National: Midterm elections will likely see increased effects of misinformation, reduced federal security activity, experts say | Paige Gross/News From The States

A year after the 2024 presidential election, technologists and election experts are wrestling with their new reality; tech-aided misinformation and disinformation campaigns are and will continue to be a part of the United States’ democratic process. Technology has always played a role in information dissemination in elections, said Daniel Trielli, an assistant professor of media and democracy at the University of Maryland. Mass use of the internet in the early 2000s gave everyday people the ability to be “publishers,” which increased the amount of misinformation, he said. But the rise of social media platforms and the evolving technologies, like generative artificial intelligence, in the last five years have brought it to new levels. “We have had much more volume of misinformation, disinformation grabbing the attention of the electorate,” Trielli said. “And quickly following through that, we see a professionalization of disinformation … The active use of these social media platforms to spread disinformation.” Read Article

Arizona says it will sue Mike Johnson if he does not swear in new rep – and likely trigger the release of the Epstein files | Joe Sommerlad/The Independent

House Speaker Mike Johnson has been threatened with legal action by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes over his ongoing failure to swear in her state’s new Democratic congresswoman-elect, Adelita Grijalva. Grijalva, 54, won a special election in Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23, comfortably beating Republican Daniel Butierez by picking up 69 percent of the vote to his 29 percent, and will, eventually, succeed her late father, Raul Grijalva, who passed away in March. In a letter sent to the speaker on Tuesday, Mayes wrote: “Arizona’s right to a full delegation, and the right of the residents of CD 7 to representation from the person they recently voted for, are not up for debate and may not be delayed or used as leverage in negotiations about unrelated legislation.” Read Article

Colorado election officials say they don’t expect big changes after sudden sale of Dominion Voting Systems | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

The announcement last week that a former Republican election official had purchased Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and given it the new name Liberty Vote took many county clerks in the state by surprise. Unaffiliated clerk Tiffany Lee from La Plata County in southwest Colorado said she had no advance warning about the sale from Dominion or Liberty Vote. “There was no notification to us that this was even a conversation at their level,” said Lee. Like other clerks she found out through the media and Liberty Vote’s press release. “That’s concerning to me that we didn’t get any kind of information from them directly or Dominion,” she said. Reasd Article

Florida: After yearslong lawsuit Miami-Dade will save ballot images | Claire Heddles/Miami Herald

Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Alina Garcia will start saving digital images of ballots starting in next month’s local elections — a change Florida’s Democratic Party has been fighting the office for in court for years. Under state law, supervisors are required to save paper ballots for 22 months after an election. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit have argued that law should apply to digital images of the ballots taken by the voting machine too to add another layer of security during recounts. Their case against Miami-Dade’s elections office was set to go to trial in January. “This is a huge victory for verifiability and for transparency,” said Joseph Geller, one of the plaintiffs and Democratic Miami-Dade County School Board member, of Garcia’s decision to start saving ballot images. Read Article

Georgia will continue to use election equipment under Liberty Votes ownership, spokesperson says | Chase McGee/Georgia Public Broadcasting

Dominion Voting Systems, the company contracted to supply Georgia’s elections equipment, has been sold to a former Republican elections director. In 2019, Georgia entered a 10-year contract with Dominion and has since spent more than $100 million on election infrastructure. During the 2020 election, the company was plagued by baseless conspiracy theories, which alleged that the voting machines rigged ballots in favor of then-candidate Joe Biden. Dominion’s new owner, Scott Leiendecker of Missouri-based Liberty Votes, wrote in a message that his company was “committed to transparency, independent audits, and verifiable paper records,” echoing challenges to past elections. Read Article

Michigan election tampering case stalls as DePerno seeks to block texts linked to 2020 audit effort | Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

After the preliminary examination of former attorney general candidate Matt DePerno and former state Rep. Daire Rendon (R-Lake City) kicked off on Thursday, the review of evidence has been put on pause over a dispute on whether a series of text messages should be admitted as evidence. Rendon and DePerno, as well as attorney Stefanie Lambert Junttila, were indicted in 2023, following an investigation into potential tampering with election equipment following the 2020 election, led by Special Prosecutor D.J. Hilson. The three defendants are each accused of participating in a conspiracy to gain access to voting tabulators, where a group of information technology experts allegedly performed “testing” on the machines.

