election experts say the move in most states to hybrid voting systems – paper ballots tallied by electronic machines – could give voters greater confidence. The United States invested hugely in paperless electronic voting machines after the contested presidential election between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 shook election officials’ confidence in paper ballots. By 2006, the share of registered voters using paperless machines had surged, though hand-marked paper ballots that are later scanned by electronic tabulators remained the most popular. For the next decade, about a third of all votes were cast on direct recording electronic machines.

Full Article: Explainer: U.S. midterm elections: How America casts and counts its votes | Reuters

National: Election deniers in charge of some county election offices are continuing to sow mistrust in the electoral system | Bob Ortega, Audrey Ash, Curt Devine and Scott Bronstein/CNN

Pop into a meeting of the Board of Elections in Spalding County, Georgia, and it may appear like any other eye-glazing gathering of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair. “We hang our political hats at the door when we come in and do the people’s work,” Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at one meeting earlier this year. “There ain’t no room for politics in elections.” But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. An election-conspiracy believer, Johnson has authored a social media post to “fellow insurrectionists” and proclaimed that Joe Biden “is an illegitimate president.” On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell. Among other actions since taking office, Johnson has voted not to renew the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion Voting Systems – a frequent target of election conspiracy theories. As chairman, Johnson will have charge of the county board’s certification of the November midterm results – and his actions and continuing claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent have raised concerns over how he and the Republican-controlled board will handle the upcoming election.

Full Article: Election deniers in charge of some county election offices are continuing to sow mistrust in the electoral system | CNN Politics

National: Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists hound election officials out of office | Linda So, Joseph Tanfani and Jason Szep/Reuters

Businessman Robert Beadles claimed he had found evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Then he went on the attack, targeting a 48-year-old woman who runs elections in Nevada’s Washoe County. “Now, let’s talk about treason. That’s right, treason,” Beadles told a Feb. 22 county commissioners’ meeting in Washoe, the second-largest county in this election battleground state. The Republican activist falsely accused the registrar of voters, Deanna Spikula, of counting fraudulent votes and told commissioners to “either fire her or lock her up.” After the meeting, Spikula’s office was flooded with hostile and harassing calls from people convinced she was part of a conspiracy to rig the election against former U.S. President Donald Trump. On March 2, a caller threatened to bring 100 people to the county building to “put this to bed today.” Spikula, under severe stress, stopped coming into the office. A post on Beadles’ website said she was “rumored to be in rehab.” That was false, she said; she was at home, working on a state elections manual. By late June, fearing for her family’s safety, she’d had enough and submitted her resignation. Beadles’ campaign in Washoe is part of a wave of efforts by pro-Trump activists to gain control of voting administration by replacing county government leaders with election conspiracy theorists. Some are spending big money. In Nevada, Beadles has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns targeting opponents of Trump’s false rigged-election claims and backing Republicans who believe them.

Full Article: Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists hound election officials out of office

National: Right-Wing Leaders Mobilize Corps of Election Activists | Alexandra Berzon and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

On the eve of a primary runoff election in June, a Republican candidate for secretary of state of South Carolina sent out a message to his supporters. “For all of you on the team tomorrow observing the polls, Good Hunting,” Keith Blandford, a candidate who promoted the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump, wrote on the social media app Telegram. “You know what you are looking for. We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack.” The next day, activists fanned out to polling places in Charleston, S.C., demanding to inspect election equipment and to take photographs and video. When election workers denied their requests, some returned with police officers to file reports about broken or missing seals on the machines, according to emails from local officials to the state election commission. There were no broken or missing seals. After Mr. Blandford lost, the activists posted online a list of more than 60 “anomalies” they observed, enough to have changed the outcome of races, they said. They called the operation a “pilot program.” The episode is one of many that have election officials on alert as voting begins for midterm elections, the biggest test of the American election system since Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 results launched an assault on the democratic process.

