Georgia: ‘Extremely confident’: Cherokee County finishes election audit | Shannon Ballew/Cherokee Tribune and Ledger-News

An audit of ballots cast in Cherokee County in the May 24 primary and June 21 runoff elections confirmed the county’s certified results, the county’s election department reported. The elections board initiated a risk-limited audit, conducted Wednesday and Thursday, of all early voting May 24 primary ballots at the Oak Grove precinct and June 21 Election Day ballots for the Democratic lieutenant governor runoff and the two Republican school board runoffs at the county’s Dixie, Hillside, Neese, Clayton, R.T. Jones and Teasley precincts. The precincts, other than Oak Grove, were selected at random. Elections officials initially planned to audit four precincts plus Oak Grove early voting to audit 10% of the precincts, the elections department said, but due to low numbers they added two precincts, for a total of seven audited precincts. The overall margin of error was 1.69%, with 294 votes separating the audit total and the total for those precincts as tabulated by the voting machines, Elections Director Anne Dover said. “We were very pleased with the outcome of the audit,” she said in an email. “The margin of error was 1.69%. This difference is well below the 10% mark we had set, and is below the State’s margin of error that was given to us for the November 2020 hand count, which was 5%.”

Source: ‘Extremely confident’: Cherokee finishes election audit | Local News | tribuneledgernews.com

Massachusetts high court hears GOP case challenging mail-in voting | Anthony Brooks/WBUR

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday heard arguments about a new law that allows anyone to vote by mail for any reason. The state Republican Party contends the law is unconstitutional and could encourage voter fraud. At issue is the VOTES Act, which was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Charlie Baker. The sweeping election law makes no-excuse mail-in voting permanent while expanding options to vote early, among a number of other changes. The MassGOP argues the state constitution only allows people to cast absentee ballots in certain circumstances. Michael Walsh, an attorney for the party, argued early voting should also be banned, even though the state has conducted it for the past eight years. “Decisions — no matter how wrong, how old or how bad — if they’re bad they deserve to be overturned,” Walsh said. Walsh argued that early voting and no-excuse mail-in voting make elections more susceptible to voter fraud, though he acknowledged there was no evidence to back that up. “We certainly didn’t say that in our complaint,” he told the justices.

Full Article: Mass. high court hears GOP case challenging mail-in voting | WBUR News

Michigan Makes $8M in Funds Available for Election Security | Jared Leatzow/Government Technology

As much as $8 million in federal funds will be available to Michigan’s election officials, including northwest Ottawa County. Municipalities are eligible to receive up to $1,500 in reimbursements for each one of their voting districts. The money is meant to help improve security for local elections. Grand Haven Township has reported in a recent weekly newsletter that it is eligible to receive as much as $10,500. Township officials said they will be using the money to pay for a security camera to monitor their election drop box at the administration building, and pay for seven voter I.D. scanners and eight laptop computers. Ferrysburg Clerk Jessie Wagenmaker said her municipality has only one district and would be eligible to receive only $1,500. Wagenmaker said Ferrysburg has not decided yet if it will use the funds. Spring Lake Township Clerk Carolyn Boersma said the township will be receiving $9,000, and plans to spend the money on laptops, I.D. scanners and another ballot scanner. Michigan primary elections will be held on Tuesday, Aug. 2. Ottawa County residents will be asked to vote in the Republican primary to decide who their candidates will be for the county’s Board of Commissioners.

Full Article: Michigan Makes $8M in Funds Available for Election Security

Nevada’s GOP chair continues to deny he was a fake elector | Jessica Hill/Las Vegas Sun

Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald doubled down last week on his assertion that his plan to send electoral certificates in favor of Donald Trump to Congress in 2020 was legitimate. “Many of you remember we were called, they called us fake electors,” McDonald said at a Mt. Rose Republican Women’s Dinner last week. “We weren’t fake. We were elected. We were elected to convention.” The Sun obtained an audio recording of McDonald’s remarks, and it was unclear what convention McDonald was referring to. McDonald and James DeGraffenreid, the state party secretary and a member of the Republican National Committee, were two of six “alternate electors” who on Dec. 14, 2020, signed the fake electoral document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — that declared Donald Trump as winner of Nevada’s six electoral votes and sent it to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Trump lost to Biden by about 30,000 votes here, and Nevada’s Republican secretary of state has assured the public that the election was free and fair and untainted by meaningful fraud.

