Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: ‘We are a tinderbox’: Political violence is ramping up, experts warn | Melanie Mason and David Lauter/Los Angeles Times

In San Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood, an intruder broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and violently attacked her husband. In a New York courtroom, a man pleaded guilty to threatening to kill California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell. In Washington, federal law enforcement warned that violent domestic extremism posed an elevated threat in the approaching midterm election. All on the same day. The targeting of the home of Speaker Pelosi, a Democrat who is second in line for the presidency, stood out on Friday for its brutality and sinister intent. But for many Americans, shock was tinged with a weary sense of inevitability. Far from a freak occurrence, the attack felt of a piece with the other threats and warnings publicized that day — the latest additions to the country’s growing sense of political menace, especially from the far right. “Unfortunately, this is a continuation of at least a 2½-year-long established pattern of violence against elected officials and local officials, including poll workers, that has been steadily ramping up,” said Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies political violence. Politically motivated violence has ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. history. Currently, America is going through an upsurge in right-wing violence, according to researchers who track attacks and other incidents. They say today’s climate is comparable to that in the mid-1990s, when a similar wave of right-wing violence culminated in the 1995 bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. Full Article: Extremist political violence is increasing, experts warn - Los Angeles Times

National: Federal officials warn that domestic violent extremists pose heightened threat to midterm elections | Geneva Sands and Sean Lyngaas/CNN

Federal officials on Friday warned that domestic violent extremists pose a heightened threat to the 2022 midterm elections, in a joint intelligence assessment sent to state and local officials and obtained by CNN.The bulletin, released by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, US Capitol Police and National Counterterrorism Center, says that perceptions of election fraud will likely result in heightened threats of violence. The bulletin did not list any specific credible threats. “Following the 2022 midterm election, perceptions of election-related fraud and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes likely will result in heightened threats of violence against a broad range of targets―such as ideological opponents and election workers,” it states. Enduring perceptions of election fraud related to the 2020 general election continue to contribute to the radicalization of some violent extremists, and likely would “increase their sensitivity to any new claims perceived as reaffirming their belief that US elections are corrupt,” according to the assessment. The joint federal assessment comes as election workers are increasingly concerned about physical threats to themselves and election infrastructure, and foreign actors seek to widen divisions in the United States. “We assess that election-related perceptions of fraud and [domestic violent extremist] reactions to divisive topics will likely drive sporadic [domestic violent extremist] plotting of violence and broader efforts to justify violence in the lead up to and following the 2022 midterm election cycle,” the bulletin states. Full Article: Feds warn that domestic violent extremists pose heightened threat to midterm elections | CNN Politics

National: In 5 key battlegrounds, most GOP state legislative nominees are election deniers, report finds | Adam Edelman/NBC

Nearly 6 in 10 Republican state legislature nominees in five key battleground states deny the results of the 2020 election, according to an analysis by a group tracking the races. Of those 450 Republican nominees — including incumbents running for re-election and nonincumbents — in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota, 58% of them have echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, according to research shared exclusively with NBC News by The States Project, a left-leaning group that tracked state legislative races in battleground states. Experts warn that if enough of these election-denying nominees are elected, Republican majorities in the state houses of these crucial battlegrounds could have the power to rewrite election laws and affect future elections, including in 2024 when Trump might run again. “When election deniers are in control, they will do whatever they can to undermine free and fair elections,” said Daniel Squadron, The States Project's executive director. “We know that the rules for elections and determining the winners are set through the legislative process, so what these folks do would have enormous impact” on “everything from who can register and who can vote to how the results are counted,” Squadron added. Full Article: In 5 key battlegrounds, most GOP state legislative nominees are election deniers, report finds

National: Election deniers hope hand count in Nevada offers a roadmap for future | Amy Gardner/The Washington Post