Full Article: Right-Wing Leaders Mobilize Corps of Election Activists – The New York Times

National: Voting and vote-counting concerns grow ahead of midterms | Rick Klein, Averi Harper, and Alisa Wiersema/ABC

Almost 2 million people have already voted in this year’s general election — a level of participation reached earlier than ever in a midterm cycle, according to the University of Florida’s U.S. Elections Project. With 22 days — and what may be more than 100 million more ballots — to go before Nov. 8, the pace of voting is set to pick up even as questions grow around almost every aspect of voting: access to ballots, manpower running elections, the pace and integrity of vote counting and, of course, whether results will be accepted by losing Republicans up and down the ballot. Early voting starts Monday in Georgia, a state at the center of so many of 2020’s political storms and where additional voting restrictions have been imposed since then. Monday night’s debate between Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams is likely to surface questions about 2022 in a high-profile way. Other key states, meanwhile, are already warning that vote counting could take days after Election Day to complete — and that if that happens, it doesn’t indicate there’s automatically something to mistrust about the results.

Full Article: Voting and vote-counting concerns grow ahead of midterms: The Note – ABC News

National: Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority | Nick Corasaniti, Michael C. Bender, Ruth Igielnik and Kristen Bayrakdarian/The New York Times

Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system. The doubts about elections that have infected American politics since the 2020 contest show every sign of persisting well into the future, the poll suggested: Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections. Political disagreements appear to be seeping into the fabric of everyday life. Fourteen percent of voters said political views revealed a lot about whether someone is a good person, while 34 percent said it revealed a little. Nearly one in five said political disagreements had hurt relationships with friends or family. “I do agree that the biggest threat is survival of our democracy, but it’s the divisiveness that is creating this threat,” said Ben Johnson, 33, a filmmaker from New Orleans and a Democrat. “It feels like on both sides, people aren’t agreeing on facts anymore. We can’t meet in the middle if we can’t agree on simple facts. You’re not going to be able to move forward and continue as a country if you can’t agree on facts.”

Full Article: Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority – The New York Times

Editorial: The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has. | Jamelle Bouie/The New York Times

The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign. It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants. As the historian Edmund Morgan once wrote of the Virginians who helped lead the fight for Anglo-American independence, “The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.” Virginians, he continued, “may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”

Full Article: Opinion | The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has. – The New York Times

Arizona: Early voters in midterms report harassment by poll watchers | Rachel Leingang/The Guardian

A voter in Maricopa county, Arizona, claims a group of people watching a ballot drop box photographed and followed the voter and their wife after they deposited their ballots at the box, accusing them of being “mules”. The voter filed a complaint with the Arizona secretary of state, who forwarded it to the US Department of Justice and the Arizona attorney general’s office for investigation, according to Sophia Solis, a spokesperson with the secretary of state’s office. The incident allegedly occurred at a Mesa, Arizona, outdoor drop box on the evening of 17 October. Early voting, both in person and via mailed ballots, began on 12 October ahead of the midterm elections. “There’s a group of people hanging out near the ballot drop box filming and photographing my wife and I as we approached the drop box and accusing us of being a mule. They took a photographs [sic] of our license plate and of us and then followed us out the parking lot in one of their cars continuing to film,” the voter wrote in the complaint. In Arizona, voters can only drop off ballots for themselves, people in their households or families, or people they’re providing care for. Other states don’t ban so-called ballot harvesting. The practice became illegal in Arizona in 2016.

Full Article: Early voters in Arizona midterms report harassment by poll watchers | US midterm elections 2022 | The Guardian

Colorado Secretary of State appoints election supervisor in Elbert County, where Republican clerk copied voting machine hard drives | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold has appointed a supervisor to help oversee elections in Elbert County, the second such order she’s issued this week. On Monday, she appointed a supervisor in Pueblo County. In each case, Griswold cited mistakes made by the clerks. Both will still be involved with running the upcoming midterm elections in their respective counties but with additional oversight. Griswold said her decision to issue an order in Elbert County is due to the ongoing investigation into the actions taken by the Republican clerk Dallas Schroeder when he made copies of the county’s voting machine server. While it’s not illegal to capture an image of the hard drive, Schroeder told state investigators that he made copies with two county employees present and two outside people guiding them by phone, and then gave the duplicates to two attorneys. “The decision to appoint a Supervisor in Elbert County follows a 2021 election security protocol breach where Republican Clerk Dallas Schroeder violated Colorado Elections Rules by giving unauthorized individuals copies of images of the county’s voting system hard drives,” said a statement from Griswold’s office.