Full Article: Nevada’s GOP chair continues to deny he was a fake elector – Las Vegas Sun Newspaper

New Hampshire is preserving the ballot design that made secret elections possible | David Brooks/Concord Monitor

Up to about 140 years ago, anyone who wanted to cast a vote in a state or federal election in New Hampshire had to get a ballot from the political party of their choice — whether Republican or Democrat or some group that has long since faded away, such as the Prohibition Party. This meant that bystanders at the polling place knew which candidate voters were choosing, because every party’s “ticket,” as they were known, looked different. This made it possible for outsiders to threaten or bribe voters — hard cider was a common reward — and ensure the result they wanted. Political parties made extensive use of this ability. “There was real corruption in elections,” said Brian Burford, New Hampshire state archivist. “It got very bad. The reform movement in 1880s said we’ve got to do something about this — we’re going to have the state-run (elections) and have some way to have some secret ballots.” Secrecy was ensured by what is known as the Australian ballot, so called because it was first used in that country in 1856. Its design, still used today, puts all political parties on a single ballot. Bystanders couldn’t tell how anyone voted so they had less of an incentive to use bribes or threats.

Full Article: NH is preserving the ballot design that made secret elections possible | State news | sentinelsource.com

Rhode Island governor signs bill allowing internet voting | Benjamin Freed/StateScoop

Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee last week signed legislation that could allow some of the state’s registered voters to cast their ballots over the internet, despite concerns raised by election officials and critics of electronic voting. The new law, S2118, calls for giving deployed military service members, citizens residing overseas and people with physical disabilities the ability to receive and submit their ballots online. While the legislation passed the Rhode Island General Assembly earlier this year with comfortable margins, it raised criticisms from election-security advocates who’ve long said that submitting votes over an internet connection could imperil the secret ballot. “The landscape of the internet hasn’t really changed much since the early 1990s,” said C. Jay Coles, a senior policy associate at Verified Voting. “The internet wasn’t designed as a secure space.” Under the new Rhode Island law, eligible voters could request an electronic ballot if the secretary of state’s office approves a system that’s gone through “one or more independent security reviews” and meets the scrutiny of the cybersecurity framework published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Full Article: Rhode Island governor signs bill allowing internet voting

Texas GOP’s proposed election reforms would restrict mail-in voting for seniors, early voting | Jill Ament/Texas Standard

Leaders of Texas’ Republican Party continue to promote false claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump – and during the Texas GOP convention in Houston last month, members overwhelmingly voted to make election reforms the party’s No. 1 priority. As the Houston Chronicle reports, this means they want the state to adopt laws in the 2023 legislative session that would further restrict voting by shortening the early voting period from two weeks to one and by no longer letting any senior vote by mail. “They’re going off of this assumption that there’s more fraud in early voting and in mail voting,” said Jeremy Wallace, a political reporter at the Chronicle’s Austin bureau. “That is based on some of the unproven claims from former President Donald Trump about how elections went in other states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, and the Texas Republican Party has kind of grabbed that baton and are pushing it in Texas, even though there’s been no evidence that the expanded early voting time that we have here in Texas has resulted in additional fraud.” Under legislation that would limit seniors from voting by mail, instead of letting anyone over the age of 65 have the option, as they have for decades, seniors would instead only be able to do so with an excuse. Out of the million voters who utilized mail-in voting for the 2020 presidential election, 850,000 were 65 and up, Wallace said. But Republicans’ new proposal would limit absentee voting to those who are in the military, have a disability or are out of the country.

Full Article: Texas GOP’s proposed election reforms would restrict mail-in voting for seniors, early voting | Texas Standard

Wisconsin: An incompetent circus’: Michael Gableman’s 2020 election review reaches 1 year and the $1 million mark with little to show | Molly Beck/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A year ago, Robin Vos was unequivocal.”We give you our word that we are doing everything we possibly can to uncover what occurred in 2020,” the Assembly Speaker told a conference center full of Republicans meeting in Wisconsin Dells for their first state party convention since Donald Trump began tying make-believe voter fraud to his loss in the Badger State, contributing to losing his presidency. But since Vos announced his hire of former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to probe the 2020 election completely and Assembly Republicans’ intent to pass bills based on Gableman’s findings, the review has failed to accomplish those goals. Lawmakers did not receive any recommendations from Gableman before wrapping up their work for the year. And the review has turned up little information not previously known, and has not found evidence showing the 2020 election outcome was incorrectly called.