Jay Goldberg, a retired electrician who enjoys four-wheeling with his wife, Bonnie, in the dusty hills that loom over this desert town, sat in a tiny government office here this week counting ballots by hand because he believes the 2020 vote was rigged against Donald Trump. “If something can be manipulated, it eventually will be,” said Goldberg, 70, referring to unproven claims that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems threw the presidency to Joe Biden. “It’s that simple.” And to Goldberg, there’s a simple answer: Go back to hand counts. … Around the country, only a handful of jurisdictions count ballots by hand, mostly counties and towns with tiny populations concentrated in New England and Wisconsin, according to data provided by Verified Voting. Together, voters living in these communities represent just 0.2 percent of registered voters nationwide. But so far this year, communities in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada and New Hampshire have discussed switching to hand-counting of ballots. Just last week, the clerk of Elko County, Nev. — about the same size as Nye, with roughly 53,000 residents — announced plans to conduct a hand-counted audit after the Nov. 8 election. Experts say that if hand counting is adopted on a broad scale, election results could be thrown into chaos by errors and delays. That could give bad actors more time to sow doubts and to slow or even block certification. Time and again, post-election audits have confirmed that machine counts are accurate. No proof has emerged that the machines were hacked in 2020. “If the whole point of this is to engender more trust in the correctness of the election outcome, then I think the first thing is to understand the existing process and what is already in place to make for a trustworthy election,” Smith said. She noted that jurisdictions in Nevada already audit results by hand-counting a sample of ballots. They do so after unofficial results have been reported, encouraging confidence in the result without gumming up counting on election night.

Full Article: Election deniers hope hand count in Nevada offers a roadmap for future – The Washington Post

National: Inside the secretive effort by Trump allies to access voting machines | Emma Brown and Jon Swaine/The Washington Post

A week after the 2020 election, as Donald Trump raged over what he claimed was rampant fraud, officials in a rural county in southern Georgia received a disturbing report from the employee who ran their elections. New voting machines in use across the state could “very easily” be manipulated to flip votes from one candidate to another, she claimed at a meeting of the county elections board, and ballots could be scanned and counted more than once. She stressed that she had correctly tallied the results in their county, where Trump won in a landslide. But she said not everyone in positions like hers could be trusted to do the same. “Yes there are several check points for the honest person, but the honest person is not in every county,” Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton told the board, according to minutes of the Nov. 10 meeting. One board member declared that the new equipment, made by Dominion Voting Systems, “SICKENS HIM.” Alerted by Hampton, Trump’s team quickly took interest. “I would like to obtain as much information as possible,” a campaign staffer emailed Hampton that same day. Full Article: Inside the secretive effort by Trump allies to access voting machines - The Washington Post

National: ‘Complex threat environment’ ahead of midterm elections, top cybersecurity official says | Tyler Clifford/Reuters

Election officials in the United States have been alerted to safe-proof their voting systems and be vigilant about political violence amid a "very complex threat environment," top U.S. cybersecurity official Jen Easterly said on Sunday in the wake of an attack on the husband of a leading Democratic lawmaker last week. Easterly, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in an appearance on CBS "Face the Nation" said the agency is concerned about a range of threats, including cyber, insider, physical and disinformation even as it sees no "specific or credible" threats. CISA is distributing information about disinformation campaigns and tactics that seek to undermine confidence in U.S. elections, she said. "We are putting out information ... to make sure that state and local election officials have the information that they need to protect their voting systems and their election infrastructure." Full Article: 'Complex threat environment' ahead of midterm elections, top cybersecurity official says | Reuters

‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: local election officials fear for safety | Dani Anguiano/The Guardian

Inside the office of the Shasta county clerk and registrar of voters, which runs elections for about 111,000 people in this part of far northern California, Cathy Darling Allen can see all the security improvements she would make if she had the budget. “We have plexi on the counter downstairs for Covid but that won’t stop a person. It’s literally just clamped to the counters,” the county clerk and registrar said. For about $50,000, the office could secure the front, limiting access to upstairs offices, she estimated. Another county put bulletproof glass in their lobby years earlier, she knew, something officials there at one point considered removing, though not any more. Elections offices didn’t used to think about security in this way, Allen said. Now they can’t afford not to. Following Donald Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Allen says the once low-profile job of non-partisan local election official has transformed in counties like hers. A culture of misinformation has sown doubt in the US election system and subjected officials from Nevada to Michigan to harassment and threats. The FBI has received more than 1,000 reports of threats against election workers in the past year alone. Source: ‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: local election officials fear for safety | US news | The Guardian