Full Article: Secretary of State appoints election supervisor in Elbert County, where Republican clerk copied voting machine hard drives | Colorado Public Radio

Georgia: Judge: Trump knew his voting fraud stats were inaccurate | avid Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Then-President Donald Trump knew claims that thousands of people voted illegally in Georgia were inaccurate when he included them in a lawsuit that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory here, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. In a December 2020 lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court, Trump claimed 10,315 dead people, 2,560 felons and 2,423 registered voters cast ballots illegally in the presidential election. He later incorporated those claims when he contested the Fulton County proceedings in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. But correspondence among his attorneys shows Trump knew the statistics were false by the time he vouched for them in the federal lawsuit. In Wednesday’s ruling, a federal judge in California found that Trump’s false verification of the voting fraud statistics in Georgia was part of an effort to delay the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional certification of Biden’s victory. He made the determination after reviewing hundreds of emails that a Trump attorney sought to withhold from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. And he ordered some of the emails to be released to the committee. “The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” U.S. District Judge David O. Carter wrote. “The court finds that these emails are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

Full Article: Judge: Trump knew his Georgia voting fraud stats were inaccurate

Michigan GOP scores victory in election challenger lawsuit | Clara Hendrickson/Detroit Free Press

With the midterm election just weeks away, a Michigan judge issued an order Thursday invalidating new instructions for election challengers created by the Bureau of Elections. The order from Michigan Court of Claims Judge Brock Swartzle marks a legal victory for the Michigan GOP and Republican National Committee which brought the lawsuit challenging the legality of the election challenger manual issued by the Bureau of Elections this year. Swartzle’s order bars election officials from using the manual and requires Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Michigan elections director Jonathan Brater to rescind the manual or revise it to comply with Michigan election law. Swartzle found that some of the provisions in the manual such as a ban on the use of electronic devices at absentee counting boards were at odds with the law or failed to undergo the proper rule-making procedure with input from the public and state lawmakers.

Full Article: Michigan GOP scores victory in election challenger lawsuit

Nevada ACLU takes ballot-counting lawsuit to State Supreme Court | Associated Press

The Nevada chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed an emergency petition to the state Supreme Court on Monday challenging Nye County and its interim clerk’s plan to count election votes by both hand and machine, a method crafted by elected officials and candidates acting on false claims of election fraud. The complaint is nearly identical to the ACLU lawsuit that was recently dismissed in Nye County District Court due to technicalities. The district judge there did not receive a record of the publicly available county commission meeting referenced in the petition from the ACLU. She said it was unreasonable for the court to go through a 7 1/2-hour meeting, among other issues. The ACLU asked the court to rule by Friday, five days before Nye County officials plan to start early hand-counting of mail-in ballots and one day before early in-person voting starts statewide. In an email, Nye County’s interim clerk Mark Kampf declined to comment on the lawsuit. “Instead, the County is devoting its limited time and resources to furthering its obligations to the voters of Nye County,” Kampf said, adding that the county is still finalizing the physical setup of polling places. They will offer tours of its facilities prior to the start of early voting, he added. The ACLU said the plan to start counting mail-in ballots two weeks before Election Day risks public release of early voting results. It alleges that county officials’ method of using a touch-screen tabulator for people with “special needs” illegally allows election workers to ask about a voter’s disability or turn away otherwise eligible voters based on “arbitrary decision making,” and that Nye County’s wording of “special needs” is ambiguous.

Full Article: ACLU takes ballot-counting lawsuit to Nevada Supreme Court

New Mexico braces for confrontational poll watchers | Morgan Lee/Associated Press

New Mexico’s top elections regulator said Wednesday that precautions are being taken to guard against the possibility of deliberate disruptions by party-appointed poll challengers and watchers in the ongoing general election. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said at a news briefing that she is aware of efforts to recruit poll challengers by people who believe the election process is rigged and may want to interfere. “Maybe they feel like at the end of the day, even if they ultimately get removed, that they’ve been able to slow down the process, cause folks to get discouraged,” Toulouse Oliver said. “As long as a challenger is following the rules and not obstructing the election process and not interposing challenges in bad faith, they can stay there the entire process. But when we start seeing this other behavior, that’s when they have to go.” At the same time, Toulouse Oliver has encouraged people with concerns about the integrity of elections to volunteer and work at the polls under oath. She said hundreds of new poll workers have responded. Poll challengers and watchers have traditionally functioned as an essential element of electoral transparency at polling locations, acting as the eyes and ears of major political parties to help ensure that the mechanics of voting are administered fairly and accurately.