Full Article: Michael Gableman investigation at 1 year: $1 million, little to show

America Is In Denial | Mitt Romney/The Atlantic

Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops. As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending. As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice. When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel. And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching. What accounts for the blithe dismissal of potentially cataclysmic threats? The left thinks the right is at fault for ignoring climate change and the attacks on our political system. The right thinks the left is the problem for ignoring illegal immigration and the national debt. But wishful thinking happens across the political spectrum. More and more, we are a nation in denial.

Full Articxle: Mitt Romney: America Is In Denial – The Atlantic

Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Republicans and other conservative groups are undertaking a huge effort to recruit election workers, a push that could install people with unfounded doubts about the 2020 election in key positions in voting precincts where they could exert considerable power over elections. At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.

Full Article: Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | US voting rights | The Guardian

New Missouri law bans use of electronic voting machines | Davis Suppes/KOMU

Gov. Mike Parson signed five new measures into law Wednesday, including House bill 1878. The bill is focused on improving methods for Missourians to vote. Beginning Jan. 1, 2023, the bill requires the use of a paper ballot that is hand-marked by the voter or marked in another authorized manner. Any election authority with direct recording, electronic vote-counting machines may continue using such machines until Jan. 1, 2024. These electronic vote-counting machines were first introduced back in 2002 with the first wave of electronic voting. There are currently zero of these machines used in Boone County and only two machines of its kind being used in the state of Missouri due to updates in technology, according to Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon. The technology was updated in favor of ballot-marking devices. The ballot-marking devices require the voter to put a piece of paper into the ballot-marking device machine. The voter can then use the touchscreen for accessibility purposes to make their selections.

Full Article: New Missouri law bans use of electronic voting machines | State News | komu.com

An end to ballot bar codes? Georgia election officials consider design changes | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

When Georgia began using computer-printed paper ballots in 2020, they raised a new issue: Votes are scanned from bar codes that are unreadable by the human eye. The inability to verify that the text of a ballot matches the contents of the bar code raised concerns from election integrity advocates, who said voters can’t be sure that their ballots were counted as they intended. They’ve warned that bar codes could be manipulated by hackers, though there’s no evidence that has ever happened. Now, state election officials are weighing whether to replace bar codes with ballots that display candidate names with ovals next to them. A U.S. cybersecurity agency, in a report that found vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting equipment, recently said local governments can choose to eliminate bar codes. While no decision has been made to change the ballot design seen by every in-person voter in Georgia, the secretary of state’s office has been discussing the idea for over a year, Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling said. Election officials are considering security, costs and challenges of printing a longer ballot. Georgia began using printed-out paper ballots in 2020, ending 18 years of electronic voting by purchasing $138 million worth of voting equipment manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. Paper ballots provide a way to hand count and audit results. The voting system relies on a combination of touchscreens and printers, which produce a sheet of paper that includes a bar code — called a QR code — along with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices. Then, voters insert their ballots into optical scanning machines that read the bar code, which counts as the official vote.

Full Article: An end to ballot bar codes? Georgia election officials consider design changes

National: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Controversy over election outcomes is not new. Overall voter confidence that votes were properly counted was lower after presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 than it was in 2020. What is new is the level of overt hostility toward the people who administer elections, manifested in an ongoing pattern of threats to their personal safety. Recent congressional hearings have included emotional accounts from election officials at all levels, from threats to the family members of a senior official to the crippling fallout when an election worker was falsely accused of fraud, by name, by the former president and his attorney. Spurred on by misinformation, including continued assertions from campaigning politicians that a national election was somehow “stolen,” members of the public have not backed off from such harassment. A Brennan Center poll of election officials, conducted more than two years after the 2020 election, found that one in six had experienced threats. Almost 80 percent said that threats had increased in recent years, and 30 percent knew election workers who left their jobs because they felt unsafe. More than three-fourths felt the federal government should be doing more to support them, and one in three said the same about their local government. Members of the election and law enforcement communities have joined together to help fill this void, forming the nonpartisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE).