National: ‘Our security here is a joke’: Election workers lament lack of federal spending on security ahead of crucial midterms | Sean Lyngaas/CNN

Millions in federal dollars could have gone to protect election workers and improve the physical security of their offices, but in a classic tale of bureaucratic red tape, most of it remains untapped less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The botched funding opportunity comes as election officials across the country have faced an unprecedented wave of violent threats stemming from conspiracy theories about the voting process. Now, things like additional lighting or security guards for some election offices may not be in place for Election Day on November 8. “Our security here is a joke,” said Scott McDonell, the Democratic clerk for Dane County, Wisconsin’s second largest. His office is a block from the state capitol building in Madison, where thousands of people have previously gathered to protest the 2020 election results. McDonell worries that people “could walk right in” to confront him. In April, the Department of Homeland Security reviewed the security of McDonell’s office and found glaring shortcomings, including doors within the facility that visitors could pass through unchecked, according to the DHS assessment obtained by CNN. Yet, until CNN told him about it, McDonell said he was unaware of a DHS grant program that has in recent years made millions of dollars available to state and local government offices for various security and counterterrorism projects to bolster their physical security. Instead, Dane County plans to spend $12 million in county money to move to a more secure facility next year. “Everyone agrees that something has to be done,” McDonell told CNN. “A lot of it is the employees. They have to feel safe on the job.” Full Article: 'Our security here is a joke': Election workers lament lack of federal spending on security ahead of crucial midterms | CNN Politics

National: New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots | Areeba Shah/Salon

In what election experts call the latest effort to stoke widespread doubt about election security and the accuracy of vote-counting, Republicans in many rural counties are pushing to hand-count ballots in the upcoming midterms, despite no evidence of widespread fraud or voting machine irregularities. Hand-counting is far less accurate than machine counting, experts say, and is likely to create errors and delay results by hours, days or even weeks. In at least six states, Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation this year that would require hand-counting of all ballots instead of electronic tabulation. None of those bills have passed so far, but similar proposals have gained traction in some county and local governments. ... Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for the responsible use of technology in elections, said that these efforts are part of a broader effort to discourage voters from trusting any part of the election process. American elections "objectively are more trustworthy now than they have been in decades, but the fear-mongers are broadcasting the exact opposite," Lindeman said. Attacks on voting technology are "creating an environment in which some really dedicated public servants are leaving the profession because they're demoralized and in many cases afraid. That is a tragedy that injures all of us." Full Article: New Republican effort to feed "distrust of elections": They want to hand-count all ballots | Salon.com

National: How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable | Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel/The New York Times

On the morning of July 8, former President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he founded with people close to him, to claim that he had in fact won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, despite all evidence to the contrary. Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. And yet Mr. Trump’s baseless claim pulsed through the public consciousness anyway. It jumped from his app to other social media platforms — not to mention podcasts, talk radio or television. Within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post, more than one million people saw his claim on at least dozen other sites. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Full Article: Ahead of Midterms, Disinformation Is Even More Intractable - The New York Times

National: A Scientist’s Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine | Spencer Mestel/Undark

In late 2020, a large box arrived at Juan Gilbert’s office at the University of Florida. The computer science professor had been looking for this kind of product for months. Previous orders had yielded poor results. This time, though, he was optimistic. Gilbert drove the package home. Inside was a transparent box, built by a French company and equipped with a 27-inch touchscreen. Almost immediately, Gilbert began modifying it. He put a printer inside and connected the device to Prime III, the voting system he has been building since the first term of the George W. Bush administration. After 19 years of building, tinkering, and testing, he told Undark this spring, he had finally invented “the most secure voting technology ever created.” Gilbert didn’t just want to publish a paper outlining his findings. He wanted the election security community to recognize what he’d accomplished — to acknowledge that this was, in fact, a breakthrough. In the spring of 2022, he emailed several of the most respected and vocal critics of voting technology, including Andrew Appel, a computer scientist at Princeton University. He issued a simple challenge: Hack my machine. Their access would be unfettered — no tamper-evident seals to avoid, chain of custody procedures to subvert, or mock poll workers to dupe — and they’d have to agree to only one condition: Flip every vote to the same candidate. By this point, Gilbert had published a video of his ballot-marking device, or BMD, in action, but he was unsure how the hacking community would respond. “There’s a part of that community that’s very confident in what they do,” he said. “And if they hear how it works, they may run away from it.” Full Article: A Scientist's Quest for an Accessible, Unhackable Voting Machine

