National

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has highlighted the growing danger faced by public figures across the United States and experts are warning that, unless politicians dial down the divisive rhetoric, more violence is likely. Politicians, state legislators, election workers, school board officials and local prosecutors are increasingly targeted with death threats, harassment and other abuse as the political atmosphere before the election on November 5 becomes more tense. This is forcing local officials to take extraordinary measures to keep themselves and their staff safe. At her office in Douglas County, Nevada, Amy Burgans, the county clerk treasurer, has stockpiled personal protective equipment to keep election workers safe from ballots spiked with drugs. She has nasal spray on her desk to reverse overdoses in case any fentanyl gets through, and has organised training on how to deal with active shooters. She also carries a personal firearm. Read Article

CISA publishes resilience-planning playbook for critical infrastructure | Sophia Fox-Sowell/StateScoop

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday published a supplemental manual to its infrastructure resilience planning framework, which provides guidance on how local governments and the private sector can work together to improve the security and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure. The new playbook includes processes and table top exercises to help public and private sectors minimize the impact of cyberattacks on their communities, reduce the risk of disruption to critical services and keep system restoration costs low. It also outlines key actions for resilience planning, such as establishing incident-response groups, identifying critical infrastructure and those that dependent on it, creating mitigation strategies and integrating solutions into existing protocols. Read Article

National: Conservative groups are pushing to clean voter rolls. Others see an effort to sow election distrust | Julie Carr Smyth/Associated Press

Conservative groups are systematically attempting to challenge the legitimacy of large numbers of voter registrations across the country before the presidential election. The strategy is part of a wider effort raising questions about the integrity of this year’s election as former President Donald Trump repeatedly claims without evidence that his opponents are trying to cheat. The voter roll tactics include mass door-knocking campaigns, using special software designed to identify voters whose eligibility could be challenged and a crush of lawsuits. Read Article

National: How mapping tech is revolutionizing election administration | Chris Teale/Route Fifty

When St. Louis County, Missouri, kicked off its redistricting process after the 2010 Census, local officials used colored pencils on transparent paper to redraw their legislative boundaries and reflect population shifts. Ten years later, following the 2020 Census, officials in Missouri’s most populous county had traded in their pencils and paper for geographic information system mapping. St. Louis County, despite delays wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, had automated the process and used GIS to redraw the lines with the updated residency data. The result was more accurate and transparent maps. The story was similar in Orange County, California, which used to use “reams of paper” in its redistricting process, according to Matt Eimers, GIS supervisor at the Orange County Registrar of Voters. Officials there would have to compare their hand-drawn maps against paper records, which was a laborious process. Read Article

National: CISA bolsters security of US election infrastructure with new OpSec guide | Liam Garman/Cyber Daily

The six-page guide highlights the potential security risks menacing the upcoming US elections and provides actionable insights into how election officials can effectively manage them, from securing online infrastructure to protecting voter information. The document also includes insight into how the US’ adversaries collect private information and officials can find themselves on the radar of overseas threat actors, before laying out actionable steps for the creation of OpSec policies. “CISA provides various training programs for election workers, including secure practices, incident response planning, and de-escalation techniques,” Cait Conley, CISA special adviser to the director for election security, said. “This guide is another excellent resource CISA provides the public with to keep our elections safe and secure.” Read Article

National: Deployable voting machines for overseas troops move closer to reality | Jonathan Snyder/Stars and Stripes

Deployable electronic voting machines are now fully functional and could be used in a pilot election as soon as next year, the president of a nonprofit technology firm said this week.“We now have a fully functional prototype and are a few weeks away from wrapping up our report to [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency],” Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks and the technical lead on the project, told Stars and Stripes by email Monday.VotingWorks unveiled an early-stage version of its deployable voting machine in February at the National Association of State Election Directors conference in Washington, D.C. The machine aims to allow service members around the world, even at remote locations, to transmit a signed, encrypted digital ballot to their home precinct for tallying on Election Day. Read Article

National: Conservative activists find errors in software they hoped would root out voter fraud | Jane C. Timm/NBC

After months of testing, some conservative activists are finding that the vigilante computer programs they’d hoped would give them the ability to root out redundancies and fraud in the country’s voter rolls aren’t very reliable. Last year, those activists excitedly embraced EagleAI and similar programs that promised to help them look through voter rolls across the country in search of outdated or fraudulent voter registrations, even as experts warned about the programs’ limitations. The country’s voter rolls are designed for registration, not removal. Few people think to cancel old voter registrations when they move, which can lead to messy voter rolls as election officials must wait years to remove outdated registrations under federal law. Read Article