Full Article: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security

National: How the Supreme Court could radically reshape elections for president and Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it has agreed to hear a case next term that could upend election laws across the country with the potential endorsement of a fringe legal theory about how much power state legislatures have over the running of congressional and presidential elections. The case, called Moore v. Harper, is centered on newly drawn maps of voting districts for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the next U.S. House of Representatives. Republican state lawmakers want to resurrect a map that North Carolina’s state courts struck down, finding that the map approved by the GOP-controlled legislature violated multiple provisions in the state’s constitution by giving Republican candidates an unfair advantage through partisan gerrymandering. A court-drawn map has been put in place instead for this year’s midterm elections. In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.

Full Article: U.S. Supreme Court takes on the independent state legislature theory : NPR

National: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop

U.S. Cyber Command wants more tech companies and others on the front lines of the global fight to secure the internet to share more cybersecurity intelligence so that the organization can improve its defensive capabilities, Cyber Command Executive Director Dave Frederick said in an interview Monday. Frederick said Cyber Command regularly shares information it gleans during so-called “hunt forward” operations, defensive cyber missions carried out alongside partners, but needs more private companies to fully report cyber incidents so that Cyber Command can learn from them. Frederick, who was speaking during an industry webinar organized by Billington CyberSecurity, said the 27 hunt forward operations Cyber Command has conducted in the past two years have empowered partner countries to “immediately strengthen the defenses of their networks” and have given Cyber Command “unique insights into adversary malware which we then bring home.” Those insights inform not only Department of Defense cyber defense strategy, but also are shared with the private sector, he said. “We’re able to share the indicators of compromise, new samples of malware that we discover from hunt forward, with the broader cybersecurity community, and they’re able to then build signatures to detect that malware and basically disrupt adversary operations targeting the U.S. civil sector,” Frederick said. “It’s almost like giving an antidote to a virus, so it’s really turned out to be a great model.”

Full Article: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations

National: Violent Threats to Election Workers Are Common. Prosecutions are Not. | Michael Wines and Eliza Fawcett/The New York Times

“Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.” In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and chief election official of Colorado. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail was unable to protect her, then added: “This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.” Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland established the federal Election Threats Task Force, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford’s guilty plea is the only case the task force has successfully concluded out of more than 1,000 it has evaluated. Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally sparse, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold said.

Full Article: Election Workers Don’t Feel Safe Despite Federal Effort to Combat Threats – The New York Times

National: The People v. Donald Trump – The evidence for a possible criminal case against the former president is piling up | David French/The Atlantic

From the moment the attack on the Capitol began, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s moral culpability was clear. That mob would never have assembled on the National Mall but for Trump’s decision to relentlessly lie about the results of the 2020 election. His legal culpability, however, was more ambiguous. We did not possess any evidence that he directly coordinated with the rioters prior to the invasion of the Capitol, and although his speech to the mob on January 6 itself admonished his followers to “fight like hell” and warned them that “you will never take back our country with weakness,” it also contained an explicit statement that they should march to the Capitol to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Also hovering over the legal analysis was a prudential calculation. Former presidents shouldn’t be prosecuted under novel legal theories. If the government is going to prosecute, it should bring a case that’s easy to justify under existing precedent. Otherwise, the prosecution itself could be dangerous, further fracturing and destabilizing an already fragile American political culture. Those considerations are precisely why Trump’s conduct in the case of Georgia had seemed more obviously to involve potential criminal liability than his actions on January 6. In Georgia’s case, Trump was recorded telling Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” and then explicitly threatening Raffensperger with criminal sanctions if he didn’t accede to the president’s demand.

Full Article: The People v. Donald Trump – The Atlantic

Editorial: It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Alaska rejected more than 7,500 ballots in the US House special primary. Here’s why. | Wesley Early/Alaska Public Media

More than 7,500 ballots were rejected in the special primary election to fill the remainder of the late Congressman Don Young’s term, according to the final vote tally. That’s a statewide rejection rate of 4.55%, double the rejection rate from the 2020 primary. The final ballot rejection rate in rural Alaska communities was even higher, with about 1 in 8 ballots not being counted. The primary was Alaska’s first statewide by-mail election. According to a report from the Division of Elections, the biggest reason for rejections was a lack of a witness signature, accounting for more than a third of rejected ballots. Roughly 25% of ballots were rejected because they were postmarked or handed in after the deadline, while a fifth weren’t counted because the ballot didn’t have a numerical identifier, like a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a voter’s social security number. State Division of Elections spokeswoman Tiffany Montemayor says while officials are concerned any time they have to reject a ballot, they’re bound by state law. “If there is not a voter signature, a voter identifier, a witness signature and a postmark on or before Election Day the ballot cannot count,” Montemayor said. “These provisions have been in place for decades.” Generally, rural Alaska — communities off the road system with populations that tend to be majority Alaska Native — had the highest rejection rates at around 13.74%. More than half of those rejections were because of a lack of witness signature.