Full Article: New Mexico braces for confrontational poll watchers | AP News

Pennsylvania: Philadelphia might scale back a process for catching double votes — because of GOP ‘election integrity’ rules | Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

Philadelphia elections officials are poised to remove or significantly scale back a procedure meant to catch double votes. Ironically, it’s because of rules Republicans imposed on “election integrity grants.” Otherwise, the city risks losing millions of dollars. The procedure, known as poll book reconciliation, compares mail ballots with poll books from Election Day. If a person is listed in the poll books as voting in person but the city also receives a mail ballot from the same voter, the mail ballot is rejected to ensure only one vote per person counts. The process caught dozens of accidental double votes in 2020, but none in the last three elections. But poll book reconciliation temporarily stops the vote count, sometimes for a day or more. And that appears to conflict with a new state law known as Act 88, which provides state election funding with conditions, including that counting “continue without interruption.” Now local officials have to decide whether to risk millions of dollars by keeping the procedure in place to catch double votes — or expose anew a vulnerability that was addressed in previous elections.

Full Article: Philadelphia catches double votes. Republican ‘election integrity’ rules make it harder.

Texas County Asks for U.S. Election Monitors as State Plans to Send Inspectors | eil Vigdor/The New York Times

Officials from Harris County in Texas on Thursday requested federal election monitors from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division after the State of Texas confirmed this week that it would send a contingent of election inspectors there during the midterms in November. The state’s move added a layer of scrutiny tied to an active examination of vote counts from 2020 that former President Donald J. Trump had sought. But that step quickly drew criticism from some officials in Harris, Texas’ most populous county, which includes Houston. They accused the state of meddling in the county’s election activities as early in-person voting is about to begin on Monday in Texas. Christian D. Menefee, the county’s attorney, said in a statement on Thursday that the state’s postelection review was politically driven and initiated by Mr. Trump. Still, he said, the county would cooperate with the inspectors. “We’re going to grant them the access the law requires, but we know state leaders in Austin cannot be trusted to be an honest broker in our elections, especially an attorney general who filed a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Menefee said. “We cannot allow unwarranted disruptions in our election process to intimidate our election workers or erode voters’ trust in the election process.”

Full Article: Texas County Asks for U.S. Election Monitors as State Plans to Send Inspectors – The New York Times

Texas election administrators are under attack. Here’s what that means for the midterms. | Jerey Schwartz/The Texas Tribune

With the 2022 midterms less than a month away, election administrators in Texas and elsewhere continue to face a level of harassment and threats that experts say had never been experienced before the November 2020 presidential election. In August, the entire staff of the elections office in Gillespie County, about 80 miles west of Austin, resigned, citing threats, “dangerous misinformation” and a lack of resources. The same month, Bexar County elections administrator Jacque Callanen told KSAT, a San Antonio news station, that her department was confronting similar challenges. “We’re under attack,” Callanen said.“Threats, meanness, ugliness.” She added that staff members were drowning in frivolous open-records requests for mail ballots and applications. Texas is one of several states targeted by right-wing activists who are seeking to throw out voter registrations and ballots, according to The New York Times. Last month, angry activists disrupted a routine event in which officials publicly test voting equipment outside of Austin, swarming the Hays County elections administrator and Texas Secretary of State John Scott, a Republican, while alleging unproven election law violations.