National: US intel reveals Russia plans to meddle in 2024 election | Ariana Baio/The Independent

Russia will attempt to influence the 2024 US presidential election using familiar tactics like spreading misinformation online to subvert the public’s faith in the democratic election process, according to intelligence officials. On Tuesday, officials in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters that Russia is using covert social media tactics like targeting voter groups in swing states with bot farms. The goal, they said, is to drive a larger rift in domestic political ideology, promote mistrust in the electoral system and sway public opinion in favor of a certain candidate. “We haven’t observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections,” a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Though officials did not name a particular candidate, investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election found that their strategies were aimed at helping Donald Trump. Read Article

Georgia: Critics charge GOP election board members violated state laws in rushed meeting | Stanley Dunlap/Georgia Recorder

The three GOP members of the Georgia State Election Board convened an emergency meeting Friday to press forward with several new election rules in a rush to have new procedures in place for the November election, sparking accusations of state open meetings law violations. A couple hundred people packed inside a state Capitol room for the impromptu hearing where Democratic party members and progressive voting rights advocates shouted “shame” and waved signs reading “this meeting is illegal” as GOP board members Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King conducted an “emergency meeting” scheduled about 24 hours prior. Jeffares and King, the two newest members of the election board, threatened to remove disruptive individuals from a meeting, which would culminate in the adoption of two new election rules and the threat of legal action for violating open meetings rules. Read Article

National: Election officials push back against draft federal rule for reporting potential cyberattacks | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

A group of state election officials is urging the nation’s cybersecurity agency to revise a draft rule that would require election offices to disclose suspected cyberattacks to the federal government, casting the mandate as too burdensome on overworked local officials. The new rule is the result of a 2022 federal law that directed the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop regulations that require certain entities to report potential cybersecurity breaches or ransomware attacks to the agency. Election offices fall under the requirement because their systems are considered critical infrastructure, along with the nation’s banks, nuclear power plants and dams. In a letter, the executive board of the National Association of Secretaries of State asked CISA to consider making the rule voluntary, limit the types of information requested and more clearly define what types of cyber incidents would trigger a report. The proposed rule says state and local election offices must report suspected breaches within 72 hours. Read Article

National: As ‘Pro-Democracy’ Philanthropy Grows, Experts Warn of Many Obstacles to Combating Misinformation | Alex Daniels/The Chronicle of Philanthropy

To cut through online noise and potentially false information surrounding the U.S. elections and ensure that voters go to the polls armed with verified facts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Thursday announced it will put nearly $7 million toward fighting misinformation in states crucial to determining the results in November. Funding for the Associated Press, in the amount of $1.5 million, will provide training to small newsrooms on how to report election-related polling and how to identify and explain to readers instances of misinformation spreading online. Another $2.75 million will be dedicated to the Knight Election Hub, which provides resources like polling and data, as well as training for newsrooms. Knight will split the remainder of the commitment among nonprofits that support journalism and will direct grants to one news outlet in each of the election swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Read Article

National: GOP jump-starts 2024 election challenges with Trump-inspired lawsuits | Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf/The Washington Post

The Republican National Committee has expanded legal challenges to voting and election procedures in key swing states since March, when presumptive nominee Donald Trump installed new party leaders with a mandate to pursue his unsubstantiated claims of widespread cheating. In Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, Republicans are seeking to force election officials to remove voters from the rolls, despite federal law limiting such actions in the months preceding an election. In another Nevada lawsuit, the RNC is seeking to block mail ballots from being counted if received after Election Day, using a legal theory that has been repeatedly rejected in other courts and would upend existing practices in many states. Critics say the challenges are legally frivolous. But the cases are dangerous nonetheless, they argue, because they are meant to further erode public confidence in elections and lay the groundwork to overturn the results if Trump loses. Read Article

National: The man who cries voter fraud: how Hans von Spakovsky has built a career peddling election security fears | Alice Herman/The Guardian

At a US House hearing in May, a bespectacled 65-year-old attorney made a startling claim: American citizens’ right to vote was under attack. Non-citizens, Hans von Spakovsky claimed, were voting unchecked in federal elections, and something needed to be done about it. For Von Spakovsky, who leads Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative and authored the section of Project 2025 on federal election oversight, the testimony joined two of his favorite topics: immigration and what he believes is the unseen scourge of fraudulent voting in American elections. It was also deeply misleading. The criminal penalties for voting in federal elections are steep for immigrants without full citizenship – felony charges and even deportation. So they rarely cast ballots in US elections. That has not stopped Von Spakovsky from doubling down on his claim that non-citizen voting threatens election security. Read Article