Full Article: Alaska rejected more than 7,500 ballots in the US House special primary. Here’s why. – Alaska Public Media

Arizona: GOP poll watcher training casts unfounded suspicion on Arizona elections | Jen Fifield/AZ Mirror

The Republican National Committee is telling potential Arizona polling place observers that there are “festering problems” in how elections are run, such as security issues with vote-counting machines and problems with voter rolls, as it trains them for the state’s upcoming primary election. The RNC training delivers the message that the “2020 election had serious problems,” worrying experienced former election officials and lawyers who have trained observers in the past and who say the point of training should be simply to encourage observers to watch for violations of law at the polls without disturbing the peace. Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, who as an attorney led Republican observer training in the 2000s, said the messaging concerns him because his focus was always on providing a straightforward picture of what was legal and what was not at the polls. “It’s not about kind of ginning people up, which is what that sounds like,” Gates said. “That’s the narrative, though.” Votebeat watched an RNC Zoom training at the invitation of an attendee, and separately received information about an in-person training from an attendee, after an RNC spokesperson said that reporters were not allowed to attend.

Full Article: GOP poll watcher training casts unfounded suspicion on Arizona elections

Colorado: Pueblo County voting machine allegedly tampered with, election officials say | Anna Lynn Winfrey/Pueblo Chieftain

A Pueblo voter is accused of tampering with an in-person ballot machine during the Pueblo County primary election Tuesday, according to a spokesperson with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. The incident did not affect any votes cast in the election, the spokesperson said. It took place at the Pueblo County Elections Department on 720 N. Main St., and the Secretary of State was alerted Tuesday evening. Signs of tampering were discovered when one of the department’s election judges — who are tasked with cleaning voting machines between each use — went to clean the machine and saw an error message, the spokesperson said. Election workers removed the machine from use. The voting machines are not connected to each other. … Voting on ballot machines is rare in Colorado because ballots are mailed to all eligible voters. In this year’s primary election, approximately 1.3% of Colorado voters cast their ballots in-person.

Full Article: Pueblo voting machine allegedly tampered with, election officials say

Georgia: Subpoenas seek info on attempt to copy election data in Coffee County | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Subpoenas sent this month are seeking evidence of whether election conspiracy theorists gained unauthorized access to Georgia voting equipment and copied sensitive files in Coffee County after the 2020 election. The subpoenas demand documents including ballot images, election data, computer software and the identities of who funded the endeavor. The subpoenas, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were issued by plaintiffs in an ongoing election security lawsuit against Georgia. In addition, the secretary of state’s office recently opened a separate investigation into allegations of a breach in Coffee County, located about 200 miles south of Atlanta. The Georgia allegation is the latest example of attempts to gain access to voting computers after Republican Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, similar to incidents in Colorado, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump supporters claimed there was fraud and blamed elections equipment manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. Recounts, court cases and investigations have repeatedly upheld the election, which Democrat Joe Biden won by less than 12,000 votes in Georgia. Dominion has sued over the unfounded allegations. A year and a half after the presidential election, it remains unclear whether Coffee County election computers were compromised by individuals pursuing evidence of fraud. Flight records provided by FlightAware.com show a plane from Atlanta visited the county on Jan. 7, 2021 — the day after the Capitol riot in Washington.

Full Article: Subpoenas seek info on attempt to copy election data in Coffee County

Louisiana elections officials get first hands-on experience with potential new voting machines | Mark Ballard/The Advocate

Elections officials Monday got their first hands-on experience with different types of devices voters will soon be using to cast ballots in the future instead of the 10,000 or so antiquated and hard to repair voting machines now used in Louisiana. Nine different vendors briefed Voting Commission members, clerks or court and registrars of voters. Some allowed them to hand mark ballots. Others had touch-screen computers that printed out the results on special paper. Both systems fed the paper ballots into scanners that counted the votes and kept the paper ballots in a secured vault. Both systems left a paper trail to allow elections commissioners in each parish to hand count ballots cast at the precincts on election day, if requested by the candidate or by a court, something can’t be done now, said Steve Raborn, the Registrar of Voters in East Baton Rouge Parish. The demonstrations will be open to the public Tuesday at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge. On Wednesday the Voting System Commission will vote on what attributes they want to see on the machines.

