National

On January 7, 2021, the day after the attempted coup, a team of computer forensic experts entered the elections office in Coffee County, Georgia, welcomed by the local elections supervisor. The team, who worked for an Atlanta-based company called SullivanStrickler, had been hired by Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers. They were accompanied by an Atlanta bail bondsman named Scott Hall, who is reportedly a brother-in-law of David Bossie, a Trump campaign adviser. The then chair of the Coffee County G.O.P., Cathy Latham, who has been subpoenaed in connection with her role as one of sixteen fake electors in the state who signed an “unofficial electoral certificate” after the 2020 election, joined them as well. During the course of the day, the forensic experts copied election-machine software and 2020 voting data. In March, 2021, during a recorded phone conversation with Marilyn Marks, the executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance—a nonprofit that works on election transparency and security—a man identified in court papers as Hall said, “We went in there and imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment.” He added, “We basically had the entire elections committee there, and they said, ‘We give you permission. Go for it.’ ” (According to Marks, “The elections board was not there—only one member was there, and we believe that only one member was aware of the breach.”) The files were then copied for others to examine on a password-protected site. Because all Georgia counties use the same Dominion Voting Systems equipment, anyone with access to the Coffee County software had access to the election-management system of all voting machines in the state. At least a dozen states use the same Dominion system.

Full Article: Will Election Deniers Again Try to Access Voting Systems? | The New Yorker

National: An Uber Millionaire Wants You To Vote On The Internet – Despite The Inherent Vulnerabilities | Spenser Mestel/The Intercept

In the fall of 2010, the District of Columbia was preparing to do something bold: allow overseas voters to cast their ballots online. A few weeks ahead of the November general election, it conducted a mock internet election and invited the public to try and hack the system. Within a few days, computer scientists at the University of Michigan had gained near complete control of the election server. The team took control of webcams mounted inside the server room that housed the pilot, used login information to match specific ballots to specific voters, and changed not just votes that had been cast, but also ones that would be. “There is little hope for protecting future ballots from this level of compromise, since the code that processes the ballots is itself suspect,” the team wrote in a follow-up paper. Afterward, D.C. officials confirmed that they had failed to see the attacks in their intrusion detection system logs, didn’t detect their presence in the network equipment, and only realized what had happened after seeing the group’s calling card: the University of Michigan fight song playing on the “Thank You” page that appeared after voting. Technology has improved significantly since 2010, but internet voting presents a unique challenge. With paper, voters can verify that their ballot is correct before they mail it or insert it into a scanner. Once that ballot is tabulated, there’s no way to connect it back to the voter. It is irretrievable. When you cast a vote electronically, how do you ensure that the ballot the election office receives is the same ballot that you submitted — while also maintaining anonymity, producing an independent paper trail, allowing for some way to audit the results, providing publicly verifiable evidence if errors are detected, and ensuring that candidates can contest the results?

Full Article: Uber Millionaire Pushes Voting via Internet, Despite Vulnerabilities

National: Conspiracies Fuel Hand-counting Push In US Midterms | Anuj Chopra/AFP

Conspiracy-endorsing US politicians have amped up their rhetoric against voting machines as two swing state counties moved to allow hand counting ahead of next week’s midterm election — at the risk of stoking doubt about polling accuracy. The contentious Republican push for hand counting — which US experts consider often less accurate than machine counting and prone to delays — has gained traction since Donald Trump falsely asserted that voter fraud led to his 2020 election defeat. The rhetoric got a fresh boost last week when officials in rural Cochise County in the battleground state of Arizona voted in favor of counting ballots by hand, ignoring warnings of logistical challenges and threats of lawsuits. The move came after officials in Nye County in Nevada, another swing state, approved hand counting, citing deep mistrust among local residents in tabulation machines. “Best practices in hand counting take time and care to implement,” Pamela Smith, president of the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting, told AFP. “These last-minute changes in Nevada and Arizona introduce chaotic conditions that invite errors and undermine confidence, not least because they are hard for the public to observe.”