National: House passes GOP bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote | Ali Swenson and Farnoush Amiri/Assocaited Press

The House on Wednesday passed a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration, a proposal Republicans have prioritized as an election-year talking point even as research shows noncitizens illegally registering and casting ballots in federal elections is exceptionally rare. The legislation, approved largely along partisan lines but with five Democrats voting in favor, is unlikely to advance through the Democratic-led Senate. The Biden administration also says it’s strongly opposed because there already are safeguards to enforce the law against noncitizen voting. Still, the House vote will give Republicans an opportunity to bring attention to two of their central issues this year — border and election security. Read Article

National: Even Disinformation Experts Don’t Know How to Stop It | Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson/The New York Times

To fight disinformation in a chaotic election year, Ruth Quint, a volunteer for a nonpartisan civic group in Pennsylvania, is relying on tactics both extensively studied and frequently deployed. Many of them, however, may also be futile. She has posted online tutorials for identifying fake social media accounts, created videos debunking conspiracy theories, flagged toxic content to a collaborative nationwide database and even participated in a pilot project that responded to misleading narratives by using artificial intelligence. The problem: “I don’t have any idea if it’s working or not working,” said Ms. Quint, the co-president and webmaster of the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh, her home of five decades. “I just know this is what I feel like I should be doing.” Read Article

National: Mission to support fragile democracies steps up US election monitoring | Andrew Jack/Financial Times

A programme created by former president Jimmy Carter to support elections in fragile democracies is increasing election monitoring in the US as political polarisation and voter distrust grow ahead of November’s presidential contest. The Carter Center’s Democracy Program, which has carried out work recently in countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela and Sierra Leone, will support non-partisan election observation missions in up to five US states. The pledge comes as Donald Trump and his supporters continue to cast doubt on the integrity of US ballots following the ex-president’s claim that he would have won the 2020 poll if it had not been rigged. “We have taken our international election observation expertise and have needed to turn it inward to the United States,” Jason Carter, chair of the Carter Center and grandson of the 39th US president, told the Financial Times. Read Article

National: Supreme Court rejects effort to limit government communication on misinformation | Derek B. Johnson and Madison Alder/CyberScoop

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected an effort by Republican states to sharply limit the ability of the federal government to share information with social media platforms to combat the spread of false information online — something the plaintiffs argued had resulted in censorship of conservative viewpoints. The ruling represents a major victory for the Biden administration, whose communications with social media platforms sought to limit the spread online of election- and COVID-related misinformation. Those communications prompted attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana to bring suit to limit information-sharing between the government and online platforms. In a 6-3 ruling, the court concluded that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit and lacked sufficient evidence to prove that government communications had resulted in the restriction of online speech. The ruling overturned a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that found the government had, through its regular communications and information-sharing efforts, effectively “coerced” the platforms into censoring content. Read Article

National: Trump allies test a new strategy for blocking election results | Amy Gardner , Patrick Marley and Colby Itkowitz/The Washington Post

When a member of Georgia’s Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections refused to join her colleagues as they certified two primaries this year, she claimed she had been denied her right to examine a long list of election records for signs of fraud or other issues. Now the board member, Julie Adams, an avowed believer in the false theory that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, is suing the board, hoping a judge will affirm that right and potentially empower others in similar positions elsewhere to hold up the outcome of elections. To voting rights activists, election law specialists and Democrats, such actions represent an ominous sign that could presage a chaotic aftermath to the 2024 election. They are particularly worried about the threat of civil unrest or violence, especially if certification proceeds amid protests or efforts to block it. Read Article

National: Fight against misinformation faces headwinds as 2024 election nears | Carrie Levine/Votebeat

We are 135 days out from the 2024 presidential election. The fight against misinformation and disinformation is hopelessly politicized, and the infrastructure set up to push back against bad or misleading information online is far less robust than it was. High-profile efforts to combat bad information about elections, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, have scaled back or shut down. Some are facing threats, as well as lawsuits and investigations from conservatives who say the groups are allied with the left and targeting speech liberals disagree with. The result of the Republican pushback, some experts say, is a climate that’s friendlier to disinformation baselessly undermining faith in elections, and feeding political extremism. “We may be less prepared 155 days out in 2024 than we were under President Trump” in 2020, Sen. Mark Warner told The Associated Press earlier this month. Warner, a Virginia Democrat, chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. Read Article