Full Article: Louisiana elections officials get first hands-on experience with potential new voting machines | Legislature | theadvocate.com

Michigan: Sheriff’s investigators used ‘scare tactics’ to grill county clerks on 2020 election | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A deputy and a private investigator working with Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made unannounced visits last year to local election officials’ offices to question them about the 2020 presidential vote. Multiple clerks in Barry County said Leaf’s department used what they viewed as “scare tactics” as it examined and advanced unproven claims of fraud in the last presidential election. State authorities, including the Michigan State Police, are currently investigating whether those working with Leaf, a Republican, gained improper access to vote-counting machines that could have violated the law and compromised voting equipment in the battleground state. Some election clerks in Barry County said they believe their conversations with Leaf’s investigators — one of whom identified himself as a forensic auditor — were secretly recorded and said they were told not to inform other clerks about the probe, according to a series of interviews with officials in the county and emails obtained by The Detroit News through an open records request. “I asked if they were investigating all of the township & city clerks & was told yes, and I am to be questioned last,” Barry County Clerk Pam Palmer emailed a lawyer in June 2021. “They have purposely asked the clerks to not say anything to each other or myself because they want the element of surprise.”

 

Full Article: Sheriff Dar Leaf’s investigators used ‘element of surprise’ to grill Michigan clerks on 2020 election

Missouri enacts new voter rules, including a photo ID requirement, and nixes presidential primaries for caucuses | Neil Vigdor/The New York Times

Missouri overhauled its election rules on Wednesday, enacting a voter identification law similar to one the state’s highest court blocked two years ago and doing away with its presidential primary in favor of a caucus system. The new law, which Gov. Michael L. Parson signed at the State Capitol in Jefferson City, requires voters to present a photo ID when casting a regular or absentee ballot. Those without such documentation will be required to fill out a provisional ballot that would be segregated until they provide photo identification or their signature is matched to the one kept on file by election officials. The voter identification rule was the latest instituted in a Republican-controlled state, and reflected the party’s continued mistrust of common voting practices, including the use of voting machines. It requires the use of hand-marked paper ballots statewide starting in 2023, with limited exceptions for certain touch-screen systems until the end of next year. Among the other changes is a prohibition against the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots — a practice that many Republicans criticized during the 2020 presidential election — and replacing Missouri’s presidential primary, held in recent years in March, with a series of caucuses.

Full Article: Missouri Enacts Strict New Voter Rules and Will Switch to Caucuses – The New York Times

New Mexico Secretary of State says she was threatened | Morgan Lee/Associated Press

New Mexico’s top elections regulator says she received threats to her safety via an email and telephone calls to her offices and that the FBI has been notified. Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver on Tuesday told The Associated Press that there have been three instances of threats against her within the last two weeks and that federal investigators have been alerted. Two threats were made indirectly in phone calls to the office of the secretary of state. The FBI in Albuquerque did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Toulouse Oliver previously went into hiding in response to online threats by leaving her home for several weeks in December 2020 and January 2021. Investigators linked those threats on a website against multiple election officials to Iran. “I went a nice, long period with anything” threatening, Toulouse Oliver said. “My election security officer has referred them over to the FBI. They’re looking into it obviously.” Toulouse Oliver said the threatening email touched upon social media and video commentary by a conservative filmmaker in defense of his widely debunked documentary “2000 Mules” that alleges widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Full Article: Top New Mexico elections regulator says she was threatened | AP News

Nevada: Gilbert says video proves fraud; election official says it proves security | essica Hill/Las Vegas Sun