Nebraska group starts ballot push for winner-take-all, hand-counting votes | Juan Salinas II/Nebraska Examiner

A nonprofit group behind a handful of Nebraska ballot initiatives announced a campaign Tuesday to gather signatures for two new ones aimed at conservative election goals. One would alter how the state awards Electoral College votes for president, giving all five to the winner of the popular vote statewide. The other would require elections in the state to be conducted exclusively using paper ballots counted by hand. The group, Advocates for All Nebraskans, is now collecting signatures for five ballot initiatives. The group, headlined by former leaders of the Nebraska Republican Party, argues that the initiatives are about reclaiming the state’s voice and promoting government accountability. Read Article

North Carolina: Voting rights advocates prep for federal trial over ‘election integrity’ law | Will Doran/WRAL

A federal trial scheduled for next week could help shape the rules that govern the 2026 elections in North Carolina, as voting rights advocates challenge a law approved by Republican lawmakers who said it would protect election integrity. The trial could be happening in Winston-Salem at the same time state lawmakers return to Raleigh to further assert their influence ahead of next year’s midterms — by attempting to further gerrymander the state’s U.S. House of Representatives districts in favor of GOP candidates. Marques Thompson is the organizing director for the group Democracy NC. He said Tuesday that the law his group is suing over, as well as the proposed new maps, both have a shared goal: Making it less likely that the will of the people matters when it comes to who wins or loses elections. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Five years after trying to aid Trump, Fulton County faces steep penalty | Carter Walker/Votebeat

After President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, he and his allies were pushing false narratives about the election being stolen, pressuring state and local officials, and calling for audits of the results. In Fulton County, Pennsylvania, a Republican stronghold where Trump won a larger percentage of the vote than anywhere else in the state, local leaders wanted to help. “Sending this email to see what’s going on with this rigged election,” County Commissioner Randy Bunch, a Republican, wrote to state Sen. Judy Ward, also a Republican, in a Nov. 12 email obtained by watchdog group American Oversight. “We can’t let this election get stolen if there is anything I can do please let me know.” A few weeks later, according to court documents, the county let an outside company examine its voting machines and download data from them. In text messages sent shortly afterwards, one county commissioner said that if the county hadn’t given the company access, a Trump ally would have forced it to do so via a subpoena. That decision to allow a third party to access sensitive voting equipment set off far-reaching consequences for Fulton County. As a result of a state order, it had to purchase all-new voting equipment. After years of legal proceedings, the county is facing more than $1 million in fines, an amount equal to roughly one-eighth of the county’s yearly budget. Read Article

South Carolina: Missing $4 million? State investigations? Election Commission awash in drama | John Monk and Lucy Valeski/The State

A missing $4 million, a $10 million loan installment coming due with no money to pay for it and whether former State Election Commission director Howard Knapp misrepresented the price of buying new machines for the state in 2024. Those were three questions about a $28 million purchase for machines to count voter’s ballots aired Wednesday during an unusually open public meeting of the State Election Commission board. “We know that we authorized $28 million (for the voting machines) … but the loan appears to be for $32 million,” said Commission chairman Dennis Shedd during the meeting. The three other commission members agreed that they had approved a $28 million loan. Read Article

Texas: Voter system switch leaves thousands of residents unverified ahead of early voting, | Shakari Briggs, John Lomax V/Houston Chronicle

Elections officials across Texas are scrambling to register voters after the near-collapse of a voter registration company led counties across the state to transfer to a system provided through the Texas Secretary of State’s office. Votec, a California-based company that has run voter registration everywhere from Harris County to Travis County, warned officials in August that a grim fiscal outlook had cast doubt on their ability to register voters ahead of the November election. The scare sparked a mass exodus of counties from Votec to the Texas Elections Management System, a statewide database that has been used by the Secretary of State’s Office to manage voter registration information since the early 2000s. But the transition to TEAM has been bumpy, and came just as the state rolled out a major update to the system. All told, the switch has left as many as 17,000 voters in Harris County and 400 in Fort Bend County in limbo with just days before early voting is scheduled to begin. Read Article

Wisconsin: Bill to allow candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to withdraw from ballots is sent to Governor | Molly Beck(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin lawmakers this week sent Gov. Tony Evers a bill that seeks to avoid a scenario that played out during the 2024 presidential election when independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was blocked in attempting to take his name off the ballot in an effort to widen President Donald Trump’s vote tally. The bill allows independent candidates for president and all candidates for statewide and legislative offices to remove their names from ballots before Election Day — a move currently barred for all reasons except death. Kennedy sought to remove his name from ballots in Wisconsin and other swing states after ending his presidential campaign as an independent candidate and endorsing Trump. Read Article

