Nebraska State Senator files complaint against Nebraska Attorney General and Secretary of State for joining Texas lawsuit | Kayla Wolf/Omaha World-Herald

State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha filed a disciplinary complaint against two top state officials Friday for adding Nebraska to a last-ditch Texas lawsuit over the presidential election. The complaint names Attorney General Doug Peterson, who signed on to a friend of the court brief in the case, and Secretary of State Bob Evnen, who publicly endorsed Peterson’s action. Both men are attorneys. Chambers submitted the complaint to the Nebraska Supreme Court’s counsel for discipline, who enforces professional conduct rules for attorneys. The veteran lawmaker, who earned a law degree but never took the bar exam, argued that Peterson and Evnen violated those rules by signing on to, or endorsing, an “action of such frivolousness as to constitute disrespect for a tribunal — the highest one in the land.”

Full Article: Chambers files complaint against Nebraska AG, secretary of state for joining Texas lawsuit | Politics | omaha.com

New Jersey: Replacing old voting machines will come with big price tag. How big? Who knows? | Jeff Pillets/NJ Spotlight News

New Jersey officials estimate that replacing the state’s aged fleet of voting machines could cost between $60 million and $80 million. Add to that the price tag for new technology that would enable early in-person voting — a 2021 priority for state policymakers — and taxpayers could be looking at a $100 million bill in the next few years just to finance their own votes. That comes to about $22 for every one of the 4.5 million Jerseyans who cast ballots in this year’s general election. But other states that recently took on overhauls of their old voting equipment found that keeping the expense of democracy under control proved tricky, as the cost of employee training, along with maintenance and troubleshooting for the new technology soared. Hidden costs such as licensing fees also hit taxpayers hard. Citizen groups in Georgia, for example, said the actual cost of new voting machines installed last year grew to $82 million more than the $104 million budgeted for the statewide project. In New York, the cost of installing electronic poll books in early voting centers spiraled past initial estimates to a total of more than $175 million, according to a state elections board report that was leaked to the media. Louisiana taxpayers were also hit with a wave of unexpected costs when the price for their new voting system pushed past $100 million.

Full Article: Replacing NJ’s voting machines: Costs, complications | NJ Spotlight News

Nevada Secretary of State: No evidence of ‘wide-spread fraud’ in 2020 election | Riley Snyder/Nevada Independent

Nevada Secretary of State ’s office announced Friday evening that it has “yet to see any evidence of wide-spread fraud” in the state’s 2020 election, an indirect rebuke of unsupported claims of mass voter fraud made by President Donald Trump and Nevada Republicans. In a “Facts vs. Myths” document posted to the secretary of state’s website late Friday, Cegavske’s office wrote that it is pursuing several “isolated” cases of voter fraud, but has not seen evidence of any large-scale fraud that would meaningfully affect Trump’s 33,596-vote loss in the state. Electors cast Nevada’s six electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden on Monday. Publication of the document comes two days after President Trump tweeted that “Nevada must be flipped” based on testimony presented by a Trump campaign attorney, Jesse Binnall, during a U.S. Senate hearing on election security on Wednesday. A Binnall-led lawsuit by the Trump campaign to grant the president the six electors tied to Biden, or withdraw Nevada entirely from Electoral College proceedings, failed in early December. The purported evidence presented about the alleged fraud in Nevada’s 2020 election has been roundly rejected by courts in the state, including by a District Court judge as offering “little to no value” and failing to establish that any illegal votes were cast in the election. Judge James Russell’s order called into question data analyses provided by the Trump campaign, saying their methodology was questionable or that witnesses were unable to verify data or identify its origins.

Full Article: Secretary of State: No evidence of ‘wide-spread fraud’ in Nevada’s 2020 election

New York: Tenney leads Brindisi by 19 votes after count of Chenango County ballots | Mark Weiner/Syracuse Post-Standard

Former Rep. Claudia Tenney expanded her lead from 12 to 19 votes over Rep. Anthony Brindisi today after three counties reported corrected vote totals in the undecided 22nd Congressional District election. For now, Tenney leads Brindisi 155,519 to 155,500, according to unofficial returns from the eight counties in the district. Those totals are likely to change again after Oneida County finishes its review of disputed ballots ahead of a court-ordered review of disputed ballots from all eight counties next week. The biggest change Friday occurred in Chenango County where election officials counted 44 affidavit ballots and two absentee ballots that had not been previously included in their vote totals. After election officials counted the ballots today, Tenney picked up 25 votes and Brindisi 17 votes, said Carol Franklin, a Chenango County elections commissioner. An additional four ballots left the line for Congress blank. State Supreme Court Justice Scott J. DelConte had ordered Chenango County to count the 44 valid affidavit ballots after they were found by election officials in their office on Dec. 1, almost a month after the election. The ballots were cast during the state’s early voting period.