Full Article: Conspiracies Fuel Hand-counting Push In US Midterms | Barron’s

National: Election Day tests voters, voting systems amid election lies | Christina A. Cassidy and Geoff Mulvihill/Associated Press

Final voting began Tuesday in a midterm election where voting itself has been in the spotlight after two years of false claims and conspiracy theories about how ballots are cast and counted. Voters lined up at polls before dawn in several East Coast states, including New York and Virginia. Since the last nationwide election two years ago, former President Donald Trump and his allies have succeeded in sowing wide distrust about voting by promoting false claims of widespread fraud. The effort has eroded public confidence in elections and democracy, led to restrictions on mail voting and new ID requirements in some GOP-led states and prompted death threats against election officials. Election Day this year is marked by concerns about further harassment and the potential for disruptions at polling places and at election offices where ballots will be tallied. Election officials say they are prepared to handle any issues that arise, urging voters not to be deterred. “This bipartisan, transparent process administered by election professionals across the country will be secure, it will be accurate and it will have integrity,” said Matt Masterson, a former top election security official in the Trump administration, at a briefing organized by The Aspen Institute. “The best response for all of us is to get out and participate in it.”

Full Article: Election Day tests voters, voting systems amid election lies | AP News

Tennessee: Multiple counties report issues with ballots | Adam Friedman Nashville Tennessean

Multiple counties across Tennessee have reported ballot issues leading to some early votes cast in the wrong races. Election officials in Benton, Davidson and Shelby counties have all reported ballots issues largely related to congressional districts that were redrawn earlier this year. Jeff Roberts, the Davidson County administrator of elections, said 438 voters in Nashville cast votes in the wrong races. Roberts said it’s an increase from the 212 initially reported late last week because the previous amount did not factor in the final days of early voting, which ended on Nov. 3. Davidson has precincts split across the 5th, 6th and 7th Congressional districts. Meanwhile, Shelby County election officials reported 50 incorrect ballots were cast for voters in a precinct split between the 8th and 9th Congressional districts. A Benton County election official told the Associated Press some voters, likely fewer than 10, had been assigned to the wrong congressional districts, but they had fixed it before any votes were cast. Benton has precincts split between the 7th and 8th Congressional districts.

Full Article: Tennessee election 2022: Multiple counties report issues with ballots

Biden sends a stark warning about political violence ahead of midterms: ‘We can’t take democracy for granted any longer’ | Kevin Liptak, MJ Lee, Betsy Klein and Phil Mattingly/CNN

President Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered a stark warning to Americans that the future of the nation’s democracy could rest on next week’s midterm elections, an urgent appeal coming six days before final ballots are cast in a contest the president framed in nearly existential terms. “We can’t take democracy for granted any longer,” the president said from Union Station in Washington, blocks from the US Capitol where a mob attempted to interrupt the certification of the 2020 election. It was a sharp message to Americans considering sitting out next week’s congressional elections that the very future of the country was at stake. Biden suggested the preponderance of candidates for office at every level of government who have denied the results of the last presidential contest was red-flashing warning signal for the country. “As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America – for governor, for Congress, for attorney general, for secretary of state who won’t commit to accepting the results of the elections they’re in,” Biden said. “That is the path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American.” Biden’s speech placed blame for the dire national situation squarely at the feet of his predecessor, Donald Trump, accusing the former president of cultivating a lie that has metastasized into a web of conspiracies that has already resulted in targeted violence.