National: Pro-Trump Republicans court election volunteers to ‘challenge any vote’ | Patrick Marley, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

The Republican National Committee and its allies say they have staged thousands of training sessions around the country on how to monitor voting and lodge complaints about next month’s midterm elections. In Pennsylvania, party officials have boasted about swelling the ranks of poll watchers to six times the total from 2020. In Michigan, a right-wing group announced it had launched “Operation Overwatch” to hunt down election-related malfeasance, issuing a press release that repeated the warning “We are watching” 10 times. Supporters of former president Donald Trump who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen have summoned a swarm of poll watchers and workers in battleground states to spot potential fraud this year. It is a call to action that could subject voting results around the country to an unprecedented level of suspicion and unfounded doubt. “We’re going to be there and enforce those rules, and we’ll challenge any vote, any ballot, and you’re going to have to live with it, OK?” one-time Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said on a recent episode of his podcast. “We don’t care if you don’t like it. We don’t care if you’re going to run around and light your hair on fire. That’s the way this is going to roll.” Full Article: Trump supporters say they're training poll watchers to spot fraud - The Washington Post

National: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Early voting for midterm elections is well underway in many states, and so far has proceeded without major incident. But a new Reuters/Ipos poll finds that four in 10 of American voters are worried they will encounter intimidation or threats of violence at polling places. (Two out of three fear actual violence from extremists if they are displeased with election outcomes.) In a paradoxical crusade for transparency, armed “observers” stationed themselves near Arizona ballot boxes with their faces and license plates masked, taking photos of voters and their vehicle tags. A group of retired and Latino voters filed a lawsuit against the organization the watchers claim to represent. Responding to news of such activity, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the Justice Department "will not permit voters to be intimidated" during midterms. Last year, the DOJ established a task force to address threats against those involved in administering elections and an 800 number and online complaint form for reporting threats to the FBI. The prospects for disruption vary within the more than 170,000 electoral precincts in the country, but physical and cybersecurity are priorities for all. Moreover, vigilantes can create uncertainty by menacing officials across state and local borders. Full Article: In a Climate of Threats, Election Offices Focus on Security

National: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | Colleen Long/Associated Press

Election Day is 12 days away. But in courtrooms across the country, efforts to sow doubt over the outcome have already begun. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed this year around the Nov. 8 elections. The legal challenges, largely by Republicans, target rules for mail-in voting, early voting, voter access, voting machines, voting registration, the counting of mismarked absentee ballots and access for partisan poll watchers. The cases likely preview a potentially contentious post-election period and the strategy stems partly from the failure of Donald Trump and his allies to prevail in overturning the free and fair results of the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden. That was an ad hoc response fronted by a collection of increasingly ill-prepared lawyers that included Rudy Giuliani. The current effort, however, is more formalized, well-funded and well-organized and is run by the Republican National Committee and other legal allies with strong credentials. Party officials say they are preparing for recounts, contested elections and more litigation. Thousands of volunteers are ready to challenge ballots and search for evidence of malfeasance. “We’re now at the point where charges of fraud and suppression are baked into the turnout models for each party,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, co-chair of the Election Official Legal Defense Network and former counsel to the George W. Bush campaign and other Republican candidates. “Republicans charge fraud. Democrats charge suppression. Each side amplifies its position with massive and costly amounts of litigation and messaging.” Full Article: Election Day is Nov. 8, but legal challenges already begin | AP News