Full Article: How harassment of election administrators could impact the midterms | The Texas Tribune

Wisconsin: Who’s behind all the election administration lawsuits? | Elizabeth Pierson and Nicole Safar/Wisconsin Examiner

Over the past few weeks, months, and even years, dozens of challenges have been mounted to Wisconsin’s election laws and how our clerks run elections. A close look reveals that a small handful of conspiracy theorists and right-wing movement lawyers are driving these lawsuits and administrative complaints. These actors have clearly defined, antidemocratic interests that are not aligned with what most Wisconsinites want from their government. Who are these people so determined to block the will of the people and reshape our elections, and what do they want? … These right-wing lawyers and their funders have a clear agenda: if their public policies and candidates cannot win the contest of ideas in free and fair elections, they will stop at nothing to undermine free and fair elections. Their tactics are particularly bold considering that conservative Republican lawmakers actually built our election administration system. The Wisconsin Elections Commission was created under one-party Republican rule in 2015. In 2016, when then-candidate Donald Trump won the presidential election in Wisconsin, nobody from WILL or the St. Thomas More Society had any problem with the absentee voting process—the same process in place in 2018, 2020, and now 2022. Fast-forward to 2020 and then-Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin, and suddenly, the right-wing agenda favored by WILL and the St. Thomas More Society was in danger. So, they began to attack the very systems their allies had created.

Full Article: Who’s behind all the election administration lawsuits?   – Wisconsin Examiner

How wireless modems in voting machines could endanger the midterms | Eric Geller/Politico

There’s a largely overlooked hacking target that could help those who want to sow doubt about vote tallies in the November midterms: cellular modems that transmit unofficial election-night results. The modems, which send vote data from precincts to central offices using cellphone networks, help election officials satisfy the public’s demand for rapid results. But putting any networking connection on an election system opens up new ways to attack it that don’t require physical access to machines, and security experts say the risks aren’t worth the rewards. “You’re counting on a bunch of infrastructure to deliver data back and forth, and it’s well within the capabilities of nation-state hackers to break into that infrastructure,” said Dan Wallach, a Rice University computer science professor who has repeatedly exposed flaws in election equipment. While tampering with unofficial results wouldn’t actually corrupt an election’s outcome, it could fuel misinformation about both the accuracy of the vote tally and the integrity of the process. That’s a particular concern since the 2020 election, in which then-President Donald Trump seized on large discrepancies between early returns and final vote counts to falsely allege widespread fraud.

Full Article: How wireless modems in voting machines could endanger the midterms – POLITICO

Hand-counting ballots would cause ‘downright chaos,’ experts say | Jen Fifield/Votebeat

Cochise County officials are considering hand-counting all ballots cast by the county’s 87,000 voters this election, a radical measure for a county of its size that election experts say is also problematic and unnecessary. A hand count would produce inaccurate results, confuse voters, and consume extensive time, money, and labor, said C.Jay Coles, senior policy and advocacy associate at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for the responsible use of technology in elections. The county elections office estimated a hand count in Cochise would take 2,500 total hours of work. Election researchers and consultants generally advise against hand-counting ballots, because machine counts are proven to be more accurate and efficient. “It’s such an opportunity for confusion, and, really, downright chaos,” Coles said. The Republican-leaning county on the southern Arizona border is the latest to propose such an idea, part of a larger trend fueled by distrust of vote-counting machines that emerged after the 2020 election, when conspiracy theorists spread unfounded claims that the machines had been programmed to switch votes in favor of Joe Biden. In neighboring Nevada, a state judge recently ruled that Nye County could move forward with a similar plan that had been challenged by a progressive advocacy group, ruling that the state law doesn’t prohibit hand-counting ballots. Efforts to force hand counts in New Hampshire slowed down election results last month for the primary. And after the election, in El Paso County, Colorado, losing candidates called for their races to be recounted by hand, which is not allowed under state law. Less than one percent of registered voters in America live in jurisdictions where ballots are hand-counted, and many of them are small towns or precincts, according to research conducted by Verified Voting.

Full Article: Hand-counting ballots would cause ‘downright chaos,’ experts say

National: America First Secretary of State Coalition boosts Trump-aligned election deniers vying to oversee elections | Keith Newell/OpenSecrets

The America First Secretary of State Coalition, a coalition of Republican candidates touting disproven claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, raised more than $300,000 through a Nevada-based PAC called Conservatives for Election Integrity in an effort to exert control over election administration in battleground states, an OpenSecrets analysis of Nevada campaign finance records found. The coalition aims to elect candidates who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election and will be positioned to influence the outcome of future elections, including the 2024 presidential race, according to the group’s founder, Jim Marchant, the GOP nominee in Nevada’s secretary of state race. The proliferation of misinformation about voting fraud and conspiracy theories have thrust secretary of state races into the forefront of American politics this year. Candidates for secretary of state have reported  raising over $51.8 million in the 2022 election cycle as of Oct. 13. The 12 election-denying candidates who received the GOP nomination for secretary of state have raised $6.2 million, an OpenSecrets analysis of campaign finance data shows. Marchant touted the coalition at a Trump rally in Minden, Nev., on Saturday, telling the crowd, “When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country, and President Trump is gonna be president again in 2024.” “All we have to do is influence it a little bit, and we win,” Marchant said in a September interview with Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump. “And we negate whatever ability they have to manipulate the system.”