Full Article: Tenney leads Brindisi by 19 votes after count of Chenango County ballots – syracuse.com

Pennsylvania: Trump wants US Supreme Court to overturn election results | Jill Colvin and Marc Levy/Associated Press

Undeterred by dismissals and admonitions from judges, President Donald Trump’s campaign continued with its unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the Nov 3. election Sunday, saying it had filed a new petition with the Supreme Court. The petition seeks to reverse a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases having to do with mail-in ballots and asks the court to reject voters’ will and allow the Pennsylvania General Assembly to pick its own slate of electors. While the prospect of the highest court in the land throwing out the results of a democratic election based on unfounded charges of voter fraud is extraordinary unlikely, it wouldn’t change the outcome. President-elect Joe Biden would still be the winner even without Pennsylvania because of his wide margin of victory in the Electoral College. “The petition seeks all appropriate remedies, including vacating the appointment of electors committed to Joseph Biden and allowing the Pennsylvania General Assembly to select their replacements,” Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in a statement. He is asking the court to move swiftly so it can rule before Congress meets on Jan. 6 to tally the vote of the Electoral College, which decisively confirmed Biden’s win with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. But the justices are not scheduled to meet again, even privately, until Jan 8, two days after Congress counts votes. Pennsylvania last month certified Biden as the winner of the state’s 20 Electoral College votes after three weeks of vote counting and a string of failed legal challenges.

Full Article: Trump wants Supreme Court to overturn Pa. election results

Pennsylvania: 10,000 votes are in limbo. They won’t change the outcome. They could still have a huge impact. | Jonathan Lai/Philadelphia Inquirer

About 10,000 Pennsylvania votes are still sitting in purgatory. And they’ll remain there for weeks or even longer, until the U.S. Supreme Court tells the state what to do with the mail ballots that arrived after Election Day last month. The justices will decide Jan. 8 whether to take up cases challenging those ballots, the court said Wednesday. The outcome could have major implications for election policy in the future. For now, the ballots remain excluded from Pennsylvania’s certified presidential and congressional vote tallies, and are not reflected in Joe Biden’s 81,000-vote victory in the state. (They were counted for state races.) Given that Democrats voted by mail far more than Republicans, they are presumably mostly Biden votes. Responding to concerns about an overwhelming crush of ballots being mailed days before the election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in September ordered counties to honor and count any mail ballot that was postmarked by Election Day — the deadline to cast a vote set by state law — but arrived sometime after 8 p.m. that day and within the ensuing three days. Republicans appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Justice Samuel Alito ordered the late-arriving ballots separated from the rest until the court could decide what to do. For weeks, Democrats feared that a post-Election Day disqualification of those ballots could cost Biden the state, and the presidency. But an urgent campaign to get voters to return their ballots by the original deadline ended with only about 10,000 arriving during the grace period.

Full Article: Fate of Pennsylvania mail ballots that arrived late could have future election implications

Utah: Mitt Romney calls Trump’s attempts to overturn election loss ‘sad’ and ‘embarrassing’ | Bryan Schott/Salt Lake Tribune

Sen. Mitt Romney did not mince words when asked about President Donald Trump’s continuing efforts to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. “It’s really sad and in a lot of respects embarrassing,” said Romney, R-Utah, who made the rounds on the Sunday morning political talk show circuit. “He’s leaving Washington with a whole series of conspiracy theories and things that are so nutty and loopy that people are shaking their heads, wondering what in the world has gotten into this man.” Romney was a guest on CNN’s “State of the Union” and “Meet the Press” on NBC Sunday morning, where he discussed a range of pressing political issues. Romney, who has clashed frequently with the president on a range of issues, said he thinks Trump’s influence on the GOP will endure even after he leaves office but Romney remains hopeful the party will eventually return to its roots. “The party has taken a different course than the one I knew when I was a younger person,” he said. “The party I knew was very concerned about Russia and Putin and Kim Jong Un and North Korea. We were a party concerned about balancing the budget. We believed in trade with other nations. We were happy to play a leadership role on the world stage. We believed character was essential. We’ve strayed from that and I don’t see us returning to that for a long time.”

Full Article: Mitt Romney calls Trump’s attempts to overturn election loss ‘sad’ and ‘embarrassing’

Wisconsin: A Conservative Justice in Says He Followed the Law, Not the Politics | Reid J. Epstein/The New York Times

Justice Brian Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is a veteran of the last decade’s fiercest partisan wars. As chief legal counsel of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, Justice Hagedorn helped write the 2011 law that stripped public-sector labor unions of their collective bargaining rights. Then in 2019, he won a narrow election to a 10-year term on the Supreme Court with backing from the state’s Republican media and grass-roots networks. But Justice Hagedorn, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, who in 2016 founded a private school that forbids same-sex relationships among its employees and students, is no longer a darling of the right. In a series of 4-3 decisions in recent months, he sided with the court’s three liberal justices to stop an effort to purge 130,000 people from the Wisconsin voter rolls, block the Green Party candidate and Kanye West from the general election presidential ballot and, on two separate occasions, reject President Trump’s effort to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin. Justice Hagedorn has in recent days found himself at odds not just with his political base but with his fellow conservative justices, who have spared little expense in showing their anger at him in judicial dissents defending Mr. Trump’s case.

Full Article: A Conservative Justice in Wisconsin Says He Followed the Law, Not the Politics – The New York Times