Dominion, Company at Center of False 2020 Voting Conspiracies, Is Sold | Nick Corasaniti and Jim Rutenberg/The New York Times

Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest manufacturers of election machines that were at the center of multiple false accusations and conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, has been sold to Liberty Vote, a new group run by a former local election director. Liberty Vote announced the acquisition in a brief news release that proclaimed the mission of the new company would be “to restore public confidence in the electoral process.” It featured language favored by conservatives, professing to “improve election integrity in America” and “leveraging hand-marked paper ballots enabling compliance with President Trump’s executive order,” a reference to the president’s effort in March to overhaul electoral processes that has been largely blocked by courts. The founder of Liberty Vote, Scott Leiendecker, is a former Republican election official from St. Louis with years of experience in elections. He also is the chief executive officer of KNOWiNK, a company that produces electronic poll books, digital devices that are used across the country to help election workers upload and maintain voter rolls at voting sites. In July, KNOWiNK announced that its Poll Pad “was the first electronic poll book to earn certification from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.” Read Article.com

National: ‘The stakes are quite large’: US supreme court case could gut Voting Rights Act | Sam Levine/The Guardian

The US supreme court is set to hear a case this month that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act, effectively killing one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement and the nation’s most powerful statute to prevent discrimination in voting. The court is considering the constitutionality of the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act: section two. The measure outlaws election practices that are racially discriminatory and has been the tool that minority voters and voting rights advocates have frequently turned to challenge redistricting plans – from congressional districts to county commissions and school boards – that group voters in such a way to dilute the political influence of a minority group. Read Article

National: Congress hears pleas for more election funding. Will it respond? | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

On the eve of a government shutdown Tuesday, dozens of local election officials from around the country wandered the labyrinth of office buildings adjacent to the U.S. Capitol, lobbying members of Congress for more federal funding of elections. In some ways, the local election officials were among the only people in the Capitol complex who didn’t really have to worry about the pending shutdown: The $15 million in election security grants that Congress appropriated for the states this year has already been doled out. But that amount helps explain why they were on Capitol Hill. States and local jurisdictions are primarily responsible for running elections, and bear most of the costs. But elections have become increasingly complex and expensive, because of changes to state laws and cybersecurity concerns, and they’re under unprecedented scrutiny, from ordinary voters right up to the president. Read Article

National: Voting groups ask court for immediate halt to Trump admin’s SAVE database overhaul | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Voting rights groups are asking a court to block an ongoing Trump administration effort to merge disparate federal and state voter data into a massive citizenship and voter fraud database. Last week, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and five individuals sued the federal government in D.C. District Court, saying it was ignoring decades of federal privacy law to create enormous “national data banks” of personal information on Americans. On Tuesday, the coalition, represented by Democracy Forward Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Fair Elections Center, asked the court for an emergency injunction to halt the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements into an immense technological tool to track potential noncitizens registered to vote. Until this year, SAVE was an incomplete and limited federal database meant to track immigrants seeking federal benefits. Read Article

National: Supreme court appears open to Republican challenge over Illinois mail-in ballot law | George Chidi/The Guardian

The US supreme court appeared sympathetic on Wednesday to a challenge brought by a Republican congressman to an Illinois law governing how the state counts mail-in absentee ballots received after election day. The lawsuit challenging Illinois’ election law from Mike Bost, a Republican representative from Illinois, is viewed by Trump-aligned conservatives as an avenue to continue attacks on mail-in voting. Bost filed the suit to argue that the Illinois law allowing ballots to be counted up to two weeks after election day if they are postmarked by the deadline unconstitutionally allows an extension of the election period. Arguments center on whether a federal candidate has standing to challenge the law, not whether the practice itself is constitutionally valid. Justices asked questions about whether they should view a political candidate as an “object” of the law – an entity for whom a regulation bears a direct consequence, and whether the odds of mail-in ballots tipping an election had bearing on whether a candidate had a right to challenge the law. Read Article

National: Smartmatic scores win against Fox in election machine defamation case  | Nina Pullano/Courthouse News Service