Full Article: America First Secretary of State Coalition boosts Trump-aligned election deniers vying to oversee elections • OpenSecrets

National: Election workers in battleground states faced onslaught of malicious emails, researchers say | AJ Vicens/Cyberscoop

County election workers in Arizona and Pennsylvania were inundated with a “surge” in malicious emails ahead of those states’ August primaries, security researchers said Wednesday, highlighting the ongoing threat facing election officials weeks before contentious midterms. The malicious activity, which included password theft attempts and efforts to deliver malware via poisoned links, is particularly concerning considering that county election workers are often “the least sophisticated actors in terms of cybersecurity postures, but the most critical in actual electoral engagement with voters,” researchers with cybersecurity firm Trellix’s Advanced Research Center said Wednesday. Voting officials and poll workers nationwide have become much more security aware since the 2016 Russian election interference operations, but malicious activities remain a concern for all election workers who “have become targets of threats and intimidation in the physical realm,” the researchers said. Poll workers around the country have faced a growing number of threats ahead of the 2020 election and in the months after. Now, officials in multiple states are reporting new pressures ahead of the midterms. Some state officials have reported a deluge of records requests from “self-styled fraud investigators,” The New York Times reported recently, while others have been offered training designed to prevent violence through de-escalation, CNN reported Sept. 30.

Full Article: Election workers in battleground states faced onslaught of malicious emails, researchers say

National: Election offices tighten security for Nov. 8 midterms | Andy Sullivan and Julia Harte/Reuters

When voters in Jefferson County, Colorado, cast their ballots in the Nov. 8 midterm election, they will see security guards stationed outside the busiest polling centers. At an election office in Flagstaff, Arizona, voters will encounter bulletproof glass and need to press a buzzer to enter. In Tallahassee, Florida, election workers will count ballots in a building that has been newly toughened with walls made of the super-strong fiber Kevlar. Spurred by a deluge of threats and intimidating behavior by conspiracy theorists and others upset over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, some election officials across the United States are fortifying their operations as they ramp up for another divisive election. A Reuters survey of 30 election offices found that 15 have enhanced security in various ways, from installing panic buttons to hiring extra security guards to holding active-shooter and de-escalation training. Reuters focused on offices in battleground states and offices that had openly expressed a need for security improvements, for example in congressional testimony. While the survey does not speak to how widespread such moves are, it does show how election officials are responding to threats in parts of the country where the election will likely be decided.

Full Article: U.S. election offices tighten security for Nov. 8 midterms | Reuters

National: ‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers | Ned Parker, Linda So and Moira Warburton/Reuters

Inside the El Paso County clerk’s office in Colorado, where officials had gathered in July to recount votes in a Republican nominating contest for this year’s midterms, dozens of angry election watchers pounded on the windows, at times yelling at workers and recording them with cell phones. In the hallway a group prayed for “evil to descend” on the “election team,” said the county’s Republican clerk Chuck Broerman. “It’s astonishing to me to hear something like that.” The election watchers had showed up to observe a five-day recount of votes for four Republican candidates who claimed the primary was fraudulent in a contest where they faced other Republicans. Protesters had mobilized outside the clerk’s office, holding signs with the signature “Stop the Steal” slogan of former President Donald Trump and demanding the county get rid of its voting machines. As the United States enters the final stretch to November’s midterm elections, Reuters documented multiple incidents of intimidation involving an expanding army of election observers, many of them recruited by prominent Republican Party figures and activists echoing Trump’s false theories about election fraud. The widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election as alleged by Trump and his supporters was never proven.