Full Article: Biden sends a stark warning about political violence ahead of midterms: ‘We can’t take democracy for granted any longer’ | CNN Politics

National: States look to secure election results websites ahead of midterms | Kevin Collier/NBC

States are working to shore up what might be the most public and vulnerable parts of their election systems: the websites that publish voting results. NBC News spoke with the top cybersecurity officials at four state election offices, as well as the head of a company that runs such services for six states, about how they secure the sites. All agreed that while there was no real threat that hackers could change a final vote count, a successful cyberattack would be harmful for public confidence if hackers were able to breach the websites that show preliminary vote totals. “Election night reporting sites are very, very ripe for a perception hack, because they’re so visible,” said Eddie Perez, a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for election security and integrity. The effort necessary is because it’s relatively easy to knock a website offline and deface it with simple cyberattacks. Vince Hoang, Hawaii’s chief information security officer, is well aware, having recently dealt with just such an attack. Last month, a hacker group called Killnet, which presents itself as a small group of pro-Russian hacktivists, announced plans to attack U.S. state government websites and air travel websites. While there’s no evidence Killnet stole any data or altered any files, it was able to temporarily keep some states’ sites from loading for hours with a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, unsophisticated cyberattacks that flood websites with traffic. One of its victims last month was Hawaii.gov, which also hosts the state’s election night reporting. Even though Hawaii uses Cloudflare, one of the top DDoS protection services, Killnet was able to render Hawaii.gov inaccessible for several hours.

Full Article: States look to secure election results websites ahead of midterms

National: Why do election experts oppose hand-counting ballots? | Karina Phan and Ali Swenson/Associated Press

Why do election experts oppose hand-counting ballots? It takes longer than counting with machines, it’s less reliable, and it’s a logistical nightmare for U.S. elections. A growing number of Republican lawmakers have pushed for switching to hand-counts, an argument rooted in false conspiracy theories that voting systems were manipulated to steal the 2020 election. Though there is no evidence of widespread fraud or tampering of machines in 2020, some jurisdictions have voted to scrap machines and pursue hand-counts instead this year. Numerous studies — in voting and other fields such as banking and retail — have shown that people make far more errors counting than do machines, especially when reaching larger and larger numbers. They’re also vastly slower. “Machine counting is generally twice as accurate as hand-counting and a much simpler and faster process,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who has conducted research on hand-counts. In one study in New Hampshire, he found poll workers who counted ballots by hand were off by 8%. The error rate for machine counting runs about 0.5%, Ansolabehere said. Just how long can hand-counting delay results? Depending on jurisdiction and staffing, it could be days, weeks or even months.

Full Article: Why do election experts oppose hand-counting ballots? | AP News

National: ‘Stolen election’ conspiracies already spreading ahead of US midterm | Mark Scott/Politico

With less than a week before the U.S. midterm elections on November 8, scores of local groups in key battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Georgia are spreading conspiracy theories about alleged election fraud and calling on voters to take in-person action, based on POLITICO’s review of social media activity over the last three months. The falsehoods, which appear on mainstream networks like Facebook and Twitter as well as fringe platforms, include accusations that ballots will be tampered with and right-wing voters will be disenfranchised, as well as threats of real-world violence. Some of these allegations are fueled by high-profile figures, including former U.S. President Donald Trump. In many ways, the activity mirrors the so-called Stop the Steal movement in 2020. For months before that movement erupted in November protests across the country and on the National Mall on January 6, right-wing activists were peddling unsubstantiated claims on social media that accused Joe Biden and other Democratic politicians of rigging and plotting to steal the presidential election.

Full Article: ‘Stolen election’ conspiracies already spreading ahead of US midterm – POLITICO

National: Justice Department mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | Evan Perez, Katelyn Polantz and Jeremy Herb/CNN

As Donald Trump inches closer to launching another presidential run after the midterm election, Justice Department officials have discussed whether a Trump candidacy would create the need for a special counsel to oversee two sprawling federal investigations related to the former president, sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. The Justice Department is also staffing up its investigations with experienced prosecutors so it’s ready for any decisions after the midterms, including the potential unprecedented move of indicting a former president. In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. But behind the scenes, investigators have remained busy, using aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles to compel testimony from witnesses in both the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents kept at his Palm Beach home. Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency. “They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged. “This is the scary thing,” the attorney said. Trump and his associates also face legal exposure in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State and expects to wrap her probe by the end of the year.