A New York judge said court documents from a Murdoch family trust dispute are fair game for discovery in election technology company Smartmatic’s defamation case against Fox News. Ruling from the bench at a two-hour hearing on a slate of motions from both parties, Judge David Cohen tossed a judicial hearing officer’s finding that the material from court proceedings in Nevada was not relevant to Smartmatic’s case. Smartmatic sued Fox Corporation and its right-wing news network in early 2021 over broadcasts that falsely claimed the company interfered in the 2020 election. Read Article

National: Does Donald Trump really believe he can be president again? | obin Abcarian/Los Angeles Times

On Tuesday, in the middle of a meeting between President Trump and Democratic leaders over the impending government shutdown, red “Trump 2028” baseball caps suddenly appeared on the Resolute Desk. “It was the strangest thing ever,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN. Not really. Trump teasing a third term is getting to be, well, old hat at this point. Last March, he told Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” that he would not rule out pursuing an unconstitutional third White House stint. But is he serious? “Some of this is trolling,” said Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan. “But the man has the largest ego of any person out there and he will do whatever it takes to be the center of attention.” Read Article

California Governor Newsom warns of possible Trump interference in California election | Sophia Bollag, Alexei Koseff/San Francisco Chronicle

As Election Day approaches, Gov. Gavin Newsom is raising concerns that President Donald Trump may try to interfere in California’s special election to redraw congressional districts. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board, Newsom pointed to Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops, the government shutdown and the president’s past criticisms of mail voting. Trump first federalized thousands of California National Guard troops in June over Newsom’s objections and deployed them to Los Angeles to quell protests over his mass deportation campaign. On Aug. 15, the same day Democrats released proposed new congressional maps, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent Newsom and the head of the California National Guard a letter saying most soldiers would be released from the L.A. mission but that 300 would remain under federal control through Nov. 4. Read Article

Georgia: Judge extends deadline for naming new prosecutor in election interference case | Olivia Rubin/ABC News

A judge on Wednesday extended the deadline for a replacement to be named in place of District Attorney Fani Willis in the Georgia election interference case against President Donald Trump and others. Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee extended the deadline to Nov. 14, after the group tasked with finding the replacement said they needed additional time, in part due to the case’s complexity. McAfee’s original order gave the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia just 14 days to appoint a replacement. Read Article

Maine: Amid ongoing investigation into found ballots, Secretary of State Bellows underscores election security | AnnMarie Hilton/Maine Morning Star

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is confident law enforcement will ultimately uncover why 250 official ballots were allegedly delivered to a Newburgh home in an Amazon package. She also said the incident underscored that Maine’s processes work and that the state’s elections are safe and secure. “Even if the most enterprising criminal were able to fabricate Maine ballots or Maine absentee ballot envelopes or if that chain of custody were broken, our elections would remain free, safe and secure because of the checks and balances in absentee voting itself,” Bellows said at a news conference at the State House Monday afternoon. Monday also marked the first day of in-person absentee voting throughout the state for the November election. In order to vote absentee, lawfully registered Maine voters must specifically request a ballot, Bellows explained. Those requests are tracked in the central voter registration system. Additionally, the Secretary of State’s office uploads public files in the lead up to the election that list absentee ballot requests. Read Article

Michigan: Prosecutors begin laying out evidence in high-profile tabulator cases | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A voting machine company determined tabulators that were obtained and inspected by supporters of President Donald Trump after Michigan’s 2020 election had been “tampered” with and should not be reused, an executive with the company testified in court Thursday. Guy Riner, vice president of account management for Election Systems & Software, was the first witness presented by prosecutors on the opening day of preliminary examinations for Matt DePerno, the 2022 GOP nominee for attorney general, and Daire Rendon, a Republican former state representative from Lake City. DePerno and Rendon — two vocal purveyors of unproven claims of fraud in Trump’s 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden — are facing felony charges for allegedly participating in a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to five voting machines that were transported to Oakland County for analysis by a group of so-called cybersecurity experts. Read Article

Nebraska secretary of state wants to hand over voter data to feds, but says lawsuit blocks it | Juan Salinas II/Nebraska Examiner

Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen last week weighed in on the latest request from the U.S. Department of Justice for the state’s voter registration data — showing a willingness to fulfill the request. Federal officials have asked states for detailed information from their voter rolls, including names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers, saying they want the information to ensure accurate voter registrations. Democratic-led states and some led by Republicans have declined or are pushing back against federal efforts to gather the data over state laws protecting data and privacy concerns. Critics have questioned the safety and potential national security risks of letting any administration consolidate such voter data in one place. Read Article