Full Article: ‘Stop the steal’ supporters train thousands of U.S. poll observers | Reuters

National: Republican National Committee seizes on political affiliations of poll workers in swing states | atrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Washington Post

For months, conservative activists who tried to overturn the 2020 election results have urged Republicans to become poll workers so they can be on the front lines of watching for fraud. Yet for the August primary in Arizona’s Maricopa County, the number of Democrats working at the polls was 18 percent higher than the number of Republicans. Such a gap is typical and legal, county leaders say, but Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has seized on it in an effort to cast doubt on the way elections are run in the swing state’s most populous county, which encompasses Phoenix. That has angered county officials, many of them fellow Republicans, who see this as a new attempt to spread misinformation, erode faith in the voting process, lay the foundation to contest results should GOP candidates lose and unfairly focus attention on election workers, some of whom have endured threats and harassment after Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020. The RNC and the Arizona GOP filed two lawsuits this week that seek to make the county shorten shifts for poll workers to make the jobs more accessible and force the release of records about who worked the polls in the primary. McDaniel mischaracterized the scope of the lawsuits in a tweet Wednesday, falsely claiming that Arizona Republicans have been “shut out of the process.” The RNC did not respond to a request to explain how Republicans have been excluded.

Full Article: RNC seizes on political affiliations of poll workers in swing states – The Washington Post

National: Election Firm Konnech Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say | Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

When Eugene Yu’s small election software company signed a contract to help Los Angeles County organize poll workers for the 2020 election, he agreed to keep the workers’ personal data in the United States. But the company, Konnech, transferred personal data on thousands of the election workers to developers in China who were writing and troubleshooting software, according to a court filing that Los Angeles County prosecutors made on Thursday. The filing adds new details about the arrest last week of Mr. Yu, whose company has been the focus of groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election. Some of those groups have accused the company of storing information about poll workers on servers in China. Before the arrest, the company repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in statements to The New York Times. Los Angeles prosecutors initially accused Mr. Yu of embezzling public money by knowingly violating the terms of the company’s contract. Since searching Konnech’s offices and Mr. Yu’s home, the prosecutors have also accused him of conspiring with others to commit a crime, according to the new legal filing. It is rare for an executive to face criminal charges for potentially mishandling data. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday. In the filing, prosecutors said a project manager at Konnech had sent an internal email early this month saying the company would no longer send personal data to Chinese contractors. “We need to ensure the security privacy and confidentially,” the email said.

Full Article: Election Firm Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say – The New York Times

National: Election Officials Are on Alert for Cyber, Physical Attacks | David Uberti/Wall Street Journal

The array of potential threats to the 2022 midterms is “more complex than it has ever been,” a top U.S. official said Thursday, but Washington has yet to see specific or credible attempts by foreign governments to disrupt the Nov. 8 vote. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, warned of multipronged threats that could include hacking of computer networks, disinformation on social media and harassment campaigns that affect poll workers in the physical world. “The security challenges are intertwined,” Ms. Easterly said. “They can’t be viewed in isolation when you think about foreign interference.” CISA has taken an increasingly prominent role in recent years to coordinate security among the network of state and local agencies that hold elections across the U.S. While those efforts previously focused on countering digital interference by countries such as Russia, some cybersecurity experts say the Kremlin’s capacity for election meddling has shrunk. “Russian influence capabilities have very likely deteriorated as a result of the nation’s war against Ukraine,” cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said in a 2022 election report released Thursday. Instead, election officials this year have reported a surge in physical threats, largely from people angry about President Biden’s defeat of former President Donald Trump in 2020.

Full Article: U.S. Election Officials Are on Alert for Cyber, Physical Attacks – WSJ

Arizona: Cochise County continues pursuit of hand-count despite warnings | Jen Fifled/AZ MMirror

Supervisors in Cochise County said Tuesday they are intent on voting on a proposal to hand-count all ballots cast in November’s election, despite repeated warnings from their lawyer that the plan would be illegal. Deputy Cochise County attorney Christine Roberts repeatedly told the supervisors that state law does not give them the authority to conduct a full hand count of ballots cast by the county’s 87,000 voters, and even if it did, it isn’t legal to change election procedures this close to an election. She may be able to prevent them from moving forward. The county attorney’s office must approve items before they are placed on a supervisors meeting agenda, County Administrator Rich Karwaczka told Votebeat after the meeting. “The county attorney would block something they believe is unlawful,” he said, adding that allowing a vote on an illegal proposal would increase the county’s liability and risk. Supervisors Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, both Republicans, want to continue using vote-counting machines this election, and to add a full hand count, as first reported by Votebeat. Together, they’re a majority on their three-person board. With Election Day only a few weeks away and early voting already under way, they didn’t offer details about how it would work or who would bear the costs.