National: Black Americans targeted with disinformation as election nears, new report finds | Marquise Francis/NBC

At least 40 million Americans may be regularly targeted and fed disinformation within Black online spaces by a host of sources across social media, fueling false information around the election, according to a new report published Tuesday. Touted as the first deep dive into understanding disinformation targeting Black America, the report, published by Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization working to combat disinformation within the Black community, identified half a dozen core online networks “reaching or targeting” Black Americans online with false and misleading narratives. Conservative commentators like Candace Owens are among the most influential distributors of false information, according to the report, followed by a variety of sources, such as platforms geared toward the Black manosphere, like the “Fresh and Fit” podcast. Some episodes of the show have outright challenged women’s intelligence and allowed guests to share false and harmful narratives without pushback. Read Article

Opinion | What Happened to Stanford Spells Trouble for the Election | Renée DiResta/The New York Times

In 2020 the Stanford Internet Observatory, where I was until recently the research director, helped lead a project that studied election rumors and disinformation. As part of that work, we frequently encountered conspiratorial thinking from Americans who had been told the 2020 presidential election was going to be stolen. The way theories of “the steal” went viral was eerily routine. First, an image or video, such as a photo of a suitcase near a polling place, was posted as evidence of wrongdoing. The poster would tweet the purported evidence, tagging partisan influencers or media accounts with large followings. Those accounts would promote the rumor, often claiming, “Big if true!” Others would join, and the algorithms would push it out to potentially millions more. Partisan media would follow. If the rumor was found to be false — and it usually was — corrections were rarely made and even then, little noticed. The belief that “the steal” was real led directly to the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Within a couple of years, the same online rumor mill turned its attention to us — the very researchers who documented it. This spells trouble for the 2024 election. Read Article

Picketed at work, confronted at church: Why election workers have left the job | Derek B. Johnson/CyberScoop

Over the course of 20 years as an election administrator in Shasta County, Calif., Cathy Darling Allen oversaw nearly a dozen national election cycles and countless local races. In February, she decided she’d had enough. Allen announced she would be retiring, citing the negative impact that the job was having on her health, especially in recent years. In a public letter, she wrote that she had been diagnosed with heart failure and her chances for recovery relied on substantial stress reduction, something that was “a tough ask to balance with election administration in the current environment.” In an interview with CyberScoop, Allen was more blunt about what triggered her decision to leave: “Being concerned on a daily basis about your own physical safety and the safety of the folks who work for us and the voters who come in to cast their ballots takes a toll.” Allen is not alone in choosing to step down as an election administrator. Across the United States election officials are leaving their posts in droves, citing threats, harassment and acts of violence at levels not seen in decades — a development that experts caution poses a far greater threat to U.S. elections than malicious hackers or AI-enabled deepfakes. Read Article

National: States struggle with unreliable federal funding for making sure elections are secure | Jennifer Shutt/Stateline

The federal government has sought to bolster election security for years through a popular grant program, but the wildly fluctuating funding levels have made it difficult for state officials to plan their budgets and their projects. Rising misinformation and disinformation about elections, often fueled by conspiracy theories, as well as threats against election workers, make the grants especially important, according to elections officials. But U.S. House Republicans are seeking to eliminate funding for election security grants — known as Help America Vote Act, or HAVA grants — in this year’s appropriations process, a move they also unsuccessfully attempted last year. “We continue to unnecessarily risk the very integrity of our elections and American democracy,” Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop said last week during committee debate on the funding bill. Bishop, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he was “concerned about the outdated and the insecure voting systems around the country that pose a very, very serious threat to our national security and to our democratic system.” Read Article

National: Rage against the voting machine | Joseph Gedeon/Politico

Elon Musk set the Xverse ablaze this weekend with a viral post calling to “eliminate electronic voting machines” due to hacking risks, racking up over 75,000 reposts. It came after independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seized on voting irregularities in Puerto Rico’s recent primary to demand a return to hand-marked paper ballots nationwide. “Flip the claim that there’s ‘no evidence of widespread fraud.’ We have evidence of sound elections,” said Pamela Smith, president of the nonpartisan Verified Voting, which promotes the responsible use of technology in elections. Smith argues that while tiny jurisdictions can feasibly hand count ballots, moving to full manual counts in larger locales would be a logistical nightmare — delaying results for weeks or months and costing counties millions to hire enough workers. Not to mention studies showing machines tend to tally votes more accurately than humans do. Read Article

National: 334 public officials in 5 swing states who cast doubt on elections are now influencing them | Erin Mansfield/USA Today