Pennsylvania counties erroneously issue dozens of duplicate ballots | Carter Walker/Votebeat

A handful of Pennsylvania counties mistakenly issued duplicate mail ballots to a few of their voters in recent weeks. Why that happened is unclear — state and county officials gave different explanations — but they cautioned that the error would have not resulted in anyone being able to have their vote counted twice. State and county officials said they have found that a total of 68 potential duplicate mail ballots were mistakenly issued. In some of these cases, they said, the ballots may not have reached voters, as the mistake may have been caught after a second ballot label was generated but before a duplicate ballot was actually mailed to the voter. Read Article

Pennsylvania: Luzerne County, state disagree on cause of ballot release error | Michael P. Buffer/The Citizens’ Voice

Luzerne County and the Pennsylvania Department of State offered different assessments of what caused the release of two mail ballots to 31 voters for the Nov. 4 general election. According to a statement from the Department of State, Luzerne County “inadvertently and incorrectly generated duplicate mailing labels.” Luzerne County Director of Elections Emily Cook noted “an apparent error with the state’s SURE system” in a news release on Tuesday that disclosed the inadvertent and “isolated” release of two mail ballots to 31 voters. The Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) system serves as the database for the state’s 67 counties to ensure the accuracy and integrity of voter registration rolls. It allows counties to update voters’ registration information statewide, eliminate verified duplicates and deceased voters from the rolls and transfer records electronically between counties. Read Article

South Carolina: Judge Diane Goodstein’s home burns to ground after ruling against Trump | Alia Shoaib/Newsweek

The home of a South Carolina judge was destroyed after it went up in flames on Saturday. A fire engulfed the home of Judge Diane Goodstein, who serves on the state Circuit Court, and led to three people being hospitalized with injuries, including her husband, according to a report from The Post and Courier. The fire comes weeks after Goodstein issued a ruling against the Trump administration. Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the blaze, and there is currently no evidence to suggest it was an act of arson. The incident quickly sparked online conversation hostility toward members of the judiciary who rule against Trump and his allies. Read Article

Texas: Dallas County GOP’s push to hand-count 2026 ballots could upend voting for Democrats | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune

Republicans in Dallas County, one of Texas’ largest voting jurisdictions, say they want to count ballots in their coming March primary by hand, if they can afford to, a change that could delay the reporting of election results and have far-reaching consequences for all of the county’s 1.5 million voters. The decision could force Dallas Democrats, as well as Republicans, to return to casting ballots at their assigned local precincts, rather than countywide vote centers, which would require finding scores of additional polling locations and hundreds more workers. It could also vastly increase the cost of holding both primaries, an increase that the parties would have to be prepared to cover on their own. Cost is one reason why Dallas County Republicans decided in 2023 against hand-counting ballots. At the time, Jennifer Stoddard Hajdu, then the county GOP chair, estimated the party would need more than $1 million to hand-count the more than 70,000 ballots cast in the 2024 primary. Read Article

Virginia: Fairfax Democrats’ online primary crashes, forcing voting to extend after system failure | Princess Harrell/WJLA

What was supposed to be a test of modern voting technology turned into a weekend of frustration for some Fairfax County voters. The Fairfax County Democratic Committee’s first all-digital primary election experienced a major technical failure that temporarily shut down the online voting system and forced organizers to extend voting into Sunday. The three-day primary, held to select the Democratic nominee for the Braddock District seat on the Board of Supervisors, used the platform Election Buddy and introduced ranked-choice voting for the first time. There were no paper ballots. Read Article

Washington: USPS rule changes may complicate mail-in voting, risking late ballots in November election | Joel Moreno/KOMO

Ballots go out starting next week for the November general election but people who mail them back through the United States Postal Service (USPS) could risk not having their votes counted. It all has to do with a rule change regarding postmarking and the point at which voters mail their ballots back. “We encourage all voters to return their ballot as early as possible but that is especially true if you plan to return your ballot by mail,” said Halei Watkins, the communications manager for King County Elections. The rule change involves added language around how the USPS postmarks mail. The postmark will now confirm the Postal Service’s possession of the letter or parcel on the date that is printed, but the postmark date “does not inherently or necessarily align with the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mail piece,” according to a recent news release. Read Article