Full Article: Exclusive: DOJ mulling potential special counsel if Trump runs in 2024 | CNN Politics

National: Election security has improved since 2016 | Tim Starks/The Washington Post

The vast majority of experts in our Network Survey told us they’re not more worried about cyberthreats in this election compared with the 2020 election. And there’s good reason for that. Ever since an election security push that began after the 2016 election, election systems have fortified with $880 million in federal funding and more states have moved toward hand-marked paper ballots. Election fraud was already a rare occurance, as our Post colleague Glenn Kessler noted in a fact-check this week. The new developments in election security lessen the risks even more – but that’s unlikely to deter some Trump-supporting Republican voters and activists from claiming election fraud in races where their candidate doesn’t prevail next week. “In physical and technical terms, we’ve made enormous progress since 2004, even 2016. In political terms, we seem very much in danger,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting. “And that gap between technical reality and political reality is a haunting one.” In 2016, more than 22 percent of voters lived in jurisdictions using a kind of electronic voting machine with no paper backup, which many experts say make them more of a security risk. Now, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit that tracks election technology, less than 5 percent do. States including New Jersey and Louisiana have had issues switching off electronic voting machines with no paper backup. But even the supposed laggards have made significant improvements, Lindeman observed. In 2020, 36 percent of Texas voters lived in counties with that kind of paperless machine, known as direct-recording electronic. In 2022, that number has shrunk to 6 percent.

Full Article: Election security has improved since 2016 – The Washington Post

National: Trump fans have a plan to trick nonexistent vote hackers: Vote late | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

The news conference President Donald Trump’s lawyers held at the Republican Party’s national headquarters soon after the 2020 election is remembered mostly for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s odd tonsorial drooling. But it must also be remembered as one of the first iterations of the clumsy effort to tie together seemingly contradictory strains of election-fraud theorizing: that the election was stolen on election night by manipulated electronic voting machines — but also later by illegal or fake mail-in ballots. Trump attorney Sidney Powell attempted to square this circle. The voting machines “probably” were used all over the country to flip Trump votes to ones for Joe Biden, something that “we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system, and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in.” Only after the flood of votes “broke the algorithm” — you can perhaps hear the sound of computer engineers slapping their foreheads — did the fraudsters come “in the back door with all the mail-in ballots.” Obviously this is all nonsense, every part of it, as months and years of analysis have proved repeatedly. But there’s something about Powell’s formulation that seems to linger as the 2022 midterms approach. Republicans who say they are worried about the upcoming elections being stolen have come up with a way to beat the system: Vote only at the very last minute to potentially stymie those devious hackers/fraudsters/Democrats.

Full Article: Trump fans have a plan to trick nonexistent vote hackers: Vote late – The Washington Post

National: Amid election conspiracy theories, CISA says there’s no credible threat to voting equipment | Christian Vasquez/CyberScoop

A week before the midterm elections, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said the Biden administration has done “everything we can” to protect election infrastructure and cautioned against overreactions to any voting mishaps on Election Day. “There are going to be errors, there are going to be glitches. That happens in every election,” Easterly said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington on Tuesday. “Somebody will forget the key to the polling place. A water pipe will burst. These are normal things they are not nefarious.” Her reassurances about the election process come as political tensions mount ahead of the Nov. 8 vote. Disinformation related to the election is flooding on social media, poll workers are facing threats of violence and experts are warning about foreign interference. And against this backdrop, mishaps that happen in the ordinary course of an election can be seized upon by political partisans to undermine the perceived legitimacy of the election process. At this time, Easterly said, CISA has “no information credible or specific about efforts to disrupt or compromise” election infrastructure. “We have done everything we can to make election infrastructure as secure and as resilient as possible.” She did point to the increase in physical threats and acts of intimidation against election officials, saying that “it’s a really difficult physical security environment.”

Full Article: Amid election conspiracy theories, CISA says there’s no credible threat to voting equipment

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,”…

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

Source: ‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: local election officials fear for safety | US news | 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.

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