A video that Reno attorney Joey Gilbert says proves fraud in last month’s primary election actually shows a Washoe County election official doing his job, a county official says. Gilbert is refusing to concede his loss in a 12-way primary election for the Republican nomination for governor, despite coming up about 26,000 votes short of the declared winner, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo. On Tuesday, Gilbert shared a two-minute, 27-second video on his Facebook page of a portion of a livestream of the Washoe County ballot room. The video shows a man walking down an aisle and stopping at different machines. Gilbert’s accompanying comments included “talk about guilty as sin” and “CORRUPT as hell.” He suggested the man was entering and uploading something into the computers. Bethany Drysdale, media and communications manager for Washoe County, said the man in the video is the county’s department systems specialist, who was closing down an imprinter at the end of the work day, as required by Nevada state law. The specialist was also verifying that office laptops were shut down for the day and that the spreadsheets on them were complete. The laptops have Excel spreadsheets that track the groups of mail-in ballots and what bins they are in, so that when a risk-limiting audit is performed, the election officials know what bin a certain group of ballots is in, Drysdale said. There is no tallying of votes on those computers, she added.

Full Article: Gilbert says video proves fraud; Nevada official says it proves security – Las Vegas Sun Newspaper

Pennsylvania: Fight over 2020 election records lands in court | Mark Scolforo/Associated Press

A county judge in Williamsport has to decide whether to force officials to provide voter-by-voter electronic election records after the state Office of Open Records ruled Pennsylvania law makes them confidential. Heather Honey, who heads the Lebanon, Pennsylvania-based firm Haystack Investigations, sought in October a digital copy of Lycoming County’s “cast vote record” for the 2020 General Election in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden unseated Republican President Donald Trump. Lycoming told Honey no, saying Honey was essentially asking for the contents of ballot boxes and voting machines, information that the state Election Code declares off-limits for public inspection. In a January decision, Office of Open Records appeals officer Erin Burlew agreed with the county elections director that the cast vote record “is the digital equivalent of the contents of ballot boxes.” Honey challenged that decision in county court in February, likening the cast vote record to a spreadsheet and describing it as “merely a digital report tallying the results of ballots scanned into a tabulator. The CVR is a report that is prepared after an election from a desktop computer that is not and never was the contents of a ballot box.”

Full Article: Fight over 2020 election records lands in Pennsylvania court | AP News

Virginia lawmakers punt on bills aimed at limiting partisan election oversight | Graham Moomaw/Virginia Mercury

Despite getting several extra months to negotiate, Virginia lawmakers went home for the summer without a deal on proposals to limit partisan influence in the state’s election bureaucracy. Legislation that would have removed the governor’s power to appoint the state elections commissioner and given the two major parties equal representation on the State Board of Elections effectively died for lack of a final vote. The General Assemly didn’t take up two pending bills on the topic when lawmakers met in Richmond this month to finish work on the state budget, which was supposed to be done in March. All the bills left unfinished are technically still alive because the General Assembly adjourned its special session to Sept. 7, a move explained as a way to take action later on an unfilled seat on the State Corporation Commission. But anything not approved at this point is effectively dead, said Garren Shipley, a spokesman for House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah. “The remaining conference reports, while they are still technically viable until the session adjourns sine die, are unlikely to move forward,” Shipley said. It’s unclear exactly what caused the talks to fail, but the state elections board flipped to Republican control during the negotiations due to the resignation of a Democratic member who had been appointed to a judgeship. While the bills were pending, Gov. Glenn Youngkin swapped out the state’s former elections commissioner, Chris Piper, for his own appointee, Susan Beals, a former Republican member of the Chesterfield County Electoral Board.

Full Article: Virginia lawmakers punt on bills aimed at limiting partisan election oversight – Virginia Mercury

Wisconsin: A year in, legal fight over Gableman election investigation keeps growing | Shawn Johnson/Wisconsin Public Radio

More than a year after Wisconsin Republicans tapped former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to lead a wide-ranging election investigation, the number of court cases connected to the probe continues to grow with no end in sight. This week, the liberal watchdog group American Oversight filed its fourth lawsuit connected to the investigation, this one against Gableman’s Office of Special Counsel after he admitted to deleting some documents connected to the probe. Lawyers for Gableman have also filed an appeal of a judge’s ruling that found him in contempt of court in another case where American Oversight is seeking open records. “The investigation has become a morass of competing lawsuits back and forth between different parties in the state and outside the state,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And those legal debates have sort of overtaken the substance of the investigation itself.”

Full Article: A year in, legal fight over Gableman election investigation keeps growing | Wisconsin Public Radio