Full Article: Cochise County continues pursuit of hand-count despite warnings | State | eacourier.com

Colorado clerks warn that election deniers infiltrate ranks of poll watchers and election judges ahead of November midterms | Conrad Swanson/The Denver Post

County clerks across Colorado say they’re bracing for a surge of highly motivated election deniers working as poll watchers or election judges in the November midterms — part of a nationwide attempt to manufacture evidence of election fraud. Local, state and federal officials, alongside political experts, have repeatedly debunked claims of election fraud but clerks in Chaffee, Eagle, El Paso, Fremont, Garfield, Summit and Weld counties told the Denver Post they’re still seeing an increasing number of bad-faith poll watchers and election judges around the state. Encouraged, even recommended, by party officials or far-right voices with national reach, the clerks say those watchers and judges have antagonized or threatened election workers, wrongly rejected hundreds of ballots and one man in Chaffee County even tried to steal a password to the election system last year. The irony sits in the notion that these far-right election judges and poll watchers are damaging the country’s foundation of fair and free elections, all under the guise of fighting for election security, Larry Jacobs, a professor of political history, elections and voting behavior at the University of Minnesota, said. Their goals appear to be to sow doubt and prop up losing candidates. The effort continues former President Donald Trump’s work to overturn the 2020 election except it’s now more sophisticated. “It’s moved from spur of the moment, ad hoc, to an organized, well-funded, premeditated effort to make charges of election fraud,” Jacobs said.

Full Article: Election deniers infiltrate ranks of poll watchers and election judges ahead of November midterms, Colorado clerks warn

Delaware Supreme Court finds vote by mail, same-day registration unconstitutional | Meredith Newman and Xerxes Wilson/Delaware News Journal

The Delaware Supreme Court on Friday struck down recent vote-by-mail and same-day voter registration legislation, overturning a signature achievement by Gov. John Carney and Democrat lawmakers. The court’s decision comes a month ahead of the Nov. 8 general election and while the Department of Elections was preparing to send mail ballots to voters on Oct. 10. The ruling means this will not happen and Delaware will return to its more limited, pre-pandemic voting setup where one must vote in person or have an excuse to vote absentee and one must register weeks in advance of an election to cast a ballot. Delawareans must now register to vote by Oct. 15. Debate over the legitimacy of the voting changes, enacted by lawmakers this past summer, centered on whether the state’s constitution would allow all registered voters to cast their ballot through the mail as well as whether allowing people to register to vote all the way up to Election Day is allowed by the provisions of that document. The court heard arguments on the issue Thursday. Friday’s ruling was only three pages long, and the justices wrote that a more thorough opinion explaining their logic will be issued soon.

Full Article: Delaware vote-by-mail ruled unconstitutional by state Supreme Court

Georgia memo says voter challenges not allowed at polling places | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s election director told county election officials Thursday that challenges to voters’ eligibility can’t be filed with poll workers when voters are trying to cast their ballots. The Official Election Bulletin from State Elections Director Blake Evans clarifies a previous memo earlier this week that resulted in questions about whether voters could be challenged in polling places as early voting begins Monday. Over 65,000 Georgia voter registrations have been challenged this year by Republican voters who believe registrants are no longer eligible to vote, often because address records indicate they might have moved. Georgia’s voting law passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly last year allows any voter to challenge the qualifications of an unlimited number of voters within their county. Most of the challenges have been dismissed by county election boards, but about 3,000 have been upheld, resulting in either canceled registrations or voters being placed in “challenged” status, requiring them to cast a ballot that would be reviewed before it’s counted. “Any voter challenge must be in writing, must specify distinctly the grounds of the challenge, and must be filed with the board of registrars,” Evans wrote. “Challenges cannot be filed with a poll manager or any poll worker.”

Full Article: Georgia memo says voter challenges not allowed at polling places